Noo please don’t Ubuntu. Just plain debian or mint debian instead for the closest thing without canonical. Ubuntu is based on debian and all the actual reasons to use it over debian ended probably like a decade or so ago.
I don’t think there are many distro specific proton issues, if they exist at all. I’ve switched from arch to tumbleweed to bazzite(ublue/fedora based) and the only issues were unrelated to gaming. Proton would work on a toaster if it had a display and a vulkan compatible GPU.
I’m not sure for Ubuntu… I’ve seen here and there that some snap are still not as good as flatpak or .deb.
Especially the steam one where some games wouldn’t launch on the snap but do with the flatpak or the .deb. Progress are made regularly, but until the snaps aren’t on par with other packages type, I wouldn’t recommand Ubuntu for beginners.
Distro based on it, without snap, yeah sure. Pop OS, tuxedo OS, Mint, Debian… There is a lot of alternative where you do not have to struggle on forced non finished applications.
Someone who’s going to use Ubuntu wouldn’t know what “debian,” “mint debian,” or “canonical” are. You should include an actual explanation or link to what you’re referring to when trying to help beginners otherwise you’ve failed to help them
I’ve had exactly zero issues with steam on NixOS. It might actually be the best distro to choose short of the officially supported ones as steam runs in chroot with exactly what it’s expecting in terms of libraries etc. Not a beginner-friendly distro though, user base is pretty much made up of devops, functional programmers, programmers appreciating replicable environments and willing to tolerate nix, as well as the odd enthusiast tinkerer.
Nixos user here, ive used it on nixos with meh experiences. Especially with proton + the witcher 3 for example. Have to install it through flatpak for better compatibility.
Try switching Witcher 3 from using fullscreen to borderless window or the other way around, that fixed the fullscreen issues for me, it’s just the game getting confused about whether it has focus or not. That was before the update though haven’t tried since then.
That’s a general proton issue though and not NixOS, fullscreen just is fickle on windows and that extends to an emulated windows.
Oh yeah? Explain why I can’t run league of legends, valorant, Fortnite, R6 siege, PUBG, faceit csgo, destiny 2, fiveM and hundreds more games if Linux is better in literally every way? (your words)
And why did I have trouble setting up wifi and sound drivers? Why did a simple update break my whole PC so much I had to reinstall windows again? Why superusers™ are always disrespectful and condescending? Why are kernel developers so disconnected from reality? Do I really need 999+ distros for every use case?
Maybe, a big MAYBE year 2100 will be the year of the Linux desktop. For now, it’s better to just stick with what’s been working for the past 30 years.
Oh I’ll be stomped for criticism, because I threatened the holy open source. Come on, hack me using your terminal like some 90’s kid and prove me wrong. Or don’t. I don’t care 💅🏿😘
Obviously because those developers are specifically making that impossible. That’s not Linux’s issue.
Also I’ve played CSGO and R6 siege on Linux before with no issues.
Also valorant, Fortnite, and Destiny 2 are shit and made by companies that are practically hostile to environments they don’t have strict control with.
Why did you have trouble? Maybe because you suck. You don’t need to distro hop. Most of us do that for fun.
The real fact of the matter here is that you’re here to be a troll.
Actually it was around mid 2000’s when it matured enough as a desktop environment to be used by a regular user. Since then it has been improving, and for the last decade or so I dare say it is even easier to use.
Check out Lime disto. It’s a friendlier interface and all the cool perks of Ubuntu. It’s built on the basic same architecture. I have had my Steam and many other games work. If it wasn’t for Epic I would go full Linux.
I’m sure you’re probably aware, but the Heroic Game Launcher has compatibility built in to install and launch both Gog and Epic games. Makes it almost as easy as steam to set up and get going. I can’t speak to any multiplayer/FPS games with anti-cheat shit though, probably SOL there
I tried it. It does have the launcher. However the Anti Cheat software of the game no one can get around. I’m even in their discord and the explicitly say it doesn’t work or load in. You can get into the game menu and the minute you instance in the game boots you.
The only reason my windows partition still lives is so I can stream VR to the quest 2, literally everything else I do in Linux and I’m so close to 100% I can taste it!
I think Linux holds you back. Stop edging “when will this ancient technology support come?” and migrate to the best operating system 🪟1️⃣1️⃣ worldwide.
We support your VR, 1999 wifi drivers, we have drivers for every plastic you own. It takes one step. Come to us.
That is what we like to call a “gateway drug”, first they try out an Android, then “just a taste” of Steam Deck, and next thing you know they’re installing arch btw on their grandparents’ computers
Windows 12 may end up being my transition to Linux, especially if they go for a subscription model. If you told me just a decade ago that Linux was a viable OS for gaming, I would have laughed at you.
Valve have outdone themselves with Proton. So have those who worked on DXVK and VKD3D.
I’ll be the first to hope for the demise of Windows…but I thought the “subscription model” rumours were all discredited. Obviously anything could happen in the future I guess.
There was a decent selection of games on Linux ten years ago. Just because your favourite games didn’t run didn’t make it a nonviable games platform. Xbox doesn’t run all games either, but it’s still viable.
I don’t think that comparison tracks. If you’re a heavy gamer and the platform doesn’t allow you to play a lot of your favorite games, I wouldn’t recommend it as a platform. Xbox doesn’t get everything but it does get about 95% of all the titles you are looking for that aren’t platform exclusive to Sony or Nintendo. A decade ago linux could only play a much smaller fraction of the games you could play on windows. What your percentage of viable vs non-viable is, is up to you but I’d wager for many heavy gamers that percentage was much too low then.
Outside of competitive shooters, which is my favorite genre to play on PC, a lot of stuff runs well through Proton. And that’s an issue of the anti-cheat systems.
Linux gaming isn’t for everyone, I play what I can on PC and have a PS5 for other experiences. There are plenty of games I wish I could play, but I’m not interested enough to dual boot windows. I would do vfio passthrough for a VM, if they weren’t getting better at detecting that.
Ultimately I have enough games I can play to stay busy.
I played a lot of WoW back then, it ran fine. Speaking personally. I guess if you want to gatekeep gamer hard enough you could call Linux nonviable back then but I always thought it was dumb. A ball and a deck of cards are viable gaming platforms. :p
I’m not American so I don’t know where this is coming from but you have to consider different contexts for the word. Viability is going to differ based on needs.
And that’s fine, you had your game that ran well. We’re not gate keeping here, we’re just talking about the reality that most people want to play a wide variety of games and that simply wasn’t something you were able to do then. We’re also not saying that’s the case today, things have changed and we should celebrate that.
There was a good selection back then too is what I’m saying. Minecraft. Literally every web based game. It was a fine gaming platform, there was more than enough to keep you busy, if you weren’t picky.
Agreed! Way better. I just hate how ‘viable’ is such a moving target. You can always find SOMETHING to dismiss it with. Linux is ‘unviable’ because of some random game that doesn’t work or because of some new feature in the latest whizbang. If that is viable we’ll never be there.
Viable is when it meets one’s needs sufficiently, not when it can do some impossible list of tasks perfectly. Viable isn’t perfect, and I hate it when people pretend it is.
It definitely wasn’t as good of a situation as it is now, but 10 years ago was actually pretty good for Linux gaming too. At that point Valve was already starting to support Linux and there were a bunch of native Linux releases for games at that time, including lots of indie titles in Humble Bundles and even a good chunk of AAA titles were getting Linux releases (e.g., Bioshock Infinite). If you had specific windows games you wanted to play you could very well have been out of luck, but there was actually a really solid number of native Linux ports at the time. I was personally pretty happy with it and just completely blew away my windows partition at that point. Of course you didn’t have access to the full catalog so to speak, but honestly you probably had access to more titles than on many consoles at the time, which arguably made it a viable gaming platform at the time (I made do with it!) Naturally, like any platform, you may or may not be okay with the selection of games available so it really depends on the person, but I was a pretty happy camper.
It depends what you’re comparing against, but I had plenty of games on Linux when steam released their Linux client. 10 years ago was the start of a huuuge shift. It died down a little bit after a few years (I think a lot of developers stopped caring when steam machines petered out and developers started to decide the Linux releases weren’t worth it), but then after a little while Proton started kicking off and the rest is history. Obviously you didn’t have nearly the selection of windows, but there was still selection.
I don’t have an opinion on Linux as a banking platform, but that analogy is bad. An Xbox can play 100% of games made for the same generation of Xbox hardware. If Linux can’t play close to 100% of the games released for PC hardware for at least a few years after the hardware was new, then it’s a substandard option. That was the case until pretty recently.
I was going to say the same thing. Pretty much all the games I was playing at the time worked on Linux 10 years ago, Portal 2, Civ 5 , Kerbal Space program. There were others I’ve forgotten too.
oh man. I played SO much KSP. I think my lifelong love of indie games partly stems from being a Linux user: I tried things I wouldn’t otherwise have tried. Factorio, as well, was a Linux game right out of the box. SNES and NES emulators.
Sure, a lot of the latest and greatest corporate shiny didn’t work (or not without caveats) but there were tons of perfectly good games.
What is ‘viability’? Like, if viability is this Holy Grail state where everything works perfectly, we’re setting ourselves up for failure.
Windows 11 is my stopping point. I will use windows 10 until end of life (either myself or the os). BUT knowing windows every other os, the next one after w11 should be OK. Time will tell.
A decade ago I was already firmly away from playing games under Windows.
World of Tanks, SW:TOR (IIRC), Warcraft III TFT, SW: KotOR I and II, Jedi Academy and Jedi Outcast, X-Wing Alliance, X-Wing vs TIE Fighter, Empire at War, older Paradox games and a few others ran fine for me under Wine. I’m not sure if I had Rome: Total War working back then (definitely ran Medieval II: Total War with a few heavy mods later), I think at some point RTW worked fine. Well, also Galactic Battlegrounds (again Star Wars) and the second Battlefront (again Star Wars). And Battle for Middle-Earth I and II (these are boring), and War of the Ring (that one was and is really good), and some little-known space station manager game from a Russian studio, and likely some other things. Ah, also Star Wars: Rebellion without tactical space battles (would crash on these).
It wasn’t a viable OS for gaming for adults, but for teens with interest in Linux - no problem at all.
They don’t have to make a Linux version. Wine is a program that allows you to run windows programs on Linux. The reason it doesn’t work with fortnite is because fortnite anticheat blocks it. In order to let Linux users (including steam decks) play fortnite, they just have to change an anticheat setting not to block Wine. Fortnite uses battleye and eac, both of which have wine support
I do, in VirtualBox. I have a 20 year old printer, and the drivers don’t work in newer Windows versions. I mean, at all. The installer crashes, and automatic driver installer only gets the scanner working.
Anyway, I don’t use Windows. It works on Linux. Kinda. In Linux Mint, I just can’t use high DPI, but I can scan, print, and see “remaining ink” just fine.
Manjaro is another story. Only “Normal Grayscale” works, hp-toolbox doesn’t even show the color cartridge. So I just use Windows 7 with the drivers as the heaviest printer driver ever.
But when I have to use Windows (e.g.: at school), I prefer Windows 7. Windows 10/11 have really weird control, and they are SLOW. Also, when installing Windows 10 onto school computers, nobody bothered to install drivers.
I like the ThinkPad T440s laptops that are in one class. But after upgrade to Windows 10 they have some battery charging issues, and some of them just fail to boot from time-to-time. I use the last one with Windows 7 because it just works.
You really should not be using Windows 7. If you need to for old software make sure it is isolated and doesn’t have network access. It is very insecure at this point.
Perhaps because this is such a typical Linux-bro meme?
By no means is it more user friendly. I drive it daily, my grandmother most definitely could not, they’re way too many times when something stops working or goes wrong with DEs.
It depends on what you mean. For me, it’s pretty user friendly, but I’m also fairly comfortable using a terminal and am very technologically literate. The fact it handles tedious tasks automatically (or can be made to trivially) is so much nicer than Windows. You can easily update all applications and your system in a matter of seconds. Compared to Windows where the application itself has to check for updates when it launches, sends you to download the installer, you have to run that and close the previous version, relaunch, and then you’re finally updated for that single application. Let’s not talk about system updates. Linux is more friendly. It requires a certain level of competence that Windows doesn’t, but if you’re above that level it’s generally better.
Sure, things can go wrong with DEs and other stuff, but it’s often easier than when things go wrong in Windows. Have you ever had the desktop or Explorer crash in Windows? It’s a bad time. Windows is not user friendly. People are just used to it.
They both do things that are more user-friendly than the other. The fact you think it isn’t user-friendly is really showing who doesn’t understand the term. I listed a few things Linux handles better than Windows, and there are many more. Windows fails at many steps, but people accept they understand Windows and deal with it. Windows also doesn’t have any options for customization, so it’s the same bad for everyone, which does help people solve issues, though they maybe shouldn’t have had them in the first place.
I also find those constant Linux comments annoying but one should really avoid using Windows 7. Win 7 has been out of support for a long time, either update to Win 10 (if possible), air gap it, install some other OS like Linux, or consider replacing the computer.
Windows has more minor problems that are superficial and easy to fix, Linux has less problems but when it does they’re more significant and detrimental.
Yeah I’m a Linux and Windows sysadmin for almost 15 years and don’t really care what it is in practice, just disagree with Microsoft on many things. People have actually argued to me here why I shouldn’t use Windows Server in an enterprise setting, as if a sysadmin who doesn’t prefer Windows would have any bearing on such things. It’s also funny how people seem to think managing Windows is very different than managing Linux, you’re basically doing the same things, I really only interact with Windows in the same manner I interact with Linux it’s just remote powershell instead of ssh. Building Windows server is just running a powershell script, building Linux server is just running the playbook.
Also I disable mostly everything through group policy on Windows and remove all the dumb stuff with remove-appxpackage. Use both for workstations too.
That’s my experience as well. I’ve been a Mint user for around 6 years (2012 to 2018 or 2019), with different DEs (Gnome, Cinnamon and Mate) and installations and there was always something that stopped working all of a sudden, or something wrong with Mint altogether that made the experience bittersweet. I even tried LMDE for a bit and didn’t last a week using it.
I ended up hopping to Antergos (RIP) and have been with it ever since.
I’d love if Linux could do everything but I still keep a Windows laptop. Mostly because I don’t want to go forum diving to update the firmware on my synthesizers or exert effort into something that should be thoughtless and trivial.
I used Windows 7 in 2023. It’s the best windows that still ran stuff but obviously that’s changing. I made the switch in April and have been dumbfounded by just how great proton is at running all my games.
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