Steam on Linux around 0.9% marketshare
phoronix.com
phoronix.com
If only more popular games were compatible, and game series like The Witcher or Mass Effect wouldn't get truncated with Windows-only continuations, I would be happier.
A little bit offtopic but I wish Playstation would have created a development kit/env accessible to everyone that has a Unity/Unreal instance running. Nowadays a PS5 supports both m&k and controllers, it's like a highly opinionated gaming rig, developing on such a platform should be way more easier and accessible. Modding and indies have always been the fifth wheel, do something Sony!
This is one of the main reasons I use the Steam flatpak!
I used to keep a seperate windows desktop but that was a long time ago, now I have a new gaming rig (Linux) which is also my workstation, and my old windows desktop is now an htpc running fedora.
Laptops are Linux but that's a bit besides the point.
To some degree this is not the fault of our Linux developers, but the fault of hardware vendors who will not release decent working drivers.
Fall Guys has EAC which will never run in Linux. So there's no point in even trying.
Games like Katamari Reroll have more problems in native Windows than they did on Linux, so I actually end up with a better gaming experience in Linux.
As far as Steam goes, it's the same as Windows once you enable Proton. Click "Install."
People talk about hassle as if their experience 5 years ago is still the modern use case.
Lack of decent working drivers isn't limited to Linux either. I remember nVidia dropping driver support for the 2xx series GeForce cards... and being unable to run games on my GTX 275 in Windows because I'd always end up with out of memory errors. That problem went away when I switched to Linux.
The meme of how you have to cut and paste stuff into terminal to get things working hasn't been the Linux reality for some time. Your precious time is mostly safe these days.
This made me chuckle. My main desktop is linux and I also game on it. But just this week I was trying to connect a 2nd monitor in my Linux PC into the integrated graphics hdmi and its deffinitely not "plug and play", not feasible with point and click, and even the instructions floating around Linux forums didn't work for me. This PC I have dual boots to Windows (i use it very rarely) and to test I connected the 2nd monitor on Windows and it worked automatically. (I commented about this here in HN two days ago, so my history shows it).
I love working and playing in Linux. But I am honest with people who ask me about it, there are still plenty of rough edges and "paper cuts'.
S
But this goes beyond gaming, Nvidia are crushing it with chipsets for ML workloads. A non-negligible portion of Linux compute is now running through these proprietary machines and I find that quite sad.
There’s enough great games on there now, that runs perfectly, to last me a lifetime. I occasionally run into games that aren’t Linux compatible that I really want to play (disco elysium, for example) but I just shrug and go to the next game on the endless list of games I want to play
but at the same time, i understand that it usually won't make commercial sense for game developers to go out of their way to support their games on linux, since the market simply isn't there & the variability of linux distros will add to support burden
I do however use Lutris a lot and have a huge GOG library. I can't help but think that some of these numbers are affected by the fact that the demographic of the usual Steam user and the usual Linux user are rather different. If anything, Lutris installs might be an interesting comparison point.
They simply want to use their devices with as little hassle as possible. They have no idea what a terminal is and dont care to find out.
Simply sharing a point of view does not an argument make.
Experienced Linux user can spend whole weekend configuring drivers, and still be unable to enjoy game.
I would say that UX of a first user is much better
Ask me how I know you've never used a Linux distribution before.
We could easily have an honest debate about operating systems if you didn't decide to be so dishonest about the actual process.
Ubuntu itself has less steps during the installation process than Windows 10 does.
From there, Software Center, Steam. Click install. Done.
Drivers are already installed and don't need to be 'configured.'
On Windows, game installation worked perfectly every single time.
On Linux, I firstly needed to instal Xorg (because Steam couldn’t start under wayland). After that I spend whole day configuring drivers (I switched from Noveau to proprietary and then back) because I couldn’t get full performance from my card. As time went by, and I tried more and more games, I regularly needed to apply some ad hoc fixes (if you open protondb you will see that most of games sometimes need manual adjustments).
I must say that some games worked perfectly under Linux, but I still can’t recommend Linux to my friends gamers who never seen console in their life (and tbh, even I gave up on Linux gaming, and I just use Windows now).
Also I don’t use Ubuntu. I would probably have nicer gaming experience if I did, but for some other reason I don’t want to use it.
Especially compared to the where is charly game you have to play in Windows to do any troubleshooting.
Although in practice, and in personal experience, users have a tendency to become effectively illiterate as soon as words appear on a screen instead of a physical media. They've been trained to look primarily for symbols or keywords ("Settings", "Internet", etc.) and ignore all that "other fluff." They don't want to read the output of a command line to figure out what happened, they want a pop-up that gives them their answer directly.
However, I agree that for the vast majority of folks, using a terminal is not an option.
I played a few Steam games on Linux (not much of a gamer), haven't used Windows/Mac in 20 years, but I always assumed that Steam on Linux was an insurance policy against Microsoft one day changing things and killing Steam.
I've never spent hours trying to debug why I need to reboot to get wifi back on Windows.
Now, I'm not claiming that everything is smooth sailing on Linux, because it isn't, but the "I've spend hours trying to debug something" argument can be said for both sides and if it comes to that the mythical "average user" won't be able to sort it out by themselves in either case, command line or not.
Anyway, the main issues in linux tend to be with proprietary software which were not properly ported to linux (because of the small market share) or that weren't ported at all (and you're running them with wine). It's a chicken and egg problem. If linux had a greater market share the proprietary stuff would "just work" as much as they do on windows, anyway.
Since about 3-4 years ago, I have had many more "just works" experiences on GNU/Linux compared to other OSes.
I have. (Windows update official drivers broke Wifi, the site for the Wifi card no longer had older drivers available to download. Thus, broken Wifi.)
Anecdotes are fun!
So I'd say for gaming: no.
You need to update your 10+ year old talking points if you want to have an honest debate about this, bud.
Unfortunately I had to help my partner debug some code using CUDA and had to move to the 64 bit only drivers for whatever compatibility. Steam requires 32-bit still, too much hassle to get them both running. As such I've basically dropped my gaming habit, throwing £50/mo elsewhere now!
Anyway I'm off to play Gary's Mod on Linux steam.
it's such a shame that linux gaming = using windows emulator for valve..
proton should be used as a way to SUPPLEMENT, they need to push native builds harder, c'mon valve
create more libraries that are crossplatform by design, create build system that makes it easier to cross compile games
encourage AAA companies to support crossplatform builds
it's sad to see linux stagnating despite valve being so vocal about it
I think the main problem that game developers quote for not wanting to release their games on linux is that the sales they get on the platform do not counter balance the increased number of support requests that come from it.
The one thing Valve could do to mitigate this issue, would be to allow devs to not offers support on specific platforms. I think that the linux community at large is able to work around issues even without dev support.
Another issue that I've seen over the years, and one that even seasoned developers fall into, is that they do not seem to be aware of the Steam Linux Runtime as a single platform to support linux, but start getting discouraged by how many distributions there are, how many versions of glibc to support and all that mess.
Maybe valve should get into cloud gaming and push linux as backend OS
Maybe they should lower the 30% cut they get if linux is supported
Proton is based in Wine I Not An Emulator. Which basically is a set of "library that is cross platform by design" . Its doesn't add the additional emulation layer .
The problem currently is not the technology: AFAIK Unreal,Unity and other libraries already offer builds for different architectures.
The problem is operational: Having to maintain/support/operate an additional architecture.
I play games with friends and I will buy a game just to play with my brother. Personally, I’m ultimately going to go back to a windows desktop since I don’t need to worry about a game working or not.
For example, Dota 2 (a Valve game native on Linux) has became barely unplayable for me because of low fps (30-40) while it was flawless (~120) just a couple of years ago. My GC is a Nvidia 2070.
Another example: I can't play Wine/Proton games because they become dark / unresponsive just after I launch them.
Don't install any packages or drivers manually, and only use recommended default versions (ie- no specialty repos).
I can attribute 90% of the issues I've ever had on Linux to unnecessary feature-chasing. The other 10% are distro bugs that got missed because I installed from RC and upgraded to release.
If you want to test which, just redownload the latest version of your distro, live boot, and try playing a game with vanilla packages. If it works, it's not the distro.
I have a game that doesn't run at all in Windows, despite it being a native Windows game, that runs flawless within Proton.
Also, you may need to check that you actually have nVidia's drivers installed.