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Linux gamers on Steam cross over the 3% mark

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Re: Linux gamers on Steam cross over the 3% mark

#221

Post by throw2312321 »

I am a big fan of gaming on Linux, but I've been running into weird bugs with some of my favorite games.

For example, a couple months ago, my install of TW:WH3 started to crash after 20-30 seconds in the main game. I think it started happening after a minor patch. Another example is Battle Brothers. The game ran flawlessly. Then I installed and played a copy on a Windows laptop using the same Steam account. After that the game stopped booting properly on Linux. (Maybe a coincidence.)

As a result, I still boot into Windows now and again to play these games. I am dual-booting.

Re: Linux gamers on Steam cross over the 3% mark

#222

Post by Jach »

modeless wrote: post #124

Whoa, I thought Ubuntu was the most popular distribution. Arch and even Linux Mint are beating it?

The survey only shows Ubuntu 24.04.3 LTS and Ubuntu Core 22 for 8.25% vs Mint's 22.1 and 22.2 at 9.21%. There's a whole 18.04% hiding in the "Other" category that I suspect contains a lot of other Ubuntu interim and older LTS releases.

Re: Linux gamers on Steam cross over the 3% mark

#223

Post by mikkupikku »

viktorcode wrote: post #126
mariusor wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple really shot themselves in the foot with their insistence on dropping OpenGL and not having an in house Vulkan implementation. Games that want to support macs need to add Metal renderers.

Seems this kind of comments will keep coming no matter what. Nevertheless, here's some points on the matter: Apple was the company that boosted OpenGL popularity by using it as the graphics API for OS X. In Apple platforms world there's only one graphics API that is guaranteed to work across their hardware, so it was a big deal. However, they could not keep up with OpenGL updates, as they overlapped poorly with their…

> Apple was the company that boosted OpenGL popularity by using it as the graphics API for OS X

Certainly they were a company that boosted OpenGL, but the company? During the early years OSX had less market share than Linux does today, and OpenGL was already well established by gaming and professional software before OSX ever came out. Quake supported it (not on release), Quake II and Half Life supported it on release, Quake III required it. Heck, Quake III released on Linux shortly before MacOS (classic), making it arguably as influential then, and of course the OSX port of that only came a few years later. But point is, that Id dared to release their new flagship with only OpenGL support shows that OpenGL was already firmly established and supported before OSX existed.

Re: Linux gamers on Steam cross over the 3% mark

#224

Post by ThatPlayer »

bigyabai wrote: post #175
andoando wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thats my exact setup and Ive had no issues so far. Running Arc Raiders on PopOS, Nvidia 5070ti highest settings on 120hz monitor with 120-200 fps. Can always dual boot, so its worth a shot. I have windows just for a few games like BF6 which wont work on linux cause of its anticheat

It is shocking how well Arc Raiders handles ray tracing on Linux. I have a locked 60fps at 1440p on my 3070Ti, and tons of GPU headroom to spare. These Embark people... they scare me.

I think the issue is more about how other games handle ray tracing. For games that just treat ray tracing as an "ultra quality" setting, there's no point of making a low quality ray tracing option, because then you'd just turn it off when non-RT options look just as good.

But Arc Raiders (and their previous game, The Finals) does use RTGI for good effects. And that low quality RT setting is still going to be better than no RT because of its realtime nature. https://youtu.be/MxkRJ_7sg8Y shows that off to good effect.

You can see this kinda performance on Indiana Jones and Doom Dark Ages, which have switched to workflows that require RT. Low quality RT in these games is performant enough to run on Linux AMD drivers which run RT in software on cards that do not have hardware for it: https://youtu.be/44XaGU01J84

Re: Linux gamers on Steam cross over the 3% mark

#225

Post by CamperBob2 »

bee_rider wrote: post #176
PeaceTed wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One would assume but I do wonder how much long term damage they are doing for short term gains with this drive? I'm not a believer in "the year of linux desktop!?!!?" and all that, but it achieved a level of robustness about 5-10ish years ago that I openly encourage non technical users to give it a try. For the few people that actually did try, they did stick with it. At this point it is Microsoft's position to lose…

I don’t much like MS, but in their defense they are trying to sell operating systems in a market where the going out-of-pocket price is $0. The development of their competition is ad supported, community supported, or built into the price of hardware. Turn the boat around? To where? Nobody would be willing to pay for their product even if they were to start trying to make it appealing.

I would be MORE than happy to pay for an un-enshittified version of Windows. They won't take my money.

Re: Linux gamers on Steam cross over the 3% mark

#226

Post by galangalalgol »

bee_rider wrote: post #176
PeaceTed wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One would assume but I do wonder how much long term damage they are doing for short term gains with this drive? I'm not a believer in "the year of linux desktop!?!!?" and all that, but it achieved a level of robustness about 5-10ish years ago that I openly encourage non technical users to give it a try. For the few people that actually did try, they did stick with it. At this point it is Microsoft's position to lose…

I don’t much like MS, but in their defense they are trying to sell operating systems in a market where the going out-of-pocket price is $0. The development of their competition is ad supported, community supported, or built into the price of hardware. Turn the boat around? To where? Nobody would be willing to pay for their product even if they were to start trying to make it appealing.

None of their products have a decent moat left, and all are heavily competed. Focusing on making azure competitive while accepting it is a commodity industry with commodity margins is how they stick around. But they will be a value stock, not a growth stock. That is ok, as long as you know that is what you are.

Re: Linux gamers on Steam cross over the 3% mark

#227

Post by jjcm »

IMO the biggest barrier to linux is disappearing - the requirement to know how to use the command line. You still have to use it, but you don't have to know how to use it anymore with the introduction of LLMs.

I also have switched my primary desktop from Windows to Linux, and now when I have an issue, I just ask an LLM. I play pretty fast and loose with just chucking commands it gives me into the command line. I'm pretty well versed in linux sysadmin things, but LLMs make it so easy I don't even bother trying to solve things myself first.

I have a few people in my friend group who aren't well versed, but they're able to navigate linux just fine by doing this same approach.

There's still friction, don't get me wrong, but it's a different type of friction. On Windows there are far fewer bugs, but there's friction introduced due to it being non-unix based (especially when it comes to code/doing any sort of model training) and due to anti-patterns Windows keeps shipping into the OS. On linux, the friction is just bugs. You can address / fix bugs for the most part, but you can't fix Windows' friction points.

Re: Linux gamers on Steam cross over the 3% mark

#228

Post by yoyohello13 »

bigyabai wrote: post #196
machomaster wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder how much Omarchy (based on Arch) made a dent... DHH said that it has been downloaded hundreds of thousands of times.

The hard part is never installing an Arch-like distro, it's making it past 5 sudo pacman -syu iterations without an AUR package going thermonuclear and requiring 45,000 pinned dependencies.

Just don’t use the AUR. Problem solved

Re: Linux gamers on Steam cross over the 3% mark

#229

Post by andreldm »

bblacher wrote: post #192
andreldm wrote: post #184

After many years playing on Linux, first struggling with Wine then with Proton when it came out, had to install Windows on my gaming pc. I mostly play Overwatch 2 with friends on my very short free time, thanks to a Steam bug ( https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux/issues/1028... ), on every single evening I had to wait forever (seriously, 15+ min) for shaders to compile or start the game immediately but s…

How old is your GPU/does it/the driver support async shader compilation? I've turned off shader pre-comp like two years ago because of this bug, never had any problems/lags with any games.

RTX 3060 mobile, nvidia blobs, default settings from the distro. Indeed, I disabled the shader cache at some point, for most single player games it was a good workaround, that was not the case for OW2 for some reason.
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