I tried it just last month for a whole week before I ditched it back for Windows. Its just not ready for serious gamers. I am very anti microsoft so when it is ready, I will happily make the switch.
I think the main difficulty with Linux desktops is this “all or nothing” approach to the OS.
Recently got a Steam Deck and most of the games really just work, but that’s a handheld where I play solo. On desktop I mostly play online with friends.
I really don’t want to constantly switch OS depending on the anticheat situation when we play something else.
And then there is software (fusion360, simhub) & hardware (3d mouse, joysticks, ffb wheel, maybe VR?) that just works on Windows.
So instead of maintaining Windows & Linux on dualboot I just stick with Windows on the desktop.
And I used Linux for a long time on my laptop (and can’t wait to ditch MacOS), still use it on servers, but the desktop is just a whole different beast.
Well said. I’m in a similar situation with the Sim Racing stuff. Also my daughter plays Genshin Impact and my son is just getting into StarCraft 2;
SC2 works flawlessly under Proton apparently, but Genshin not so much (anti-cheat stuff it seems). So if you share a gaming PC the question becomes even trickier to answer.
I could see using Linux as a daily driver for work and flipping to windows for games if work had a stipend or Byod option. But otherwise I seem to tend to stick to one or the other.
That said I do keep a Linux distro on my laptop mainly for gimp and kdenlive for making videos from my drone recordings for a buddy.
Quite simple: When using Linux, I tend to play around, try different stuff, switch distros every couple of month… When using Windows or MACOS, I just use it as is and don’t try to break stuff. And while I could use Linux quite easily without breaking it, my inner child prevents me from using it this way…
Tell me your parents were upset at you when you were eight, for dismantling appliances, without telling me your parents were upset at you when you were eight, for dismantling appliances
Two things: the Adobe Creative Cloud (which I hate but am totally dependent on) and better support for FreeSync with more than one display. Even with a 7900XT, which gets open-source drivers, graphics stuff is just easier on Windows.
A few apps I needed didn’t work on Linux without a hassle and a lot of games I play with friends only run on Windows. I also found a lot of things were kind of a hassle on Linux, especially screen scaling. Fractional screen scaling straight up barely works and everything on my laptop screen was usually tiny.
I would totally go back when the experience is a bit nicer, I’m pretty frustrated with Windows. I think the Linux desktop experience isn’t totally ready imo.
The amount of comments in here that are conjecture or just straight up bullshit is off the charts… my tech illiterate wife, and my 80+ year old grandparents use Linux without any problems.
Different needs, different hardware, different skill levels. My kindergarten kids used it for 2 years for school, no problem. I still don’t use it because its too rough for my advanced needs.
Linux runs circles around Windows in terms of privacy, security, control, customizaton, and DE workflows and efficiencies… so what advanced needs keep you from using it? I’m genuinely curious because Linux is far more advanced than Windows in basically every single way I can think of… I can’t think of any reason I would prefer to use Windows over Linux. The only problem Linux suffers is from software support, so if you are in an industry with software that doesn’t support it… well then, yeah, you have to use Windows. Or if you want to play a game with anticheat… and you are okay with installing what is essentially a rootkit on your computer, then yeah, Windows.
I haven’t run Linux myself, but I know people who have.
The Linux experience, from the outside, seemed to consist of solving problems that wouldn’t exist if you just used the OS your computer came with, and being so very proud of your geek prowess, without having the self awareness to realise you’re the one who broke it in the first place.
The cure seems to be growing up, having adult responsibilities, and not having the time or inclination to spend an evening un-fucking your computer.
Gaming is the only reason I dual-boot back to Windows. Out of curiosity, what’s your distro and hardware config? I’ve had no luck with Proton or Lutris on Suse or Ubuntu. I don’t think I’ve ever been able to play a game all the way through without issues. Not sure if it’s my distro choices, Nvidia drivers, or the specific games I try to play. Even Steam Deck certified games do not work properly for me.
Hardware is 5950x, 64gb ram and a 4090. Although before I had a 3070 Ti.
I’m on Arch, but what problems are you having with proton or Lutris? Which Nvidia drivers do you have installed (dkms?) and what kernel?
With the state of proton, I almost never have to check the force compatibility tool and select a version, it’ll work out of the box. There have been a few exceptions of course.
With Lutris, I got stuck on an error about architecture. I tried changing WINEARCH to WIN32, but it didn’t work. Tried making a new systemwide default prefix in win32, didn’t work. Went down a bit of a rabbit hole on Google but I was not able to get the game to even install, let alone run.
With proton, games install and typically run, but not without issues. For example, when Return to Monkey Island launched, it was Windows-only, so I tried it in Proton. It worked for a day, then mouse input just stopped working entirely. Half an hour of trouleshooting later I decided it would be easier to just boot into Windows. That’s the general experience I’ve had with Proton, even for Steam Deck certified games. And then sometimes games run but with unacceptable performance, like Stray.
Until recently I was stuck on the 510 drivers because the newer ones broke CUDA in the Ubuntu repositories. That was recently updated to I think 525, but I haven’t tried any games since updating. But I also had similar problems on Suse with drivers from Nvidia, and the old Ubuntu LTS (18.04 was it?).
If Lutris is going to be so finicky about Wine versions and prefixes, I wish it would just bundle its own instead of using the system wine. I use Wine for other things and can’t easily nuke my whole config.
I’ve basically given up on playing non-native games on Linux. It seems like this is a “me” problem but I can’t imagine what’s so unique about my Steam install. I try to keep as close to stock Ubuntu LTS as possible precisely to avoid these issues, but here I am.
I’d be interested to know the breakdown of AAA titles in that library!
Gimp is appropriately titled as it is a joke compared to Photoshop. If this is the closest suggestion to a suitable replacement it will guarantee windows/osx always has a place in my work environment.
For AAA titles (not gonna list every one), here’s a few:
Hogwarts Legacy, Dead Space remake, Resident Evil 2/3/4/7 remakes, God of War, Returnal, The Last of Us Part 1, Uncharted 4, all the Assassin’s Creeds, Atomic Heart, the Batman games, Bioshock games, Dark Souls 1/2/3, Death Stranding, Elden Ring, Days Gone, Dying Light 1/2, all the Far Crys, Final Fantasy 7 remake, FF8-15, Ghostrunner, GTA5, Hi-Fi Rush, Spider-Man/Miles Morales, Tomb Raider games, Sekiro, Sonic Frontiers, Star Wars (all) and Jedi Fallen/Survivor, The Division 1/2, The Witcher 1/2/3, Yakuza (all), plus more
Yeah, Proton has made leaps and bounds the past few years with the sheer amount of time and money Valve is funneling into it. Now you can often expect newly released games to run just fine on Linux through steam, the big remaining hangup being anti-cheat software.
I would guess a “serious gamer” is one who wants to play all the latest AAA multiplayer games. Just not possible for Linux to work for 100% on Day 1 with the ridiculous kernel-level anti-cheats.
For me, even though I play mainly on Linux, the issue is with random niche mods or hardware; Tobi eye-tracking, headtracking, VR.
The anticheat for a game I liked to play with my wife didn’t work on Linux and playing in a VM barely worked due to the game’s outdated spaghetti code. It was more important to me at the time because the game was how I met her and at the time we weren’t dating yet, she was just a friend I was crushing on big time, enough to reinstall windows for her.
We don’t even really play it anymore, so maybe I’ll switch back to Linux. I still got mint installed on dual boot, just never thought about starting it up until now. I always did like how a couple of terminal commands could fix like, 99% of issues whereas windows says “Noooo… You have to reinstall me for the 20,000th time! It’s the only way!”
I suppose I can technically answer this. I do use Linux full-time now and have for several years, but prior to that I had a few false starts where I’d switch back to Windows. Usually it was because I’d encounter some technical issue I just didn’t know how to fix besides reinstalling the whole OS, or a graphics driver issue. For example, at one point when I had an NVIDIA graphics card only the newest drivers from NVIDIA’s website supported it but the ‘stable’ drivers in Ubuntu’s repo didn’t, so I had to manually install the drivers. Except then whenever the kernel was updated by Ubuntu (basically every week) my display stopped working and I’d have to switch into a TTY and manually reinstall the drivers.
Now I know how I’d fix that (setup some rule to reinstall the drivers whenever the kernel updates, which I believe is now the default anyway), or use a PPA containing the latest NVIDIA drivers, or use AMD instead - but really any kind of problem that requires the user to both diagnose and fix the issue prevents non-technical people from adopting it.
I used Linux desktop as my work rig for a year and a half. I absolutely hated it, had constant problems and lost time almost every day to stupid workarounds. When I tried to search or ask for help the answer I was usually met with was “your hardware is wrong” or “why do you want to do that” or more often than no “you’re using the wrong distro, you should use [different one every time]”. I also found the UI to be quite ugly and often obtuse, you can tell that there’s very few open source UI/UX designers. I switched back to windows and I’ve had better performance and less bugs.
Do you feel like you ever got over the initial setup period? A lot of what you are describing is what I encounter after a fresh install but I don’t typically have any issues after a little bit of tweaking.
Maybe because it was a work laptop I didn’t spend as much time on setup as I would for a personal computer. There’s were a lot of issues that I solved with tweaking at the start, but many of the lingering issues either had no solution or were so intermittent or complex that I couldn’t figure out how to word it in a way that would lead me to the solution.
Screens, scaling, nvidia drivers, games… Even spent an hour on gnome trying to get my desktop background image to fill the whole screen instead of repeating to fill the space. Solution ended up being download an image editor and resize the image to be the exact same size as my screen resolution. Tried KDE and kept hitting 100% CPU bug
In the end I just wanted a pc that worked, so went back to Windows with WSL.
Seems a perfect combo. Do my dev in WSL, and the desktop just works.
However I’m getting increasingly frustrated at every UI change Microsoft make… Which is what made me try Linux in the first place. If Microsoft Win7 and early 10 was great, I wish they’d stop touching UI and just improve under the hood
No, already burnt out from reinstalling different distros. I try Linux desktop every couple of years and it’s always the same frustrations. I’ll give it another go next year
ReactOS is fascinating, when I was younger and dumber I was optimistic about the project…but at it’s current rate it’ll never be an actual usable daily driver, and with Proton, the need for it is lessening, not growing.
I honestly get where you’re coming from as I went through a similar process of hating Windows, trying to make Linux work for me and just ending up back on Windows. I finally settled on Nobara Linux, but in my personal opinion it might be worth looking into Linux Mint for you if you want a rock solid distro. I installed Mint for my girlfriend not too long ago and everything magically worked with Nvidia drivers, wallpapers, Discord screen sharing, etc. I was so impressed that I considered distro hopping one last time.
Say fucking what? When was the last time you tried KDE or Gnome? Gnome is a beautiful masterpiece that blows Windows and Mac OS desktops out of the water.
It’s my opinion. Part of the problem is ‘which desktop’. As long as I can ssh into a Linux system I’m happy. The guis are clunky, but I’ll admit to not having tried all of them or the absolute latest versions. Also, and I likely ought to have mentioned this, in my homelab almost all ‘systems’ are vms, so the desktop gui has to function well in a virtual environment and has to at least try to have a decent rdp implementation.
It’s really not a problem anymore. Look at a distro like Mint, compare the lightweight xfce version versus the full fat Gnome cinnamon. They both look the same on the surface using the same theme, all apps work, look and behave fine over all versions, yet you’ve got the option between “small and snappy” or “pretty and high end” which works much better than turning off the animations in Windows.
I’ve been an on/off Linux desktop user for years and now is just a comfy time to be a Linux user. All websites work, most of my Steam/Epic and GOG library just works with no messing, the various software stacks we use day to day are there, mature and “just work”.
Many DE have received substantial improvements over the last couple of years. It sounds like you’re really looking for something lightweight, more than you are something that is fully featured. I don’t have much experience with the lightweight Linux DE, because when I need performance I just use command line like you do. I’m sure if you did some searching, you could find a really snappy DE, but it doesn’t sound very important for your use case. Definitely do check out some of the full-featured desktops though if you ever decide to use Linux as a primary PC. Several of them are really slick now.
I tried installing Zorin amd Pop_OS on my laptop, but the mousepad gestures, bluetooth, speakers, and a bunch of other small things didn’t work.
I just don’t have the time to tinker with it. I have an hour or two of free time a day and it’s hard to convince myself to spend it trying to get linux to work whenever I have windows that just works.
Plus, i found that people just weren’t helpful. Unlike some people, i didn’t come out of the womb knowing how linux works. I did research and fixed what i could, but some things i could’t fix. People were rude, condesending, and just not helpful whenever i would ask a question
I think the biggest thing here is how insular the linux community can be. I do think that Lemmy’s linux communities are much better about being supportive and welcoming however. Less of a dick measuring contest and more a group of people who are passionate and want to engage with the topic.
Add comment