Steam decks have been out for years now, and even though they sold millions of copies they’re not the majority of Linux machines, you can check the GPU AMD Custom GPU 0405 on the GPU field since that’s the steam deck one, it’s at 0.82% and had a 0.23% increase this month. So some of the increase in Linux came from it (around half), but there’s still a lot of new Linux PC users.
Also it’s worth mentioning that every time that the Linux share has gone down it coincides with a spike in Chinese language usage.
Because percentages don’t tell you the whole picture, imagine you have a group of 100 people, with 2 of them being of a certain group, e.g. Linux users, also 20 of them are of a different group, e.g. Chinese speaking. In percentages that means 2% for one and 20% for the other group. If next month the 20% group increases to 33.3% and the other drops to 1.6% there are a couple of alternatives, but the simplest explanation is that 20 new people from the second group were added to the total, meaning that while the percentage decreased for the first group the total amount of people in it did not.
So, when you only have a percentage it’s hard to know if the total number of people increased, decreased, or remained the same because you don’t know if the total is the same. Since people don’t just decide to switch to Chinese it’s expected than when the amount of a language changes significantly that most likely means the total amount of people changed, and you can guess by how much, doing that calculation you can see that every time the Linux users decreased its likely the total number of users increased and the number of Linux users remained the same or even grew, just not by the same margin as the total amount of users did.
I was digging around on the steam hardware survey and it does list steam deck separately if you tell the hardware survey to only show you Linux, and it is ~5.5x more popular that arch, and also reports that arch and Ubuntu are similar, leading me to believe the steam deck is fully excluded from the default combined view.
If you take that x5.5 and use it to extrapolate, steam decks should have about 0.82% market share
This is what you get for using fedora in 2023. I have no issues with garuda, lutris and proton: it’s been at least a month since I’ve tried to play a game and failed. Which is alright imo- I don’t wanna play any given game if it doesn’t support Linux EAC in the first place
Yup. If performance isn’t good enough, I upgrade my hardware. The delta between Windows and Linux is generally not interesting enough to have separate installs.
I decided to install LM Cinnamon as the main OS on my new PC, and I can’t get GOG Cyberpunk to work for the life of me - tried Lutris where it doesn’t launch at all, and Heroic where it launches but has no sound. I’m ready to give up and go back to Windows at this point.
Use proton and/or a distro actually meant for gaming (Linux mint is simplified, more for beginners imo and not one I’d personally recommend). Try Pop!, Manjaro or Garuda.
As someone contemplating a move, posts like this and many others make me nervous. I have used mint a few weeks for just documents and browsing and had planned it for my main PC. Now you say it isn’t meant for gaming?
Sometimes reading about Linux is a mix of you can do anything with anything but shouldn’t do anything with somethings.
Linux mint specifically is great for documents and browsing but other distros are gonna have better gaming presets is all I was saying. Imo, It’s a “typing laptop” OS when you probably want Pop! Instead. That or the other ones I listed have extra drivers and whatnot by default. Just trying to be helpful!
I jumped right into Mint without trying other distros because I was coming from Windows, and it sounded like Mint is the least-needy next step. But my experience so far has been: If it’s not easily fixed with a version upgrade/downgrade, it’s not getting fixed. There are lots of forum posts to look at for guidance, but the fixes are always really specific to the OP’s system and not applicable to mine. I’ve seen a lot of people on Lemmy using Pop!; maybe I’ll try that next before giving up completely
You absolutely should, sounds perfect for your use case. It’s meant for gaming PCs, and as you’re starting out don’t be afraid to take advantage of the several different package managers out there (I think pop has one built-in but there are others like snap). Finding and installing programs via command line isn’t as hard as you might think either and is usually more secure/ideal. If you need something more cutting edge and are willing to dive into stuff like that I’ve had great experiences with garuda and manjaro too. There are lots of FAQ’s out there, and it can be really daunting at first but I promise it’ll be rewarding somehow. I personally love all the different free software repositories and having apps like fortune run when I start my machine- there’s something so cozy about configuring a PC to be a little fun and reflect your own personality a bit.
Love to hear it! Hope that does what you need it to for a long time! being a commercial product (kinda, system76 mostly makes money off hardware with it iirc) there should be great support and I’m pretty sure it has its own forum too like many other distros. Good luck!
I greatly appreciate the help. So then something like Pop caters more with drivers one may need.
I’m just tying to make sure my step into Linux is a good one. I have only used Ubuntu and Mint a bit and not what I would call extensively.
I was tempted by Arch but I don’t salivate at the idea of creating my own desktop environment like others seem to. Hmm. I have my research to do as I had not looked at Pop.
If you don’t like it there are always other options (if you like a lot about arch, Garuda or Manjaro would be my next suggestion) but I do think Pop is great for those adjusting to the new ecosystem from windows
Disclaimer: my experience is only with Arch Linux (daily drive for 2 years) and a little bit of Linux Mint on a relative’s PC.
For me I found it more tedious to get games working through WINE on Linux Mint compared to on Arch Linux, some packages I wanted seemingly don’t exist in the apt repositories (wine mono and wine gecko) and had to be manually installed.
I also had some trouble because the package names were different compared to on pacman, especially the lib32 ones, but to be fair I would probably have had the same issue on Arch if I first used Linux Mint then Arch so not having the same package names isn’t inherently a fault of Linux Mint.
But it wasn’t that it wasn’t doable, it was just more tedious, and to be fair daily driving Arch for 2 years compared to using Linux Mint every once in a while means I’m way less familiar with Linux Mint.
Arch sounds both wonderful and terrifying. I’m still watching videos to pick a distro but aur sounds like the wild west. I also am not sure how much effort I want to put into creating my own desktop environment. Videos talk about building it all but provide little info on what length of effort and maintenance that will take. Are things more likely to break? I’m unsure and trying to find out.
Arch is made out to be a lot harder and unstable than it really is. And AUR is a great resource but realistically you won’t even use it that much. At least I haven’t. I used it for Brave Browser package before switching to Firefox, some WINE gst plugin, and some other small stuff I don’t remember.
Also keep in mind even if it’s a AUR package, you can just install the package like normal if it’s a binary (it will be named with a -bin at the end, like brave-bin), so just because you’re using some packages from AUR it doesn’t mean you have to build lots of packages from source every time you update.
People hear scary stuff about some random update breaking the system but it’s exaggerated.
You definitely can break stuff with user error and sometimes if you’re not paying attention while updating you can get problems (combination of bad defaults + user error).
Main problem is that you can do whatever you want, but you might not actually know what you really want to do or you might not be doing what you meant to do, and Arch Linux will let you do it even if something breaks due to it.
And well that’s going to be same regardless of OS but it’s more accessible on Arch.
However you shouldn’t be too worried about it, in the basically worst case scenario you might need a Live USB and another device with an internet connection to look up and what you need to do to fix what’s wrong, but you can always count on that there’s a fix.
Most other OSes if you have a problem, depending on what it is you might just be stuck with it.
Biggest noob mistake I recall doing was that I had my old windows hard drive as extra storage and slowly moving stuff over once in a while, so I hadn’t reformatted it and I also wasn’t aware of that the default Linux NTFS driver wasn’t very good and that I should’ve gotten NTFS-3G if I weren’t going to reformat.
Well one day while not paying attention while updating my system through pacman (yay actually) I was also copying files from my old windows hard drive and I didn’t even look before just pressing accept on some AUR package rebuild.
Well it turns out that package was formerly part of Extra repository and thus it used to be a binary package, but now since it was moved to the AUR and it didn’t have -bin it was changed to a package to be built from source, and if I were to continue using it I should’ve changed which package.
But I just hit accept and it started chugging away, and it needed more RAM that I have and apparently there’s no safe guard for this (at least not by default) and by the time I noticed that my RAM usage was getting to high the system already got too sluggish and I was too late to end the process.
I also didn’t know about SysRq at the time so the only option I knew was to force shut down by holding down the power button for 5 seconds.
My actual system was still fine and all but my old windows hard drive that was transferring files got borked. It wasn’t completely bricked so I eventually salvaged it and it’s since been reformatted too, but I thought I had bricked it at the time.
Well that might still seem a bit scary but that was me making several user errors in a row, and at the end of the day it still wasn’t even a big problem.
When first switching to Linux I tried Pop!_os and it was awful was a headache to get anything to work … switched to Ubuntu and all my problems went away , I don’t recommend using pop .
I haven’t tried fedora myself and at this point I don’t want to mess with what is working great for me . I did have some issues with it freezing when idle but that was fixed with a kernel update.
For me it was the reverse. Pop was the clear winner for several reasons. Plus I like System76 overall. I vigorously recommend Pop as a beginner/gaming choice.
But honestly, Ubuntu vs PopOS should not have been that different for you - they are extremely similar. Pop is cleaner with less bloat, and not beholden to Canonical.
To each their own of course, and having options is what makes switching great.
My wife’s laptop crapped out so I threw pop os (previously had arch on it) and made profiles for both of us. Lets her play the few games that she likes, and Firefox is the same. It’s made for an easy transition from windows to Linux for her. Ubuntu would probably be just as easy overall, but she likes the tiling too since it’s very helpful on a small screen (arch + bspwm is my main driver so I wasn’t going to give up tiling)
This may be a YMMV situation. I’m not a huge gamer, but Pop has worked great for me for nearly all games I’ve tried. The one glaring exception has been the Civilization series (specifically 3 and 6)… Anyone know if that’s a Linux problem, a Pop problem, or a just me problem?
(Also, sorry you’re getting downvoted for sharing your honest opinion/personal experience)
I had a bunch of issues and the more I tried to fix it the worse it got to the point that steam wouldn’t even work anymore and couldn’t get any games to launch. I’m not worried about upvotes so it’s all good lol .
Windows also doesn’t work out of the box like you demonstrated in your post, people are just familiar with how to get it working. Like, Linux isn’t more complicated than Windows, it’s just both complicated and unfamiliar to a lot of people.
Yup. Imo, Linux has a better OOTB experience than Windows since most drivers are already part of the kernel (esp if you buy an AMD GPU). If you only need basic software (web browser, office suite, etc), you’ll be good with any major Linux distro after a default install.
The complexity of Linux only really comes into play if you run into issues, like some hardware isn’t properly recognized/supported (frequent on cheap laptops, esp WiFi and sound), or you need specific Windows software.
That said, if you know both systems well, I think Linux is easier. It’s usually just tweaking a config file or setting up a third party repo and installing a propriety driver. And that can be nearly completely avoided by being careful when buying hardware, and knowing what to avoid takes some experience.
Reading your post I'd say you should've installed Ubuntu. Don't know why you chose Fedora over anything else if you don't know what you were doing. The problems you faced were all likely already fixed in Ubuntu long ago.
I don’t see how anything here depends on the distro, could you be more specific? Here’s what I see:
azerty issue - I have the same with Dvorak, and having qwerty as the first keyboard in my DE and as my system keyboard and using Dvorak as my active keyboard usually works well; but this issue isn’t unique to Linux, non-qwerty keyboard users are second class citizens most of the time
rendering issue in game - related to drivers and Proton version, neither of which differ by distro
It’s possible the azerty issue works better in Ubuntu (not sure how), but the second is due to property software that Ubuntu does not have control over (NVIDIA drivers most likely), as well as the Proton version which is shipped by Valve (again, Ubuntu has no control here).
So unless you know something I don’t, I don’t see how choice of distro is relevant here. I’ve had the keyboard issue on every distro I’ve used: Ubuntu, Fedora, Arch, Debian, and OpenSUSE (both Leap and Tumbleweed). It’s just a quirk of how Linux DEs handle keyboards.
It’s hard to convey and interpret tone in text-format comments, especially short ones. I can kind of see where he’s coming from, but it’s not really hostile enough to warrant an accusation. It’s curt at most.
Many readers are overly sensitive these days. If you use things like a period on the end of your sentences, and don’t include emojis, then anything you say will be called out as “hostile” by some people.
Also, I’ve noticed many people ignore qualifiers in speech. If you use qualifiers thoughtfully, having them ignored by the reader can lead to miscommunication. I think the fact that so many people have used them without thought has led to a blindness for qualifiers. OTH, not including qualifiers can make us sound authoritative and even arrogant to some people.
For instance, in my first sentence, above, I said “Many readers…”, and “…things like…”, and “…by some people.” If you ignore those qualifiers, what I said takes on a very different tone.
it runs my games better than Linux and I’m really lost.
You already answered your own question/experience – do some “duckduckgoing” (even if it means falling back to the basics once again, “How to run a windows game on linux”) and then come back here. Because yes, GNU/Linux is 100% viable for gaming and can even run games better than on Winblows – if you know how to setup things properly.
A word of advice however, Linux tend to be a bit “sensitive” regarding some system elements/packages – you’ve got to provide all possible info to everything – theres no “ready out of the box” in these lands.
Some games, others run worse. It’s usually within 10% either way, which isn’t something I’d personally pick an OS over. You can probably tune things to eek out an extra percent or two, but imo that’s not worth it unless you’re really into that kind of thing.
theres no “ready out of the box” in these lands
That’s just not true. Most of the time, Linux works great out of the box, but there are some common areas where that’s not the case:
laptops with dGPUs - Linux just doesn’t handle graphics switching as well as Windows, but the solution is easy as OP found out
crappy WiFi cards - just buy Intel NICs
crappy sound cards - less of a problem these days, but sound can still be a massive pain
And that’s pretty much it. If you buy quality hardware, your OOTB experience is probably going to be great! If you buy an AMD GPU, it’ll be even better since you don’t even need to install graphics drivers! I had zero issues on my desktop switching between distros (everything just works), and my only issue with my laptop was using very recent hardware, which was fixed with kernel updates (there was a known bug with sound over HDMI on my AMD laptop).
Imo, Linux is much more likely to “just work” than Windows, assuming you’re installing the OS yourself. Every time I’ve installed Windows, I’ve had to track down a bunch of drivers, downloading Wi-Fi drivers on my Linux computer and installing them with a USB stick. That sucks.
I’ll check out Tumbleweed. Any downsides to it compared to Ubuntu forks?
It has been a while, but nVidia drivers have always been a pain to install, especially when you also need an older version of CUDA. If tumbleweed has a better compatibility/easier installation process, it is a big win.
Tumbleweed is rolling release (kinda like arch), although they have a pretty rigorous testing process. So that could be a pro or a con depending on who you’re asking.
If what you’re specifically after is older CUDA toolkit compatibility, then I’d recommend using distrobox instead. That’s what I do for ML workloads. (If you plan on redistributing binaries then you’ll have to strip them with binutils though)
That take depends on what you need from Ubuntu 18.04. I’m not to familiar with how robotics stuff works, but perhaps a docker image would work? That way you can keep whatever libraries you need, and run it on whatever base OS you need. That said, I don’t know how much of CUDA or whatever is in the driver vs the userland library, so I’m not sure if it would work.
As for distro, it doesn’t matter as long as it’s relatively decent. I recommend Linux Mint Debian edition, but I personally use OpenSUSE Tumbleweed.
I saw a question below about Tumbleweed, and you may want to look into OBS, which is OpenSUSE’s way of building whatever libraries you need in a repo. So you’d basically find or build a recipe for your version of CUDA and install that alongside whatever else is in the system (assuming the Docker option doesn’t work). If you’re using a relatively popular stack, chances are someone has already gotten it working.
linux_gaming
Newest
This magazine is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.