Linux Gaming
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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Original /r/linux_gaming pengwing by uoou.
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More like "...thanks to years of neglect by Apple."
Years? More like decades at this point. Apple hasn't really given a shit about gaming since the late 90s.
This is awesome. As someone that games on all 3 platforms, I’m happy to see that Linux usage has gone up so rapidly, even if it is only because of the steamdeck. It’s a great way to introduce people to the wonders of Linux! And yes I do game on my MacBook. The sims lol, it is actually nice to have SOMETHING to play when I feel like not working. And a surprising # of my favorite games work on Mac wonderfully like cities skylines and the 2 point games and many more. I’m always happy when any platform other than windows can play games as collectively these smaller platforms need to dethrone windows, in my opinion.
Two decades ago, we at KDE always said that 5% was the magic number. If we got to 5% market share on the Linux desktop, then commercial games, applications, etc. would directly target it rather than ignore it. The steamdeck is wonderful, and if you include it, Linux is at about 3% right now. But it actually caused a huge acceleration in game adoption. So gaming is now ahead of that projection. Applications (i.e. Photoshop) probably still need 5%. Although we made that projection two decades ago, so it may no longer be valid due to cloud apps.
(I'm no longer involved with KDE, but was for a decade. It was an awesome decade.)
Thanks for all your work on KDE! My favorite DE, hands down. O7
Everybody knows that the one true game on Mac is Apple Chess. That's why hardly anyone makes ARM Mac games: the competition is just too stiff.
I started using Linux / GNU/Linux based operating systems for more than a day or so at a time when I got Puppy Linux on my USB drive back in 2016 or so. Ever since then I put Fatdog64 and other Linux based operating systems such as Ubuntu and Linux Mint on my laptop.
The gaming support is what got me to completely switch to Linux for daily driver. Havnt used windows in 3 years thanks to proton. My computing experience has never been better.
Can I ask what got you initially interested, and were there any speedbumps you had to deal with on the way? As a long-time Linux user, I see a lot of pushback against it from gamers online, and I'm curious to hear about your pathway.
Not OP, but personally i got bored of windows and wanted more control over my OS, especially as internet surveillance and data harvesting continue to be on the rise.
In my opinion a lot of the pushback comes from the fact that most distributions(especially recommended starters like Mint) don't come with the packages you need for gaming out of the box. Things like Lutris/vkd3d/gamescope/dxvk/gamemode/mangohud/WINE/ProtonGE, etc.
As someone who shifted to linux over the past year or so there was a metric fuckload of things i needed to learn and things i needed to tweak, especially when things went wrong. To the point i have over 10-20k character count tutorials i wrote for myself whenever i need to reinstall from scratch. These days i can get everything up and running fairly quickly, but that initial learning experience wasn't all fun and games for sure.
I had a leg up by already having my feet wet in linux server/virtual machines, but for someone who's coming directly from windows with zero experience and wants things to just work out of the box i can see why so many aren't interested. It doesn't help nvidia drivers are still horrible(in terms of desktop feel) for one of the most popular desktop environments for windows converts out there, KDE. Don't get me started on how you somehow need to know to disable compositing(or toggle via hotkey constantly like i do when i'm forced to use xorg instead of wayland) if you have more than one monitor in KDE or else your FPS will effectively halve itself.
Linux as a whole has a MASSIVE user experience problem if you want to do anything outside of basic office work and web browsing. Distributions like Garuda(my personal choice) help a lot because they give you the ability to have all of that stuff in the OOBE or an easy to use GUI, but that still only goes so far when little niggling issues crop up and you effectively need to relearn your entire workflow. It's just not something everybody is willing to do for the sake of not having Satya Nadella know when and where they poop.
My biggest hope is valve finally publishing SteamOS as an actual desktop OS. Because i know they could do it well as they seem to be keenly aware of the needs of the average gaming user, unlike most distribution maintainers these days which just assume you're a linux intermediate by default.
Just in time to exit Windows due to their "telemetry" programs.
I'm so happy that I never have to use that dog shit OS ever again, or any of their software for that matter.
I was dual booting because of some games but decided to delete the Windows partition anyway. There are some games that I cannot play (mostly because of anti-cheat) but I don't care anymore. I'm more than 2 years free of Micro$oft and couldn't be happier.
I too was dual booting for a while but the last straw was when a windows update erased GRUB a second time. I've been on Linux exclusively for 4 years now and I haven't looked back.
Every time I have to use a Windows VM for something, I become more and more grateful that I don't have to use their crap anymore. What got me recently was finding out that you are forced to create an account and be online to even install the latest version!
Technically there are still workarounds like disconnecting from the network or editing the installation sources, but it's still anti-user and worse than in older versions. Win will continue to get worse over time. Look at a freshly installed, default W11 Home consumer desktop for example. What most people probably use. Just open the start menu. It looks like the OS needs an exorcism first, before you can use it. But maybe many people have already become used to things being this bad
Disconnecting no longer works, you'll need to open a shell and put in a cryptic command to disable the check or use an email address which got banned
I've been gaming on Linux for a while now. The pace of improvement in Proton has been staggering since the steam deck was released. I noticed the other day that I've gotten so used to games just working now that I don't even bother to check to protonDB before I purchase. I'm sure that won't bite me any time soon -_-
Steam deck and my desktop. The only thing that would be useful is if I could find a program that would work with excel macros for union business. I basically have always used computers for gaming and browsing.
I've replaced everything I actually use which is something I haven't been able to do before. for anything else there's VirtualBox.
~~2020~~ ~~2021~~ ~~2022~~ 2023 the year of the Linux desktoop
I'll read up on it myself, but can virtual box run a windows instance from inside my Linux partition? I've never done any virtualization but that would be about the only thing from windows that would be useful. Just so I could use our excel doc to do billhead.
You can run windows in a vm in linux yes, with the caveat specifically for gamers that games with overzealous anti cheat can detect that they are running in a VM.
No need for windows to game anymore, steam/proton, lutrus and wine handle what I need just fine these days. This is more about using Microsoft excel as I have some union business that operates out of an excel file and Google sheets and libreoffice do not play nice with all the macros going on in it. Literally just to run excel.
That's the whole point.
I joke it runs faster than on bare metal but because you don't use it for everything and can in fact have a fresh install for each program it probably does.
Isn't Excel Web compatible with its own macros?
As far as I understand, the wbe versions are very stripped down compared to their desktop counterparts. That's a great question though and one I should explore. When I actually spring for excel/365 I can check out the web version while on Linux and if it doesn't work, look into setting up a virtualized Windows setup.
As far as I understand, the wbe versions are very stripped down compared to their desktop counterparts.
True but they're constantly improving and they may be good enough, depending on the use case.
🥳🥳🥳
NGL, I'm surprised macOS was ahead of Linux given Apple's deep-seated, cultural disinterest in gaming.
No, you're wrong! Apple is going all in on gaming. Again! First Myst, then Quake 3, then iPhone games on M1, and now a port of one game from 2019 using Wine. What a time to be a Mac gamer.
And yet some developers decide to pour over resources to make a MacOS native port over a Linux port
People who buy Macs probably have money and are willing to spend it.
This is kind of like saying you’ve beet a Toyota Prius on the track.
Gaming is the only reason I still bother to install windows on desktop PCs.