Discussions and news about gaming on the GNU/Linux family of operating systems (including the Steam Deck). Potentially a $HOME away from home for disgruntled /r/linux_gaming denizens of the redditarian demesne.
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I saw there was a somewhat similar post to this, but I'm kind of celebrating the fact that this was the first year I was able to game exclusively on Linux! I'm very thankful for all of the effort from the people involved in all of the aspects of Wine/Proton, it's great to not need to reboot to play games.
Reminds me of that pie chart meme where it's saying 100% but the categories are like
🟦: X
🟥: X but in red
I'm too happy with my keyboard and mouse to go that far! Also, some of the games I play aren't necessarily the best for the small screen/controller combo on the Deck.
Uh, you know the steam deck is just a computer right? You can plug in a mouse, keyboard, monitor, and any other peripheral you want.
Of course! But if I'm going to do that, I'll just sit down in front of my gaming PC and play everything on ultra and use an ultra widescreen monitor! I play story based and casual games some, but I also spent a lot of time in strategy games and simulators, which don't always translate well to the small screen.
Same as you friend, in fact the Deck helped me to realise that the vast majority of my games play fine on Linux doing nothing but enabling Steam Play for all other titles in Settings. That's literally all I had to do.
I know it's definitely not the same experience for others but I'm glad I could make the 100% jump to Linux. Especially with Cosmic on the way for PopOS!
It certainly has been great! Hopefully it only gets better from here!
I don't have a Steam Deck so all my play time was on Linux, so it doesn't show me this pie chart. But still, Yay for Linux!
It's a great portable device if you have a good use case for it. I could even see it as a fairly capable primary device with some peripherals. But I'm sure you've heard and seen all of that before! :-)
I use it to play in bed. Last year, my split was 75% Linux, 25% Steam Deck, and this year it's 25% Linux, 75% Steam Deck. So it grew on me quite a bit, and it's now my primary gaming device.
Yes, in bed is the perfect spot for it! I often use it on the couch or on the back porch as well. And it's a game changer for when I'm in bed sick too. When I'm feeling half decent I can just grab it for a bit and chase away the boredom, and then put it down just as quickly.
I don't think I'll be using as my primary device anytime soon, but there's always that possibility! I like high resolution monitors and high graphics settings too well on some games!
I honestly don't care much for graphics settings, and I mostly play older AAAs and indies anyway. Gaming isn't the primary purpose of my computer, so my GPU is just good enough to make that pleasant (6650XT), and i can usually get decent frames on my 1440p monitor.
So yeah, the Deck is perfect for my use case, especially since I usually play with a controller on PC anyway. I still use my PC for certain games (strategy games, RDR2, and certain shooters), but it's just really hard to beat the thing sitting on my nightstand.
It does sound like it's perfect! I enjoy seeing what all people do with their Deck, it's sometimes pretty impressive. I've definitely used mine for retro gaming before, it's great how capable they can be.
I still haven't gotten into emulators because there are enough other games to keep me well stocked with fun stuff to play. Maybe I'll play with it over Christmas break.
Last year I was about 75 linux / 25 deck but this years its 100% deck. In my case the deck is much better than my laptop for gaming but its also so easy to pick up and jump into a game.
My desktop is quite a bit better than the Deck, but the Deck is good enough and more convenient, so it wins. I still play strategy games and other KB+m heavy games on the Deck, hence the 25%.
Same here! Switched to Linux on my desktop almost exactly one year ago. Let's celebrate together 🎉
That's great!
The steamdeck is so great!
I swapped from windows to linux this year and got my steamdeck recently
It's a great device! I actually didn't use it quite as much as I did last year, but it still accounted for 31% of my total time. I'm hoping for a slightly bigger screen if the SD2 comes out, but it's very good as is.
There will probably not be a SD2 in the next year. And i hope it isnt coming out soon as the SD OLED got released relatively recently and it would be just a "why" when they release 2 "New" handhelds in like 1-2 years. And the OLED is already the perfect console to game. It has compatibility with like 95% of games and it can run them with ease on good optimized games on high and not optimized on low - medium, touchpad is accurate, the trackpads are the best and repairability and upgradability is just great! The only thing i would want is a new Steam Controller, in a nutshell SD but without the display.
I'm perfectly fine with waiting several years, I agree that it would be way too soon otherwise. I have the LCD and I'm happy with it, when this one breaks or I decide to upgrade I'll take a look at an OLED and see if I think it's worth it for me.
I've been very impressed with the trackpads for a lot of games. I even find myself using them on games that were designed for controllers because there's just nothing like a mouse sometimes.
I wouldnt be suprised if they would release SD 2 with VR support in few years ;D
That could definitely be a possiblity! While I can't say I would use it a huge amount, VR is something that I would like to tinker with in the future. My understanding is that it still needs some work on Linux, but that may be changing.
Steam could pusht stuff like that too! They pushed linux compatibility with steamdeck and i could see that they push it with their vr headset. and they just need to improve the linux compatibility and then theoretically both steamos and all other linux distros can run easily steamvr
I could definitely see it happening that way. I don't think anything has been announced either way, but I know I had seen some rumors or speculation about a possible semi self-contained VR headset from Valve. If that turns out to be fact, I could see them using Linux as the base for it.
Steam Deck runs on Arch, so 100% of your gaming was on Linux! I haven't opened Windows for gaming in about a year. It's rad!
I definitely have not missed all of the rebooting and issues involved with starting that partition just to play some games!
Where are you guys pulling these charts from?
It's from the Steam Year in Review, you can access it from the front page of Steam if you're logged into an account.
It's from the steam year in review. It should show up on your steam frontpage
I'm only surprised I don't have 50%+ on controller vs m+kb. Idk if steam got it wrong, but I'm sure I havent used them for more than a half of my time. Although I wasn't any inspired fot a gamepad gaming coming from competitive shooters, it feels so right with racing games, fightings and rpgs I'm enjoying rn.
Pretty happy to have 80% on Linux tho. After all these terrible stories of how games don't work there, it's a wonder that all I wanted, licensed or pirated, worked out of the box with only minor exclusions. If not for Adobe bastards, there's no need to have Windows even as a virtual or dual-boot platform. And even them can be replaced with tools like Krita.
If it's not the year of a Linux desktop, I'm sure 2025 would be.
The controller vs keyboard and mouse was messed up for me apparently, because it didn't show up this year. And I know I spent 60+ hours using a DualSense on American and Euro Truck Simulator, plus all of my time on the Deck!
Glad to hear Linux gaming is working out for you as well! I started doing some basic gaming on Linux some years back, but I didn't really start running it on my main gaming computer until a couple of years ago. Then this past year I decided to not boot into Windows to game unless I couldn't do it on Linux. Then all year it worked just fine! With the push by Valve in recent years it's made it so easy, as long as the game devs don't throw roadblocks into it!
Yep. It's so easy, so comfy rn, it's a pleasure.
My only worry, as I said, are specific programs, but as long as Linux is so good, I'd be better finding workatound from there than trying to emulate windows for them.
That's my thought on programs like that. Unless you absolutely have to run some extremely esoteric software or something from a company that just hates Linux, it's usually going to work just fine. It was completely worthwhile to deal with learning a new workflow on a few things to get all of the benefits. I found native replacements that work just as well if not better for every program that I used, except for my music player. I can't find anything that works quite as well as Aimp, so I just run it through Wine.
My viewpoint on a lot of things is to use what works for you. In my case, Windows didn't cut it anymore, so I switched to what did!
Why is Steam Deck separate from Linux? Doesn't it run on Linux?
It is definitely Linux underneath. Technically it says different devices, so that might be why they're splitting it down. In reality it's probably a good way to get more advertising for the Deck as people share their stats for the year.
I've been at this since before valve expressed any interest in Linux. Years of spending more time trying to get the game to run rather than gaming. Back when Ubuntu CDs were a thing, and before I stopped liking Ubuntu.
And you beat me, good work.
We all have it so easy now, that's for sure. It definitely appears you prefer your Deck!
It's more convenient and I can't afford a high end office chair for the desktop. The last few used ones got scooped up even in bad condition. I've tried the car bucket seat type and even have one from a workplace 'boomer execs trying to be hip raffle event', but car seats are generally uncomfortable to begin with.
But yeah the deck is pretty excellent for anything it can maintain a stable frame rate with and I use it even when performance is a bit iffy. I tell anyone considering one that it handles like a wiiu gamepad with better button placements though.
Dang. GeForceNow made it so I'm shown as using mostly Windows.
That is awesome! What games did you try? Were there any that required initial manual tweaking, or did everything "work out of the box," so to speak?
I can pretty much just play the games I would normally, which fortunately doesn't normally include any MMO or multiplayer only. I do play Star Trek Online on rare occasions, but it works just fine for me.
I've always been lucky in that probably 40% of my favorite PC games already have native ports or native options for play, but Proton has been pretty great out of the box for most that aren't native. This year the only games I remember having major issues with were Uncharted Lost Legacy, and Batman Arkham Asylum. Uncharted was a glitch with water rendering crashing the game. It worked fine once I tweaked some settings and changed the Proton version, so it could have even been a game issue. Batman wouldn't launch without a few different tweaks, but ProtonDB had some fixes.
I've been Linux only going on 3 years, it's super fulfilling. Welcome to the club
Thanks, it's been great so far! I'm sure I'll run into something that'll give me some issues, but we'll see!