2024 is the Year of Linux on the Desktop, at least for my boyfriend. He’s running Windows 7 right now, so I’ll be switching him to Ubuntu in a few days. Ubuntu was chosen because Proton is officially supported in Ubuntu.
I would recommend creating a Ventoy USB drive and download some live ISOs of your choice. Then boot them and let your BF try them. Because then he can choose a distro by his liking to the overall experience.
To be fair, he could simply pay 5 bucks for a key and switch to Windows 10 or 11. Linux should be something people choose to try firsthand for a while before moving on.
I’m sorry but arch is a terrible choice for a first Linux OS: it breaks often, and has problems updating it if you don’t update regularly, (stuff only Linux Nerds overlook when advising an OS).
It doesn’t break often, it doesn’t have problems updating it you don’t update regularly.
It might be a bad choice for a first-time Linux user due to the heavy setup process/time post-install, but as a gaming platform it works absolutely fine. Steam Deck runs on Arch ffs, come on now. 😄
Curious: when was the last time you used Arch? Seems like you haven’t used it of late, considering those misconceptions you spewed. Or maybe you are running experimental/unsupported stuff?
I’ve used it for over a decade now and had less problems with it than with Ubuntu that I ran for much less time before Arch.
Let me try to reply to your somewhat heated rebuttal, Last I used arch (that was manjaro 4years ago; endeavorOS 3 years ago) so yes quite a while back I confess, I encountered multiple issues updating some of these listed below:
As I updated sporadically around once every 1-4 months with little time to spare for system maintenance and the prime requirement It Just Works™️ running Steam, in both cases eventually it didn’t cut it for me.
I only recently learned that updating without being subscribed to their newsletter is not recommended, none of the YouTubers or Arch enthusiasts I’ve come across warn about this.
wiki.archlinux.org/title/System_maintenanceRead before upgrading the system Before upgrading, users are expected to visit the Arch Linux home page to check the latest news, or alternatively subscribe to the RSS feed or the arch-announce mailing list. When updates require out-of-the-ordinary user intervention (more than what can be handled simply by following the instructions given by pacman), an appropriate news post will be made.
I don’t know what kind of issues Manjaro or Endeavor have had, probably plenty, but I’m running vanilla Arch for over a decade as I said, no issues. I update once a week maybe. I take a look at the packages that will be updated, and I do as the wiki said – check the website for big news/manual intervention. Sometimes there’s manual intervention, but they almost never concern me because it’s due to something I don’t have installed. This is standard routine for Arch, and if you don’t pay attention then you are not using Arch properly. (I don’t pay attention most of the time either, honestly, but it still doesn’t break.)
I also use Nvidia and Steam (Flatpak) and it works great and I’m very satisfied. Works better than my Windows installation actually; better performance.
Arch being an unstable mess is a misconception these days since a long time, I think. It’s been great.
I’ve updated old laptops with Arch that have been sitting for years without updates. I just run -Syu and it basically replaces every single package 😅, then I reboot into a fresh, working system. 👍 All good. Happened plenty of times.
Yes, these are global stats, but as someone from the third world myself, I can say that most gamers around here resort to piracy, even though steam has gained a lot of popularity, so, only a fraction of us are included in the steam statistics, which would make such data not very representative.
Perhaps a better source for understanding software usage in the third world is data from statcounter. They show something around 3 to 5%, a much higher number. However, even this data can be biased, because they only count machines connected to the internet and who browse certain sites.
In that case steam doesn’t need to send the survey to all users, but only to a randomized sample, and it will statistically represent the whole of steam users.
As a former lifelong Windows user (from 2002 to 2019), I honestly don’t get why people continue using Windows in the future. It doesn’t make sense to me. They’re cracking down on liberties, increasing system requirements, and old software and games are gradually becoming less compatible. And people seem to be starting to realize that other options are becoming gradually more attractive, because Windows is now hovering below 70% while just ten years ago it was at over 90%. Meanwhile Mac has grown from 7% to 20%, and Linux is at an unprecedented 3%, and that’s not counting ChromeOS, which is slightly higher.
The mistakes Microsoft is doing can prove fatal. Because I think for most people, once they embrace Linux, even if Windows improves, they won’t wanna go back.
You’re right. And people continue to use Windows because all software is available for it. See… Adobe products, Notion, Windows games with just a double click, even the Whatsapp application, Full OneNote and do not even mention MS Office…
Yeah, I think the reason many don’t switch, is because of software availability.
Only reason I use windows is for work. All the software for industrial controls stuff is windows only. But luckily its so shit at being updated that I still have to keep a windows xp VM around for some stuff so hopefully I’ll be retired before I need to use windows 11+
I got my CNC router working via wine about 2 years ago. Was very happy when it not only worked but worked well. Thought I was going to need to setup a dedicated windows PC for it but I can just use my workshop/tinkering laptop.
I still might try and use Linux as a host for the windows VMS but I’d probably still need to keep a dual boot around can’t risk not having it in case of something that wouldn’t work with USB pass through.
Having recently replaced my laptop (with a used Lenovo T495) and set it up to dual boot Win11 and Endeavor…Windows 11 was by far the most difficult and time consuming to get from “boot off installation media” to “open functional web browser”. Would have been even easier had I asked Endeavor to just use up all of the partition I left free from installing Windows.
So when I got the T495, I went through the Win 11 OOBE to check it out. Turned it off until I got the Ram upgrade for it in the mail. That was my first problem, because “turn off” doesn’t mean what you think it does in Windows. If you want to get to the Lenovo system settings/boot order/diagnostics, turns out you have to “restart”. Go figure.
Then I did the switcheroo with NVMes in my old T470s and the 495. Took my 1TB out of the 470 into the 495, and took the 256 that came with the 495 and put it in the 470.
Then go to start the 470 and it boots fine to Win 11 but I can’t login with my PIN because my PIN is now expired. I’d enter a password but it never even let me do that. I tried to connect to my wifi and it wouldn’t connect.
Obviously this is because the host system changed and the TPM isn’t there anymore, but still frustrating to not be able to use the laptop offline just the same. I ended up just formatting and installing Endeavor on that, too. This was just where I finally realized that “reboot” means “give me the option to change boot order this time”, because I couldn’t get back into BIOS after it booted to windows.
Have downloaded 10k songs in the last week, at 160GB so far, 22,000 total. Synced all to my phone with media monkey. Ditching any subscription services.
That also helps linux. Tried watching something on someone else’s peacock account logged into Linux, and got an error. Checked Google to see if it was available. A free site had it, in better quality streaming too! We ended up using her computer, but I was kind of amazed.
It’s ancient, unsupported, and closed source. Nobody can create or distribute security updates. People would have been happy to keep using horses and buggies if there’d been an automatic horse shit shoveller.
How so? 7 is the last good version of Windows. It’s not surprising some people want to keep using it. It does have security issues but at least there are no ads in the Start menu and it doesn’t shill for OneDrive on startup.
That’s true, but their apathy or ignorance is a threat to any networked device. There’s definitely an argument for “my device,y software, my rules”, and technically you can run windows 7 as long as you want, but Valve shouldn’t be perpetually expected to support deprecated software either. In their case specifically, if would be hard to ensure their anti-cheating software isn’t being circumvented at the operating system level, meaning the experience of everyone on any OS would be lowered by continuing to support a 14 year old version of Windows.
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.
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.
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