No, definitely not but getting there! Last year despite slow production ramp up, about one million were sold. Source: a SteamOS developer on a KDE conference in autumn.
This year a financial analyst company predicted an additional two million until the end of this year but that was before the OLED announcement. Valve then recently said “millions”. So I guess 3 million may be a somewhat conservative estimate now that the OLED model is out. 4 million if we’re generous. It’ll take a while until 10 million are reached, if they’ll be reached at all. My memory is a bit foggy but I think Valve people said that the Steam Deck was intended to launch earlier but the Covid semiconductor crisis delayed the announcement. My guess is that at least a Steam Deck Lite will be announced first but the overall performance will stay about the same, so that could drive sales a bit before the eventual successor comes out.
These tech YouTubers should do Linux comparisons. These are not small differences when comparing, let’s say, Nvidia 4060 and the RX 7600. It could make the AMD GPU edge out the more expensive Nvidia offering
I’d like this. At first I stuck with Nvidia because they had drivers for Linux. But I’ve been on that train so long. Only reason I’m still on it is cuda cores for video editing with davinci resolve.
And with the popularity of the Steam Deck, it’s actually a pretty reasonable thing to do now. I want three sets of numbers: Windows and Linux on the same hardware, and Steam Deck. Maybe do a fourth for Windows handheld PCs like ROG Ally.
I dunno, just felt better not enabling a whole repo just for one app, so I went with the flatpak version.
Super easy, just install it and go. Just remember to also install the Proton flatpak package in order to enable running Windows games on Linux. And to enable it in the Steam settings. I don’t think there’s much else to it other than standard flatpak stuff, like things don’t work too great if the system GPU driver version is out of sync with the flatpak one. So if you upgrade one make sure to upgrade the other, etc.
Give it a whirl if you like, and if you bump into issues I might be able to help. We’ll see. 😅
Battle.net Account != Requiring the Battle.net client.
I’m not the biggest fan of Blizzard/Activision right now because of the shit-show with D4, but OW2 doesn’t require the Battle.net client which is very clear if you just install and run the game.
All you have to do to test this theory out is try a Grand Theft Auto game or just go for Halo. Classic bullshit signing up for shit, having to have a secondary launcher installed. blah blah blah, yadda fucking yadda. Take your friggin’ pick. Rockstar, Microsoft, and now Blizzard. Shit’s pretty much all bought up, doesn’t mean the companies don’t act like they always have with their brands.
I swapped because I did not like the direction that Microsoft is taking Windows. It felt like just more tracking, more ads, and less control with each iteration. I always felt like Linux was better, but did not meet my need for gaming. The steam deck came out just a few months before I switched, giving me the confidence that I would still be able to play the games that I enjoy.
Well, you COULD, but very few companies port now due to Apple refusing to update their OpenGL drivers in favor of Metal. Nowadays it’s a bit better, with MoltenVK providing Vulkan support, but you’re still mostly limited to Apple Arcade games and emulators for your gaming needs
MacOS still has horrible support for wine. Linux’s implementation of proton has become so good, that r/wine_gaming essentially has become nothing but MacOS helpdesk tickets now!
I’ve been gaming on Linux exclusively for 5 years now. I like it, but it’s not perfect.
Experience
Pros
1st-class developer experience.
I don’t have to deal with MS’s increasingly insane OS design. No fucking with my preferences. No baked-in junkware. No invasive telemetry. No dark-pattern mindgames.
No fighting with the Windows compositor. Better system performance more generally.
Better filesystems. Better package managers. No driver nonsense (AMD user btw). Total customization.
Yes, really! The miracle of Linux is that almost every driver you’ll need comes baked in. I’ve installed exactly one device driver in 5 years and even that one is technically preinstalled for most people (I manually installed it because I was customizing it)
Cons
Some games simply will not work. Usually for anticheat reasons, but this is also true for obscure stuff more generally. Part of gaming on Linux is just accepting that some games are not for you anymore.
Outside of Proton, you often feel like a 2nd-class citizen. Wading out into the weeds when you just wanna game sucks.
FWIW: Lutris helps. The experience still isn’t great, but it’ll gets you 90% of the way there. I’ve successfully used it to play games like Overwatch, Hearthstone, and MTG Arena with minimal tinkering.
Wayland/X11 shenanigans. It’s a total quagmire. Your issues with that ultrawide were almost certainly related to this in some way.
Picking a Distro
There are a lot of pitfalls when choosing a distribution. I can’t personally tell you which one to pick, so instead I’ll give targetted advice.
Things to avoid
Avoid Ubuntu. Avoid Fedora/RedHat/CentOS. Avoid any distro with less than 5 years of active development history. Avoid niche single-purpose distros, including gaming ones. Probably also avoid NixOS until you’re more comfortable with Linux in general.
tl;dr: Pick something that’s very popular, but not Ubuntu. Ideally, the project should have multiple full-time donation-supported maintainers and a detailed wiki.
Rolling Release vs. Point Release
A “point release” distribution is one which guarantees a certain level of stability out-of-box. It achieves this by partially freezing the available packages at well-tested & known working versions (explanation simplified for brevity). This way, when you install the distro, there are very few or even no “gotcha” moments where one niche part of the system randomly breaks during daily usage.
The downside of this strategy is that, over time, the packages on your system get more and more out of sync with the rest of the world. Eventually, you have to sit down and do a big, fat upgrade to the latest version. This has the effect of potentially breaking lots of things all at once, which makes upgrading these systems comparatively onerous.
A “rolling release” distribution has no numbered versions. You just upgrade your packages and presto: you’re rolling the latest code. Yes, there are more day-to-day difficulties, though you generally experience fewer cascading catastrophic failures, since usually only one thing will go wrong at a time. The risk of day-to-day issues is then addressed by splitting the distribution into time-gated “channels” where new package releases are intentionally delayed for days/weeks based on which one you’ve opted into. This gives you as a user flexible control over how current vs. stable you want your system to be.
tl;dr: For most newcomers, I recommend using a rolling release set to the safest available release channel. It offers most of the day-to-day stability of a versioned release with none of the upgrade headaches. These days, I feel that versioned releases are mostly only preferable in corporate/institutional usecases (this is a controversial, personal opinion and not a statement of fact, but I welcome flamewars down below…)
Wayland vs. X11
Wayland replaces X11 (which is old and bad)… but it also breaks compatibility with stuff. If you use Wayland, you will have more issues, so I generally recommend newcomers choose X11 if the installer gives them an option.
With that being said, sometimes you have to choose Wayland because you need its modern features, such as display scaling. If you have a >1440p monitor or use monitors with mixed refresh rates, this probably includes you. It’s not the end of the world, but you’ll have to deal with learning to troubleshoot Wayland’s various quirks as you go.
tl;dr: Use X11 if you can unless you have big/weird monitors. Wayland’s still very workable though, despite what reputation would otherwise suggest.
Gnome vs. KDE vs. Other
Gnome/KDE are what we call “Desktop Environments”. I won’t dwell on the terminology too long because it’s a mess, but basically these are the two major “all-in-one” kits that distros tend to bundle for their sytem GUIs. Gnome is the usershare king, so it’s generally the most well-supported by other desktop software and therefore my default recommendation. KDE is mostly interchangeable with Gnome, though it’s a pretty distant second usage-wise.
There are many alternatives to Gnome/KDE, such as the lightweight LXDE, but I generally don’t recommend these to newcomers unless there is a strong reason. This is because desktop apps can have all sorts of weird bugs if they can’t find a specific Gnome or KDE version of a certain components (e.g.: polkit).
You can also build your own desktop environment from scratch, which is actually what I do. This allows for maximum ricing, but obviously isn’t a great starter situation. Even if you eventually do want to roll your own environment, I recommend newcomers start with either Gnome or KDE as a base and then slowly replace individual pieces as they go, ship-of-theseus style.
tl;dr: Just use Gnome and eventually rip out the parts you don’t like. KDE is a good alternative if you really like it, though.
linux_gaming
Top
This magazine is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.