Non-Windows systems fucking doubled. I’m going to have to say it: THE YEAR OF THE LINUX DESKTOP
Every year will be that year from now on, but unironically!
Slowly but surely 👀 Proton and Steam Deck really changed the game for Linux gaming.
Yeah, my steam deck was a gateway drug to Linux for me, I know a couple of other people who had the same experience.
Games will just work these days, its amazing. Except when they want to run anti-cheat as a kernel module… And I dont want those games anyway.
I play all kinds of games and they just work. Sometimes you have to adjust the settings a bit, but to be honest, that is rarely the case. At first I had problems because I wanted mod support for Cyberpunk 2077 and I tried to get the Nexus apps to work (any of them) and it just would not work. But then, someone suggested the native Linux app Limo which works very well for me for installing and administrating mods. For installing and starting the games, I used to use Lutris a long time ago, but now I rely on Heroic Games Launcher, and unlike Lutris, it has not let me down so far.
I use Bazzite btw.
The only settings I ever change are Linux Native to Proton 9 because it’s just SO much better for games more than 5 minutes old.
I find that I don’t have to tinker with settings anymore than I did on Windows — which is to say that it’s pretty occasional
But what I like about Linux is that in the rare instances of struggling to make stuff work (like when I found out how to run mods in Baldur’s Gate 3 — big love to the random person who made an excellent Steam Community guide on how to mod Bg3 on the steam deck), at least at the end of it, I come away from the process with some additional knowledge that’ll be useful beyond the problem I was dealing with.
The OS is just way more transparent and communicative in a way that facilitates learning (once you learn the basics of how to communicate with it, such as not being terrified of the terminal)
I’ve been running games that advertise they run in linux for a few years, but only within the last 6 months or so started trying out made-for-Windows games, and it’s really incredible just how good the Proton compatibility layer is now. All of the games I’ve tried are at least playable - most run perfectly, a few are a bit slow, and some you have to tweak settings but there’s a big database of how to get different games to work at appdb.winehq.org. Not one of the games in my library don’t run on linux at all, other than a couple with kernel anti-cheats that I don’t play any more anyway.
I was dual-booting but a couple months ago I deleted my Windows partition and now I just run linux full time. If a game only runs on Windows, I just won’t buy it.
While that page is great I think for proton https://www.protondb.com/ is a lot easier as you don’t have to be aware of how proton wraps wine to apply the fixes from winehq.
oh, proton and how it integrates has been that good for at least 2 years now
I would have installed linux on my system, but my mouse/keyboard are wireless and wouldnt work during the installation process of bazzite.
Looks like an error.
There’s ‘0 64bit’ and ‘64bit’ along with huge number of ‘others’
There’s not a single Fedora based distro on the list, looks like they have problem identifying it.
I wouldn’t be surprised if it got counted multiple times in this mess.
My bet is once they sort it out, Linux will be back to 2.5%
I’m bringing three more people home in the coming weeks.
“massive”
Linux users on Steam used to be a rounding error. It is relatively massive.
Looks sus. Probably a fluke.
There has been a disproportionate amount of “fuck windows” chatter on social media recently. It could be real.
I wish that was it, but what are those unnamed 64 bit Linuxes supposed to be?
And those channels have been talking about Linux for months. Why now such a sharp increase?
I hope windows 12 pushes even more AI. The shitter it gets, the more people move to linux.
I hope that too. Can’t wait to get a reason to switch back.
I spent most of my gaming days well below <1%. Now that I don’t have time for gaming, Linux usage decides to surge? 😡
Going to add one more PC in day or 2. The courier company is holding my PSU. GIVE ME MY PSU!!!
You bought a PC? In this economy?
I don’t stuff’s gonna get cheaper anytime soon (I hope I am wrong) so might as well just get it now than later (when the world has been more unpredictable than ever)
most likely bought it in parts over a period of time, before everything went to shit as much as it is now
I guess now is as good as time as ever, because they are only going to become more rare and expensive going forward. If you have the money for it of course.
Maybe, maybe not. I wonder if after the AI bubble pops (whenever that happens - crosses fingers) data centers will close and suddenly have to liquidate a bunch of assets. Kinda like what happened after the NFT crash.
It will crash but we don’t know when. It could be 2-3 years from now for all we know or it can be tomorrow. And when it crashes a lot of people are going to lose their incomes and I don’t want to be in a position when everything is cheap but I still can’t afford.
The AI bubble bursting will probably cause a shitload of tech companies to go bankrupt and cause divestment in data centres, but it’ll be enterprise hardware mainly I think. Prices likely will fall as a second order effect. And the economy will probably also collapse as bad or worse than 2008. Lots to look forward to.
Actually, at least RAM prices are currently dropping.
I dream about the times when all software and games are made for Linux first and have Windows users use Wine lol.
I mean, cross compiling is a thing. It has never been easier to build an agnostic game and compile it for different OS.
I have a theory: Windows users don’t have the skill to fix their broken PCs, and now they don’t have the money to replace them.
Hell I don’t have the skill to fix that shit, it’s garbage and the only solution is installing Linux
Windows users can’t even install Windows.
