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Posted by throwaway270925 7 hours ago

Gaming on Linux has never been more approachable(www.theverge.com)
241 points | 187 commentspage 2
B-Con 4 hours ago|
I just rebuilt my PC and setup Steam on Linux. It was fairly smooth.

I've dual-booted Arch and Windows for about 16 years. I always kept Windows around for gaming, and the occasional "doesn't support Linux" workflow.

For a few years where I didn't game I found myself almost exclusively in Linux. But then I spent the last 5-6 years stuck between the two as my PC use for daily tasks dwindled, I stopped working on side projects, and I started gaming a bit more.

I hated trying to split my time between them. Most of what I used a PC for was the browser, so I could just stay in Windows most of the time. I wanted to use Linux, but rebooting to use a web browser just didn't make sense. As a result I would accidentally go 2-3 months without ever booting Arch. As a result, I had a couple of major updates that didn't go smoothly.

I wanted to use Linux, though. I like having a customized WM, I like having so many useful tools at my disposal, etc. I just like using Linux, in spite of the occasional technical complexity.

In the last couple months I rebuilt my PC and a major requirement was that I get set up to game in Linux as much as possible. I even bought an AMD card to ensure smooth driver support.

I'm so incredibly thankful that Steam has made gaming not just possible, but relatively simple. Installation was simple. My single-player games seem well supported so far. And most importantly, Steam has made it obvious they're committed to this line of support, so this isn't some hero effort that will bit rot in a couple years.

I still have to reboot to play competitive games, due to their anti-cheat requirements, but that's less of a problem, I'll take what I can get.

vagab0nd 5 hours ago||
I had to briefly go back to Windows and I just couldn't understand how anyone serious can run an OS that just decides to reboot itself in the middle of the night.
layer8 5 hours ago||
Just install Reboot-Blocker. Or equivalently, define a Scheduled Task that rotates your “working hours” every hour, so that it always matches the current time. Yes it’s annoying to have to do that and that there isn’t a simple switch anymore like there used to be, but at least it’s defeatable.
WD-42 5 hours ago||
This 100%. The main purpose of an operating system is to run programs and keep them running. Windows fails at that.
jaza 3 hours ago||
The (only) people who pay for Windows are corporate managers. Therefore, the main purpose of Windows is to make corporate managers happy. Corporate managers want updates to install promptly, so they can tick their ISO compliance box saying "no insecure software running here". They couldn't care less about an annoying experience or slightly reduced productivity for their underlings. Therefore, Windows succeeds at its main purpose.
keithnz 4 hours ago||
I really like windows 11, works great. I have it way more customized to my liking than most "normal" users would, but there's really no negative impact on me. I also have a Mac and use Linux (bounced between arch, ubuntu, and now just use PopOS). Overall I generally prefer windows, it generally runs everything. Things like windows powertoys make the user experience pretty nice, doing similar on linux requires a lot more work. Wezterm standardizes the terminal across all platforms. But the OS really doesn't matter too much, it only accounts for maybe <10% of my experience. But everything just seems a bit easier on windows but I could live just fine in any of the OS's if I had to.
thewebguyd 4 hours ago||
I generally like Windows too, which is a lot of why I'm so incredibly frustrated by the direction Microsoft is taking.

There are still glaring bugs, omissions, and regressions in Windows 11 that just are not getting attention because Microsoft is 100% focused on AI instead of improving their product.

I have a MacBook Pro now. I get by. Window management drives me absolutely insane, but this is the best laptop hardware, performance, and battery life I've ever had. Windows is now shoved into a VM that I pop open only when I explicitly need it for a few work things (primarily Excel and PowerBI Desktop).

I'd go back to Windows again the moment Microsoft starts respecting their users again, but it doesn't look like that's going to happen.

throwawee 3 hours ago||
I had to help someone elderly set up Windows 11 recently and it was monstrous. The error messages were useless and when we finally got it going, the UI was horribly sluggish. There was a time Windows was a solid default choice for the average consumer, but Windows 7 was 15 years ago.
marcus_holmes 3 hours ago||
I switched over last year, no problems. Everything runs fine, and often better than on my wife's Windows machine. We're going to switch her over soon, because Windows 11 is such a shitshow.

Really interested to see where Valve goes with the new hardware. I love my Steam Deck, so I have faith they'll do a good job.

LanceH 4 hours ago||
I just tried installing Heroic Games on Arch, and the install process has left me less than impressed. It will be one vague error with a bunch of forums saying, "try this" and no "this is what that error means". I try to install that one and it has its own error, with the same forum experience. I'm not trying to install something which will allow me to install vulkan which will allow me to install heroic games...maybe.

I don't think an Epic games launcher is exactly obscure. Mind you, I'm completely commmitted to Linux and having the launcher is just in the "nice to have" category, but it hasn't gone well so far.

dgunay 4 hours ago||
The experience using Heroic Games Launcher is a good bit less polished than Steam IME. I only really use it to play games that are occasionally given away on the Epic Games Store for free so I mostly treat it as a nice bonus if they actually work on Linux.
LanceH 4 hours ago||
I use it almost exclusively for Satisfactory, which I could buy again on Steam, but I don't want to.

Steam is working flawlessly. Other than anti-cheat, I haven't run across anything that doesn't play exactly like its windows counterpart.

tmtvl 3 hours ago||
My experience installing the Heroic Games Launcher on Arch was just:

- git clone the heroic-games-launcher AUR repo,

- makepkg -sc,

- pacman -U.

And it just worked. This was something like a month ago, though so maybe my experience is more recent?

Venn1 4 hours ago||
This week we shut the doors on our Linux gaming podcast that has been running continuously for the past 13 years. No fuss, no drama, but with the announcement of Steam Machine II (we also covered the origianl launch) it just seemed time. Proton has evolved to the point most things work out of the box. Nobody is bothering with native and it's gotten difficuls to find things to cover.

It really feels like evertying is ligned up for the year of Linux in the Living room and yeah, it's really good to see.

djhworld 5 hours ago||
My gaming PC sits next to the TV in my living room and I use it like a console, I have one of those cheap blutooth wireless keyboards with trackpad for the really basic iteractions and then I just use a game controller for playing games.

Windows 11 has been fine for me, I don't interact with it much other than seeing it for a bit when launching games.

I honestly wouldn't mind giving Linux a go, the only downside is I made the mistake of buying an nvidia graphics card, I'm not sure how much of a pain it is these days but last time I tried it was a bit of a nightmare - the general wisdom at the time was to go with an AMD card.

sbrother 5 hours ago|
Nvidia's Linux software is first rate -- actually a large amount of the software that would merit buying an Nvidia graphics card is Linux-only anyway. I actually briefly had an AMD card but ended up giving it away since it didn't support ~any of the projects I needed to work on. But YMMV, my anecdata is from a ML engineering perspective.
robotnikman 5 hours ago|||
I can confirm your anecdote, based on messing with ML on a linux system in my personal time over the last few years. I don't do any work in ML, but I have never heard of anyone doing anything with ML on Windows other than maybe running some models locally.

Though I will say I have encountered issues in the past with a Linux gaming computer which experienced issues with the Nvidia drivers anytime I decided to update the distro (I was using Kubuntu at the time).

selectodude 4 hours ago||
I do ML in a Debian WSL install because I’m a crazy person. But I hate dual booting and it works perfectly.
rabf 3 hours ago|||
Not only has Nvidia Linux support been first rate for decades now, but their FreeBSD support is also great. The secret has been that they run the same driver on all platforms with just a shim to interface with the different kernels.
Escapade5160 4 hours ago||
If you are looking solely for a Linux gaming distro, Bazzite is it. I switched from Windows earlier this year and I haven't looked back. Everything works out of the box.

https://bazzite.gg/

ndesaulniers 3 hours ago||
Dunno, just upgraded Fedora to Fedora 43 and all of the games I had set up (wine) stopped working. Will try gaming on Linux again next decade.
dgunay 4 hours ago|
I've been gaming on Linux exclusively for the last few years. Problems with games are few and far between these days.

I've only had to fully reinstall once every ~2 years or so, and it's usually due to some problem with my DE/system not booting that I can't be fucked to troubleshoot. That's mostly my fault for running GNOME on a rolling distro. I just back up my home dir to the storage drive and I'm back up and running in less than an hour. Other than that, it just continues to work and I can be reasonably assured that if I don't touch it, it'll be fine.

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