I dont even check if a game will work anymore on Linux, it always does. Last one was Planet Crafter which was a really good game. The entire planet is changing as you terraform it which is very fun to see.
Planet crafter, steer clear of that game. That’s some addictive shit, I 100%'ed that game before I even knew what I was doing. Really hit the subnautica style base building, alongside a progression system that frankly didn’t take the piss with my time
Yeah, it’s good. Sort of like a survival cookie clicker.
Getting it to work is one thing, getting past anticheat bullshit to play MP is different. Luckily I’m really only into single player at the moment, which all work flawlessly on my bazzite.
There are good MP games that works on Linux, but if one really cares about a specific title (and I totally get it, we want to enjoy stuff with our friends and all) dual boot I feel is a good compromise. Sure it is annoying to reboot every time you want to play some X game but nothing is perfect and you can keep your windows install pretty minimal.
Fair enough. I hate the way windows has gone, so I’m perfectly fine with any flavor of Linux.
That game ate 60 hours of my life in a week when I first played it
Pure addiction planet crafter, I bought the dlc in a heartbeat
What’s my easiest distro route to get straight to gaming with an RTX 4070ti plus a Vive VR?
I have a very similar setup (Vive + 4070) working under Ubuntu 24.04 LTS. The only special workaround was to install Steam natively, downloading directly from Valve instead of using the Snap provided by Canonical. Aside from that, everything worked immediately right out of the box.
Outside of Valve hardware certainly Bazzite or Nobara. Not sure about Vive VR support in general though, but if it exists those distros are the most likely to work with it with minimum of issues.
I’d say something Arch based will be the easiest on account of it having so many users. For VR, check out the Linux VR Adventures wiki, and the Matrix community attached to it.
NVidia kind of sucks. I’d expect that to be the biggest wrinkle.
CachyOS would be my recommendation; it has options to get a kernel with the closed-source drivers automatically during install, iirc. I bought an AMD card, so I have no direct experience, but I’d expect the least friction with it, even compared to Bazzite or other gaming-focused distributions.
Yeah. Being Arch based it’s flexible, and I’ve heard it’s got a good setup. A friend has a bit of a rough time with the default kernel but you have options.
VR will automatically be a bit janky. The smoothest out of the box VR experience at the moment is WiVRn coupled with an Android VR headset, like a Quest or a Pico. Requires a good router though.
If someone’s looking to get into VR on Linux, I’d wait for Valve’s headset to come out. No idea if it’ll be any good or not, but the Quest is arse. I absolutely hate mine.
Reject Fedora nonsense. Go Arch, use CachyOS. Seriously, I only ever had issues with Fedora and Fedora based distros. And besides, Red Hat is slowly turning to shit. You heard it from me first. In 5 to 10 years most people will put Red Hat on the same level as Canonical.
I second CachyOS. I don’t even consider myself an advanced Linux user and it’s been a relatively painless transition from Windows gaming.
Plugged in a second SSD m.2 into my motherboard, installed off a USB, and an hour later I was goofing around with some friends on our weekly Satisfactory run like nothing changed.
If it’s the first time trying it just follow along with a YouTube guide, ezpz.
There is none. VR is a fools errand on Linux. You can maybe get something to technically run, but with missing features, worse performance, and even then only some VR will even attempt to launch to that broken state.
I have a Windows VM for VR gaming. Dual boot also works. For all non-VR gaming, Linux is pretty much flawless nowadays.
Which Distro? Pick one that has existed for at least 10 years, with the desktop environment your like the look and feel of most, and most popular and well supported from that.
We have a Vive and it works pretty okay actually, aside from SteamVR being janky.
Hopefully they fix the SteamVR jank with the upcoming Steam Frame, though!
– Frost
CachyOS or Nobara if you want the option to tinker down the line
Bazzite if you don’t want to do any tinkering ever
wait, MS cares about their product? then why is it so… gestures vaguely at the OS
Linux gaming went from good luck to Windows is taking notes. That’s a pretty wild timeline.
And it all started with a guy wanting to see sexy android ass on Linux
I need the lore
Single wizard made DirectX 11 translation to Vulkan because he wanted to enjoy his waifu. Then he made it to the point of Witcher 3 running.
There was a problem tho - some models were broken because Vulkan didn’t have some DirectX features. Then valve got involved and submitted proposal to Kronos for necessary Vulkan extension. Driver guys from MESA implemented it really quickly and suddenly almost all the DirectX 11 games became playable. Nvidia also added support.
It’s an insane story of one guy with Anime waifu in avatar turning the tides of history. AFAIK he now works full time for Valve.
🗿
the power of open source
Open source and st. Gabe willing to embrace it. Valve made tremendous effort in order to push it to the mainstream
If anything has been a driver of human ingenuity, it’s the horny
Are you judging him?
yes. I judge it as pretty neat
Wait what lol
So we can also say indirectly that Steam Deck wouldn’t have happened without the horniness of Yoko Taro who created that android ass in the first place.
What a chain of causality that is
This is how art changes the world for the better
What if they find out that people went to CachyOS for even more performance?
Cachy uses a lot of unstable patches. I wouldn’t recommend it just for benefit of bunch more frames.
So far it has been the most stable distro I’ve run, since moving to Linux full time three years ago, i think they are doing something right, idn 🤷
Agreed. The only major challenges I’ve had with CachyOS are from my Windows VM or from not realizing that Docker containers are the best option for server-type things, like the controller for my WiFi mesh network. Once I stopped trying (and failing) to run that from the AUR, it’s been smooth sailing.
But most people would just buy the dedicated mesh network controller, and the only reason I need a Windows VM is for SharePoint integration in Explorer, which is a fairly specialized requirement. Even as a power user, I almost exclusively use the web apps for O365 just so I don’t need to use Windows.
Apparently, earlier in CachyOS’s history, there were more issues, but I don’t think that’s at all true anymore. I tried installing a more “standard”/conservative choice, Debian on my wife’s and friend’s laptops, and it’s been way harder. I should have just stuck with “unstable” CachyOS, and it would have been much more stable. Turns out things usually get better with newer patches. Who knew?
I was there early in CachyOS’s history, and it was still great. The only huge issues I can remember (that wasn’t totally self inflicted) are upstream Nvidia problems, and some ambiguous manual package installs/uninstalls when some stuff was shuffled and renamed. But the later just taught me to watch the update log, as I should.
That, and I keep an LTS kernel around whenever something minor breaks. Which their setup makes totally painless.
I agree with others. CachyOS is the most stable Linux distro I’ve ever used, to the point where my laptop and desktop installs are years old now. It’s also that Linux desktop, overall, is in a good place, but still.
Debian is IMO just bad distro for desktop users. There’s a reason why Valve moved from Debian to Arch based for their SteamOS.
Microsoft is doing this ONLY because they finally recognized that Linux surpassed them flying on the one thing they were king: games
Microsoft doesn’t give a single shit about end users, never had. It always had the goal of becoming the dominant ayer, then get a monopoly, and then doing absolutely nothing anymore until users complain too much. This has been their work ethos since it’s inception and if you believe otherwise I have a bridge to sell you.
It already is better in a number of games.
And even with the overhead of translating DirectX and Windows API calls.
Just a hunch, but it’s not performance why peeps are migrating away from windows
the windows file explorer and terminal have horrible performance, it’s one of the reasons I’ll never switch back
Nobody is going to say what the real problem is unless they want to get fired
They can’t. The people working on complaints are in a different department. And departments don’t communicate at Microsoft.
That’s an understatement
Just 1 more AI data centre?
Lightly squeezes AI bubble a few times
“Yeah, there’s room for one more.”
Can’t wait to see how the fediverse grows when all these datacenters have to liquidate their stock for dirt cheap
Homelab community will get a lot more activity XD
?!?!?!
Are you stalking me or something?
you are just widespread
The performance boost is just the icing on the cake
Windows could run twice as fast and I still wouldn’t switch back to it.
Good news if you’re on a nvidia gpu then 🫠
It was for a time, when linux+Proton started outperforming Windows, in recent games, a few years ago.
But yeah, now… well Microsoft just seems very determined to actively destroy everything it maintains or touches.
I migrated because I was frustrated with having to constantly fix problems caused by forced updates. I didn’t expect the benefit of my computer being WAY faster.
My biggest “wow” was when I could hit the super key and have the start menu open immediately instead of waiting 4 minutes for it to load in and another 20 minutes to take my search input and give me back results from Bing.
Hotkeys related thing that got me is the fact that on almost any DE you can configure your own hotkeys the way you want them, you don’t have to use the ones Microslop thought are good. Using three languages, layout switching was an absolute pain with what hotkeys Windows has to offer.
Sorry you didn’t like Bing, but now we have set Edge as your default browser, you’ll love it. Also Teams is now installed on your PC, surprise!
If it took that long, then you might’ve accidentally installed your os on a harddrive
Some games have better performance running under wine on Linux than natively on Windows.
Yeah, when you’re not trying to support random crap compiled for winxp you can leave out a lot of cruft
Well the funny bit is winxp games and software run through wine quite well lol
I always wonder whether that’s because it’s doing less… like some graphics feature that isn’t supported might just no-op in Wine.
It’s because Windows is bloated. A lot of games rely on the CPU to deliver frames. If the CPU is congested so are the frames.
It’s usually because of all the other bloat running on Windows. Just various background processes on Windows will eat up like 10G of RAM just idling, where most desktop Linux distros I’ve used will use 2-5G idling. Having a few extra gigs of RAM available can make a noticeable difference.
I feel like system calls in the Linux kernel are just more efficient/faster than system calls in Windows. Windows system calls have decades worth of compatibility layers all cobbled together for business reasons, whereas I don’t think the Linux kernel suffers from that same problem.
And that’s not even mentioning the multiple layers of absolute voodoo black magic wizardry that is Vulkan (Linux graphics API) and DXVK (a translation later that translates DirectX calls to Vulkan calls). Those are some absolutely incredible pieces of software, and deserve a ton of the credit as well.
I don’t really think Linux is faster because it just injects noops sometimes though lol. You’d definitely be able to notice if part of the graphics pipeline was just… skipping enough steps to make a noticeable performance difference lol
Just one small correction for that - Vulkan is universal, not tied to any platform.
Ah right, thanks for the correction!
Unless there’s a bottleneck it’s usually Vulkan vs dx.
Nah. I mean, there might be some stuff like that, but nowadays, I’d be surprised if feature parity wasn’t 1:1 (or even better, with some open source drivers having features that are removed from official windows drivers…).
The underlying OS is pure garbage, that’s mostly it. Windows will start chugging everywhere with even moderate FS activity: running a background, single-threaded backup process will sometimes make it impossible to click in another window or open a new application. Driver API is not great, you have to jump through hoops to do basic stuff. There are many ways to do the exact same thing, each being more or less efficient than the other. Audio API is so bad, an audio device failing will sometime cause ohter, unrelated, non-audio application to spontaneously combust.
And so on and so on.
On the other hand, the Linux compatibility layer that proton provides do add some overhead in places, but surprisingly, it’s not that much overhead. And it’s not that common (basically, the code runs natively until specific instructions that requires special handling).
Obviously, when you have a better operating base, and very little extra overhead, software tends to run smoother.
And all that is not taking into account optimisation to Linux system themselves; there’s been a lot of improvement in technical stuff for graphic drivers (especially on AMD side, but not exclusively), the kernel itself can get improvement in its handling of IO and memory, the whole thing is more flexible, etc.
Windows 11/10 does some stuff that isn’t in the feature scope of wine/proton, namely on the security front (KDP, HVCI, ACG), which has a measurable performance impact. Whether you want to call that bloat or not is up to you.
On the flip side, I couldn’t get Linux native Jackbox to run because the devs failed to update it to support something (Wayland maybe, IDK was troubleshooting mid Xmas party).
Ended up installing the Windows version in Proton.
Oh yeah that happens. Some devs are just too lazy to understand their build toolchain.
That’s a story old as Linux. Native shit stops working. Thankfully wine/Proton is there to keep it functional
Hm. I wonder if still will become a problem in the future if we get more Linux native games. We shit on Windows for not playing old games when wine can, but if a game stops functioning moving from x11 to Wayland (or some other dependency) will there be people there to care enough to fix it? Although I would assume it would be an easier fix for Linux than Windows for when it does.
It won’t. You have so many options. Just install the old libraries, use a chroot, use docker. Probably automate all this with Lutris or similar.
it will always be a problem with native games.
I think it was about 5 years ago, the Terraria team Linux dev left. Something happened that stopped the Linux build launching, and the native version was not playable until they got a new Linux dev in the team. Proton version worked flawlessly with more stable framerate.
As far as I know the native Undertale build is still unplayable. If it is working now, well it wasn’t for about 6 years.
I see people get excited about native game builds, that’s great but unless it’s a very dedicated team that will update the game constantly it seems to be is no use.
I feel like the issue could be solved with a flatpak-like solution.
Once 32bit libraries are gone, only wine with the recently added WoW64 will be able to run old games ot of the box. Old native titles made for 32bit Linux will require installing all the 32 bit libs again, assuming they’ll be even available for your distro
Which is no issue w Since you can even still run old 16-bit games on linux. Maybe someone will start packaging convenient library collections at some point.
Many games ship with dependencies statically linked into the binary. Those won’t even have the problem apart from maybe glibc.
Edit: 16-bit still works. For 8-bit there are emulators.
Year of the Windows desktop here we go!
(credit)
I have Linux on my personal computer and Windows on my work laptop. Best of both worlds. Linux is currently a very nice 0 stress experience for gaming/casual stuff. With Proton, gaming on Linux is nearly as viable as on Windows.
get ventoy, start trying
Unrelated but the ventoy usb I keep on me really helped me today after a ram stick decided to die and corrupt my system along with it
Add a HIREN boot USB to your toolkit too.
I’ve run out of devices to put Linux on, so maybe I’ll create some VMs today
let’s pump those numbers up on steam hardware survey. although they might not count VMs
I’m doing my part, switched last week to Linux. A few growing pains getting everything working, but it beats the nightmare that was keeping Win11 stable.
Everyone should try it once.
CachyOS for gaming PCs, Debian for browsing laptops
No please, continue shooting yourself in the foot.
People begged for performance debloating for more than a decade but you’re only interested now because Proton outperforms Windows.
I would be asking for a multi million dollar salary as an NT kernel engineer to undo all the crappary intentionally introduced in every update ever since Windows 8.
Oof. They are about to inject a bunch of vibe code into the only part that functions well.
Lol it’s true
It’s wild that they recognized that software compiled for their own operating system goes faster through an interpreter on a different operating system
Gaming aside, it’s incredible how bad Windows Explorer performs compared to e.g. Dolphin. It’s performance got even worse with Windows 11, but at least it finally has tabs now
Is that Dolphin on Linux or Windows?
They are talking about the file explorer Dolphin, which is available on Linux and Windows.
But it is a core app for the KDE desktop environment, so it is primarily optimized for Linux.
I haven’t actually tried Dolphin on Windows, not sure how usable it is
It’s from KDE so usually Linux
Edit: …realising there’s also Dolphin Emulator and now I’m also confused lol but still feel they’re talking about KDE file manager vs Win Explorer
I was also talking about KDE dolphin.
https://cdn.kde.org/ci-builds/system/dolphin/master/windows
See also
“With things like instant file search!” Omg I can’t, what a joke of an OS.
The company views a third party app called File Pilot as benchmark for these [file search] improvements
That app is still in beta and was launched one year ago.
They’re comparing the search from the native shell (where they could directly query the NTFS table like Everything does and get instant results), native to their OS with 40 years of experience with some unknown newcomer still in beta???
Its funny because Valve doesn’t need SteamOS to compete with Windows. They made it to enable playing more games, so you buy more games. If MS matches performance with Windows, Valve still wins, because its just another avenue for people to buy more games. They don’t care what OS you do it on. But MS does care, because they need you on Windows to eat up your data. Which also means they’re at a disadvantage in competing on performance as well, because they need your games to play as well as on SteanOS while also enabling all their bullshit background services and telemetry.
Besides the data collection angle, Microsoft wants gamers on Windows instead of Linux so that there’s at least a chance they’ll buy games from the Microsoft Store.
Valve also needed to break its dependency on Windows, in case MS decides to go down the walled garden route like Apple. MS making the windows store the only supported way to install apps and games would be devastating for Valve.
Whats really fun about this is Valve started investing in Linux because a bunch of changes Microsoft made to windows 8 signaled they were moving to a locked-down ecosystem to bully corporations like Valve out of the market.
The current state of Windows is a product of MS’s blind greed but the current state of the viable alternatives is, in some ways, also a product of MS’s greed.
Windows Update will also be improved, with the goal of making Windows 11 reliable enough so that a restart is only necessary once a month.
This isn’t just a matter of Windows 11 reliability, it’ll take big improvements in Microsoft’s quality control to stop needing to follow the monthly updates with emergency patches and hotfixes.
Right now they are:
it’s patch Tuesday!!!1!1!!! We MUST release immediately an update or the users will revolt!!
But Sir, preliminary testing says that it has a 80% bricking chance with full data loss, can we postpone it?
PUSH. IT. NOW. Force the install and make sure to reboot all the computers during the working hours, bonus if you force close all the opened apps without saving
They arent going to improve the quality they’ve just added the ability to do the patches via hotpatch and not require a restart. Still gonna be same quality of slop
Lmao imagine whatever improvement they try to do end up making wine even more performant
