I tried a few games on Linux and I spent more time looking for why one game wasn’t saving my game and why another game wouldn’t actually launch with no error messages then actually playing a game.
The only games thus far that I couldn’t get to work were pirated. Id say 80%+ pirated work, and so far all legit games. Even weird launchers like FF14 (stock, not the 3rd party) and Guild Wars 2. And then of course Steam does most the work.
Everyone’s mileage varies, obvs, plus there’s different distros and games.
I’ve just recently gotten into this and installed steam through ubuntu’s store. Could be why it thought subnautica was on Linux and let me download it. I uninstalled and installed through apt-get this time, hopefully that fixes that issue.
I don’t have Subnautica but it is on my wishlist because you can play in VR, which is what I mostly play these days. PCVR is not as reliable on Linux as standard games, but nevertheless more than 50% of titles do work flawlessly now. Subnautica is definitely one of them - you should check for other people who’ve got your problem on ProtonDB. If you actually care, look into it more, you should be able to get all of those games running.
Having issue with the Steam snap isn’t surprising, as even Valve recommends against using it. A few years ago flatpak Steam had similar issues that got fixed over time.
For now I hope you’ll have more luck with the .deb!
Sounds way too confusing, and goes against the whole idea that “Linux is easier than Windows because it has an App Store” and “you don’t have to use the command line”.
Yes, it’s sad that Canonical is pushing Snap before those kinks are ironed out. In general it’s a solid distro for people not familiar with Linux, but having to stumble over those issues is a dealbreaker.
Linux being easier than Windows is true in some ways, but it completely sidesteps issues Windows and macOS solved for a while, e.g. forcing users to upgrade. It’s annoying but some people just… don’t do the bare minimum. E.g. a friend’s dad has been using Linux for probably a decade by now, and for some reason apt auto upgrades broke (likely powerloss during upgrade). An image based OS like Fedora Atomic doesn’t have this issue, as it won’t apply updates to the running OS (by default).
I play Subnautica on Fedora/Linux, installed directly from Steam (native), so I’m guessing it let you download it because with Proton enabled it’ll play just fine.
Just right click on the game and go into the properties and turn on the Windows/Proton support for the game.
As a side comment, I love Subnautica, a great game!
Bridgman is an extremely talented dude who’s contributions bettered the entire industry. I really hope he enjoys his retirement, and continues to post in the forums over at Phoronix. The guy is extremely thick skinned but laidback and incredibly friendly despite all the flame wars and trolling.
Heck of a nice guy who did some really great work for Linux, Linux Gaming, and gaming overall. nVidia users benefitted greatly from AMD’s surge in competitive software.
I have used Freebsd for sometime on my desktop back in 2021. For the most part I had a good experience except that I couldn’t figure out how to connect earphones/mic on the ports on my PC case. I had to plug it directly to my motherboard for Freebsd to detect them. I used an Nvidia card at that time and it also worked very nicely although it had much older drivers than Linux.
I ended up switching back to linux because of 2 reasons -
I have a few BTRFS drives that I use regularly and couldn’t afford to buy some new ones for Freebsd at that time.
I couldn’t play games using steam proton. I don’t know the situation these days, but I’ll surely check it out If it has improved since then.
I agree, I haven’t experienced the stereotypical “WiFi doesn’t work” (except for a college network), but I have had issues with screen brightness not working (though seems to be fixed in newer versions), and issues with the Nvidia graphics card that I can’t just swap out with an AMD because it’s a laptop and I don’t want to buy a whole new one.
No idea why you’re being downvoted. I wish I could daily-drive Linux on my laptop, but that would come at the cost of slashed battery life, permanently on keyboard backlight, no more fingerprint sensor, issues with speakers and so on. Even after years of honourable enthusiasts trying to reverse-engineer the Windows drivers, it’s just still not there. Laptops will take a while to follow suite, but Linux really does need to take a larger portion of the market before manufacturers start being interested in Linux support.
And before I also get downvoted, yes you can get a 10 year old ThinkPad and happily install Linux on it, but please realize that not all people want to limit themselves in their choice of hardware and it’s the software that should adapt to the hardware, not the other way around.
I switched to linux on my laptop i had to do 4 reinstall to get my nvidia gpu to work and as of late my speaker arent recognised anymore, despite reinstaling pulse and alsa. One of my informatitian friend that has a linux laptop had gpu issue too, the laptop at work need frequent overseeing by the it to work properly etc etc…
I love linux and I truly think we NEED to get our hands back on our tech, and understand better the technology we use, but yeah… If you really need your laptop to be fully operational quickly and you’re not tech savvy well think twice…
For stability? A missing feature or software you need I get, but stability? Which distro/DE are you using? Please don’t say you’re running Gentoo and some crazy TWM setup or something like that lol
Stability to me was one of the biggest reasons to use Linux - it does exactly what I expect it to do, never breaks, updates never break shit.
I’ve not had a single breakage in the past ~4 years I’ve been on Fedora Workstation, despite me often moving to the beta channel. Pretty nice for an up-to-date distro.
Granted, I’ve also been on some less stable distros/DEs (in my case, it used to be Manjaro’s KDE version). Perhaps yours is similar, since you claim to have extreme stability problems?
I cannot say the same for Windows, where things randomly stop working, I still occasionally get bluescreens, it shits the bed when I change hardware, etc. the last time I booted into Windows my audio stopped working entirely, and no matter how many times I reinstalled audio drivers or did a system restore, nothing would fix it. I ended up having to buy an external DAC.
I’m was talking about game stability. This is a gaming related topic right? Linux is stable but games had some issues.
Truthfully nothing major that stopped me from playing but I had to mess with proton in steam from time to time. Most recently the Last of Us crashes on start, not sure why it was fine previously. Also, there were some games anti cheat did not work and I needed to play in Windows.
Also, I have consistently had issues streaming to my steam Deck. Windows isn’t perfect either but it’s more likely to work the with windows. Sure maybe it’s my Nvidia GPU, but saying switch to amd does make my setup more stable.
They also sell non-DRM software. And most importantly they invest the money they make from selling those games into developing Linux so it’s better for everyone, I’ll take a corporation that uses my money to make things better for myself than one that sells “only” DRM free" games (when it’s convenient, because GoG also sells DRMd games in case you didn’t knew)
I don’t get why people find that funny, he’s absolutely right. It’s gotten better but Linux is still requiring a lot more tinkering compared to Windows, and mainstream doesn’t do tinkering. Let me give some examples as well.
I have windows and fedora dual booted. I also have 4 physical drives in the PC, 1 for windows, 1 for Linux and then 2 separate drives to keep windows data and Linux data. If I do a clean install of windows and want to play steam games all I need to do is let windows update run, install steam, direct steam to access the downloaded games on my secondary drive and the rest is “Steam magic”. If I do a clean install of Fedora and I want to play Steam I have to do system update, then manually install graphics drivers, then install steam, then mount the secondary drive then direct to steam to the secondary drive and the rest is “Steam magic”. If I don’t want to do the last two steps again, because Fedora doesn’t automount secondary drives, I need to also set up automounting by messing with the terminal and confog files. Honestly, you lost the mainstream gamer the moment they had to manually install graphics card drivers (because you need to do it through a terminal).
Another less important example, but one I still found funny, is when I wanted to make a new distro installer. I’ve used balena etcher to flash my stick on Windows, but I didn’t want to reboot into It Windows so I installed it on Fedora, downloaded the image I wanted to flash, started balena and added the file. I get some header error. I didn’t feel like troubleshooting so I reboot into Windows, download the exact same image, started balena and added the file. No errors and I could flash without any issues. Same file and (in theory) same software but it works on Windows and doesn’t work on Linux.
And of course there’s the Nvidia cards sucking thing, which is not at all suitable for mainstream considering almost 80% of steam users are using Nvidia cards. I get that’s almost entirely Nvidias fault but it’s still an issue with Linux. When your entire system black screens as KDE plasma is booting up even an above average user is not going to know how to troubleshoot that.
Linux is still requiring a lot more tinkering compared to Windows
As a long time windows user who’s just got a side install of Mint for funnies until.a faster drive I can dedicate to it arrives: lol, no. That’s why people are laughing at them.
I use fedora and have to…
Pick a less annoying distro then, babe. I installed Steam in one click (during OS setup actually) and then logged in, enabled proton, and started using it with the games on an external drive. Literally easier than windows cuz Mint installed it with the OS and I didn’t have to go to Steams website.
nVidia cards sucking thing
My 2080TI has worked flawlessly on Mint without any tinkering. Used the Nvidia driver manager thing and boom, running games. They even run at a bigger fps on average (about 10%).
Sounds like you used a specific distro and think those problems exist with every version of Linux. They do not, and there’s a reason why Mint is most often the recommended distro for those unwilling to tinker
And I’m not even gonna pretend that Mint is perfect, it’s not! For example my sound card just doesn’t work in it despite the OS being aware of literally every aspect of it. But the issues I’ve had daily driving it have been LESS than daily driving windows 10 even after said win 10 install has already had years of customization and tweaking done to it.
You do realize that just kicks the ball down to a different problem that prevents from mainstream use, picking the wrong distro?
That said I’ll give mint a go. EDIT. Right, no HDR support not even in sight, that’s why I went with Nobara and Fedora in the first place because KDE is at least trying. But at least it reminded me that it’s not just the tinkering that’s preventing mainstream adoption, it’s also the lack of features.
It’s ready for a lot more than that, can you tell me something that Linux can’t do without mentioning a third party company that refuses to support Linux?
Even tho I don’t own a Steamdeck seeing all games I want running on it is what got me to give Linux a serious go.
I’m now considering grabbing one of the older LCD models 2nd hand since I’m away from my PC a lot more lately. Last portable gaming device I owned was a PSP!
I can say that I was a little dubious about how much I’d use it. I also left portable gaming many years ago. I now have a nice, beefy desktop with a nice 240Hz monitor with good sRGB coverage, and I have a Steam Controller. Why would I want something smaller and weaker?
While it’s still obviously weaker from a hardware standpoint, it’s nevertheless very capable, and the fact that I don’t have to abscond to my computer just to play games and can instead play them on the couch or in bed, the fact that I can put the Deck into sleep mode at a moment’s notice, the fact that I can take it on a plane or to another city and still play things from my library, the fact that it’s a regular computer underneath and can do anything a Linux-based computer can do—these are all aspects that made me glad I bought it.
I sometimes get buyers remorse, even if just from spending a lot of money on something I really wanted, but I haven’t once experienced that with the Deck.
the fact that I can put the Deck into sleep mode at a moment’s notice, the fact that I can take it on a plane or to another city and still play things from my library
This is the largest thing for me. It’s insanely convenient just like the switch when taking the train or the bus, except that I have a full library of my Steam games and it runs way better.
I don't have any use for a handheld but I use Linux on the desktop for a few years now, since I did not want to switch from W7 to W10 or god forbid W11 (especially after dabbling with the W10 upgrade nuked itself along with my C: partition and all its data). If you don't play competitive multiplayer stuff and have a half decent technical understanding of things under Windows then it's a fairly easy switch. Not saying there are no caveats or bumps but those also exist with Windows, to a point where it became a bigger hassle for me than Linux.
The nice thing about the Deck for me is that I barely even have to look up things on ProtonDB anymore because most things just run out of the box or with little tweaking, and already have the Deck playable image on the Steam store page. It also kinda pushed the OS past OSX now and the handheld formfactor makes it a bit unique to the point where developers just get interested in it. And if they support the Deck, they'll basically also support my desktop by proxy. Win win.
my last hand held gaming device is a Gameboy… After that PC only not even console. But with the steamdeck having my PC gaming experience in my backback would be a great intresting.
Windows 8 really was one of the worst in recent history. I’d personally put Win11 as second-worst since Vista. Sure it worked well enough, but so intrusive to both your workflow and privacy. I had trouble with my last attempt to switch to Linux for gaming, but I think it’s time to try again.
Yeah windows 8 was terrible. Windows 11 was not that bad, enjoyed it a bit, except that nagging feeling I am being mined for data. But what killed it for me is the instabilities, my PC stuttered and froze like crazy, and all they say is do a clean install. So I clean installed, Mint that is
I see windows being used by managers at work and I’m soo happy I invested time in Linux so I can run it on my daily machines. It’s something that pays off every single day.
So true about Linux improving more rapidly than Windows, it’s incredible how the ecosystem has evolved just in the last few years while windows doddles along investing their dev resources into adding cloud and AI into all they’re offering.
How many times do I have to tell them I’m not interested in their AI crap on my Win10 box? I didn’t use Cortana, I’m not going to use this. Just make it stop!
Also on Mint, only real issue I’ve encountered was trying to get my old gaming mouse working… What a cold med fueled rabbit hole that was while home from work for a few days. I think I understand the issue now, which is there is nothing written into the distro itself to support more than a 3 button mouse, so I would need to write in custom USB inputs after mapping them from the device. Wanted it bad enough at the time to actually go and see if input detection was able to see the extra mouse buttons, and it could, so I finally launched a game and tried rebinding to buttons to test it, and it just worked… I think I rebuilt from a snapshot about 4-5 times in the whole process trying to make sure I hadn’t messed up something else up while trying suggested fix after suggested fix, and remembering I had issues with the initial setup of the mouse software on windows thanks to .NET Framework 3.5. I don’t need extra mouse buttons for my DE badly enough to go through the whole process of custom inputs if it works the way I need it to in game, but it’s nice to know I have a “rainy day” project if I need one.
This weekend I finally joined the club of folks that install Mint on their parent’s aging laptops. I’m a Nix/Arch user btw and am very impressed with the ease of use and flexibility that Mint brings to the table.
Yeah, it’s a nice almost out of the box and getting started distro. I have tried Arch and Manjoro about 8 years ago, not for me, nice customisation but it is really too bleeding edge with the rough edges that go with it. After trying a crap load of distros I like the boringness of Mint
Are you running Cinnamon? I was impressed with the customization options out of the box and had to stop playing with it as I wanted to keep things fairly plain. Looking forward to later dropping it on a burner laptop for my own twiddling.
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