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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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.
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.
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.)
I really hope the Linux area keeps growing and helps push for like better drivers.
I'm praying they NVK becomes as good as proprietary stuff. I would contribute if I was more knowledge 😓
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.
@emergencyfood @UnaSolaEstrellaLibre I would spend money on a great Linux laptop that could game at 1440p max settings but I have not found the one, yet. Any recs?
The framework laptops are pretty good from what I hear. If I get to the point I need a laptop, I'll look closer at those.
A mac port gets you mac users.
A linux port barely gets you more linux users because proton exists.
A mac port gets you mac users.
A linux port barely gets you more linux users because proton exists.
Apple's new porting helper is nothing but Wine + D3D to Metal wrapper + Rosetta x86 emulation.
I use both and I can tell you that is rare. Mac gaming is trash.
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 -_-
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.
Sadly corporate institutions still require windows
Yeah, definitely the downfall that spans way back to IBM. Thankfully my place gives that choice to folks (Apple and Microsoft both being proprietary but hey one is Unix based).
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 and have completely forgotten the long and arduous path to mastery the OS requires compared to rock-dead-simple windows.
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.
Is this finally the year of Linux "Desktop"...?
The year of Linux handheld console
🥳🥳🥳
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
NGL, I'm surprised macOS was even 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.
NGL I thought this was already the case lol
and there was much rejoicing!
This is kind of like saying you’ve beet a Toyota Prius on the track.