I do doubt Windows didn’t work out of the box, as with the thousands of installations I’ve done, I have had ZERO issues since Win7. Very few to none in Vista. The issues were prevalent in XP and before but that was the before times when the similar Linux issues were 10000x worse.
The only gripe I have is moving people to online accounts. Just run the oobe command from the installer to limit network requirements and voila, local accounts created.
All that extra bloat can be removed but who cares. The stuff that sits there barely affects anything, like you saw the frame rate is the same.
If Windows works for you, as it does for 90% of consumers, then use it. If you want to tinker forever with Linux, then do so. Some find that fun. I’ve moved into the “my OS is an appliance” phase of life.
Yup, the best part about Arch is the wiki. If you can’t find what you need, you suck at searching, because it’s well organized and has tons of information.
I don’t use Arch anymore, but I still refer to the Arch wiki because it’s so great.
And I don’t wanna be that guy that’s wants something to fail just because it’s not to my taste, but I’m glad to hear that the dev thinks KDE’s Wayland is in much better shape than GNOME’s, especially since GNOME’s pushing it really hard.
For me, personally, I won’t switch away until Plasma 6 comes out, if it’s in much better shape than Plasma 5’s Wayland, and games running through Proton work well enough in Wayland competitively.
To simply put: Without GSP firmware, Unreal Tournament 99 (using the fan-made Vulkan support) runs with around 30-40 FPS and without any graphical glitches; whereas with GSP firmware I get almost constant 144 FPS but using it also results in complete lockdowns at random intervals: the attempt in the video took 12 seconds after the game launch to freeze the system. I had another one in 4 seconds, and yet another in around 9 minutes or so.
On Windows I get pop-ups for unknown reasons, I have no control over what software is on my PC or what it is doing, trying to fix that usually breaks other things. I can use a controller for just about everything I need. I can boot it up and load up a game in about 10 seconds. I can change the volume, change the speakers, adjust game settings, adjust the HUD, all without leaving the game. Exiting games is a generally laborious process full of menus and loading screens, where on GamepadUI you just hit “exit game”. My internet connection seems more stable for reasons unknown. I could go on…
Assuming this is the usual case where most games are within noise of each other, the ones that don’t run under linux are excluded, and nobody acknowledges that the need to precache/predownload shaders provides short term benefits.
Its like people miss the good old days of “This is the year of linux gaming. Everything works and is perfect. Okay, those games don’t work. But every game I care about works. Except the ones that don’t”. Like, we really are in a golden age of gaming parity but pretending there isn’t still work to be done serves no benefit.
Yup. Just use the same benchmarks major sites use and note any interesting differences. They usually pick games for specific technical reasons, so most of the work figuring out where Linux is weak is done for you.
I personally play on Linux because I use Linux, but because I think it has better performance than Windows or whatever. That should be the selling point, not slight differences in performance. Show that Linux is largely on par with Windows, and then go through all of the other benefits to using Linux, like privacy, package management, and user choice.
Yeah. More or less the same. Pretty much the entirety of my work day is in a terminal and I have increasingly liked “linux” as a desktop since Mint (and now Plasma) are “more windows than windows” in terms of UI/UX. WSL gets Windows a lot of the way toward the OS I want (a good nix-ish terminal with a strong GUI for day to day), but MS also add more and more spyware and stupidity with every update so…
But holy crap do the evangelists go out of their way to undermine widespread linux adoption. Whether it is pretending that opencad is at all a replacement for fusion 360 or that gimp is comparable to photoshop or it is inflating performance or compatibility numbers.
Like, I’ve tried to switch over a few times over the years. And it has always been a shitshow. ProtonDB goes a long way, but it is also prone to outdated information (since the one person still playing Tribes 2 has no need to try newer versions of wine/proton and so forth). And if you check message boards you get the same skewed bullshit. Which mostly boils down to “Okay, well. I figured out that game X won’t work. And I now assume that these fifty other games I care about won’t either”
These days? it is a lot easier because Valve have put in the work to the point that I can more or less just check games in steam. There is still the risk of a new patch breaking something, but it is a lot closer to the good parts of protondb where the steps to recover to a good build are pretty easy (Armored Core 6 was basically a case of just rolling back a major revision of proton) rather than the shitshow. Which then makes it “Well, game X won’t work. But I am reasonably confident that every other game I care about will run performantly so…”
This is exactly why I don’t recommend my distro, OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. It works well for me, but online help is more limited vs Fedora and the various Debian derivatives. I’ve been Linux only for something like 15 years, and I’d hate for someone to take my advice and have a bad experience.
So I recommend Linux Mint Debian, because I know Debian is solid and Linux Mint has a ton of support. I also tell people to not expect crazy performance and for some games to just not work, that way they’ll be pleasantly surprised when things work better than they expect. As they say, under promise, over deliver.
Of the two main games I play, one doesn’t work on Linux due to the anti-cheat they use, and the other has horrific stuttering while loading game assets.
But Linux works better for the curated selection for this article.
I’m not familiar with the games mentioned in the article, but Linux is great for gaming. I run Manjaro on my T540p laptop and have never had problems with Angband or Nethack. I can even run DF with tilesets if I’m feeling spunky. Mind you, I do have 8 gbs of RAM and a pretty sweet Intel integrated graphics setup, so that may be why it’s so smooth.
I’m genuinely concerned about github.com/Whisky-App/Whisky (wine for mac). If they make games run well on mac, there’ll be less of a chance for mac users to want to switch to linux in order to game.
And when windows users get burned by windows 12, they’ll most likely switch to a Mac if gaming works on it.
Given just how good apple’s SOCs have gotten, more power to them if that’s what they want. If they’re willing to switch to apple they were never seriously interested in linux.in the first place
I don’t think Mac uses will switch to Linux for playing games, they’d either use Windows or play whatever is available on macOS.
But yeah, if gaming on macOS ever gets close to gaming in Windows, I can see some Windows users moving to macOS. But honestly, I also see that as a good thing for Linux gaming since the lower Windows market share is, the more game devs need to cater to the smaller platforms. Also, Apple hardware is expensive enough and hardware limited enough that I don’t see macOS ever really catering to high end gaming, so people who don’t want Windows but do want a higher end gaming experience would flock to Linux. That said, I don’t know how their SOCs compare to discrete GPUs, so I’m not sure where exactly that l line.
I meant Mac users specifically. Regular Windows users would probably be less annoyed by Windows on a ROG Ally but SteamOS is the closest thing to an Apple experience for PC games.
Perhaps. I haven’t used the ROG Ally or any of the Windows-based PC handhelds, so I can only speak for how much I enjoy my Steam Deck.
That said, the “Apple experience” would be a Switch. It just works, looks sleek, and it costs way more than it should given the hardware specs. Yeah, it’s not a PC handheld, but that’s where I’d expect most Apple users to go for games.
Who knows, maybe they’ll all of a sudden decide to invest in that if Maccies find out they can play games, but are unsatisfied with the performance. Anything can happen.
From what I’ve heard the GPU in the newest, most expensive iPhones is okay and a good step up but the chip in Macs is basically the same as in iPhones, just more cores, more memory, and not power constrained because of cooling. I think it’s pretty clear that Apple develops these for iPhone first and Macs are just an afterthought.
If that’s the case, then there is no danger - for now. But if Apple’s CEO wakes up on the wrong side of the bed and says “I want to tear up the gaming industry”, he totally could.
I’m doing my part. Had a 2nd desktop worth of parts and put latest Ubuntu on it, trying out games that I have already installed on Windows. Once my game pass sub expires next year I’ll probably fully switch over.
linux_gaming
Newest
This magazine is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.