It’s interesting that Asia is boosting Linux numbers when the Valve hardware survey showed the opposite. The numbers were recently updated to include China and it caused every OS to lose ground to Win10.
There is a MAS solution for windows that activates it on GitHub. I had to use it when the key I purchased a decade ago didn’t work when I upgraded my hardware. I didn’t want to pay a second time for an OS that was going to push Cortana, OneDrive, and ads at me.
This blows my mind. I still daily drive Firefox on all 3 of my computers and my phone. I don’t get the hate, and I feel it’s the right thing to support in this monopoly market where the biggest browser is owned by an ad company.
You have to understand, this late into the slow motion apocalypse the writers were starting to get eaten by hellhounds and so there is a lot of rushed writing/plot arcs that just doesn’t much sense when you look too closely because it isn’t like the lizard people were going to reduce the apocalypse guild writers quota just because some of them (most of them) had been eaten by hellhounds, the lizard people SENT the hellhounds so that would have just made the lizard people look incompetent.
I mean, it’s the same old enshittification thing and all you know the story.
People criticizing the ability of Linux to play games reminds me kind of like when people criticized solar power back in the early 90’s. They would say how it’s too expensive or it will never be able to produce the amount of electricity we need. Well, here we are.
Have you looked into diy? Over 60% of the installation cost from an installer can just be labor which is ridiculous because it’s actually quite easy to do. Safely and without a ton of specialized tooling. They have inverters now that’s basically everything you could possibly need in a single box which makes the install trivial
I remember looking into solar some 20 years ago. 5kWh battery bank was practically unheard of and iirc correctly was roughly $1k per kWh. Hopefully somebody with the time can come and correct numbers. Today you can find 5kWh battery banks for ~$2k.
Inverters I remember being about $5k-$10k for house sized and capable of running AC unit. Today roughly $1k-$2k.
Solar panels themselves I’ve not priced, but iirc I remember large arrays being $20k-$30k or more.
The cost to DIY a whole home off grid solar and battery bank system has gotten beyond easier, safer and an absolute fuck ton cheaper
Criticism of gaming on Linux some years back was very well deserved.
Barely any native games, and subpar drivers compared to windows didnt make it a good platform at all. And of course for basically almost every game the only choice was WINE, and more often than not it was impossible to make it work, or had game breaking issues.
Then came the Proton days and things started to change, and with the steam deck, it’s really incredible how far we’ve come.
Recently switched myself. I keep giggling like a coked-up chipmunk every time I download something on Steam and it just fucking works. No to minor fucking about.
Yeah I switched this weekend and haven’t had any real issues so far. Haven’t booted my windows since. I’ll probably just copy some game files to the Linux formatted Disk beforehand and then wipe it. Screw windows
For real, the world of Linux gaming owes a lot to Valve and to Proton's contributors. The last five years have taken gaming on Linux from a fiddly nightmare to, in many cases, performance as good as native. There has never been a better time to run Linux as your primary operating system.
I feel people are often not positive enough. I mean, in my experience, I think that in most cases, running games on Linux with Proton is as good as Windows. The exceptions are unsupported and not-enabled-for-Linux anti-cheat engines and some exceptions, like updates to certain non-Steam launchers breaking things.
It’s nice to see Linux is doing well on Steam. It’s great that Steam Deck/OS is so successful. 👍
Also kudos to Arch, I must admit I’m surprised to see Arch as the most popular among other distros.
Steam Deck runs on Arch so it’s no surprise it’s up so high.
Edit: it doesn’t count as Arch. The Steam Survey results page has a bug where it doesn’t show SteamOS as top listing for Linux OS when combined Windows, Mac and Linux view is selected.
What’s interesting is Arch surpassed Ubuntu prior to the Steam Deck release. They were neck and neck for a bit after that, then the Steam Deck helped it push past.
A lot of Linux enthusiasts use Arch, but it’s far from the most popular among regular Linux users. So we’re seeing early adopters since Arch users are probably more likely to tinker to get things working than Ubuntu users.
So if we start seeing Ubuntu take over Arch, that means we’re seeing Linux gaming reach the mainstream.
I would also like to see a survey about Linux adoption after using the Deck.
That’s what I recommend, and I’d expect Mint to eventually be #2 or #3 once it hits mainstream.
I use something else though (openSUSE Tumbleweed), but I think Mint has way better community support without a lot of the nonsense that Ubuntu has. Mint Debian is my recommendation 9/10 times.
That’s what I recommend, and I’d expect Mint to eventually be #2 or #3 once it hits mainstream.
No snark intended, but what do you mean by “hits mainstream?” It’s been around for a long time, and it still hasn’t surpassed Ubuntu, as far as I am aware. I genuinely don’t understand what you mean.
I agree that it’s generally user friendly, but many distros like Elementary and Manjaro are trying to become more user friendly, too. Couple that with the gaming community likely being the first larger group of adopters, and they’ll be looking for gaming-oriented distros like Bazzite, Pop, Chimera, and Garuda.
Linux gaming is still an “early adopter” thing. Many popular games don’t work, so the people who are willing to give those up care more about running Linux than playing those games, which means tinkerers and stubborn people.
The more Linux is compatible day 1 for popular games, the more attractive Linux gaming will be. At a certain point, mainstream users will move to Linux and they’ll probably use Ubuntu and Mint more than other distros.
But that’s not where we are. Ubuntu is probably the most popular distro for regular users, and those users seem to not play games much on Linux. That means they’re either dual booting Windows, or just not playing games.
they’ll be looking for gaming-oriented distros like Bazzite, Pop, Chimera, and Garuda
Maybe, but none of those are showing up on top of lists.
I think most mainstream users will use Ubuntu because that’s what they already associate with Linux. People are aware of it by word of mouth, so it seems “safer” than using a gaming-specific distro. They’ll likely naïvely think that gaming-specific distros are “gaming only” and want something “general purpose” if they’re going to bail on Windows.
But these new users aren’t going to be using Arch most likely, so seeing that at the top tells me that Linux gaming is at the “early adopter” phase.
That being said, I’ve been a Linux gamer since before Steam came to Linux and I remember signing up for an account back in 2013 or whatever when they did come (I think I was on Arch at the time, go figure). Before that point, I mostly played Factorio, Minecraft, and a handful of games I got from Humble Bundle back when they were new and indie-focused (Humble games mostly worked on Linux back then).
Anyway, that’s my 2¢. I’m on openSUSE now, so I’m not really contributing to any of the top distro stats.
Fedora recently hit top three for most installed gaming distros, and that’s likely because of Bazzite (which just a Fedora Atomics Spin).
But I appreciate your explanation, and I think it’s well thought. Only time will really tell what happens, but having the Steam Deck out there only helps adoption in the long term.
Oh absolutely. People can easily see what’s officially supported on Linux and try games on their Steam Deck before committing to a desktop install.
I have a Steam Deck and three of my coworkers either have one or want one, and only one of them is interested in Linux itself. Every time they complain about something on Windows, I casually ask if Steam Deck does that. :)
That’s interesting. When you look at the steam survey results under OS Version, with Windows Mac and Linux combined it shows under Linux that Arch is in first followed by Ubuntu 22, but when you switch the view to Linux only, the OS Version shows SteamOS Holo in first, followed by Arch, then Flatpack runtime and Ubuntu. So yes you’re right.https://sopuli.xyz/pictrs/image/af8117a8-99e9-4948-810b-9c0cf5c35419.webpThis shows why I thought SteamOS counted as Arch. My bad.
I only briefly dabbled with Arch >10 years ago. But it has always been evident that it is an incredibly powerful distro. The fact that its wiki is so extensive is a testament to how much people are using it. The problem it has always had is that most companies tend to support other ones (Debian, Ubuntu, Red Hat/Fedora, Alpine), so it never really had any corporate love. With Valve’s backing, we can see just how widespread Arch could be if it had more money behind it.
Not that this is necessarily a good thing of course. Look at how money has corrupted Ubuntu and Red Hat. All I want to point out is that it can do anything that the most well-supported distros try to do. And the fact that it has done so without any corporate support is a true testament to how powerful it is.
I believe I said it in a different post but 2023 was the year of the Linux desktop. Hardware like Bluetooth and webcams just work. Applications and games have gotten so much easier install thanks to Flatpak and Steam.
Now Plasma 6 is upon us. HDR could be supported this year. At this point avoid Linux only if it’s missing a specific app you need.
I mean most video games just work and I game on my machine daily. The ones that dont are limited to weird kernel based anticheats and that is very few games out of the millions of games out there.
Yeah looking at you Roblox 😠. Has anyone hacked that anti cheat nonsense yet? Right now I’m mirroring my android phone on my desktop to be able to see what I’m doing (I’m over 40 but I play with my kids in case you wondering)
I admit I don’t play video games anymore. Especially not in the last year (I did have my eyes on Baldur’s Gate). Perhaps I’ll start Palworld in a few weeks. I got a lot of games off Humble Bundle (I subscribed to Humble Choice for a year and honestly even with the discounts it wasnt worth it) and Fanatical.
The only game I couldn’t get working was the Batman Arkham Trilogy. Everything else I was able to manually force on Proton and play it. Monster Hunter World, Temtem, and GTAV were probably the games I played the most.
Mods suck for the most part on Linux. Though, I never try to mod new games.
I like Linux, and I don’t plan to use anything else, but yesterday my internet broke because swapping the GPU changed the name of the network interface
That is pretty annoying. I’m thinking of buying a new GPU myself. My Internet also runs off PCIE so I could go through the same thing as well? I wish I had another GPU to try this out.
I did look it up, it seems to come from the way BIOS names resources. Im surprised software such as Network Manager does not pick up on stuff like this.
It certainly could happen. You won’t have a problem, either NM will figure it out or you can easy change the network manually. It’s just that Linux is inaccessible to a typical person until stuff like that doesn’t happen:
I’ve had hundreds of GPUs, I’m a gaming hobbyist and help other people out, but I’m really super green in Linux. Lots of PC gaming fanboys out there with nothing but Windows experience.
Yes and no. I could hop on to a 50 year old Unix machine and operate it pretty much the way I use my contemporary Linux computer, thanks to the standard Unix tools being both great and ancient.
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