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Steam on Linux Use Skyrocketed Above 5% in March

phoronix.com

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Re: Steam on Linux Use Skyrocketed Above 5% in March

#281

The top distro is Arch - implying that the Steam Deck userbase is moving the needle. Linus has said on a few occasions that the main thing holding back user adoption for desktop is a single distro with a clear focus. What Android did for mobile. It's clear that SteamOS could be "that guy" if Valve wants it to be.

Can Linus bless a particular desktop Linux distro where he can at least veto unreasonable decisions? So when someone says "I'm switching to Linux," it means that one.

Linus has been using Fedora for over a decade.

Re: Steam on Linux Use Skyrocketed Above 5% in March

#282
I've been very impressed with Bazzite on my ASUS dual screen laptop. Honestly feel like hardware support is better (especially in the absence of crappy ASUS software) and nothing on Steam runs noticeably worse. Hard to imagine going back to Windows at this point.

Re: Steam on Linux Use Skyrocketed Above 5% in March

#283

A few weeks ago, I installed linux (Nobara, if you're curious) on my PC and hooked it up to the living room TV to use as a gaming console. I have absolutely no regret. I did it initially because apparently playing games on a shared screen is better for my kid. But I was pleasantly surprised by how smoothly Windows only games run on Linux. The whole experience has been great, and I don't think I'll ever go back. I hav…

You can get dongles for pretty much any controller you like.. Switch Pro, Wii U, Xbox etc. It's generally more stable than using bluetooth on a controller that supports it, especially if you position the dongle to have clear sight to your couch.

Re: Steam on Linux Use Skyrocketed Above 5% in March

#284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the reality - most people won't spoof until they figure out it's the way to make a specific site work; and then they'll likely spoof for everything .

I'd also like to add that we forget that we're doing it, or at least I do. Once you set something up like that, there's never any reason to get rid of it; nobody is positively discriminating towards Linux.

I love when a ruleset (firewall, for example) has a "comments" field because I inevitably forget why I added something and then Chesterton's fence means I leave it forever, lest I spend hours a year later wondering why something broke.

Re: Steam on Linux Use Skyrocketed Above 5% in March

#285

I wish things were working so seamlessly for me, as people describe in the comments. There seems to be something wrong with Steam and how it works, so that in my machine (and CPU and GPU from 2019, with official Linux drivers from standard repos, running Debian KDE) it almost never manages to start a Windows game. I will click the green "Play" button, it will change to a blue "Stop" button, as if the application was…

I had great success in such cases by just overriding the compatibility tool used, most often to just some version of proton. Default sometimes just does not work.

Re: Steam on Linux Use Skyrocketed Above 5% in March

#286
post #233

Pewdiepie becoming an arch-pilled rice-maxxer who advocates Linux for freedom and gaming has surely had some effect. He's such a good sport he even swore off Photoshop and tries to learn to like Gimp.

I haven't used GIMP in a while but I had great experience with Krita, even with my display tablet it all "just worked".

GIMP is annoying/difficult to learn well, just like Photoshop is.

Correction: GIMP is annoying/difficult to learn well, but not nearly as bad as Photoshop because it is organized logically and isn't burdened with sacred historical cruft, advertisements and product tie-ins.

The difference is that once you learn Photoshop it is a skill you can use at many jobs, and GIMP is not. Using this post as an excuse to rant, I've always thought that GIMP's priorities should be to be usable for print (mainly color management, which I think is almost totally fixed and becoming smooth) and to improve compatibility between it and vector drawing software (like Illustrator/Inkscape[0]), and layout software (like InDesign/Scribus[1].)[2]

If you're a European government or an individual rich person and you are really serious about software independence from the US, or if you're China/Russia/etc. and we know you're serious about it, you should throw about 50M at the problem. I think it would threaten Adobe so much that the US might lob a missile at you.

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[0] Inkscape also hated print, and the possibility of real exact colors and real exact measurements, and basically prioritized web icons and art. They also have a UI that requires a ton of memorization of hotkeys (which was part of the motivation for creating the software in the first place.) They seem to have wised up and made serious improvements in all of those areas.

[1] The only problem that Scribus has is a clunky UI that requires a lot of unnecessary clicks, which makes me suspect that it has deeper architectural problems. I think very few people work on it. It's ideally positioned, in the age of all books being online data, to create/become the future typesetting standard for people who want definitive versions of books rather than flowy ebook things which are not a significant improvement over .txt files. You could take a classic book and encode its typesetting, and rather than having 10M of blurry page scans combined with OCR info, you could just have 500K of text, fonts and typesetting information. With this, you could professionally print a perfect copy of the book, and as it looked when it was printed originally.

[2] Inkscape and Scribus, in turn, should be concentrating on pdf compatability, and also a way to sneak into print shops would be to write a good FOSS imposer (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imposition) that integrated well with Inkscape/Scribus.

Re: Steam on Linux Use Skyrocketed Above 5% in March

#287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't play those games myself but the word is that the EAC on linux lacks the same kernel hooks that are available on Windows. I personally consider that a plus but if you're a developer obsessed with strong anti-cheat you probably do not.

Ah, I was under the mistaken impression EAC operated in userspace.

It does on Linux. That's the problem for developers. Unless you're talking about Windows.

Re: Steam on Linux Use Skyrocketed Above 5% in March

#288
post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or maybe Microsoft continuously degrading their user's experiences has finally reached a breaking point, to the point where Pewdipie AND Linus Tech Tips are talking more seriously about linux. So yeah Pewdiepie is part of it, but I honestly think that's only because Microsoft has done such a poor job at maintaining their operating system.

If I am reading the room right, I think Wine/Proton/Steam making gaming almost effortless on linux has been the big swing. It was not like this 5 years ago. I have been a linux user for work for a decade, but still ran Windows for a gaming PC. But with Win11 dropping the ball so hard, and the general hype around Proton and where linux gaming was it, it was not hard to make the decision to switch. I haven't regretted…

Same here. Been using Linux personally for about a decade, professionally for half of that. I still ran a GPU passthrough Windows 11 VM for games up until a couple months ago. I am now switching to running everything purely in Linux, and it's great. Night and day difference between what it used to be like 5 years ago for sure.

Re: Steam on Linux Use Skyrocketed Above 5% in March

#289

When playing eve online on Linux (via Proton), the moment any other window gets focus, or the mouse slights off the game screen onto the second monitor on the side, game minimizes. I have a feeling it's just wine things. Can anybody understand what happens and maybe explain it a little? I remember that 13 years ago I did everything on Linux and only switched to Windows to play eve online. Now the game works beautiful…

Your desktop is set to focus where mouse cursor is not where you click. Usually can be changed. Also in conjunction with that the game is set to freeze when it loses focus. So maybe you can change that in game.

Re: Steam on Linux Use Skyrocketed Above 5% in March

#290
post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can Linus bless a particular desktop Linux distro where he can at least veto unreasonable decisions? So when someone says "I'm switching to Linux," it means that one.

Linus has been using Fedora for over a decade.

I know why he uses Fedora but I think it's long term is questionable. It's only a matter of time until IBM F's with it.
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