This is awesome. As someone that games on all 3 platforms, I’m happy to see that Linux usage has gone up so rapidly, even if it is only because of the steamdeck. It’s a great way to introduce people to the wonders of Linux! And yes I do game on my MacBook. The sims lol, it is actually nice to have SOMETHING to play when I feel like not working. And a surprising # of my favorite games work on Mac wonderfully like cities skylines and the 2 point games and many more. I’m always happy when any platform other than windows can play games as collectively these smaller platforms need to dethrone windows, in my opinion.
I started using Linux / GNU/Linux based operating systems for more than a day or so at a time when I got Puppy Linux on my USB drive back in 2016 or so. Ever since then I put Fatdog64 and other Linux based operating systems such as Ubuntu and Linux Mint on my laptop.
Two decades ago, we at KDE always said that 5% was the magic number. If we got to 5% market share on the Linux desktop, then commercial games, applications, etc. would directly target it rather than ignore it. The steamdeck is wonderful, and if you include it, Linux is at about 3% right now. But it actually caused a huge acceleration in game adoption. So gaming is now ahead of that projection. Applications (i.e. Photoshop) probably still need 5%. Although we made that projection two decades ago, so it may no longer be valid due to cloud apps.
(I’m no longer involved with KDE, but was for a decade. It was an awesome decade.)
I was dual booting because of some games but decided to delete the Windows partition anyway. There are some games that I cannot play (mostly because of anti-cheat) but I don’t care anymore. I’m more than 2 years free of Micro$oft and couldn’t be happier.
I too was dual booting for a while but the last straw was when a windows update erased GRUB a second time. I’ve been on Linux exclusively for 4 years now and I haven’t looked back.
Yeah, definitely the downfall that spans way back to IBM. Thankfully my place gives that choice to folks (Apple and Microsoft both being proprietary but hey one is Unix based).
Every time I have to use a Windows VM for something, I become more and more grateful that I don’t have to use their crap anymore. What got me recently was finding out that you are forced to create an account and be online to even install the latest version!
Technically there are still workarounds like disconnecting from the network or editing the installation sources, but it's still anti-user and worse than in older versions. Win will continue to get worse over time. Look at a freshly installed, default W11 Home consumer desktop for example. What most people probably use. Just open the start menu. It looks like the OS needs an exorcism first, before you can use it. But maybe many people have already become used to things being this bad
Disconnecting the internet no longer works, you’ll need to open a shell and put in a cryptic command to disable the check or use an email address which got banned
No, you’re wrong! Apple is going all in on gaming. Again! First Myst, then Quake 3, then iPhone games on M1, and now a port of one game from 2019 using Wine. What a time to be a Mac gamer.
Their translation layer is basically a rip of Proton. Obviously this isn’t going to replace anyone’s Desktop or gaming laptop. But it’s nice to see Mac users are at least being thrown a bone.
Their translation layer is basically a rip of Proton.
Of CodeWeavers’ Wine which I already mentioned. Proton is more than just Wine but Apple’s implementation does not use the Vulkan translation but their own Metal wrapper.
I’ve been gaming on Linux for a while now. The pace of improvement in Proton has been staggering since the steam deck was released. I noticed the other day that I’ve gotten so used to games just working now that I don’t even bother to check to protonDB before I purchase. I’m sure that won’t bite me any time soon -_-
Mac OS does have 15x the number of users (in the US at least, closer to 6x the users outside the US), so this is still an accomplishment in my opinion.
I used to work in the video industry so I know dozens and dozens of Mac users and I’d say under 10 of them play games. And only one of them plays games on their computer…by dual booting to windows.
I bought a mac book pro once because I was getting into graphic design and bought into the hype that mac was the way to go even after being a windows user for 10 years at the time.
But…I still had to integrate with windows networks for administration work, had to use windows only applications for work, use windows for the bulk of my games…
Obviously I ended up dual booting with windows for a while, but in the end I just stopped using the mac os.
I switched to Windows for gaming this year. With advances in Wine/Proton it was super easy; there’s nothing I play that isn’t perfectly convertible to Linux anymore.
Even using an Nvidia card in my desktop seems fine.
Only game I had to do that was for Tabletop Simulator due to a memory leak in the Linux release due to my colossal amount of subscribed Workshop items. But other than that, if there is a Linux release then that’s my go to one!
Only game I had to do that was for Tabletop Simulator due to a memory leak in the Linux release due to my colossal amount of subscribed Workshop items. But other than that, if there is a Linux release then that’s my go to one!
May I introduce you to crap like Alien Isolation where the porting companies went all-in on Nvidia-exclusive features and the version with higher compatibility is indeed the Windows release.
Steam deck and my desktop. The only thing that would be useful is if I could find a program that would work with excel macros for union business. I basically have always used computers for gaming and browsing.
I’ll read up on it myself, but can virtual box run a windows instance from inside my Linux partition? I’ve never done any virtualization but that would be about the only thing from windows that would be useful. Just so I could use our excel doc to do billhead.
You can run windows in a vm in linux yes, with the caveat specifically for gamers that games with overzealous anti cheat can detect that they are running in a VM.
No need for windows to game anymore, steam/proton, lutrus and wine handle what I need just fine these days. This is more about using Microsoft excel as I have some union business that operates out of an excel file and Google sheets and libreoffice do not play nice with all the macros going on in it. Literally just to run excel.
I joke it runs faster than on bare metal but because you don't use it for everything and can in fact have a fresh install for each program it probably does.
As far as I understand, the wbe versions are very stripped down compared to their desktop counterparts. That’s a great question though and one I should explore. When I actually spring for excel/365 I can check out the web version while on Linux and if it doesn’t work, look into setting up a virtualized Windows setup.
Btw, the web versions of MS Office are completely free when opening files on a personal, unpaid OneDrive via the web interface at onedrive.live.com
The web versions are literally the thing that Teams launches when you share and open documents there. Teams and the US’s obsession with Chromebooks at school are probably the driving factors behind improving Office Web. Benefit for non-ChromeOS Linux users is surely just coincidental (kinda like Adobe Express).
It’s also the thumbnail for the link. I don’t know what the input is for other apps but on sync I could long press it to hover the image with the breakdown and one of the others I used just makes the previews fit to begin with.
But since I’m such a great servant to random people, deck: as in title, arch Linux and Ubuntu: 0.1 and change, Manjaro and mint(? I already forgot): 0.0something … I have 256kb of memory and most of it is reserved by bloatware.
Even though this is mostly because of the Steam Deck, it's still great news. More people get to try out Linux and find out how good the support for gaming on Linux is nowadays. Some may even feel compelled to switch to it on their main machine, especially after Microsoft drops Windows 10 support and forces everyone to upgrade to Windows 11 (which, while certainly better now, still feels like a downgrade IMO).
This probably isn’t the best place to discuss it and I often get hate for saying it but Windows 11 isn’t bad at all after you install a start menu replacement and one of the free apps that allow you to easily change a large number of things like explorer UI tweaks.
I’m not seeing anyone comment on the last paragraph of the article, so I’ll paste it here.
With the SteamOS / Steam Deck monthly numbers not showing any magnificent gains, I am curious over this 0.5% increase for Linux gaming overall and whether it’s genuine.
The likely explanation is when looking at the demographics and seeing Steam by Chinese users dropping 3.4% while the English usage picked up by 3.4%. Chinese gamers and reporting differences there have previously vastly swayed Steam statistics in prior months.
All they said for sure was they sold out their first two production runs which were based on pre-order numbers, and that was over 1mil at the time they said that. Found this quote though:
“According to Omdia, the Steam Deck sold an estimated 1.62 million units in 2022, and is on track to sell about 1.85 million units throughout 2023. This would push total Steam Deck unit sales to 3.47 million by the end of 2023.”
So if true, they blew through those first units super fast, and then ramped production again. I’m sure they sold a ton last month when t was 20% off for Summer Sale as well.
I made the switch fully recently. It's honestly nicer overall for sure. Glad to see things picking up. The more that move over, the more support Linux will get.
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