341–350 of 560 posts
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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…
Link looks dead?
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My tech friends always joke that pretty soon we’re going to see “the year of the Linux Windows”, where windows will just be an OS on top of the Linux kernel. I think we’re only half joking though, I could see it happening.
> " My tech friends always joke that pretty soon we’re going to see “the year of the Linux Windows”, where windows will just be an OS on top of the Linux kernel. " There's no need because the Year Of Linux On The Desktop™ already happened and it's called WSL2. Meanwhile, the opposite has also already actually happened: SteamOS + Proton is a distro whose main purpose is to be a launcher for Windows apps on a Linux ker…
Windows also comprehensively lost the "exclusivity" moat. Most of popular apps are now cross-platform, because they need to run on Android/iOS/macOS. So desktop Linux is often an easy addition: Slack, Discord, all the messengers, Zoom, various IDEs, etc.
So Linux indeed won to a large extent. Just not in the way people expected it.
It's crazy to me that Arch Linux is the second biggest Steam distro. That's always been positioned to me as the one for hackers and experimentalists. You'd think the more 'user-friendly' distros would be higher.
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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.
Biggest hurdle for me to do this is just multiplayer games. I wish Linux would offer a solution to that. No idea what it would look like though. Contrary to most Linux advocates I’m a big believer in giving studios the tools they need to defeat cheaters and I don’t care much about system integrity if it means fairer games.
Even on Windows they are losing despite the invasive anticheats. I suspect the answer to cheating will ultimately be big brother and hiding information from the client. The server should stop sending positions of undetected enemies - this requires rethinking game engines due to the predictions they perform. The server should log every single action by every single player (full replays) in perpetuity, train models on…
The speed of light makes this _marginally_ problematic to do. It is possible that a unit might move out of the fog of war, or out of cover, during the latency to the client (or between server ticks). You'd effectively have pop-in during some scenarios - but it would be minor and the net benefit would probably make it worth it.
I recall one of the MOBAs adding this during its lifecycle, HoN I think?
I only wish Fortnite were possible. that’s the only thing I keep windows around for.
Sweeney said Linux is cancer when they stopped Linux support for Rocket league, so probably unlikely.
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?
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…
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…
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…
Whenever I see someone say “most modern games work flawlessly” I know they’re full of shit or just don’t do much gaming.
Don't get me wrong, I’m not going back to windows, but it’s not the panacea that people pretend it is. Often enough it doesn’t “just work” and you have to hunt down some additional command line args to get games to run.