Linux gamers on Steam cross over the 3% mark • Hacker News Board

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

#191

Post by LelouBil » Sun, Nov 02, 2025, 9:53 PM UTC

elashri wrote: post #90

Does this over count because I think good chunk of Linux people (including me) have dedicated windows or maybe old windows machine where they play some of the games that are unplayable on linux. Also double boot is something that would be common in situations like that. In such case, I think this should be higher a little bit. Or Am I missing something?

I don't think this should over count because the steam hardware survey is done once per account each time.

It just depends if you're booted into windows or into linux when you have the survey popup.

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

#192

Post by bblacher » Sun, Nov 02, 2025, 9:53 PM UTC

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.

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

#193

Post by badsectoracula » Sun, Nov 02, 2025, 9:54 PM UTC

hamdingers wrote: post #72

try_the_bass wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of curiosity, why are such high fps numbers desirable? Maybe I don't understand how displays work, but how does having fps > refresh rate work? Aren't many of those frames just wasted?

If you have a 60Hz display and the game is locked to 60fps, when you take an action it may take up to 16.67 milliseconds for that action to register. If the game is running at 500fps, it registers within 2 milliseconds, even though you won't see the action for up to 16.67 milliseconds later. At extremely high levels of competition, this matters. Also, there are 540Hz displays.

> even though you won't see the action for up to 16.67 milliseconds later

Note that this is only the case if you have vsync enabled. Without vsync you will see the action (or some reaction anyway) +2ms later instead of +16.67ms, just not the full frame. This will manifest as screen tearing though if the screen changes are big - though it is up to personal preference if it bothers you or not.

Personally i always disable vsync even my high refresh rate monitor as i like having the fastest feedback possible (i do not even run a desktop compositor because of that) and i do not mind screen tearing (though tearing is much less visible with a high refresh monitor than a 60Hz one).

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

#194

Post by [deleted] » Sun, Nov 02, 2025, 9:54 PM UTC

accoil wrote: post #89

hoten wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> React based start menu with visible lag That surprised me. But seems not true? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44124688

The Windhawk Start Menu Style[1] uses XAML to modify the Start Menu, and I doubt that they are translating XAML to React [1]: https://windhawk.net/mods/windows-11-start-menu-styler

[deleted]

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

#195

Post by andyjohnson0 » Sun, Nov 02, 2025, 9:55 PM UTC

ErroneousBosh wrote: post #84

eek2121 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I switched a couple months ago. This is my third time trying to switch to desktop Linux, and things are very different this time. I installed CachyOS and all of my hardware just worked, including NVIDIA/Wayland. No real bugs beyond incorrect monitor positioning, and some tinkering needed for Diablo 4/Battle.net. The Diablo 4 issue is present on Windows as well, and ironically, there isn't a fix on Windows for those a…

> No real bugs beyond incorrect monitor positioning Windows really needs to catch up with this. Multiple monitors have been a thing in Linux pretty much since the beginning of X. Why can't I plug a Windows laptop into a docking station, and expect the screens to come up in the same order they were in last time? Why is it so hard?

> Why can't I plug a Windows laptop into a docking station, and expect the screens to come up in the same order they were in last time? Why is it so hard?

I regularly move my work Win 11 Pro laptop between three different multi-monitor (hdmi) setups, and it works flawlessly. I don't recall any problems with Win10 over many years either.

What am I missing out on?

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

#196

Post by bigyabai » Sun, Nov 02, 2025, 9:55 PM UTC

machomaster wrote: post #152

modeless wrote: post #124

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

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.

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

#197

Post by cvoss » Sun, Nov 02, 2025, 9:56 PM UTC

It is always with great fear and trepidation that I install the drivers for my discrete GPU on my Ubuntu system and configure the system to use it. The state of affairs might be better these days, but I remember it rarely working and having a high likelihood of horribly breaking the configuration, and trying to rectify it in the terminal while frantically searching forums on my phone.

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

#198

Post by ewuhic » Sun, Nov 02, 2025, 9:58 PM UTC

wtcactus wrote: post #143

About every 3 months or so, I install some gaming Linux distro (or, if I'm in the mood, install Linux Mint from scratch and try to configure it for gaming) and get solely disappointed and return to windows. Most of the Linux hurdles in day to day work can be overcome (mostly is the lack of the apps I normally use that cause some attrition, but with some compromises and some work I can get around it). But for gaming (…

Dare I suggest you use NixOS, or even better, https://github.com/Jovian-Experiments/Jovian-NixOS, so you

1) get a working setup in minutes by following just https://nixos.wiki/wiki/Jovian_NixOS;

2) if something does not work, you don't start from scratch next time you have an urge to try again;

3) have best-in-class community support;

4) overcome lack of apps by plugging into nixpkgs - the biggest repo of packages out there among all the distros.

Hope I did well on selling NixOS to you.

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

#199

Post by k__ » Sun, Nov 02, 2025, 9:58 PM UTC

I'm using Steam on Arch and am very happy with it.

The recurring compilation of Vulcan shaders after every update bothers a bit, but it works very well.

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

#200

Post by shmeeed » Sun, Nov 02, 2025, 9:59 PM UTC

dangus wrote: post #148

SteveNuts wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only thing windows has focused on has been dark patterns to force users towards cloud and figuring out more and more ways to collect data to sell ads. I’m not naive, I know a ton of huge enterprises still run huge fleets of windows “servers” but I still find it hilarious that a supposedly serious server OS would default to showing you the weather and ads in the start menu.

While I agree that Microsoft has not been the greatest at delivering customer-friendly stuff, and has built in a lot of revenue streams to their (mostly not-paying) users like Bing and cloud upsells, I think that your take is overly cynical to the software. Windows 11 has some really legitimate improvements that make it a really solid OS. It’s not surprising that Microsoft isn’t focusing on Windows as a server OS as…

It was interesting to read your comment and find myself disagreeing with every single point you made. I'm not invested enough to argue about anything of it, it's really just a meta observation that stood out to me: Obviously it's still possible to have substantially different points of view on even the most basic aspects. I guess that's a good thing, at least it feels kinda reassuring to me. We could both be right, and the truth is probably somewhere in the middle.