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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

#251

Post by chrneu »

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?

Multimonitor support and bluetooth are the two biggest reasons I ditched windows a couple years ago.

I have no idea how multimon got so, so bad on windows.

Then bluetooth ...wtf? Again, how did they get so bad?

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

#252

Post by cannonpalms »

p1necone wrote: post #32

I made the switch more than a year ago and it's been basically problem free. Almost all modern games work flawlessly through proton and I get better compatibility for really old stuff through lutris than I ever did on windows (I used to have to run a win 3.1/95/98 vm to play certain older games, now I just use lutris/wine). The only stuff that doesn't work is multiplayer games with unsupported anticheat - it's always…

The unfortunate reality is that, depending on your personal preferences, "most modern games" require such a ring 0 anti-cheat. Any game that has a matchmaking mode with a competitive option requires a rootkit.

As an aside, I recently found Riot Games' Vanguard installed on my Linux ESP partition... after having installed the game on my windows partition. It rooted every OS it could find mounted. Incredible.

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

#254

Post by pmarreck »

fainpul wrote: post #49
hu3 wrote: post #31

I didn't expect Linux to be above macOS despite Wine's awesomeness. - Windows 94.84% - Linux 3.05% - macOS 2.11%

macOS is by far the worst gaming platform. I think most macOS users are fully aware of that.

Baldur's Gate 3 looks absolutely fantastic on it due to the HDR rendering and high screen quality on Apple hardware though.

It's sad for me as a long-time Mac fan and gaming fan that Apple has always had hardware and OS that was technically superior when it comes to gaming, but neither Jobs nor Cook ever cared about gaming except as a checkbox, so it all went to waste.

The amusing thing to me is that so many productive things have come OUT of pursuing gaming, such as graphics cards being useful for mining and then AI.

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

#255

Post by forrestthewoods »

lokeg wrote: post #208
forrestthewoods wrote: post #181

As a Steam game developer I don’t think I can ever forgive Linux for being 1% of our players but 50% of our support tickets. I probably shouldn’t hold a grudge, but I do! I suppose it’s probably better in 2025 now that the best API for Linux gaming is Win32. Proton is genuinely spectacular. I love my Steamdeck. SteamOS is great. Supporting one distro is easy. It’s supporting a million unique permutations that is pure…

There is a somewhat famous post about this: https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/qeqn3b/despite_hav... Essentially stating that Linux users disproportionately care to actually report bugs they encounter rather than ignoring them. I find that very plausible.

> Essentially stating that Linux users disproportionately care to actually report bugs they encounter rather than ignoring them. I find that very plausible.

In my lived experience, this 100% pure unadultered copium. It’s the wishful thinking lie that Linux people tell themselves to support their preferred choice of OS software which is, for some reason, part of their identity.

Supporting “Linux” isn’t too bad in 2025 if all you care about is SteamOS and Ubuntu. But distributing pre-compiled binaries and getting them to run on an unbounded range of system configurations is a nightmare.

Linux users do at least expect to run into problems. So they’re willing to fight through errors for several hours before asking for help. And the Linux gamer community is willing to help each other out to jump through all these hoops.

But none of that changes the fact that supporting Linux is an additional mountain of work. Although in 2025 you should definitely support SteamDeck via either Proton or native.

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

#256

Post by chrneu »

andyjohnson0 wrote: post #195
ErroneousBosh wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

My last 2 laptops have really struggled with win10/11 multimonitor support. Explorer would often crash, taskbars would not populate, behaviors weren't consistent, taskbars would reset themselves, settings would change randomly after reboots, not including updates resetting all my settings and having no real way to disable updates cuz windows would re-enable them.

did i mention explorer would crash pretty often? like, half the time I plugged in a docking station it would crash explorer. That then reset all the settings. lol just a mess.

Pop OS! is a simple plug and play on any setup i've tried it on, over usb3 or hdmi/dpi. Works great.

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

#257

Post by paulbgd »

ffsm8 wrote: post #91
TACIXAT wrote: post #26

I just made the switch. I had been developing on Windows for the last couple of years, mostly to get used to the ecosystem. I wanted to be able to write C and C++ like I do on Linux, without an IDE and with the native toolchain (i.e. no cygwin). On top of that, I play Overwatch every night. Windows just seems to have zero focus on performance though. React based start menu with visible lag, file Explorer (buggily) pa…

Does HDR work though?

On Wayland+gnome/plasma I’ve had great luck with games, Firefox is almost there with some bugginess, and video playing apps that use mpv like plex work great. It’s definitely not perfect and you may dive into configuring per app flags to make them utilize hdr, but the easy stuff generally works

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

#258

Post by chrneu »

gambiting wrote: post #243
andoando wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never understood why file search is SOOO bad on windows (mac too). Its so damn slow and even feature wise I never figured out why it was so difficult to just search for files in this directory

It regressed compared to Windows 10 too - I have a folder with photos, I normally have them sorted by date taken. On windows 10 I would open the folder and they were always sorted correctly the moment I opened the folder. Maybe there was a point in time at the start there the system had to sort them for the first time but ever since they were always shown correctly the second I opened the folder. On windows 11? Every…

it's also worth mentioning that windows 10 search was a huge regression from 7 and xp.

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

#259

Post by cwbriscoe »

modeless wrote: post #142
currymj wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Steam Deck is Arch-based, that's most likely why.

SteamOS is counted separately.

Yes, but a lot of linux games use an Arch distribution such as CachyOS since SteamOS also is. They get updates faster because of the rolling releases.

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

#260

Post by chrneu »

bigyabai wrote: post #147
cedws wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does anybody have security concerns about running games with Proton/Wine? Games already have a massive attack surface and I can imagine there are some nasty bugs lurking in the compat layer that would enable RCEs not possible on Windows. This is kind of holding me back from making the jump.

You can trivially sandbox your Steam installation with pretty much zero performance overhead, if you install it through Flatpak. Using an app like Flatseal, you can then configure Steam to only have access to a designated drive with next to no further contact to your PC. You can individually disable access to networking, audio, D-Bus, USB devices, Bluetooth, shared memory and even the GPU itself if you're really frea…

>Steam installation with pretty much zero performance overhead, if you install it through Flatpak.

In reality that isn't true. Flatpak steam runs like poo for a lot of people. Really, flatpak should be avoided if there are other installation methods, in general.

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