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As a long time Linux enjoyer, this is honestly the easiest way to get it into the mainstream. People have already seen the success of the steam deck which only reinforces that Linux can be used for gaming better than ever before. As long as people stop using Windows I’m here for it.
Eh, I don’t really care if they stop using Windows, I care that they start using Linux. Dual boot if you need, but more market share for Linux increases the likelihood that devs will support Linux directly.
For sure. I’m doing the dual boot life these days because as much as I want every game to work on Linux there are still some that don’t. And some games just work better on Windows. But at the same time that’s why more devs supporting Linux is what we wanna see.
I’m always curious tochear what games people aren’t able to run in Linux. Which ones are you unable to run?
It’s mostly the problems with anti cheats. The one that comes to mind is Helldivers. I already hated the anti cheat for that game but it’s impossible on Linux. If I was still into Apex Legends I’m sure Easy Anti Cheat would cause some issues but I’m not sure. If Easy Anti Cheat doesn’t work then there are a lot of games to add to that list like Halo and The Finals. I can’t name a lot off the top of my head but Easy Anti Cheat is super popular with devs of online games.
Proton has modules for EasyAntiCheat. I have played Halo on Arch. I don’t know about Helldivers, or Apex. But I absolutely know anticheat is an issue on Linux. Well if you ask me it is more so that these Kernel level anti-cheat mechanisms need to die.
(iirc) Apex worked great up until recently, when they started deliberately banning Linux players.
Helldivers or Helldivers 2? HD2 runs very well in Linux.
Helldivers 2. It kept crashing so I figured it was because of the anti cheat. Perhaps it was just user error and I need to try again.
openSUSE, Mass Effect Legendary Edition does not boot on my setup, but on ProtonDB, it says gold. Just using Proton did not work for me, so I don’t know what extra BS people did to get it running, but yeah. That’s a recent one I’ve run into.
Not super familiar with openSUSE, but you could get protonup-qt and install Proton-GE.
I tried that too, as I did have the GE option under compatibility when trying different versions. It just won’t install EA’s shitty app. I feel like on one of the Proton versions, it did “install” and booted up, but then just showed a black screen with nothing afterwards. I shut it down to try again because I know how finicky these things can be, and then the EA app was saying t wasn’t installed. I gave up after about an hour and went back to Windows. I work way too much to be able to sit there and tinker with this crap when I get off from a 10 hour shift…
I mean, use the tool that fits the job. I could probably help point you in the right direction. Is it from steam, or straight EA play app?
more market share for Linux increases the likelihood that devs will support Linux directly.
I’m starting to wonder if that’s true. I thought so do but now I’m wondering, especially with compatibility layers like Proton, and even Wine before that, and plenty of tools like Electron, Unity, etc helping to be cross-platform, if the lack of support is rather due to bad habits instilled by years of Microsoft partnership with manufacturers (and thus driver support) implying that drivers must be kept secret and thus Linux support is “bad for business” and that then cascades down to developers then users.
I think it’s more that devs see Linux support as a liability. Linux market share is low, and supporting Linux opens them up to Linux specific cheats, so they’ll need to spend resources on Linux specific mitigations. Why do all that for ~2% market share, most of whom seem content not playing their games?
I don’t think we need to jump to conspiracy theories. If Linux adoption gets to 10% or so and still see this issue maybe the conspiracy theory carries some weight.
I just installed Linux and holy shit it is so much easier and more straight forward than a windows install. Really wish I would have done it sooner.
It’s funny because while some of it has to do with work to make Linux desktops better, a non-trivial amount of it is how worse Microsoft has made it to deal with Windows.
Also, some (most) annoyances with installing Linux, still, is primarily due to Microsoft managing to fuck things up in subtle ways.
Creating an offline account to install windows is worse than installing 99% of the Linux distros out there.
Which distro ? I’ve been rocking Bazzite for a year, and holy mother of christ, it requires less maintenance than my smartphone.
I’ve been rocking endeavourOS.
It’s really nice, but I hear great things about bazzite. I’m going to have to take bazzite & steamOS for a spinI installed EOS and I’m liking it.
If you like endeavourOS, CachyOS is really good too. It’s also Arch based and includes a really fast custom kernel. It also has lots of gaming enhancements whatever that means. I’ve been trying to spread the word, not a lot of people seem to know about it. I hear Bazzite is pretty good as well. I definitely need to try it out.
That’s actually what I went with too. I considered Mint and Pop!OS but really my PC is a gaming machine with a nvidia card. A friend recommended bazzite and its exactly what I was looking for.
Is it me or is it really something truly extraordinary? In the sense that it requires zero maintenance, it just works.
Yeah. Windows install and Linux install quietly switched which was the difficult shitty experience sometime when I wasn’t watching.
As a Mac user I too want SteamOS to succeed, because it will indirectly result in more games that are compatible with macOS via game porting tools and wine.
Honestly windows is just annoying to deal with. I don’t like the ads, and I don’t like my start menu bar being reorganized. I run it in a VM and managing my install keys is a huge pain with their login system.
Linux is awesome, it’s neat watching its developer friendliness result in snowballing market share.
If a SteamOS desktop system gets established, it would be time to add productive software to the ecosystem. Like a web browser, email, libreoffice, maybe some other tools. There are good free versions of all kinds of productivity software, and having them nicely packaged for a system like that would add a lot of value to the SteamOS driven family PC.
FYI, if you switch to Desktop mode on SteamOS, all those applications you listed are available via the included app store that taps into Flathub. SteamOS also ships with Firefox out of the box. I have them all installed on my SteamDeck already.
Wonderful!
A real corporate productivity suite for Linux via SteamOS would be a wonderful thing.
Well, yes and no. The main point of compatibility that games should be working towards if they want to run well on macOS is to have ARM versions that work better with Apple’s M-series chips. SteamOS/The Steam Deck are still built for x86 processors which Apple has since stopped supporting.
It’s not impossible to bundle the games in an emulation layer, but it is a bit more involved than something like Proton/WINE, which are just compatibility layers and not emulators, and it comes at the cost of performance.
Rosetta 2 seems pretty good still. It’s not free translation, but it’s viable.
I don’t expect macOS to be the best platform for games, I just want them broadly playable.
Yeah a lot of the proton work is going into
https://developer.apple.com/games/game-porting-toolkit/
Which there’s a cool user friendly experience with
A lot of that work is going directly into
https://developer.apple.com/games/game-porting-toolkit/
So there is certainly overlap, though as you said, architecture emulation is a different beast
That’s the thing though. I bet you Valve is already prototyping an ARM based Steam Deck. It’s the logical next step to improve performance and thermals/battery at the same time.
Not SteamDeck, but there is evidence that Valve is working on x86-ARM emulation for a stand-alone VR Headset.
Linux is awesome, it’s neat watching its developer friendliness result in snowballing market share.
Why not ditch MacOS? Mac’s are just as bad as Windows, just in different ways.
Apple has been progressively neutering root on a path to make a laptop as much of a walled garden as iOS. Not to mention the entirely soldered RAM and SSD and then charges ridiculous premiums to get more
Why not ditch MacOS? Mac’s are just as bad as Windows, just in different ways.
Eh, I disagree. Yes, macOS isn’t great, but calling it “just as bad” is a bit disingenuous. If I had to pick between Windows and macOS, and installing Linux wasn’t an option for whatever reason, I’d take macOS in a heartbeat because it doesn’t spy on users anywhere as much as Windows, most Linux stuff works seamlessly (macports or brew, take your pick), the built-in software is actually pretty decent.
That said, I very much dislike macOS as well (I use it for work), and there’s no substitute for me for Linux.
Doesn’t MacOS phone home every time you run a new or changed executable? https://eclecticlight.co/2020/10/27/xprotect-what-do-we-know-about-it/
Edit: might be that it phones home for each executable if last it run was more than 12 hours ago, given this: https://www.howtogeek.com/701176/does-apple-track-every-mac-app-you-run-ocsp-explained/
Doesn’t Windows as well?
Regardless, Windows recording literally everything I do is worse than logging the apps I open.
This does annoy me.
I’m working on a program that uses ctest and compiles a folder of test executables, and it takes seconds to test the first time vs hundredths of a second after.
Yeah, a second isn’t a lot of time, but it means I can’t accurately benchmark performance easily.
For me it strikes the right balance of usability and security.
I’ve been a Mac user for almost 20 years now. I’ve had periods using Linux on desktop, but not for some time now. I’m very much a macOS power user.
The things I use my computer for: desktop publishing via Affinity, photo editing, programming, some app dev, playing mostly older games, and I do a lot of data analysis. There are a few macOS apps I could not live without: Automator, Preview, and I use Apple Numbers a surprising amount (I like that it’s table based and not sheet based).
I also find the right usability and hardware quality makes a huge difference for me. What stopped me before was Linux high DPI support and trackpad quality, but that was years ago.
An example of why I like Mac: I have a script at work that spits out Google cloud buckets in gs: format and I can’t change the script. I set up a simple Automator workflow so now I can right click the url and format it as a link to the bucket viewer in my browser instantly.
I have a ton of these little workflow improvements that I’m sure you could do with Linux but already work well for me.
managing my install keys is a huge pain with their login system.
It’s often easier to activate it with other means even when you have a real key.
Microsoft could also be terrified of how shitty Windows 11 is. I have to think back to Millennium Edition to compare to something this disastrous, but Satya doesn’t care about Windows, Surface, or XBox. Microsoft’s future is M365, Azure, and D365. Big fat high margin Enterprise Agreements since everyone is locked into their proprietary shitty office formats. And they get enterprise problems with audit, identify, access control like few other businesses.
What I don’t know understand is why companies refuse to sell off businesses that they know will die off from their neglect. A shame, except for Windows.
Microsoft always follows the pattern of good OS, bad OS, good OS, bad OS. We just have to wait for Windows 12 for a good one.
10 sucked ass. It’s the reason I stayed on Windows 7 way longer than I should have.
10 was good?
I liked it just fine. You have to admit it was good compared to 8.
I actually liked 8.1. 10 was fine until they started hiding all of the classic control panel settings and stuff behind their new ones and we got a total fustercluck of windows, buttons and options.
It’s true:
3.0 - aka the Windows Protection Fault release 3.1/3.11/WFWG, now with far fewer WPFs 95 - I lost nearly a year of life waiting for it to reboot, again. 98! Second Edition TBF ME - Lets remove stuff and cause cause problems XP - SP2 - I can login before my PC is taken over by RPC calls from the Internet! Vista - UAC up the Longhorn ass 7 - took long enough 8 - 1.5 half complet OSes 10 - erased 1 OS, completed the other 11 - I am still waiting for file Explorer to open. Where is fileman.exe? It’s so laggy, why does the context menu draw out one row at a time.
Windows 98 was supported until almost a year after Windows XP’s release, so nobody really had to use Millennium Edition. Windows 10’s support is ending in October and no new version has been announced.
When most/all multiplayer games start working on Linux that’s when Linux can really start taking off.
It’s the year of the Linux Desktop!!
They do. We’re already there.
The only titles that don’t work are the ones with kernel level anti-cheat, and that needs to die anyway.
Are you serious? Most games can be played on Linux? I don’t care about the kernel anti cheat games, since that shit is not going on my pc anyway
Seems more like about 20% of games. It’s definitely improving but still a long way to go.
Steam Deck compatibility has a much higher standard since it requires the performance being good, gamepad support, etc, and even that’s at 40%. General Linux can’t be less than 95% for games that don’t require kernel level anticheat. Try checking a random sampling on https://www.protondb.com/.
I appreciate it; seeing more than a couple of people recommending protondb. I’ll have to investigate it on my next day off from work that’s not a weekend. Thank you.
20% of games are broken or working? That’s way off either way.
Yea… you’re probably right. Maybe it’s just the games that I want to play. Those tend to not be Linux compatible (if they’re in steam), and for the games that aren’t even in Steam, I don’t bother trying to make them work in wine or anything like that. Just dual boot and call it a day.
I haven’t had a problem running anything yet, currently playing fallout 4 with f4se and a few mods using a ds4 controller over bluetooth.
That’s probably one of the buggiest games out there so that’s saying something. It’s the first game I’ve had to tinker with the launch settings though
If you aren’t playing games with a kernel anti cheat, legit 99.99% of games will work. Nearly every broken game is due to an anticheat. ProtonDB lists only 4% of the top 1000 Steam games as “borked”, and the majority of those are due to anticheat. Any that aren’t will likely be fixed by Proton updates.
If you also want to avoid any games that might not be super smooth, filtering Bronze ranked games are another 3%. Silver is another 8%, but I’ve never had an issue running a Silver rated game.
My issue is I only play multiplayer games and most have KLAC.
Then there’s nothing wrong with staying on Windows. I play nearly exclusively competitive multiplayer games, but all the ones I play work with Proton.
Proton is basically magic. I’ve got 1960 games on steam and I have a chunk that are listed as ‘untested’ but less than 10 that are listed as incompatible. The games listed as untested also usually end up just working. You may have to mess with proton or winetricks sporadically, but even that is very rare in my experience. It is nearly always an issue in a multiplayer game with anti-cheat when it just doesn’t work.
I’m sure there are exceptions… I haven’t tried every game. But most games in my Steam library work with 0 tinkering, and the rest usually just require setting a few launch options.
The only games I haven’t been able to get working at all are Riot games (vanguard anti-cheat is a b*****) and the VR mods for HL2.
I haven’t found a game that isn’t riot owned that doesn’t let me play on linux
I have a Windows PC to play Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen, and more recently Marvel Rivals. We’re still not quite there yet, although it was pretty cool that Baulders Gate worked on Linux.
Both of those games are marked gold on protonDB, so you shouldn’t have to use windows to run them if you want (although marvel rivals apparently needs
SteamDeck=1 %command%in the launch options): https://www.protondb.com/app/3107230 https://www.protondb.com/app/2767030Interesting… thanks for this. I’ll need to look into protondb more; had not heard of it prior to this.
I was a part of the pre-EA access group for Pantheon so my game isn’t a part of Steam. Is this a Steam specific thing?
Proton is certainly “cleaner” to use with Steam, but you don’t have to use Steam to use proton. I’d recommend adding the executable to Steam as a non-Steam game for simplicity. Otherwise you can use Lutris or find a tutorial online to run that specific executable with proton outside of Steam
I appreciate the info, and willingness to discuss this. I think you’ve been able to identify my point of reluctance around all of this now; it feels like work. When I’m done with work, I don’t want to do more work in order to get my games to play. Might explain why I bought a PS5 in May too.
Maybe I’ll give this some investigation on my next holiday / day off. That way it’ll feel only “kinda” like work.
That’s a fair point, linux has gotten a lot better with stuff ‘just working’ but when it doesn’t, it requires some research and tinkering.
I was figuring something out the other day and it dawned on me that the reason I’ve become so enamored with linux is that it’s a hit of nostalgia from getting things working in the 90s. (Also I’m a nerd and I think the way computers work is fascinating lol)
Yes, Proton is primarily a Steam thing, but it’s free software and it’s being actively ported to other launchers as umu (not by Valve). The project is very new and I’m not sure it perfectly matches Proton behavior yet, at least as far as game-specific tweaks are concerned.
Personally, for a non-Steam game I would just try to run it via Lutris. Lutris tries to automatically setup everything so you don’t need to tinker with anything in the best case. It even automatically downloads the game installer and wine, and you can configure it to use the aforementioned umu instead of vanilla wine. In the ideal case, you get the game installed and running with minimal effort all from within the Lutris client. The problem is that the Lutris scripts are maintained by the project itself with recommended corrections from the community. So it’s possible that a game could run with tinkering, but it hasn’t been automated yet.
I don’t know about Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen, but Marvel Rivals worked fine out of the box for me.
For context:
CPU: Intel 9900k
GPU: RTX 3080ti
Distro: EndeavorOS
Display: Wayland
As someone who almost exclusively plays multiplayer games - we are def not there. I agree with you that kernel-level anti-cheat needs to go and games should focus more on AI-based (behavior and pattern analysis) anti-cheats instead. But, it’s simply not fair to to say that “we’re already there” when almost 50% of the largest (most played) games out there don’t work on Linux.
We are not there. Is it Linux’s fault? No. But we are absolutely not there, yet.
I’m curious, what games have you tried that don’t work in Linux?
Perhaps I’m just lucky but it rarely happens to me these days.
RUST, VALORANT, PUBG_BATTLEGROUNDS, DELTA_FORCE, BATTLEFIELD_2042, TOM_CLANCYS_RAINBOW_SIX_SIEGE.
You probably don’t play multiplayer games as much as I do.
All games that enforce kernel level anti-cheat won’t work
This is the final hurdle keeping me on windows, a seamless gaming experience. If SteamOS can hammer everything out, there’s zero reason to stay.
I would argue that at this point, today, its already a fairly seamless experience.
The only singular issue is MMOs with invasive rootkit anticheats. All the MMO’s i’ve played have worked like a charm with zero issues, but thats because I actively avoid games that use invasive rootkit anticheat systems… and I did that on windows, too, so its never been a big issue for me.
Might be an issue if you love your korean mmos though.
and I’m not, like, a sysadmin with 2 decades of linux experience or anything. I’m just a random idiot.
I dont say this to proselytize or try to get you to convert/install today. Just a vewpoint from general everyday user.
Nope, I’m almost exclusively single player at this point. How’s the performance and everything? Is there any drop off?
Check for the games you play here, it will tell you if there’s good linux support for it currently
Everything runs about as good or better than on windows.
That doesnt mean there arent games that run bad… but those games run bad because of something wrong with the game, and not because of running it on Linux or Windows. Cities Skylines 2 and Starfield being prime examples of games that run like ass, because they are ass, and not because of running it on Linux or proton. . . Just for full disclosures sake.
I will say that I run a gaming specific distro (I personally use nobara, but I’ve also heard good things about other gaming distros like bazzite) that takes care of a lot of the headache and has all the annoying shit setup and installed ready to go. It would definitely be more headache trying to get to the same point on, say, ubuntu.
My biggest issue is I work in IT and by the time I’m done for the day I absolutely don’t want to screw with it. I just wanna fire up and go. It seems that I might need to do some research, as things have progressed further than I’d realized.
Thats pretty much my experience with every game I play anymore. Its just click and go.
The only extra step, is something you only have to do once upon fresh install of steam, and thats go into settings > Compatibility > Enable steam play for all games, and set the default proton to use for them to proton experimental.
after that every windows game you download will automatically use proton experimental and should just run right off the bat.
Its genuinely amazing how far proton has come just in this last year alone, and gaming on steam in general… and for that latter part, a lot of the progress is simply due to the gaming focus distros that have everything pre installed, configured, and setup ready to go.
Year of linux desktop, amirite?
Jesus, news outlets love hyperbole, don’t they. We are not even at 5% market share.
I’m legitimately curious how many half-baked ad-filled second-to-the-punch products will be too many for Microsoft before they finally capitulate.
Man, if microsoft capitulated, and gave us a Windows 7 - 2, that was just windows 7 with current support, no spyware, no telemetry, and a nice coat of polish… I would definitely be tempted to switch back lol
That would be nice, having good competition solves a lot of problems. Plus if steamOS gains enough traction more large game studios may start to specifically support it.
if steamOS gains enough traction more large game studios may start to specifically support it.
Do they have to though? Isn’t “just” running on Linux (mostly done by avoiding weird tricks, say a Windows build from Unity often works) enough?
Anticheat doesnt usually work, and often it takes tweaking to get windows games working perfectly. It’d be nice if everything just worked.
I’m at an uncomfortable crossroads of knowing enough to hate Microsoft, but not knowing enough to trust myself with switching to Linux. I’m like just barely tech-literate enough to wander into places like Lemmy, but beneath some surface level shit I’m probably one of the dumbest motherfuckers here when it comes to not setting my devices on fire.
So… a ‘Linux for dummies’ sounds exactly like what I need!
Well, there are a lot of newb-friendly distros these days. Some options:
- Linux Mint (any spin) - one of the easiest to get help with online, with minimal compromises
- Fedora - also pretty easy to get help w/ online
- Bazzite - great if you just want to play games; it’s about as close to SteamOS as you get w/o an official release
Any of those should be pretty friendly to users new to Linux, and they go roughly in order from fitness as a regular desktop (top down) to fitness for gaming (bottom up), but any of them can handle gaming and desktop stuff pretty equivalently.
Bazzite is freaking awesome. I started my Linux journey with Arch, then tried Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, Mint, Zorin, Endeavour and more. Bazzite has been on my PC for a year and it’s been the best experience I had with PCs in my whole life. I freaking love it.
It does look nice. My main concern is the read-only root, which seems annoying to deal with for non-gaming stuff. I’m a dev and sometimes need to install new dependencies and whatnot. But I’m sure there’s a good workflow for that as well.
Aurora (KDE) or Bluefin (gnome) have dev editions. They are based on ublue like Bazzite, but are more dev oriented.
I’ll have to check it out.
I’ve also considered trying the openSUSE MicroOS versions as well (Kalpa for KDE and Aeon for GNOME). I use Tumbleweed on my systems right now, so that would be a natural transition.
I feared making the plunge as well but it was so seamless tbh. Got Linux Mint and it just feels like a newer version of old Windows. Not sure how it’s with other distros, but I find it to be precicely Linux for dummies.
I’d say the difficulty to getting used to new environment was on a similar level to getting from Windows XP to Windows 7. If you can dual boot I recommend just trying it - the water is fine.
beneath some surface level shit I’m probably one of the dumbest motherfuckers here when it comes to not setting my devices on fire.
Well… if you actually want to learn, as we ALL did, get yourself a device you can literally set on fire. By that I mean a RPi 3 (probably going for 10 EUR nowadays) or a 2nd hand laptop. If you can’t find that easily, try a virtual machine, if you don’t want to bother give a whirl (with a ad blocker…) to https://distrosea.com/ and come back, risk free.
It’s honestly empowering to learn and it has been relevant for decades (basically since the UNIX days) and STILL is relevant today in the time of the “cloud” where all such commands are still used.
Bazzite is exactly that. You can’t break it unless you read and study how to break it, intentionally. Flash it to a USB drive, boot to the installer, done. You’ll never worry about drivers, updates, ads, spyware, telemetry, that will be a thing of the past.
I hope to see this before the EoL date set for Windows 10 and a bunch of people throw out perfectly good machines to buy something that works with Windows 11.
Personally, I won’t use Windows 11 on my home machines. But my concern is that I install a distro this year and want to switch to SteamOS later, but would have to start over with customizations, etc. in the new distro. I wish SteamOS was available now for gaming rigs!
my concern is that I install a distro this year and want to switch to SteamOS later, but would have to start over with customizations, etc. in the new distro.
I wouldn’t sweat that at all.
I switched distros last week, didn’t like the new one as much as I thought I would, and switched again a few days later. It’s not that big of a deal. Install some apps, reload your files from a USB stick. It’s not a major commitment.
I think it should be available just in time for Windows 10 sunset later this summer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tdR-bxvQKN8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ebmp2FIrTlE
I’m waiting for a MS vs Steam lawsuit where MS tries to sue over the usage of the Windows api
They would have a hell of a time trying to say they want to control API usage after letting everyone and their mother use it free and unrestricted for decades. But I wouldn’t put it past them to try.
SteamOS will let you pay games from GOG, right?
Because they’re DRM free, they’re super easy to install too! Another install method is Heroic
Yes you just have to sideload the client. I believe Lutris makes it easy but I don’t use GOG myself.
I hope the installer will be so easy that even non-gamers with little to no technical knowledge will be able to download it, double-click, and follow the wizard then end up with SteamOS installed. That would be the dream.
Bazzite is exactly that. Dead easy.
Don’t you need to put it on a USB-stick first? That’s the biggest hurdle, I think. Then getting into the BIOS and choosing which device to boot from. Those 2 steps are the ones that kick most normal people out.
