I am and always was a casual gamer, I like playing puzzles, strategy and builder games, sometimes I play with friends some 7 days to die or AoE2. I am on Linux Mint for more than a year now and was surprised how easy gaming was. From time to time I had problems with weird DirectX error messages, but all in all everything just worked.
My setup:
- AMD Ryzen 5 3600
- GeForce GTX 1660 Super
- 32 GB DDR4 RAM
So last week my girlfriend worked on my computer (we are not living together), she wrote some bills for customers and did some table stuff in calc. When I asked her at the end of the day how it was to work on Linux, she shrugged and said “Oh I didn’t notice” lol (using Cinnamon as DE btw).
Today she bought Until Dawn the remake on Steam while she is here and because she really wanted to play she downloaded it to my PC. She just started to play and everything was great. I wondered again if I should say something like “you see how great you can game in Linux”, but then it came to my mind - she doesn’t care and she didn’t even question it! The Linux Desktop got so mature, that non-tech people just don’t notice!
I think the biggest “problem” with Linux adoption is that it does not come preinstalled on computers, and this kind of proves my point I guess.
Yeah that’s all, I just wanted to share this with you guys.
P.S.: There were some bugs btw. but it turned out they have nothing to do with the OS.
I have friends who says “I still run Windows because I don’t want to do any tinkering,” but don’t realize they’d do less tinkering if they switched haha. It’s not 2015 anymore.
“Windows doesn’t require any tinkering, just run this to make a local account, decline 100 requests to use OneDrive and Office 365, get these debloaters, uninstall all these things, and make sure you always tell Windows to not restart your computer while you’re using it every time it updates. And when it does update, you’ll need to run the debloaters again.”
I mean, you don’t really have to do these stuff. I doubt the comment’s author’s friend cares about debloating and privacy.
Yes, in the same way that you don’t typically need to tinker with Linux
In the end they’re not so different, except Windows intentionally does anti-consumer things that make people want to tinker.
No joke my linux laptop hardest part was the initial install. Steam made gaming seemless. No ms account login, no asking for ai, no drivers. Just install and boom im playing my games. Its so nice.
It’s wild. “I don’t want to have to tinker,” then go on to talk about the 10 different debloating softwares they need to run every time it updates.
$sudo apt install realtek-firmware-nonfree
“NOOOOOO SO USER UNFRIENDLY!!!”
“On windows all i have to do is go to regedit, then HKEY/SOFTWARE/Microsoft/Windows/classes/someObscureSetting, then select DWORD and change the value to 0x0011111, then save and reboot. SO EASY AND USER FRIENDLY!! Thanks microslop!!!”
Lol right? I used Windows for decades, and edited the registry a countless number of times. Never did I have any clue what the fuck any of it was doing. Not once.
With Linux, I gain permanent knowledge any time I need to use a command I found online.
skill issue
never have to tinker more in my life than on windows. its even worse with the batshit things Claude will do. On Linux shit just works
N00b or liar?
claude on Linux? it works.
Too bad Linux users don’t.
they don’t work?
It’s pretty obvious that they’re generally anti-work, and have all day to spend online extolling the virtues of GPL/ Linux. Commies don’t tend to know the reality that it only works at gunpoint. And they’re not intelligent enough to simply make enough money doing just 1-2 hours of work a day. The stereo type of ‘mom’s basement dweller’ is real. Also explains why we don’t run into LiGNUts in public.
what a complete cluster fuck of wildly inaccurate generalisations. this reads like ai-slop from a microsoft-hired bot farm using free tier AI
So you are just a troll. Took a minute to figure that out.
I shouldn’t feed you, but its been so long.
My mother, who is the stereotypical boomer that doesn’t get technology, got upset with all the privacy invasion of Microsoft, and has been running Linux for over a decade
For what? Recipe keeping?
If she is immune to branding then marry that one! She’s rare.
The different file system was the biggest adaptive hurdle for me. Just the default knowledge of how windows worked from the MS-DOS era took a bit to adapt to. I think knowing Windows actually made it harder to switch compared to someone who wouldn’t know much more than opening the internet browser.
But for gaming: more than anything navigating all the compatability files being used by WINE and Steam can be a nightmare.
Yeah - my wife has occupied for hundreds of hours the SteamDeck and really doesn’t care that it’s Linux. Her games do work. And after Microsoft switched off Win10, I moved her to Mint and she really had no issues at all with that. Everything she does still works the same. We just saved a few hundred Euros by being able to keep using the Laptop
Nice it’s always great to hear the work millions of people put into the Linux ecosystem is paying off.
This is the kind of story we should forward to Linus Torvalds, the Linux mailing sublists and other volunteers so they see how their work gets recognized ^^
Yeah Linux’s biggest problem now is “oups, your application / driver isn’t available”
Not user friendlyness.
Yeah, other than photoshop/outlook, the day to day is fine for just about everyone.
The days of a kernel update screwing over a video driver aren’t quite gone yet. When things go sideways, they are much harder to fix for the average person, and the people with the necessary skill sets are still a bit scarce. Not every family has a cousin Jimmy capable of reading dmesg and screwing with kernel modules.
That said, most of the big ai’s are totally capable of walking a non-techie through fixing a pretty screwed up linux box.
What drivers are you missing?
Back then the LEGO mindstoms stuff was a problem. And my Logitech remote.
Not sure if that changed. Growed tired of dual boot, and went windows. The thing is, just one app or game you can’t use can screw up everything.
Unsupported LEGO mindstorm stuff seems to be a problem of the past https://www.ev3dev.org/ but even in the past, it was probably more a config problem.
Never the less, you don’t lower your overall efficiency because one out of a hundred apps do not work correctly. You don’t even need to dual boot. You can just fire up QEMU with a Windows VM and use this app and shut it off afterwards. That also makes snapshot handling way easier.
What I admit is, if you want to play a game, you can only use virtualization if you have a spare GPU you can pass through for hardware acceleration. Otherwise playing in a VM doesn’t make any sense. But on the same time I also have to say, WINE improved so so god damn much over the last 5 years. I am trying to get games to run with WINE since like 2005 or something and it was always painful and nothing from this side of the century worked…
But now, even with the proton wrapper, everything just works tbh. I have a lot of games, different games, new games, old games, multiplayer games with anti cheat etc…
Everything works on my machine. Now even my non-tech-friends are jumping this wagon, I now a handful of those people running Linux only for at least a year now and all of them are happy with it. I’m not saying that they couldn’t be happier, but they also sometimes overesitmate their Windows know-how, because in the end, most of their frustration comes from the fact, that they don’t know how to do certain things, but they actually didn’t know before either.
They would fake read some stuff, download 3 things, randomly click on a lot of stuff, change some settings they don’t remember and when they fucked the poor rectangular prism enough, they called me to unfuck it and get done whatever they wanted in the first place. It wasn’t too different from what they are able to achieve now on their Linux machine. But I have one or two people, that gaslight themselves into believing that they knew more about the Windows Machine, didn’t fuck it up on a regular basis and did not need to call me in to fix it.
I don’t know why they talk themselves into this fictional scenario, I don’t care, they are still on Linux, everything they want works and they already started customizing KDE to their liking.
I never had trouble, so others never had trouble and are lying…
That’s kind of a shity and condescending attitude to have.
And the official ev3 app never worked. Ev3dev never had the same convenience.
It’s like saying you don’t nedd Photoshop because gimp exist.
And yeah, i grow tired of having to spend time on getting stuff to run that on windows is just “install and run” because the manufacturer / developer actually made sure it would work on windows.
No what I’m saying is that I literally help a couple people in my area jump to Linux and none of them have any trouble they didn’t already have before and in general they have less trouble. Everything works, there is literally nothing someone wants to get done what he or she can’t. We even got Cheat Engine up and running for this one guy because he really really wanted to use cheat tables instead of GameConquerer. And we have done it, it works and he can bow do it himself. But those are rare edge cases, most of the people and systems I kinda look over are happy and work fine.
I mean to be fair, there was one attempt which failed because he was using some high end audio hardware which indeed just wasn’t supported for Linux, there were alternatives, but he already had his equipment so he went into the path of Win11 and debloating & running all those famous removal scripts but again, its an edge case and the only failed attempt
Excellent. That means it’s working as intended.
The best user interface is one that you don’t even notice. The seamless layer between you and your tool (or game in this instance).
Compared to when I started with Linux 21 years ago, we are absolutely spoiled with games that work well today.
Gaming on Linux wasn’t really that much worse back then. This is just reaction to Proton propaganda. Proton didn’t even fix the frame timing issues that caused rhythm games to be near unplayable or racing games with time trials to be unbeatable (imagine spending hours on an impossible to beat track). -Wine devs fixed that so very recently that many probably aren’t even on that fix yet!
And Microsoft is constantly coming out with newer technologies that Linux will never keep up with or come out with on their own from ‘volunteers’.
If you want to play modern games, there’s no reason to not use Windows. There are reasons to not use Linux.
It was DXVK that really made thinks work, not Proton.
Yes, first developed by Philip “doitsujin” Rebohle. It’s a shame that Linux evangelists constantly praise Valve / Proton when the groundwork was laid out by others over decades.
It’s no wonder there’s a large history of FOSS developers quitting and selling out.
Tbf Valve definitely plays a part in simplifying the entire process. I’m sorry but without Steam even with Lutris and basic ass Wine the process of getting games to run is a fucking pain in the ass. At least Valve is what convinced people due to the nature of “Just download and run” on the Steam Deck. Plus verified games.
I don’t disagree with you but Valve does deserve some credit.
Not nearly what they’re getting. Maybe you forget when Steam was considered malware and the vocal minority was shunning it. Or overlook how they’re becoming the monopoly that they claimed to be against. Or how they’re the original ‘you will own nothing and be happy’.
Do they deserve recognition. -What Gabe has done is for himself, just like all the other corporate contributors to Linux. Even if it were charitable; it pales in comparison to decades of Wine development. -The stuff that never gets mentioned. The GNU cult is fragmenting like denominations.
You must be misremembering things to the extreme.
Gaming in Linux was utter shit in 2005, and improvements were only crawling forward. When we checked WineHQ for compatibility the average score was bronze “unplayable”.
Although the Play On Linux program helped a lot and came out in 2008, Linux gaming didn’t improve much until after the Steam Client for Linux was released in 2013.I dual booted Windows the first couple of years where Linux was my main OS, ONLY to be able to play games. After a few years I got tired of dual booting and ditched Windows completely. The result was that I gamed very little, and when I did, it was retro gaming.
Things improved a lot with DXVK, but that did no come out until 2018. Up until then you could almost only play games made with OpenGL, and even that was hit and miss.I haven’t seen any Proton propaganda, and fortunately a lot of progress on Proton goes back to Wine, so Wine is also a lot better today even without Proton.
So Proton does not deserve all the credit, a lot of work has been done before and outside Proton. But Proton does make it dead easy with the Steam client, but today it may not be necessary if you use other tools to mange the Wine configuration on a per game basis. Or if you are an enthusiast that like to do it manually.
But 21 years ago, even an expert had very little luck except with very few games.
Everyone’s experience is different. It’s how I remember it. -But I consulted an AI, and it agrees with you. -Thanks for the insight!
I’m glad you had much better luck than I did, because playing games with Wine always worked like shit in my experience. It was occasionally an option that made the game playable at all, and very occasionally it would work flawlessly and all would be astounded, but the vast majority of the time I had little to no success. Maybe I just sucked.
Whereas these days I hit the play button on Steam and it works 100% of the time, in my experience. I basically only ever play games with friends online, and none of them even knew that I’d switched from Windows to Linux at some point in the middle.
I think we’re different kinds of gamers, though, because you said Wine recently fixed a frame timing issue that made rhythm games and racing games playable after they’d been unplayable forever… but I don’t care about that at all. I don’t play those games, and those were never the problems I had in the dark ages, but I’m glad you’re all good now too!
Not everyone uses Steam, and Steam does a lot of stuff that Proton does not.
I mean most of the games I’ve run in the past few months I couldn’t run at all 3 years ago which was my last attempt at Linux. And all my searching last time basically came up with other people having the same question as me and the answers always being “someday…” Well, someday is here because I’ve had no issues this go with Linux. I’ve literally never gone so long without windows until this install of mint.
Good for you, but how much playing do you do vs fiddling with the OS? I got far enough to see texture issues, frame timing issues making games unbeatable half way through, issues with rhythm games, and anti-cheat issues. The main reason to even PC game is for mods, and modding sucks on linux.
I’ve literally clicked the button for proton and that’s it. You seem like you’re just trying to invent reasons to hate Linux. Have you even used it in the last 10 years? Because everything you’re saying isn’t a thing anymore.
Anecdote
Meanwhile I have a riced setup with programmer dvorak keyboard layout and shortcut heavy interaction which makes my computer almost unusable to normies.
AMD drivers are so smooth on Linux!
The “doesn’t come preinstalled” part is still huge, combined with the “doesn’t have first-party device manufacturer support”.
If you buy a PC with Windows preinstalled, that doesn’t only mean that you don’t have to install Windows, but also the whole set of hardware in there will work just fine under Windows. They don’t put a fingerprint reader in there that doesn’t have a Windows driver, or a GPU with bad Windows driver support.
And yes, most hardware natively works pretty well under Windows, but the manufacturer taking care that they only select components that work fine under Windows is a big part of why there isn’t a hardware lottery under Windows.
taking care that they only select components that work fine under Windows is a big part of why there isn’t a hardware lottery under Windows.
There isn’t a hardware lottery under Linux, either, unless you buy random hardware instead of choosing known-good components or turning to one of the system vendors who do this for you.
I find it kind of weird that people who would never take mystery medication without it being prescribed to them, and would never buy a paycheck worth of food without considering its contents against their allergies and tastes, would buy a computer without checking whether it will run the software they intend to use.
Perhaps the perceived problem would fade if we taught people that computers and operating systems are not all equal, and that just as MacOS is more likely to run on a machine made for it, Linux is more likely to run on a machine made for it. (Edit: The same is true for Windows, for what it’s worth.)
That’s a bit of a weird argument to make.
We were talking about PCs with preinstalled OSes. How often do you come across DIY-built PCs with preinstalled OS?
If you select your own components you never have a preinstalled OS.
Also, most people who switch from Windows to Linux do so on existing hardware. It’s rare for people to buy a completely new PC to try out an OS. Maybe if €1000+ is something you shell out on a whim, but not if you actually work for your money.
For existing hardware you always have the hardware lottery on Linux.
Perhaps the perceived problem would fade if we taught people that computers and operating systems are not all equal, and that just as MacOS is more likely to run on a machine made for it, Linux is more likely to run on a machine made for it. (Edit: The same is true for Windows, for what it’s worth.)
Congratulations, you just happened to get the point that I made. And for some reason you thought that was a gotcha.
My argument was that if Linux came preinstalled on machines (apart from the current selection of tiny boutique manufacturers), these machines would be configured by the manufacturer to include only components that work well with Linux, which is not the case if you use a device that doesn’t have manufacturer support for Linux.
All in all you ended up at the whole point I was making, but somehow you first had to claim that it’s all nonsense.
All in all you ended up at the whole point I was making, but somehow you first had to claim that it’s all nonsense.
No, I pointed out that the problem you described is completely avoidable, which wasn’t apparent in your original comment. This is an important distinction to other readers who are considering a move to Linux, since they otherwise might be put off by your suggestion that doing so is necessarily a hardware lottery.
It was a different perspective, not a personal attack.
Your combative, snarky response is unpleasant, unwarranted, and unnecessary. Goodbye.
I almost broached the topic with my mother (60s) the other day about moving to Linux. She’s got a computer that sucks, and my other brother got windows 11 on there so it’s exceptionally slow. I was helping her with some documents and printing and whatnot so I started asking a couple of the questions you would ask, like what she uses the pc for. She uses this tax software and “needs” it installed (as opposed to the browser version) so I didn’t continue down that road but I’m pretty sure it’d blow her mind how much better this thing would run with mint. And other than that tax software, it’d be nearly identical for her, open a browser and go to the thing.
My dad has been using the (“proudly antifascist”) antiX I installed on his beloved, ancient Compaq netbook for more than a year, and it seems to make total sense to him.
Linux does come preinstalled on a number of laptops if you buy them in Europe.
Problem is that the Linux variants used are usually incredibly out of date, with no straightforward way to upgrade, abysmal desktop experience and so on.
There’s also simply too much choice when it comes to Linux for the average people. Your Average Joe wants to sit in front of a computer, turn it on, and have a usable desktop, readily available office and basic utility apps, and easy installation of software.
They don’t want to learn the difference between KDE, Gnome, Cinnamon, X11 and Wayland, open or closed sourced drivers, licences, and so on. To most people, a computer is a tool that should be as complicated to use as a screwdriver - you can swap different heads (software for different purposes), but it works the same, no matter how you sit in front of if.
Historically, there’s been a singular distro offering anything even close to this requirement, Ubuntu, and even that has gone to shit.
Hopefully, with gaming being a major pull force, this can change and we will see more generic use distros pop up like Bazzite and SteamOS, but at the moment, there’s simply no alternative to Windows or macOS that can proper take them over.
