I grew up a die hard gamer. I do al of my software development for the last 13 years on Linux. Long ago I dived deeply into Wine and had a phase of trying to game on Linux but it was a nonstop nightmare of solving ‘uninteresting problems’ and I was solving them when I wanted to be gaming not developing. These days I have an expensive gaming machine running windows and a more expensive laptop running Linux and don’t see myself ever polluting my development environment with gaming packages again. I’m sure there are a lot of people like me so I have doubt about whether Linux gaming will ever move the needle.
I was in the same boat regarding polluting my development environment - nowadays Steam's Wine/Proton stuff is completely containerized and just works ("Steam Runtime").
My experience with Ubuntu/Kubuntu is that Steam just works. I can always dual boot into Windows to play other games, but I prefer to stay in Linux.
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.
High five, exactly my thoughts just that I'm not using a Linux host anymore, WSL2 is enough for the development I do. Java/Clojure dev in my free time is awesome on Windows with Docker Linux images. In recent years on Ubuntu Desktop, I had encountered many problems with IntelliJ, it is just flawless on Windows. But if your dev involves a lot of low-level native stuff in C, Go, maybe a Linux desktop environment is still the way to go.
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!
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.
I'm very much in the same boat. I've had more than one attempt at gaming on Linux over the past two decades. The Linux situation is, still, a joke. Its better than what it was, but its still far more hassle than its worth. My free time is limited, and when I want to play a game I'd like to play a game, not play a game of "sort out the next bug / hurdle as to why this game wont run properly".
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.
Huh. Cause when we're sticking to the topic... Steam and Linux... I can honestly say that with exception of less than a dozen games that won't run with Proton, everything else has been exactly the same, if not BETTER, than running games within Windows.
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.
>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'.
Hardware developers are too embarrassed to release the source for their drivers I assume. And probably worried about leaking trade secrets also. A shame, because the open source community would probably fix them up happily.
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.
As a gamer who puts in about 10 hours a week into gaming, avoids ‘state of the art’ games, and only plays games my top of the line desktop from ten years ago can run, steam on linux has been amazing
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
as someone who uses linux by choice and happily avoids touching macos or windows where possible, i love steam proton support. many recent games that don't even officially support linux just work.
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'm a Linux gamer -- Proton is great. It really, really JustWorks™ the vast majority of the time and performance is great. I don't buy many games on Steam (I don't like how it's effectively DRM) and don't use the social features that much (or at all).
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.
Steam is the most user friendly DRM I've ever seen. Sure, it's still a vice, but Valve have kept their promises so far. I'm also looking at shipping a game on Steam soon and DRM is optional, so I'll be avoiding that altogether.
Good luck with your endeavor -- but please, please also ship it on GOG. I have 500+ games in my GOG library and about 30 on Steam; the difference is entirely due to their different philosophies about what 'DRM' and 'DRM free' really means.
As long as any troubleshooting on linux will require the user to open terminal it will never gain a significant marketshare. No other system is as user hostile.
I consider Windows trying to wheedle me into getting a Microsoft account or Apple's increasing number of restrictions on controlling my own system to be way more user-hostile than anything the GNU system does.
Yes, but you are not the average user. Most people I know, mostly non-technical users including people playing computer games, simply dont care. Some have MS or Apple accounts, some dont.
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.
I use both Windows and Linux for a long time, and I tried Steam on both platforms in last two years.
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.
In theory, absolutely you're right, it's much easier, and much more user friendly. Even if you have to type your command(s) in by hand, with tab-complete available in virtually every modern shell, it's quicker and more direct than fiddling through menus.
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.
This was the reason why I switched to Linux more 10 years ago, in addition to copy/past, history of what has been done and taking notes is something I don't think is replaceable with GUI, furthermore eventually I realized all commands can be converted into scripts, that survive distro updates.
Executing random VBScript or PowerShell script files from the net worked out so nicely on Windows... Why should the equivalent action on Linux be less than an insta-own of the user's system in practice?
How is the experience on Mac? I was surprised it has only 2.54% market share (3x Linux).
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 don’t believe i’ve had to use terminal once when troubleshooting something on mac. Granted my overall experience has been more of a ”it just works” with macs than with Linuxes.
I never understood this. Ok, so this way of troubleshooting is uncomfortable for some. But what's the alternative? Last time I used Windows the alternative seemed to be just not having the ability to troubleshoot at all.
For every couple "just works" cases there is a corresponding "doesn't work at all". Given the diversity of the PC as a hardware platform there are going to be edge cases. There is no avoiding that. I'm fairly certain there are cases where hardware "just works" on Linux but doesn't do so on Windows either because there is no driver any more, or because the driver is borked, or any other reason. And here's my anecdote: the wifi on a windows laptop I had once kept dying or dropping packets randomly. Turned out the shitty Killer wifi driver was doing some kind of "optimisation" <insert hand-waving here> to improve throughput. It took a lot of google-fu to find out what the problem was. And this is where I believe you are wrong wrt the command line. The command line is a powerful diagnostic tool and having text files as configuration is much more accessible than delving into a 13-level deep registry chain.
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.
Things don't always just work on windows. Just look at any windows forum. And the solution is usually doing things in a different way to not hit the problem or installing some third party software that does what you'd do by typing a few commands in a shell, but in a more cumbersome way (requiring a compiler, writing an actual program, etc).
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.
I spent months trying to debug why a windows update stopped my microphone working (which needs a powered 3.5mm socket). Reinstalling didn't fix it, and the mic worked perfectly on GNU/Linux the entire time. In the end I had to buy about $250 of USB audio equipment just to talk to my friends again.
Since about 3-4 years ago, I have had many more "just works" experiences on GNU/Linux compared to other OSes.
Personally, I would say this is a much smaller issue than GNU/Linux simply not being pre-installed on machines and sold at retailers. I think there would be much better adoption if people could simply walk into a store like Best Buy and buy a machine with GNU/Linux preinstalled and go about there day. I do agree that UX/UI consideration like terminal use are certainly a barrier but I do not think it is the biggest issue.
I used to use steam on linux, it was great, the wndows compatibility of proton was fantastic - I would often get better perf than on Windows! I dropped my dual boot and all was good.
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!
I managed to play The Elder Scrolls Online through Proton. For a graphically demanding online game it goes to show the art of the possible on Linux. However many games are actively hostile to Linux gaming, especially online games using anti cheat software. I've also had PUBG fail to run for me on Windows due to having installed virtualization software (another anti cheat mechanism).
> encourage AAA companies to support crossplatform builds
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.
I agree with your main point. But want to clarify that Proton/Valve is NOT an emulator. As such the games people play on Linux run at the same speed/performance than in Windows.
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.
IME Proton works better than most native ports in terms of likelihood of the game even launching, portability across distributions, not needing to install libraries on the underlying system, stuff like controller support, and even performance (often significantly).
As someone who recently transitioned to a Mac + Ubuntu household, so far my experience has been subpar. I’m excited for these improvements and hope Linux continues to grow.
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.
Linux on Steam is still early beta IMHO, no matter what they say.
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.
Sounds like a config/version issue. Give Pop_OS (or any recent distro) a try.
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.
My biggest issue with Linux gaming is inconsistent performance. I have a GTX 1080ti in a dual boot system. Some games run super smooth on windows, but on Linux I can barely get 10 FPS.
