Steam data reveals PC gamers shifting from Windows to Linux
https://www.tweaktown.com/news/106795/steam-data-reveals-pc-gamers-shifting-from-windows-to-linux/index.htmlOpen linkView original on lemmy.world894
Comments326https://www.tweaktown.com/news/106795/steam-data-reveals-pc-gamers-shifting-from-windows-to-linux/index.htmlOpen linkView original on lemmy.world
Given how much Microsoft wants to shove AI tools every where in Windows, I don't think this optimisation will make much of a difference.
MS optimization = maximize revenue streams = more ads = more spyware
I don’t believe a thing MS says is ever meant to improve the customer experience.
Given the popularity of the Steam Deck, the Xbox handheld would have to come free with the purchase of any Xbox exclusive game to stand a chance in that sphere, I think. The fact that it's Win11 immediately turns me off and I say this as someone who still uses Windows.
lol, what is this 'Xbox Exclusive Game' you speak of, in 2025?
A hypothetical one, of course
heheheh
Microsoft has plenty of console exclusives, so they are on PlayStation and Switch but not Windows for whatever reason. Crash Team Racing Nitro Fueled is one I'm confused why they don't trust their own platform with.
That said, they don't trust their own Windows on ARM devices either and those should definitely be capable enough to run games that come to Switch.
And if we take this as an actual attempt at a better handheld experience, then this is just further proof that competition breeds better products for consumers.
Yeah and honestly, whatever optimization they promise — or deliver, for that matter — won't sway me because it's the company itself and the country where it is based that I'm against at this point. So, there's no way I'm ever going to buy any MS handheld.
AMD's own Windows drivers also perform much worse in low power situations than the open source Linux drivers, whereas Windows game mode (or whatever it'll be called) is about reducing background tasks that consume RAM. Obviously reducing RAM consumption is beneficial but it's not the whole story.
The thing that confuses me is that Microsoft is no stranger to Linux. They use it in their data centers. It's plainly obvious if you know what other offerings are doing.
Their entire front end stack for azure virtual machines is OpenStack. Some years back they integrated with OpenStack to allow it to manage hyper-v, but OpenStack can also natively manage KVM hypervisors, as it was originally designed to do, and also VMware.
Hell, I'd be surprised if there isn't a Microsoft distro of Linux floating around (not available to the public... Not yet at least).
The people who seem to be pushing Microsoft, more than anyone, are game studios. Their garbage Anti cheat rootkits work best on Windows. So use Windows so they can low jack your PC.
Microsoft is moving away from allowing anything to run with those low level permissions after that CrowdStrike incident where rogue security software bricked millions of Windows PCs, so that might take out kernel anticheat as collateral damage.
GOOD
While I'd love to see this, they also walked that back following lobbying by Antivirus vendors. So shit will continue to roll
https://github.com/microsoft/azurelinux is a thing, yes. Public and fully open source.
Well, would you look at that...
Can I post a potentially controversial opinion? I think that the 'Game Bar' feature that Win11 has now is actually kinda good. It has really come a long, long way since Windows Gaming for PC. I think that whenever I switch to Linux, I would probably seek out something similarly as elegant.
NO, YOU CAN'T. (just kidding.)
Serious now: if I got it right, this game bar is an overlay showing FPS, CPU/GPU usage, screenshots/recording, stuff like this. It doesn't look too hard to implement in Linux, and apparently there's a GNOME extension in the makes for that. (If it's compatible with Cinnamon I'll be a happy camper. I'd rather not touch GNOME directly with a 3m pole, but the tools for GNOME are sometimes OK.)
Correct! And I appreciate the recommendation. I'm an XFCE4 man (sorry. It is just what I've been using for decades) and I think I could probably get that GNOME library running on that environment.
Fixed
11% month on month expansion is fucking crazy. You can see from the data it's mostly Windows 10 users deciding to upgrade to Linux...and even OSX.
I’m in those stats when I switched to Mint!
How is your idle VRAM (video RAM) holding? For some reason i have 1GB usage in Mint with Cinnamon without anything running, while on windows i have 400MB (although i have optimised them a lot).
I’m not sure. I’m a photographer and comic. I switched to mint cause it’s easy, I’m not much of a computer person.
Did you find mint easy? I am a bit of a computer person, and I've been struggling a bit with it
Effortless. My only issue with it was installing Plank Reloaded.
I've been struggling quite a bit switching file managers. Nothing is fully satisfactory
dired-modeis as good as everWhy do you care?
If I had to guess, VRAM is probably holding stuff as a cache.
VRAM doesn’t use a lot of power and as long as you aren’t seeing out of memory issues, it doesn’t really matter.
I'm gaming with an NVIDIA GPU, so my VRAM is kind of limited. I'm at my limits in games because the company cheaped out on VRAM in their GPUs after the 10 series.
400MB??? What do you have running? I never use more than 100 unless I open a game or something.
Well, screen is running at 4k, so i think its normal.
Ah, yeah that changes things a bit.
11% of 2% is nice but not "fucking crazy"
That month on month Linux expansion is ~422,000 computers. That is a shitload of people switching in just a single month.
OSes are sticky as hell. People don't like switching. As Linux attracts these people away from Microsoft, MS is not going to get them back. And importantly, the adoption rate is high enough that many 3rd party companies are taking notice and releasing for both.
Every time they buy a new device they have to switch back to linux, because that device with very few exceptions ships with MS.
Interesting, my devices always come without OS. And on preconfigured Windows for family first thing I do is wipe it to get rid of all the bloatware it comes with.
I see your point, but installing your usual linux distro on a new device is quite easier than switching to linux for the first time, which is what people don't wanna do.
I've seen it first hand recently with a friend who sought advice regarding a low budget laptop purchase for school work and multimedia use. While he was open minded about what hardware to choose, there was no convincing him to ditch Windows. I told him he'd be better off using a lightweight linux distro on such modest hardware, but he insisted on Windows 11 based on questionable arguments ("I need office"), even knowing it'd be slow, bloated, full of ads and AI features no one care for. Old habits do die hard.
People buying Steam decks are likely the majority of those numbers. They probably ALSO have a Windows machine
The Steam Deck shows up as Arch Linux in the steam numbers; Arch is only 10.7% of the Linux user-base on Steam. And this is on top of the fact desktop Arch Linux is a thing as well sharing space in that line-item.
The Steam Deck (and Microsoft tomfoolery) certainly was the catalyst for the current wave of adoption, but it is barely a notable percentage of Linux installs on Steam.
0.3% of 130 million is still a fuckton of people. If even PewDiePie is going to Linux, that means desktop Linux has hit a point it certainly hasn't ever before
What do you mean OSes are sticky as hell? I’m currently on Arch, but only because of the AUR. I’m thinking of switching to gentoo because people keep putting malicious packages on the AUR so I might as well do gentoo
What are your feelings on switching to a different OS, such as MacOS?
These are both the same OS: Linux. And one of the nice things is Linux lets you switch around so much at-will as you are thinking of doing.
I can’t see OS X becoming a daily driver for me, but I don’t mind using it on occasion (it has bash!). Just have to turn off gestures
Until they want to play a multiplayer game with their friends, that doesn't work because of Anti-Cheat. Or maybe Linux is a bit more involved than they initially realized.
Most of those that switched probably won't go back, but I think with Linux it's going to be more than someone might think (however it'll still grow, especially over the coming months with Windows 10 support ending).
It's my understanding that anti-cheat CAN work in Linux and does with some games. The point is still valid of course. If a specific game someone wants to play doesn't work, that's going to be a frustrating experience. But still I foresee the percentage of Linux gamers will continue to grow. And gaming companies increasingly making sure to use anti-cheat software that does work with Linux, as that market share is becoming too large to ignore.
Almost all multiplayer games work fine. It's 9noy the garbage that companies like EA put out that choose not to. Just think of it like being a console exclusive, and you don't own that console. Ignore it. Their games aren't worth playing anyway. It's the same garbage as the last 10+ years.
422k out of 132 million
This is WHY percentages are a thing. Because, on the surface, yeah, that is a very large number. When you look at it relative to the denominator? It is 0.3%. What is the percentage of people who bought Clair Obsura or even just some good old fashioned feet porn?
Bragging about what is basically a rounding error relative to Windows is the same "it has been the summer of Linux for the past 20 years" that mostly just leads people to write off Linux in general.
Also, what "many 3rd party companies" are you talking about? Mostly what I have noticed is an increase in "We tested on the Steam Deck" or "we won't block Proton". Whereas EA are still actively blocking Proton in the BF6 beta?
It's all relative. When you bring the time aspect into this, it is a sharp increase compared to previous time periods.
And it's subjectively a small number of computers and a large number of computers at the same time, depending on perspective.
There's no point in arguing over these stats.
When I switched to Mint about 6 months ago, most of my programs existed on both. And my games just worked. That wasn't the case just a few years ago.
I can't imagine wanting to give EA root access to your entire system, full access to everything you do on your computer...just to play a game. I'm honestly surprised Microsoft still allows such on their platform, it's a massive vulnerability to users, as CrowdStrike demonstrated.
Good on you. Plenty of people have many problems because a lot of industry standard tools (e.g. fusion 360 for CAD) don't exist on Linux and actively break under Wine/Proton
And great (and same). But most of that is just not actively breaking Proton. Which is the Wine team plus Valve.
As for BF6: the point is that one of THE biggest third party publishers out there has spent the past year or so actively blocking Proton in almost all of their games. And for their new flagship title that they want to be the biggest game ever (ha!), they are already actively blocking Proton again.
Which goes against the "many 3rd party companies are taking notice and releasing for both". Which was already not even a thing since the vast majority of those aren't doing linux binaries (tried that 10 and 20 and 30 years ago...) and are just not actively breaking Proton.
Do you not understand that "many" has a different meaning than "all"? Being able to point to one company that is actively blocking Proton doesn't prove a single thing.
Said company being one of the biggest in gaming. Hoyoverse also tend to be varying levels of sketchy towards Proton (I think the current "meta" is to run the android version of Genshin Impact in an emulator?)
Also, you still haven't really identified what major 3rd parties are considering Linux a first class citizen versus just not actively blocking Proton and MAYBE testing against one specific SKU (Steam Deck).
You can use Fusion 360 in Linux with Wine. But instead of even trying that, I used my switch to Linux as the catalyst to switch to FreeCAD. Using FOSS just feels so much nicer.
At that rate we reach 100% Linux users in 34 months. (50% in 27)
I'd call that quite significant.
... what rate are you talking about?
I am going to assume the other person's numbers were right but it honestly doesn't matter
422k people per month? That is 0.3% per month.
2.89 + (0.3*34) = 13.09. 13% after almost 3 years. Which... that honestly still seems high but I could almost see it if SteamOS gets enough coverage by the various influencers and runs on every handheld form factor gaming PC that isn't MS or Sony branded. And if the next attempt at Steam Machines actually gains traction and they take over a chunk of the console space ahead of the PS6.Or are you talking about compound interest? Which... I think even Activision and EA would call you crazy for assuming. Also I am not sure if the math actually holds for that either but I can never remember the simple math to represent that.
Also it is completely unrelated but I'll just add: I personally don't consider SteamOS gaining a significant market share to be "linux" any more than I do Android or consider Mac to be "BSD". Yes, they have common ancestry (and varying levels of shared kernel and libraries) but it rapidly starts creating walled garden issues as developers prioritize one distro over the other to an obscene degree. And... I think we can all agree after the past few weeks that GabeN can indeed do wrong when it is in his/Valve's financial interest to do so.
It's Linux because for devs it's a Linux platform.
And yeah 11% growth month to month compounds quickly. It won't hold forever but all things like that are sigmoidal Wich does start as an exponential growth.
Sure, but even using that absurd growth rate continuously it would still take an ADDITIONAL 18 months from what you originally said to hit 50%
log_1.11 (50/2.89) = 27.32
log_1.11 (100/2.89) = 33.96
I wonder how dual boots show up in these stats
They don’t. The survey pops up on one device only. Statistically speaking though, it’s more likely to show up on the OS you spend most of your time using, so it doesn’t make that much of a difference.
This is usually true, in my experience, but I experienced an anomaly a couple of weeks ago when the survey popped up on my desktop twice (Arch and Win11) and my laptop twice (CachyOS and Win11) in the same day. I was very surprised.
Huh. That’s odd. I guess it balances out though.
Would love more support for MacOS but I’m also fine turning my windows 10 rig into a Linux machine. Need recommendations on a gaming distro! AMD TR 1950 w/GTX 1080TI
Bazzite is the go-to gaming distro. It's basically Steam OS.
I'm personally a fan of Mint (old, stable) or Fedora Plasma (cutting edge), as both feel very familiar coming from Windows. I went with Mint personally.
Bazzite is Fedora and you can get it in KDE Plasma or Gnome flavors.
A lot of people will say Bazzite and they're probably right, but I installed PopOS last year and I have had zero problems with any configuration or gaming. Also on an Nvidia GPU / AMD CPU.
I did the same with AMD+ NVidia gpu combo but it is not without problems. Do you play through Steam/proton db or are you using something else like Lutris?
I use steam, I do check protonDB but I've never had to tinker with much.
Historically I've used lutris but more recently I've been observing more broken scripts than not. But Lutris is extremely handy for mapping to a pile of game data that I might grab from Itch for example. I also havent been gaming as much lately so maybe I'm just hitting some weird games and that's all.
I've heard good things about Heroic Launcher which apparently is actually sponsored by GOG, but I've yet to try it on my Linux machine
Gonna check out Heroic. Thanks for the tip
This is my use case as well. Not that macOS gaming is terrible, it’s just not as good as a dedicated Linux system because of the easier proton translation on Linux than the tinkering required on macOS.
Switched to linux (popos - so far so good) this month because fuck microsoft. yeah, some things aren't perfect or require extra steps (modding, usually) but fuck microsoft. Fuck their AI shit, fuck their "recall" spyware, fuck their CEO that babbles about AI while laying off thousands of workers.
I'm a long-time Linux hacker and I'm currently running Pop! OS on my laptop and dev box. It's the best distro I've found yet that Just Works™ (but naturally still allows for all the customization I might want).
I've also run mint and ubuntu, but this was very smooth.
The only problem so far are I get a crackling in my headphones in at least one game (guild wars 2), and I'm not sure how to diagnose that. One of the related problems of windows being so dominant is the internet is full of SEO slop for windows problems
Easy effects (flathub) helped improve my sound a lot
I find Ubuntu to be buggier than it used to be, and snaps are inherently broken.
Mint stands between Ubuntu and Pop! OS, but is still fiddlier than what I want for a daily driver.
really? I found the customization for Pop/COSMIC extremely limited.
Like I said, it allows for what I want. I don't need to "rice" a setup that I'm trying to use to Get Shit Done. These days, the only time I'm rebuilding Linux from scratch is when I'm literally building an OS for a project.
With Pop!_OS you should be in for a good huge update in about 2026 or so. They normally released every half year with Ubuntu, but they haven't done a new release since the 22.04 LTS (Long Term Support) version because they're working on their own desktop environment and it's taking up most of the developer resources.
So hopefully in 2026 they'll release 26.04 with the new COSMIC DE to replace 22.04 with Gnome (with their customizations, also called 'COSMIC' so it gets confusing lol). I think technically they're working on a 24.04, but at this rate I think Ubuntu 26.04 will be out around the same time or even before COSMIC is fully ready.
So there's a decent chance you'll get a whole lot of improvements at once, which is cool
It was written in the scrolls. The day prophezised for hundreds of years: the year of the linux desktop.
The prophecy is being fulfilled, and our prophet Gabe made it possible.
Won't miss those years tweaking Windows to uninstall or disable bloatware and malware. I don't mind if more or less people migrate to Linux, I'm just grateful to those who are making and improving such amazingly good distros. 💪💛
Instead you'll spend your time littering your own computer with bloatware!
If all you do is game, outside of a few key games (Destiny 2, uhh,couple others) the experience on Linux is better for many folks.
The success of Steam Deck has helped a lot. Prior to that Linux ports tended to be very perfunctory and they weren't tested or supported very well. I guess that now there are actual Linux gamers (via Steam Deck), that support has improved. That said, I think outside of Steam Deck and SteamOS, your experience of gaming is going to be extremely dependent on your GPU, driver support and a number of other factors. Things are far more likely to work well on Windows than they would for Linux.
I could drill down into the work that went into DXVK before Proton came about, enabling the Steam Deck, but that's a boring history lesson. I will concede that newer bleeding edge hardware is far more likely to be plug and play on Windows, but one of the leading reasons I transitioned was Windows removing support for the audio chipset on the motherboard for my Ryzen 1600. Every time I rebooted, I'd have to unpack a zip file and reinstall the audio drivers, it was maddening.
In my experience (so, totally anecdotal), my hardware is stable longer on Linux than Windows.
My experience with Linux with Nvidia drivers was basically - hey execute this ".run" file and you get drivers. Okay that worked but then if the kernel updated, the drivers broke and had to be reinstalled. And if the dist upgraded to a new version then the drivers broke completely. And NVidia gave up providing drivers at all for their older GPUs and I was stuck with Noveau which is better than nothing but useless for gaming.
Conversely, some dists are supported by graphics manufacturers with proper packages but there is always that gap where the driver dependencies and the kernel dependencies are out of sync. Or the graphics driver only works on the last couple of dists and support disappears after that. Or you upgrade the dist and then discover there are no drivers for it yet.
I know it rankles some purists, but really there should be an long term, versioned ABI for graphics drivers on Linux. There is sort-of is one with Gallium3D but it's still not supported properly by all vendors.
I just took an old Optiplex with a GTX1650 and got it going with Ubuntu 24.04 and my experience was mostly okay but I saw a number of issues which could confound a newbie. Firstly, I had to go to the command like to run the ubuntu-drivers auto install because the card wasn't set up properly. If I hadn't then games wouldn't run properly. But then I was able to install Steam and get some games going. Acceleration looked okay and I tested games which were running under Windows emulation and natively with some success - however there was a long delay launching some games, like it was having to transpile shaders or something. Still, when they worked they seemed to work well.
The most egregious issue I had is that Ubuntu defaults to an X11 desktop and the desktop is slightly off but the games work well. If I change to a Wayland desktop, then the desktop is buttery smooth but the games are very choppy. I suspect that's the driver for this old card just doesn't work properly with the window manager for some reason in that mode, that the wm is not giving the game a proper surface to render in or is somehow interfering with performance.
The OS would autoremove them?!
It's probably Windows update "fixing" you drivers by updating them to the Windows version because it is newer. I had to turn off Windows driver updates, because it kept updating my already fully working 5.1 Dolby digital driver to a newer one that only has dual channel audio, and it also broke the optional optical out my sound card supports (and has installed).
Yeah, it was super fun. I tried reformatting, I bought a new drive and put new Windows on it and the same thing happened.
For flat games this is true, there is still work to be done for the VR side of things, even that has advanced by leaps and bounds in just the last 2 or 3 years
VR is still not quite mature imo. Also valves all in on Linux now too, and with the new steam machine and headset I'm sure things will change for the better over the coming years.
check out https://lvra.gitlab.io/ for information on linux VR
Yeah that's the biggest reason I haven't pulled the trigger on a VR set.
The pace of hardware for the last few years has been crazy rapid with almost zero thought given to non-windows OS's. The people working on reverse engineering drivers for headsets get one operable just in time for it to be out of date.
Are there really people playing VR stuff regularly? I only know 2 people in my circles that bought equipment for it, and both of them got sick of it after a couple weeks.
I don't know, what I've tried was fun for about 10 minutes, but that's about all I could take before the headache starts.
Your brain acclimates to being in VR the more you play so the headaches should disappear after a few sessions.
I'd say the issue these days is there aren't enough fresh VR titles coming out.
I have put over 9k hours of play time since i got my vive in 2018. usually play for about 2h at a stretch 7 times a week. VR has destroyed my ability to play flat games, I just can't put more than a half hour into them these days. Usually load a game, look at the main menu, may start the game then in a few mins, turn it off.
I play mil sim, zombie shooter, vr mods of flat games I have enjoyed in the past like raft and The Forest.
When I first started there was a time i couldn't play long but after a month 2h was no issue except for tiredness.
on a vr headset for everyday for the past 3 days. Each day around 4 to 5 hours
I do a lot more than that, so, hard pass.
Is it all in your browser, because pretty much everything is a web app now.
I mean, yes, but I also do dev coding work, run AI models, produce audio and video content from my machine. But years ago I adopted a 'No BS' software approach and rid myself of software that was deliberately getting in my way so transitioning to a fully *Nix workflow wasn't an issue for me.
If anyone working with aggressively anticonsumer software right now tried to switch, it's a nightmare.
lol no
I never had a single issue so far. Actually, performamce is better on Linux every single time for me. I finally got rid of Windows since I have zero use for it. The only problem could be games with anti cheats.
I'm always surprised when I hear people claiming they work in IT and find Linux to be complicated. I just installed Fedora on two of my friends' machines. Both are cluless about computers and they are doing perfectly fine. Now for basic tasks including gaming, a granny could use it without much issues if any.
When was the last time you tried Linux? If it has been a while, you might be surprised how it has changed recently. Proton made everything so much easier.
I'm not a technical person by the way; just a normal dude who uses Linux now.
The things that keeps me coming back to Windows in my gaming rig is mostly VR, which I haven't been able to get working on Bazzite.
Though I steam my games with Apollo/Moonlight to Mac's and handhelds, so I rarely need to look at Windows at all.
I have VR running in Kubuntu using the sigh "official" nvidia drivers for my 4070ti super. Many of the games work from (I have over 100 in my library) ok to real good. It is just some of my peripherals have no drivers or software to configure them. I am no expert, but I might be able to assist you in your vr on nix issue, feel free to dm
Thanks, kind stranger, and I might take you up on that, in the days ahead.
I get that it won't be turnkey like in Windows and that I'll probably need a Windows partition (or a dedicated system) for some time longer.
Just so we are clear, you are able to play Steam PCVR games and use the SteamVR environments on your Kubuntu system?
Added monkey wrench, I just use 'Virtual Desktop' for streaming 100% of my PCVR content to a Quest 3 wirelessly. I assume handling the controllers and telemetry is all software for Steam and not needing obscure system calls or api's that will have driver complications?
'Cause in hella ignorant. Lol.
actually, for my vive, the setup was EASIER than on windows as steam does all the heavy lifting and I didn't need to install the vive software, and didn't have to pair my controllers, room setup is simple same as windows.
I only do pcvr, and the steam overlay works for LOOKING at your desktop (sadly can't interact with desktop through steam, it just closes, but there is an easy to install app that is kind of like Desktop+ that gives desktop control with a double press of a button on your controller) or using the steam launcher. I stopped using their environments (I had the basic and some Dr Who ones, some star wars ones like the cantina and millennium falcon) on my older pc cause the environment was adversely affecting performance(don't think it was shutting off completely, I now simply use the empty space on the round grid with mountains in the distance and bring up my steam menu from the controller.
I never used VD and the people I know that do are only on windows.
I wish I had an answer for this one. Can quest use the steam backend like vive/index? if so should be good. I know vive and valve worked together on the software so are compatible that way. Like I said above wrt controllers they just worked with no pairing, both my index controllers and vive wands (I did a quick test for someone who was having issues with vive wands "stuck on the floor while in their hand"
Just make sure you use the steam installer from the steam site, not the flat pack or snap or whatever, they don't have the correct screen lease thing (whatever it is called) and I used Kubuntu simply because when I started my journey KDE was the preferred DE, I personally prefer Gnome but VR dammit, and wayland was the better choice for VR x11 maybe better now for VR but wayland is the future from what I read.
Thanks for sharing all of this and I'll have to take it for another spin.
Quest is a whole SOC, a beefy Snapdragon computer that has its own environment, and needs software to link it with the desktop housing SteamVR.
I'll have to try Steam's maybe platform and see if I can forego Virtual Desktop. Or at least dual boot
Yeah, that is fair. I personally don't know much about VR so I wound't know.
I admit it might be a a bit more complicated when it comes to make VR or things like a racing wheel work without having to dig around.
I had to move back to windows on my son's computer because of VR... But we now have the quest 3 and most things I want to run just work on that now anyway. It's for the kids really, it's gives me a headache
But year vr on Linux doesn't really work from what I can tell.
It's often easier for those that have few technical skills to learn new things. Simple because they need to unlearn so little. Experts have to put forth much greater effort to forget the "I have always done it this way" an "Why doesn't this respond exactly the same way I'm used to."
It takes far more effort to unlearn years of skills and replace them with new ones.
While This is true, AS long AS you weren't a Windows power User and stick to Distros like Mint with cinnamon The experience will be almost the same and you dont have to relearn that much.
So non-experts have an easier time switching vs a Windows power user?
Depends on what you used to do with your PC. If you are used to writing power shell scripts for doing stuff on your PC, it might take a bit longer to adapt to Linux. If you mainly used GUIs to do small stuff it is much easier to adapt.
So in conclusion yes, as long as the non Power user has some technical knowledge and doesn't get scared away, if the UI looks slightly different.
lol anyone who works in IT and finds Linux too complicated should not work in IT. Then again, most people who work in IT should not. It’s complex, but all you need to do is learn. People who can’t learn more all the time don’t belong in a field where things change and improve all the time.
I got started with tech starting from when I was like 7 yo in 1980 and ended up in IT since it was a passion of mine and I have an affinity for it. Working as a professional, I saw - DAILY - morons in the field who were bungling every other task they had. They didn’t think the right way, they didn’t understand it, they didn’t love it, and screwed up every other thing they did. DAILY I saw this from techs whose work I was called in to fix after the fact.
I recently got a new work laptop with Windows 11. It's just different enough from Windows 10 that it pisses me off to try to find the stuff I need. I end up hunting and grumbling and searching the web for answers to simple things.
If you're going to do that anyway, just try Linux. It's free and easy, and it doesn't steal all your private data, sell it, and use that money to corrupt your government to steal your rights and give them to corporations.
It's probably because I'm using an NVIDIA card but I switched an SSD to arch Linux because that's the only thing I could get to actually run a game and not a black or grey screen. Once I finally got steam and heroic launching games I will say only about 60% of the games I've tried work but that's because I'm trying to keep up with some newer games and play Jedi Survivor, The Last of Us part 1 and the Mass effect Legendary Edition and half the time it won't boot or has HDR issues or something. But all my indie or smaller games that are verified I'm surely installing and only playing them there.
A decade ago you tried Linux and it was hard, try again or butt out. Windows has become even more of a privacy violating, data snorting, market manipulating whore in that time and it will not stop.
I'll bet they roll out subscription based drivers before you make a legitimate atempt.
2015... I was there back then, and let me tell you, the distribution landscape is very different. You don't have to rely on package managers to get your apps anymore because flatpaks and appimages are ubiquitous. Games went from having maybe a 50% chance to run with opengl to 98% running with vulkan ootb. Desktop environments have improved across the board with stuff like wayland and plenty of other good shit. And finally, linux itself has gotten much better hardware support. Seriously, you're doing yourself and everyone else a disservice by using 2015 as a comparison point.
Dude, you need to chill. Why not take a break and unclench you jaw and fists for a while?
This conversation doesn't deserve this level of blood pressure.
lol ya
except not, not at all
Saying that there is a gaming focused linux distro is like saying there's a cliff-climbing focused dolphin.
I'm sure the delusional believe in it, but actual reality says otherwise.
Yeah see, based on your other comments on this post, I don't feel obliged to take anything you say about Linux seriously
Do you think I posted this to somehow convince you of something? I don't even know who the fuck you are
"FINISH HIM!"
I should be allowed to ban every hundredth person that replies like this, instead I'll just block you
It's better by every metric except anicheat, which is malware anyway.
The only delusional one here is you. Yell all you want angry boy, it doesn't change reality.
Maybe depends on what distro you are using. There are ones dedicated for gaming.
Well I tried redhat ubuntu gentoo fedora knoppix mint arch MEPIS and even fucking slackware because apparently i am a masochist
And you will say 'Oh but those are old distros, now they're much betterer!'
Nope the weeks of frustration aren't worth revisiting. You really don't understand how much PTSD I got from the linux forums
Get a techie to set gaming distros for you. My brother installed Bazzite for me and troubleshoots. Speaking of which, Bazzite is meant to be for average users who are less literate on computers. I have rarely had issues on Bazzite unlike with other distros. Indeed, newer distros are better.
I understand. Linux can be daunting for us average Joes. Plenty of information i see on the internet are either outdated, or simply doesn't work.
Bazzite feels so close to feature complete, but there are still corners I stub my toes on.
I have to care about whatever Wayland is, because RustDesk on Bazzite fights me (it's my backup for remoting to fix a machine when moonlight or Steam Link is misbehaving), and I miss Steam PCVR hosting, but both of those are edge cases for most folks and I can forego on most systems.
Meanwhile, the lean, light, singularly focused environment is great and I really do like not having to bother with Windows. I never want Edge to barge in on my day again. I will never subscribe to OneDrive. I don't want an AI companion modem Bonzai Buddy to "help" me remember anything, and memorize my SSN or Birthday along the way.
... us average joes...
Son I've been an IT admin since the early 90s
The great news is that all you really need to do to use bazzite is click on things in the gui so your skill set will be a perfect fit.
💀💀💀
I doubt the quality of your work.
Still, Bazzite is pretty much one of the best Gaming distros out there. All drivers are included with the installation (you select which Hardware you have before downloading) and the OS itself is immutable, so you don't have to worry about damaging the OS in any way. The only downside is that it exclusively uses Flatpaks, which does have a few problems regarding interoperability between programs (e.g. Firefox doesn't allow KeePassXC to interact with the KeePass add-on). However, I would recommend Flatpaks either way, since it adds better security and reliability, since you don't have to worry about an update breaking programs.
However, if you don't need that interoperability, I'd say there is little reason not to use it if you want to play games. And when a game doesn't work, protondb usually gives enough hints to how to fix these issues. Generally, I had less issues with games on there compared to other distros (e.g. OpenSUSE).
And yet, here we are. What are you even doing, responding to everyone on this group, if you just want to do work and just want to use Windows?
How is this informative, edifying or fun for you?
Your experience isn't normal, I give fedora to the elderly and they have less problems than on windows. You also aren't saying what any of your problems are, bad trolling.
How do you know if someone owns a Steam Deck? Don't worry, they'll tell you.
So anyway, a couple years ago I bought a Steam Deck. And since I bought it, virtually all of my gaming is on the Deck. Prior to that, virtually all of my game time was on a Windows PC. So, for me personally, there's been a big shift towards Linux for gaming.
The other big change that's coming for a lot of people I know: end of Windows 10 support. Honestly, the majority of people I know who still have a traditional Windows PC are using machines that can't be upgraded to Windows 11. These computers are perfectly functional and do everything the users need them to do, and they have no inclination to go out and buy a new computer just because. Especially in this economy. Additionally, there are quite a few people with computers that are capable of running Windows 11, but they have no desire to upgrade to a worse experience and an experience that is randomly different in a myriad different ways for no good reason. Both groups are ripe for the picking in terms of a switch to Linux. No, the year of the Linux desktop is not here, but the conditions for such a change are building. And this Steam data may present a picture of the larger trend. Who knows?
I ran a dual boot back in college to dabble with Linux a bit but gaming support back then was literally nonexistent. The Deck and Proton really reinvigorated that drive nearly a decade later.
This past winter I started a huge degoogling push and trying to replace big tech platforms in general, and I'd also recently quit the only the game I regularly played that didn't run on Linux due to anticheat bullshit,, so I said fuck it and set up a CachyOS dual boot and I haven't looked back since.
The dual boot is just there in case I ever need it for some odds or ends, or in case I break Cachy, but so far I've booted windows maybe 4 times since January.
This last try at gaming under Linux (about a year ago with a desktop PC and Pop!OS) was a pleasant surprise given that my previous try (same machine, around 5 years before) was an exercise in frustration and I just gave up on it and that partition just stayed there in a dual boot config without being used until I nuked it in this latest try.
This time it went so well that I'm now full time gaming in Linux and even though Windows is available as dual boot, I haven't booted it in many months. Granted, I don't do online multiplayer so don't suffer from Wine not being compatible with the Windows rootkits used for cheat protection in some of those games.
And this high success rate is not even exclusively with Steam and Proton - I get about the same rate of success for games from GOG with Wine under Lutris.
The ease of gaming in Linux seems to have advanced massively in the last few years.
The average person just simply won't upgrade. These are the people who find regular updates or shutting of their PC already a pain, what makes you think they would switch to a completely different OS?
They all can upgrade to win 11. Nothing is stopping them. But you have to do a couple of steps.
Either way, Linux is better and Microsoft is playing stupid games.
Unless their hardware doesn't support it. A lot of people are going to be tossing out perfectly good systems because they don't have a TPM.
Excellent, I've been looking to upgrade my setup
You can bypass that requirement. The hardware is fine you just have to tell windows to ignore it.
2 registry keys if I remember correctly.
Windows also said they don't support it and may stop it from working at any time. I have already had a problem because Windows System Image tried to restore something as UEFI when I only had BIOS so forcing my BIOS system to something that technically only supports UEFI seems like an awful idea.
Windows says lots of things. It is surprising how conflicting they are internally.
The thing is, there are a lot of ways to install windows 11. You have a lot of versions to choose from and more options than you think.
Anyways, I think it is all beating a dead horse, although you can get around windows requirements the best thing to do is not play the game.
Switch to Linux and be done with the bullshit.
Not in all cases. My desktop PC came with windows professional (10), back in 2021. Upgrading to windows 11 is not included for free (not even to windows 11 "basic"), I need to pay a new license.
You still can upgrade for free and use a registry setting to take off the nag screen.
But I really was commenting on people who think they can't. You can too by buying windows11.
Well, windows didn't allow me to do that, so I might have to do a manual process maybe.
Anyway, I am not interested in upgrading, I am just saying that I can't upgrade (click button, couple of steps), without buying a new copy. We can argue about the semantics of what "upgrading" means, but effectively there are going to be plenty of people in my situations, which is why I brought it up.
I've been running Bazzite OS on my living room big screen gaming PC since May. It's a really slick fedora-based distro that installs out of the box with Steam, proton, and graphics drivers ready-to-launch for gaming. It was really easy to use, and my games worked perfectly.
My high school age son got a new AMD proc/mb for his birthday, and I was surprised when he said he wanted to try dual booting Bazzite and Windows when we set it up. 2 weeks later, and he decided to kill the Windows boot and just use Bazzite full time. He has no linux experience and just figures it out.
Windows 11 is shit and Linux alternatives are prettier, easier to use, don't shove AI down your throat, and don't steal your data for profit. The time has come.
Valve put together a good product this time compared to the first steam machines push. Most games work without fuss and it's priced well. They didn't start the handheld PC market but they sort of Apple'ed it by taking something other companies had been doing and streamlined it enough to get mainstream copycats, Lenovo/Asus/etc. Plus SteamOS/bug picture looks a lot better today than 10 years ago. So proven market/platform that can again try to undercut Windows machines in price because Linux is free and leverages the work of open source developers
Glad to be part of a trend, for a change!
I've been using Arch for a little over a year, and it's been fun. I've learned so much more about computers and Linux itself. I highly recommend trying out Linux and you can do it here: https://distrosea.com/ - It's a website where you can try out different Linux distros in your web browser.
Microsoft Recall and Steam Deck and Proton are why.
It's not so much about users switching, it's more about the ones that will stick with it. And that we can't know for a few years yet.
Common Windows L
I tried setting up Windows 10 in a virtual machine recently and damn, what a miserable experience that was. "Please wait. We're getting things ready . . . please wait . . . We're getting things ready. Hey, you want Cortana? Tough shiat, we're installing it anyway. Do you need an Office App? Well we're going to install Live365, whether you like it or not. Also, we really want your email address. You don't have a choice. Just give us your damn email address. And your phone number, too."
Installing Linux: 15 minutes later: "You're done. Enjoy."
As people already stated in the comments, this may not be a permanent change for some (they find out something like destiny 2 refuses to work on Linux without bans, some other tools needed for certain use cases are not there yet or windows only), but I think is super important people understand there are alternatives, and not only windows or Mac. Hopefully gives more people awareness that something else is out there. And would be really cool if we had more of the user base that is on the verge to throwing away the machine because of windows 11 restrictions and instead, gives machines a second chance.
All we can do is guide them. Personally, I guide them to treasure I cannot have, since I'm damn near obligated to run and deeply understand Microsoft Windows because I work for IT support.
All of my work tools are Windows centric.
I do use windows for work as well, but if people want adoption, it starts at home. I do see a need for Linux distros in general will have to make even a bigger shift for the user needs instead of whatever agenda people like to imply (I think open source is a good goal, but if I introduce Linux to someone, I will not for certain preach endlessly about this).
We need more adoption, but I also see some camps will decide to further distance themselves from these groups of users.
I put KDE plasma on my elderly Mom's surface laptop. She uses it mostly for organising photos, and she's loving it. She complained that windows always "messes with her settings". If she gets it, you can too.
Lemmy Linux copium is one of the strongest in the world.
Anyone know if CP2077 runs better on Linux than Windows?
By much? With HDR?
Sorry for the drive by comment, but this is like the one game my 3090 can’t quite handle to my satisfaction. I've thoroughly disabled the thing from rendering in Linux and don’t want to undo all that… But if I could get like another 10% over Windows, that would be incredible. Even 5% would be awesome.
Nvidia and Linux don't have the best history. Their driver are not open source, so Valve developers have no means to improve performance and fix bugs on a driver level.
Success stories of Linux gaming are usually about Radeon and Arc GPUs whose drivers are fully open source.
This is what I was afraid of, and reflects my experience in the past, unfortunately. I am intimately familiar with Nvidia’s drivers and my random Linux black screens…
I would have gotten a 7900 TBH, but prices were terrible at the time.
I don't run any hardware with an NVidia GPU on Linux any longer, so I don't have recent first hand experience but I do follow Linux news and every year or so it's announced that Nvidia is working on the last feature that's holding back perfection on Linux. NVidia drivers don't support implicit sync but now that the Linux graphics layer supports explicit sync, the NVidia drivers make the "Final Steps Towards Ultimate Desktop Experience". Same BS every year. Nvidia is always lagging behind on Linux.
I'll consider using NVidia with Linux, should NVidia ever enter upstream kernel and Mesa development the same way AMD and Intel do.
Same here. At one point I was very versed in reinstalling the entire Linux graphics stack because the NVidia driver's kernel module decided that it is no longer compatible with the lastest kernel update.
Screw Nvidia.
I’d be on AMD if they weren’t price gouging just as bad (or worse), or on Intel if they offered 24GB+ cards for less than a car.
What? I have a 2060 and shit runs fine. Nvidia's drivers have improved a lot since the 2010s.
Of course. There's always the ones for whom everything runs fine. These are the ones who aren't affected by bugs in power management caused by Nvidia drivers because they use desktop PCs and not laptops. These are the ones who still used X11 five years after the rest of the Linux world moved to Wayland and when Nvidia drivers got good enough for Wayland, it's always "see, how much Nvidia’s drivers have improved a lot since the 2010s!!"
Nvidia is lagging years behind on adopting newer technologies in the Linux graphics stack.
Edit: These days it's "HDR can cause game-breaking graphical artifacts".
I didn't say there are never any issues I said it's fine. The idea that "success stories" are only amd is silly. 90/100 times unless you're using bleeding edge hardware or pathologically fussy you just hit play and stuff works. 9 out of the remaining 10 times you tweak a proton version or wine setting, the other time it's a driver bug.
Sometimes you don't know what you're missing though.
As an example, I figured out (on a 4900HS CPU/2060 GPU) that Stellaris and modded Rimworld game ticks are on the order of 40% slower running linux native, and still slower (but less dramatically so) in Proton. There was zero public information on this until I tested it myself.
As another example, modded Minecraft is dramatically faster on linux.
They run fine, yeah, but one's game settings are kinda capped by CPU performance in all these titles. I don't have to know the difference, but would like to, hence I'm wondering about CP2077 from the opposite side: am I missing out on a boost from linux?
Luckily I didn't write that.
Another good nugget, thanks (as I'd like to play in HDR).
And Directx 12(VKD3D) as of writing this has issues on Nvidia
Thanks, these are the kind of nuggets I’m looking for.
Not that I blame the vulkan translation layer at all. It’s incredible it even works on Nvidia.
Ig the fix came out?
Hey there! Recently downloaded Cyberpunk again to test my graphics card out.
openSUSE Tumbleweed, a 144hz 1080p ultrawide monitor (21:9), i9-10850K, nvidia 5080, raytracing and all settings on ultra, no DLSS fake frames only DLAA
I was getting from 75-120 (120 could be lower or higher as I can’t get to my computer right now) depending on what was on screen. In the city with lots of neon and ads going while driving around? 75-80 fps
Inside a building or not near any of the reflective causing lights? 90-120
I’m pretty sure my CPU is bottlenecking me for the most part, but it has never sweated on anything I threw at it, so didn’t see the need to upgrade just yet.
Hopefully that helps you out a little! I’ve got a lot of games I can report back on too, if needed! :)
Thanks! Though it doesn’t mean much without a windows reference :P
I’m pushing my poor 3090 to 4K with just RT reflections but a bunch of mods, and I’m generally getting over 60 with no framegen (which is my target).
FYI I found the game actually looks better with most of the RT disabled:
RT shadows tend to be blocky and flicker, while raster shadows “miss” more shadows but are razor sharp and stable.
RT lighting is neat for, say, reflecting a neon billboard, but I find it often clashes with built in raster lighting. For instance, it turns neon signs into blobs and messed up the Arasaka atrium in the intro.
RT reflections look incredible, especially in rain. No downside as far as I can tell.
Path tracing is a whole different ballgame my card can’t handle. But (when modded to fix it) it’s apparently extra incredible, and basically disables all the other in game settings.
Check out the digital foundry video too, which shows some of this
Good point about the Windows reference!
I will boot into Windows when I can and see the performance there I’ll report back after I run around the city and outside the city for a little bit!
I am curious to try out NexusMods Linux compatibility with their new modding app, so I haven’t gotten to mod the game yet. I wasn’t going to play through it again (4th playthrough lol) just yet.
I just remember in the “cutscenes” like driving with Panam or Takamura, the RT looking better than the baked lighting. My 2080ti on Windows wasn’t able to handle that all the time (less than 60 with medium RT, no DLSS) but the way the “cutscenes” looked was just so much better with RT on that as soon as they started, I’d turn it on. :O
Its RT reflections are doing most of the lifting driving around, I think, but they only take like 1/3 the FPS, while RT lighting and shadows are more subtle.
The settings may have been different in the past, can’t remember… I was playing on a laptop 2060, heh.
Thanks! I am curious, though I am glad to hear RT and such works well on Linux.
I am not sure, as I've actually only played it under Linux. I have a laptop with an RTX 3070. It's able to handle the raytraced low setting at 1080p, but I just run High instead so that the fan isn't as loud. And in my opinion that even looks pretty good. I might try start it under windows and run its benchmark because I'm curious now! I'll update here if I remember to do this test.
Also, you might be able to fix that!
I clock limit my 3090 to like 1700MHz-1750Mhz with Nvidia-smi (built into the driver) since any faster is just diminishing returns. You might check what “stable clocks” your 3070 runs at, and cap them slightlt lower, and even try an under volt as well.
Be sure to cap the frame rate too.
Do that, and you might be able to handle RT reflections and otherwise similar settings without much noise. The hit for just that setting is modest on my 3090 but much heavier with full “low” RT
I'll have to look into seeing if I can mess with that! It's a laptop 3070, so they:'ve already made some changes (fewer cores, lower boost clocks). My laptop sets a 100 W max TGP for it.
TBH though I've found myself caring more about the convenience of playing games (comfort, portability, ease of interrupting) more than graphics settings. Yeah it's very pretty with ray tracing and all, but I'm totally fine with playing on medium or high.
Thanks for the ideas! Hopefully I can push the graphics up without turning into a pile of lava. I need to figure out how to record graphics power consumption for me to reference to evaluate changes.
It's far more efficient to just TDP limit your GPU rather than lowering settings to try and get power consumption (and laptop fan speed) down. It will stick to slightly lower clocks, which is exponentially better since that also lowers voltage, and voltage increases power consumption quadratically.
Otherwise it will always try to boost to 100W anyway.
You can do this with MSI Afterburner easily, or you can do it in Windows with just the command line. For example,
nvidia-smi -pl 80will set the power limit to 80W (until you restart your PC).nvidia-smiby itself will show all its default settings.I do this with my 3090, and dropping from the default 420W to 300W hardly drops performance at all without changing a single graphics setting.
Alternatatively you can hard cap the clocks to your GPU's "efficient" range. For my 3090 thats somewhere around 1500-1700 MHz, and TBH I do this more often, as it wastes less power from the GPU clocking up to uselessly inefficient voltages, but lets it "power up" for really intense workloads.
FYI you can do something similar with the CPU too, though it depends on the model and platform.
Thank you very much, kind graphics wizard. I will put this knowledge to good use saving my ears from that fan. This is exactly what I was looking for!
I think there's huge variability, but as a gross overgeneralization AMD gpus run Cyberpunk 2077 a bit faster on Linux than Windows, and nVidia gpus run it a bit slower on Linux than on Windows.
If you've got a spare usb hard drive you could always install Linux there for a test drive though. You might be able to find a setup that gets you the extra performance you're looking for.
I already dual boot CachyOS! In fact I spent a lot of time tweaking schedulers, power, undervolting the GPU and such for compute performance, but I think it’s well tuned for gaming too.
It’s just annoying because I beat the GPU into submission with tons of settings (as Nvidia is funny with Wayland), so its display out is totally disabled. It’s a lot to undo.
See, that makes it sound to me like you could probably come up with a setup that would do what you want, but that doing so would probably mean making it worse at some of the other things you currently use it for.
Which is where using an external drive for a third installation might be easier. Or at least easier to dispose of if you get sick of the project. But I am perhaps unusually lazy in that regard.
You raise an excellent point.
TBH I am both lazy, and a bit paranoid/afraid of dealing with Nvidia rendering issues (even if using my IGP for desktop work), but it would probably be fine and I'm... just being lazy and paranoid.
I don't think it would make it worse for compute work.
An external 3rd partition does sound appealing, though one quirk is that CP2077 does really like SSDs. I have a slow external SSD, but it still might muddy an A/B test.
If you have a desktop, these work great for swapping SSDs out. Get a pair and swap them out whenever you need/want to. You just need a spare x4 (or larger) PCI-e slot, which is pretty common to have. (Technically they work fine with a x1 slot, but then you are slowing the SSD down.)
I’ve got an ITX mini PC with both nvme and the graphics slot filled, heh.
With path tracing it runs significantly worse than it does on Windows. Without it, it runs roughly the same. RTX 4060 Ti.
Awesome, thanks!
That's entire dependent on a whole host of things. CPU, GPU, distro (mostly kernel version), open source vs proprietary drivers, proton version etc. Also some numbers can artificially look better if the feature is just straight up ignored by proton, or just broken. If you're looking for some bleeding edge features then probably not.
7800X3D, Nvidia 3090, CachyOS, the latest arch kernel with whatever tweaks they have, I assume git Proton and all the distro's riced settings. On CP2077's side I’d like RTX reflections and DLSS as the only exotic settings, though I did run a mod that hacks in FSR 3.1 framegen.
I realize I probably have to test this myself, heh. But from what I gather (and past experience on a laptop 2060 with Linux) is that Nvidia is disadvantaged on Linux in this scenario.
As I promised, my own Cyberpunk testing of Windows Vs Linux on mostly the same hardware (they are on different SSDs, but I don't think that'll have a drastic impact).
TLDR: Windows framerates seem inconsistent, it's first benchmark I ran (the first Ultra without DLSS) was way faster with no explanation. Aside from that and Ray Tracing: Overdrive, Linux seems to win, and by a large degree (+28 FPS average on the Low preset seems ridiculous).
I don't think these results are broadly applicable to more machines. You probably won't get +28 FPS by switching to Linux.
My best guess is that the performance difference may have a lot to do with different power/thermal targets, or that Windows was doing a lot in the background (it was running an update, but I didn't expect a huge impact).
I'm guessing that on most hardware the performance difference will be pretty small.
Hardware: ROG Zephyrus G15 GA503QR Laptop Ryzen 9 5900HS, 16 GiB DDR4 RTX 3070 Laptop GPU 2560x1440 screen, up to 165 Hz
All benchmarks: plugged into OEM power supply. I held the laptop vertically so there were no restrictions to its airflow.
Game: Cyberpunk 2077 V2.3 with Phantom Liberty DLC, fullscreen 2560x1440. Values are given as Min / Average / Max FPS displayed by the game's built in benchmark.
Linux (Bazzite 42): NVIDIA driver 575.64.05 Samsung 980 Pro 2TB SSD Performance power profile
Low Preset ( no upscaling): 57.49 / 68.42 / 83.86 FPS
Ultra Preset(no upscaling): 32.91 / 39.27 / 49.71 FPS
Ultra (DLSS Transformer model, Auto): 41.11 / 48.70 / 61.30 FPS
Ray Tracing: Low Preset (DLSS transformer model, Auto): 44.12 / 51.70 / 61.63 FPS
Ray Tracing: Ultra Preset (DLSS transformer model, Auto): 29.24 / 34.26 / 39.81 FPS
Ray Tracing: Overdrive Preset (DLSS transformer model, Auto): 15.03 / 17.71 / 20.45 FPS
Windows (Windows 11 Home 23H2): GeForce Game Ready Driver 580.88 SK Hynix HFM001TD3JX013N SSD "Turbo" power profile (in ASUS Armoury Crate)
Low Preset (no upscaling): 35.68 / 40.68 / 45.17 FPS
Ultra Preset(no upscaling): 40.53 / 52.88 / 65 FPS
Ultra Preset (no upscaling, Round 2): 29.68 / 35.63 / 39.94 FPS
Ultra (DLSS Transformer model, Auto): 36.71 / 47.20 / 55.32 FPS
Ray Tracing: Low Preset (DLSS transformer model, Auto): 28.55 / 32.41 / 35.85 FPS
Ray Tracing: Ultra Preset (DLSS transformer model, Auto): 22.23 / 27.25 / 30.86 FPS
Ray Tracing: Overdrive Preset (DLSS transformer model, Auto): 17.74 / 19.96 / 22.64 FPS
I've been running Linux on my desktop for more than 30 years, so I've switched for a while. And while I'd certainly like to see it become more commonplace, I'm not sure a few decimal points are really going to change anything. It's nice that it's making progress, of course, but all in all, it's rather insignificant.
While it's under 10, or more likely 15%, nobody will care about it.
Yeah, by a whole permille I bet.
Anyone have good experiences with the NVIDIA 50 series on Linux? I've tried a bunch different flavors over the years and I'm fairly distro agnostic as long as it doesn't get too esoteric.
Also weird question does anyone know if Single Player Tarkov with Project Fika works on Linux? I think it should
Yeah, my gaming rig, running bazzite. Works how it should, no fuss, games well. Give it a run I say
My gaming distro of choice is Garuda. As long as I keep everything up to date, everything just works.
But it's also an Arch based distro so everything is bleeding edge, which poses risks of it's own. I've not had it bite me yet, but the risk is there.
Same here, except for my mom's computer, because she needs a program for embroidery design that doesn't work well on Linux despite being in the AUR. It's called "Embrilliance", and for some reason the cursor disappears whenever you try to draw freeform, so if anyone has any guidance on that, hit up my DMs, I'd love to solve it for her!
I could try it in another DE on my machine to see if that helps first. Maybe Cinnamon or XFCE would be good enough for her needs, I'd set her up with Plasma previously, which she liked but it's a no-go without Embrilliance. If nothing else, it's just one air-gapped Windows PC in the house, ultimately it doesn't matter too much.
This is a great use-case for a live Linux environment. Throw one onto a drive and see if it works well, and if not, just restart and go back to what you have.
But, like you said, not a big deal either way.
Very true, if I find a DE that works with Embrilliance this weekend, I could use my Ventoy stick and see if she vibes with it. Good call!
Ventoy even supports persistence! It's a bit poorly documented but you download the 1-2GB persistence volume, configure ventoy to include that feature and which ISOs to associate with which persistent volumes and you're off to the races
Nice! That's good to know for other things!
Steamdeck
Honestly, I kinda suspect the tariffs are speeding this up. I recently upgraded my desktop due to the suspicion that prices are gonna go bonkers shortly and since I was basically rebuilding it anyway, I went ahead and switched my last windows PC to Linux. Been a lot smoother than I had suspected, highly recommended.
I actually watched the prices increase by about 10-20% while ordering computers from work. This was through Dell so clear as mud normally for any given computer but the value of my invoices jumped by a clear 10-20% after the tarrifs started biting back in April
Seems like an increase a bit in preparation. Who knows what they'll be/what shortages will occur over the next couple of years. After all, the current bluff is a 100% tariff on chips. Which is why if you're planning to upgrade in the next year or two and have the money, it might be a decent idea to pre-emptively update your parts before they jack up further.
While I was working at an MSP that was one of the talking points regarding computer upgrades, that and Windows 10 EOL looming in October
Yep. If I didn't think it was stupider, I would almost think it was a plan to increase consumption of bs computer upgrades given how they've basically gotten to the point that people don't really need to upgrade for the most part, outside of operating system changes.
Windows bloat does a pretty good job of making fairly recent computers feel sluggish though. I just updated my work laptop with a 12th gen CPU to Windows 11 and things are noticeably more sluggish immediately following applying the update. Which is sad since its about 8 years newer than my Linux laptop with similar (but older of course) specs and the Linux laptop is significantly snappier-feeling when in use.
Pretty much. I have to use windows 11 for work, so I get the sluggish feeling. My 8th gen Intel laptop is much faster, despite being considerably older than my work laptop.
Beware some issues if your hardware isnt popular, I have freezing on all kernels past 6.136-2, so I'm stuck there. (test them all every update, no matter what I get hella random freezing requiring a power button restart) It is very stable and fast tho, kinda scary thinking the bug never gets fixed tho, still new to Linux and assuming it's bad to not update the kernel longgerm.
I had that issue last time I switched to Linux. Thankfully eventually it went away. It should help to distro hop to a more bleeding edge distro. Fedora specifically gets system updates every night through Discover.
I'm on cachyos, thought arch was the most bleeding edge
Arch is above my skill level at the moment. If CachyOS is an Arch distro, it could be related to Arch configuration issues.
Have you tried a different distro base such as Fedora or SUSE compared to Debians based? I have a laptop that will not install Debian based distros due to hardware error or bug, or if it does install they fail to boot with hardware errors messages. Fedora and SUSE work though, and ironically nixOS.
Fedora Kinoite has worked perfectly for me.
I tried mint and endeavour (also arch tho so I guess its the same) Mint had the same freezing issue. Thought it was my hardware because I had reinstalled my os when problems began, eventually tried the lts kernel and it became stable like it was originally. They recentlly updated it tho, so I have to prevent updates (idk how so I just rollback from the cache after every pacman -Syu)
Nvidia?
all amd ryzen 6900hx 6850mxt
I'm doing my part! Moving to a new country in a few days, part of the prep for that was to ditch my Windows desktop and I've been setting up a Linux laptop. Arch with KDE Plasma is so far the most enjoyable experience I've had with an OS
I've tried at various times to switch to Linux in the past. I'm enough of a turbo nerd you'd think it would have been easy for me but it was never quite there for one reason or another. This latest attempt though hot damn it's all smooth sailing. I've even converted one of my friends to Mint and making progress convincing people who don't want to use Windows 11 to just make the switch
What’s the best Linux distro to play games? Im currently on Ubuntu 22.04 and won’t leave it as my main but I have a AMD TR 1950 with a GTX 1080 TI will to play some final fantasy.
All the major desktop distros play games about as well as one another, assuming you set them up correctly.
Choose a distro based on other criteria, like the release cadence and admin tools that you find most comfortable. If you don't have any particular needs or preferences, I guess you could save 10 minutes by choosing a distro that installs Nvidia drivers by default, but it's not going to run games appreciably better than the others.
Garuda Linux if you want something that just works out of the box, but with the power to do whatever you want. It's basically Arch with all the gaming stuff pre-configured for you.
Not sure what you’re saying…. I download drivers for my hardware, download and install steam and my game and start playing? Or is it not that straight forward yet?
That's exactly how straight forward it is.
Which distro you pick is mostly a matter of taste.
If Ubuntu works, I rather stick with that. Just weird I haven’t seen anything about using that one. If I can home lab/self host and develop either gaming, that would be sweet.
Nothing wrong with Ubuntu. If you like Ubuntu, go with Ubuntu.
Most people don't mention Ubuntu because they are pushing Snaps real hard, which cause issues for people. Mint is basically the same as Ubuntu, but without the stuff Ubuntu does people don't like.
If you just want an experience as straight forward as the steam deck I have heard that the move is to just run Bazzite.
I left Debian for Arch recently and let me tell you, you immediately feel the difference with running the latest drivers for your machine. The bleeding edge drivers have upped my frames per second significantly in videos games compared to sticking with stable releases on Debian (and Ubuntu).
With the built-in
archinstallscript making Arch so easy to get going, I’d only reach for anything else if I really needed the stability.For anyone else reading this who plans to use Debian Stable for gaming, you really should enable Stable Backports. This gives you the option of newer drivers, kernel, etc. (you pick what you need individually) without having to give up the low-maintenance stability of the base system.
I use arch, but they're all equivalent. A distro is more like a preconfigured linux
Just pick one of the popular ones and tinker
Arch is the one thing that should be absolutely not recommended to beginners. Even implying that it is a suitable beginner distro in any way like you have done in this comment is only likely to drive away users when they inevitably get confused.
Existing Windows users mostly are not interested in even knowing of the existence of the Arch Wiki. They will just give up and conclude Linux is shit.
I highly recommend Nobara.
idk why you're downvoted hella ppl use proton ge and hes the one making nobara
Exactly. Maybe I could have given more context but I wrote that comment right before my flight took off.
Like the others have said, all major distros are fine. Ubuntu is or used to be Valve's "favourite distro" and the package that you can get from Valve's website is for Ubuntu. That being said, software on Linux should be installed using the package manager (the Software Centre) and not downloaded from the Web.
You may wish to upgrade to Ubuntu 24.04 LTS later. This is fairly easy (you can use the Software Updater application) but the newer versions have better drivers and newer GNOME versions which may bring better performance.
All major distros are fine, but there are some niche that specialise in making it easy for people to play games. I use Garuda Linux for that reason. It has it's own app that helps handling OS maintenance, you can install things like Heroic Launcher, Steam, and Proton with a couple of clicks, you have a nice app that checks for updates, etc., etc.
It's still Linux, which means random shit breaks for no reason, but for gaming and not having to worry about keeping the OS alive it's great.
Linux in no way means that "random shit breaks for no reason", if anything that's Windows. Some distributions may be easier to break if you don't know what you are doing but that is not an OS problem.
Things that randomly broke for no reason:
Things that broke after I installed a dGPU:
Things that broke after a system update:
This was all in a span of around 3 months.
If it was "if anything that's Windows", then I would be doing nothing but fixing user issues with my ~300 Windows devices. That's not the case.
Funny, that's not the experience of the majority of people in this thread. Several flavors of Linux that have been listed are rock solid and require little to no user action to work and launch games. You can list all of the problems you want, that's just 1 person's experience. It could be because of the distribution you chose, because of your skills, anything. But it's not statically relevant.
Also, please, Windows is known, has been known, and probably will be known for having shit break randomly. Don't you think there would be a tiny bit more Windows dominance on the servers side if the opposite were true?
I'm willing to bet the majority of people in this thread already forgot about the "linuxism" they had to deal with when they were starting, and are experienced enough to handle any new ones as they come along.
Linux dominates the server realm for a completely different reason - Linux-based servers supported hot-updates much sooner than Windows Server did, and in systems where uptime was critical, people chose Linux. That also meant that the vast majority of "server admins" had Linux experience which also contributed.
This is slowly changing now - if you look at market stats, you can see that Windows Server is (painfully slowly, granted) regaining some momentum.
EDIT: also, fun fact - I used to work at a company that had around 300 MacBooks and 2500 Windows devices. Back then I was working as a Service Desk agent. The distribution of incidents for Windows and MacOS we were getting was VERY close to 50-50... So, it seems to me that "Windows is known, has been known, and probably will be known for having shit break randomly" mostly among people who don't use Windows.
Yeah, "linuxism", that must be it... That or it's possible that the OS and distributions have evolved while you were not looking.
Linux dominates on servers because of that yes. Also because of its licensing costs, being open source, stable, secure (please don't try to tell me Windows is more secure, please please please), better performance and lesser response time. Because a Debian stable will never break with simple security updates. I am also quite curious about getting a source for that claim that Windows Server is coming back.
Finally, do tell me where I mentioned MacOS. Unless you think that MacOS and Linux are the same? That wouldn't surprise me considering your apparent knowledge (or lack of) about Linux. FYI MacOS is based on a BSD kernel.
The big benefit of linux servers for most businesses is that they tend to be configure-once systems, where you set it up, verify it works then no further maintenance is needed beyond applying updates in line with your update schedule and downtime windows. Sure there will every once in a while be something that changes but far less than you see with Windows Server where some registry values stopped working with a recent windows update without warning so now you have to track down new registry values to recreate the behavior. That and tracking down why Windows decided to ignore all of your settings and reboot this time (and how to stop it again)
As in: between today and six months ago, when I moved my personal PC to Linux and encountered various weird shit that just doesn't happen on Windows?
Wait, are you one of those weird people who believe that there are no viruses on Linux and no security tools are needed?
Windows servers are under constant attack... Just like Linux devices are at all times.
I didn't say "it's coming back". WS is still losing market share, but the losses slowed down pretty significantly in recent years. Sorry, I can't find the source again because Google is shite. Feel free to disregard this point.
Fuck off with this tone, mate.
I mentioned MacOS as an example that Windows is not as buggy as you seem to believe. I guess that went over your head and I should denigrate you now?
It'll be a slow grind. I view. Linux today similar to Macs in like 2003. Low single digit market share but increasing adoption. What doesn't match is the lack of a huge company pushing out flagship advertised laptops/desktops with them that tie in to a very popular device like iPods. But today there's so many more computers being used that a low single digit market share today is probably way more people than Macs back in 2003. And Linux gaming today is better than gaming on MacOS has ever been. Today MacOS is like 15%
Nvidia seems to be the biggest hurdle for most people. The simplest solution I've found has been universal Blue, Bazzite (specifically the Nvidia images). You don't have to think twice about Nvidia as everything is preconfigured for you out of the gate, forever, in perpetuity.
I'm not aware of the x3d issues you speak of.
People often repeat that Nvidia is a nightmare to get working and that you need to install some sort of pre-packaged distro that configures Nvidia for you but... that hasn't been true for years?
Get any distro you want, from Fedora to Arch, install nvidia-open, reboot... that's it? Maybe install extra packages for 32 bit support, video decoding and CUDA if you want, optionally. Not different from installing Nvidia drivers on Windows at all, except you're not running a .exe, but that's true for any package.
I believe one of the problems is that nvidia is an out of kernel driver so it requires each kernel update to rebuild it. There is a lot of distro's that handle this with a proper configuration of dkms but some dont and it causes issues that are hard to solve for the average user.
In my experience the version of Pop!OS with Nvidia support also works out of the box with no hassle.
I suspect the horror stories are from people who had to install the Nvidia support themselves.
OpenSUSE has drivers that nVidia releases and hosts on the nVidia repo specifically for Leap or Tumbleweed. I've never had driver issues.
I'm on Bazzite for almost a year now and I didn't have a single issue with my 5800X3D.
What distro your using?
Don't know about the X3D chips, but my 3070 TI is running flawlessly under Nobara (a Fedora flavor) - a few months ago there has been a huge boost in stability with the support of explicit sync.
This is good. This data will eventually help influence game developers to support Linux. It won't happen over night, but we this trend continues, it'll eventually start getting some attention.
Okay, I finally installed a new SSD yesterday so I could dual boot and put CachyOS on it. Played a few games and it worked surprisingly well.
But it did take quite a bit more doing than installing Windows. The USB drive wouldn't boot when made with Rufus and I don't quite get how to manage the games installed in Proton (like where is their virtual C: drive?).
I plan on migrating more of my stuff onto Linux in the coming days and will see if it can't replace Windows eventually for me.
Just tried gaming on Linux because I forgot my Ally and was stuck on my laptop. Sorry, guys, it still sucks. It's getting better, though. Perhaps in another 10 years.
So Linux bumps up 2 percentage points due to steam decks and all the linuxbois are taking a victory lap
Windows lives in your head rent free
You're worse than vegans, at least vegans have a moral position.
Edit: screenshotting this for when the mods ban me again
What an extremely normal way to respond to this post
I'm in the process of jumping into Linux. Still getting my sea legs, but your take just seems intentionally inflammatory.
I'm not sure what you thought you were accomplishing by posting it.
It's important to me for linux users to know how much I despise them
No one is more bitter than a disillusioned ex-believer, and I tried so hard to be an early Linux adopter in the late 90s, early 00s. I was bright eyed and full of hope for an open source future.
Spent 3 years trying to transition to linux as my daily driver, and every time I tried it was just days of frustration and every time I tried to go to any of the various linux forums at the time, all I got in return was literally hundreds of users telling me to read a list of books before I had the right to ask questions.
This happened EVERY FUCKDAMN place I went, forums, usenet, IRC, even oldschool bulletin boards
The worst part about the experience is that the environment is so fractured that every distro is basically it's own unique thing, with quirks and differences that aren't apparent to people who haven't been using them for years already, and that everyone is so fuckdamn hard on depreciating still used functions or just renaming fucking functions for vanity sake
So past forum posts are likely just not going to be helpful anymore, which is a really fucking ridiculous design choice when one of the primary project goals is ubiquitous interoperability and long term support.
Linux is a waste of human energy. Can you even imagine the hundreds of millions of human development hours that went into failed distros and vanity changes being actually used to make one unified fucking amazing OS?
The original dream was a community of dedicated and passionate devs working together to unseat corporate software control
Instead what we got was a thousand fractured groups all doing whatever the fuck they feel like and now you need a fuckdamn college course to figure out which of the thousand distros are for you
Fuck linux
Fuck the people who promote it
That is all
Oof, I 100% understand why you have the emotional response to it that you do. A good part of the community back then were hella toxic, and even now, 20+ years later, it's not that much better. That coupled with the enshittification of search and the death of many of those spaces for help, forums, etc. that I would argue results in a similar level of difficulty, albeit a somewhat different flavor.
But
As yesterday's empires continue to self-cannibalize it's highly likely that Linux is going to be the only safe and functional option in the relatively near future. While I understand personally not wanting anything to do with it, you will very likely need to make at least one Linux friend who can help you with those needs.
Undirected rage commenting is not the way.
The rage bait isn't even funny anymore lmao, most used OS on the planet btw. Have fun sucking microsoft off I guess
Only for servers, and of course the fact that you are dishonest about the metric just reinforces all I feel towards your ilk
nope, its the most used mobile platform as well and there are far more mobile devices than desktops.
That doesn't have any impact on desktop gaming PCs, which are the devices we are discussing here.
Again, another linux cultist who deliberately misunderstands to get their rancid 2 cents in
Offspec said most used OS on the planet and you said only for servers. You're wrong its not only for servers so it is the most used OS on the planet.
I'm not going to pretend I've been a Linux purist my entire life or anything. The landscape for daily driving desktop Linux was really rough in the time period you described attempting to migrate, but I had Linux laptops assigned to each kid in my school circa 2007 and that ignited my interest in the platform. My father was an enthusiast and build a safe environment for me to experiment as a kid when I otherwise would have been out of my depth. I had a Linux box, usually an Ubuntu derivative, around pretty much continuously from 2012-2017 which would have been pre-uni for me and served as just an environment I could easily play with making small web projects and Minecraft mods and whatnot. But I gamed on windows for most of that time. I think when proton hit I failed to install arch and bounced over to Manjaro which was my main gaming distro untill maybe ~2021 when I got tired of things breaking because of the aur and just migrated to arch using the arch install script came out and I was able to set it up trivially. Since then it's been pretty much "it just works" level compatibility, there are some niche things about my setup that are a little more complicated like some networked pulseaudio stuff and a bunch of development tools I need for work at this point, but overall I have my wife running fedora on her laptop and using a steam deck in desktop mode at her desk and she generally is able to do her schooling and whatnot without issue. I think the only real program she has issues with is an examination specific browser that she has to use another machine in the house for. I have not daily driven windows for the better part of the last decade and while I definitely have frustrations with no great CAD solution and the antagonistic relationship with publishers like EA and Epic Games, I also just am able to play my friendslop and souls games without any issues at all. I'm sorry you had negative experiences with the community, but it's kinda weird to direct your negative feelings for the losers that gatekept you at the entire platform, particularly when the platform grossly outsizes this particular niche and it's through the support of countless open source developers that we have the ability to do anything outside of the scope of Windows spyware or the fenced garden that is MacOS.
I am sorry you have such passionate hatred for something a bunch of nerds tried to do for everyone else for free, to be nice. I am also sorry you have apparently not tried gaming on Linux in the past ~3 years. It can't be comfortable having all that pent-up anger inside you.
I myself used to be like you, namely around the early 2010s when Linux distros started gaining GUIs that weren't stuck in the 90s. Where they looked sleek and modern and oh god were they not at all, they just looked that way. I tried to make it work, but every time I had to boot back to Windows to do something I eventually just ended up staying in Windows. I can't fathom how fucking archaic and awful it would've been to use in the 90s/early 00s, you tried to struggle through that for three years? I barely made it a few months with Ubuntu 10.04 in ~2010. Something I said then, and still say now to Linux dorks who don't "get it", is that "some of us want to work on their computer, not work on their computer." I just want shit to work. I don't want to troubleshoot or tweak or fiddle-fuck with settings. My OS is a means to an end, not an end in and of itself -- if I'm spending more time fucking with the OS than I am using other programs on it, something has gone dearly wrong.
Having said that, I switched to Mint about a year and a half ago, and it works pretty well for me, not nearly as many headaches as I recall when I tried Linux ~15 years ago. When I printed something from a network printer and it just worked without bullshit issues, I was floored. There's still the occasional hiccup, but then, I also had to deal with occasional hiccups on Windows as well, and the terminal isn't nearly so scary when you're used to dealing with the Group Policy Editor and PowerShell. I can count the times I've had to boot into Windows since on my fingers, it's definitely less than 10. One of the things I think I love most is that I can choose to postpone updates, or restarting for them, as long as I want without the computer thinking it knows better than me. I got shit to do, I'll get there when I get there -- and having Windows go "nuh-uh, you're restarting now" pissed me the fuck off.
Having said all that, I will freely admit and agree with you that a large portion of the Linux community is made up of elitist twats who will tell you to go read xyz instead of being in any way directly helpful. Nerds are not generally known for their social skills. However, it really doesn't do anyone any favors to be needlessly inflammatory. If Windows works for you and you like it, great, I'm glad you're happy with it. But there's simply no reason to be so aggressive over Linux existing, especially now that it's finally becoming tolerable even for former Linux-loathing users like me.
actually no, but if it makes you feel better you can believe whatever you want. I forgive you for being wrong.
Or are you just in disbelief that 2010 was 15 years ago? Because yeah, I feel old, too. I just can't remember exactly when it was, 10.04 had a beta in 2009 and released early 2010 and was the Hot Cool New Thing for a time because HOLY SHIT IT DOESN'T LOOK LIKE IT'S FROM THE 90S LET'S GET IN ON THIS. Might've been late 2009 I tried the beta, might've been 2010. I was in my teens at the time, it's too fucking long ago for me to remember exact dates.
well, this is the first time I've ever been accused of being an AI, but you can believe whatever makes you happy. It's no skin off my ass. Personally, I think you're just intentionally being dense and found there wasn't any fault you could pick with my original post to champion your original point of "linux bad", and you instead just decided being a dick and calling me a bot was a decent out. which, for the record, fuck you kindly for suggesting I only write as well as ChatGPT, even a comparison to Claude would be less insulting. But that's fine, I still forgive you. I just think that's a terribly sad way to go about interacting with others.
I hope someday you become a tranquil autist, or at least only a moderately irritated one. Because I can't fathom yours, as it is, being a satisfying way to socialize; nevermind an effective one to change anyone else's opinion on Linux or any other topic. Take care.
None of this actually happened, give any evidence, nobody would tell you to read a book. This is clearly fake, go to any linux support subreddit or forum and find one example of this, these are blatant lies.
or you were a huge asshole to people providing you free help so they told you to fuck off, which seems very likely.
prove me wrong by posting one example, you won't.
Any evidence that this has happened to anyone, ever, yes.
you are obviously lying.