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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

#411

Post by lcampbell »

zamadatix wrote: post #393
figmert wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DRM can work on Linux, it's just developers choose to not enabled support, and in some cases (Epic Games) actively update games so it won't work with Linux.

What would it even mean for DRM to not be able to work on Linux? Modules would have to disappear, source code would have to become unmodifiable, and Linux would have to remove anything related to rights/privledges/contexts, I suppose? But yes - the problem is Epic doesn't target Linux with it, not that it would be infeasible for Epic to support playing Fortnite on Linux if they changed their minds.

Epic Anti-Cheat fully supports Linux[1]. I believe what the GP comment means is that the Fortnite publishers opted not to tick the “allow Linux” checkbox on the developer portal website.

There is probably more nuance behind that decision than I’m giving them credit for, but from a technical standpoint it’s just a checkbox.

[1] https://dev.epicgames.com/docs/game-services/anti-cheat/usin...

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

#412

Post by try_the_bass »

layer8 wrote: post #190
try_the_bass wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand how this works, I guess? If your screen is 60Hz, you're drawing four frames for every one that ends up getting displayed. You won't even see the other three, right? If you can't see the frames, what difference does what's in them make? [E] Answered my own question elsewhere: the difference is the "freshness" of the frame. Higher frame rates mean the frame you do end up seeing was produced more rece…

Also, your input gets registered faster (happens earlier) in the game world.

I don't think I understand this part.

Why does the rate at which frames are rendered (by the GPU?) relate to the speed at which input is registered?

[E] Ah, I think another comment [1] up in a different branch of this thread answered this for me

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45794453

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

#413

Post by iwontberude »

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.

Yeah it felt like I got caught in an early 2000s timewarp for a second. It was nice.

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

#414

Post by nektro »

jjcm wrote: post #227

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 pr…

two sentence horror

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

#415

Post by baobun »

philipwhiuk wrote: post #298

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.

I would guess that having easy access to more recent kernels (including -zen) a and gpu firmware is a big draw for arch.

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

#416

Post by saghm »

eek2121 wrote: post #63
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…

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…

It really is hard to overstate just how much progress there's been in the past few years. I first started using Linux in late 2012 (with Ubuntu 12.10 being the first version that actually came with my laptop's wifi firmware in the default installtion; when I first tried 12.04 I had to plug it into ethernet just to download it), and by that point, graphical stuff mostly worked without needing a ton of manual work, and it was past the era where I would have had to compile a custom kernel or something (although a few years later I did learn how to do that just for the fun of tinkering when I got a macbook with a wifi driver that wasn't released in a stable kernel for another few months), but when I started getting into gaming in the later part of the decade, I had to spend a decent bit of time learning about Wine, Crossover, Lutris, etc. Over the course of the next few years I started playing around with Proton in Steam, even for games that aren't released on Steam, and nowadays I don't even have Lutris or Crossover installed, and I can't remember the last time I tried to play a game that Proton couldn't run.

At this point, Valve has done enough to make Linux gaming viable that they might have permanently bought my goodwill. Right now I mostly play on my Steam Deck an equal mix of games that are and aren't from Steam (streamed from my desktop with Moonlight, which itself is a third-party app rather than from Steam), but even if they started trying to lock things down more, I'm not sure I'd be able to get mad at them. So much of the investment they've made into the ecosystem has been in the tooling itself that isn't exclusive to them, ostensibly for the purpose of entering the "handheld desktop" gaming market (not sure what exactly to call it, but playing the same PC games on handhelds is demonstrably different from a handheld console with a separate catalog), but they did it in a way that benefited a lot more than just that. I don't pretend they're a perfect company, because those don't exist, but as far as companies go, this might be the first time I actually identify as a fan of one.

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

#417

Post by Ekaros »

philipwhiuk wrote: post #298

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.

I think if it does come from SteamOS, but indirectly. When you have pieces in place selecting distro becomes simpler. Even if it not actual SteamOS.

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

#418

Post by drnick1 »

haunter wrote: post #4
periodjet wrote: post #3

I honestly can’t believe it’s not much higher. It’s so easy these days with SteamOS and Bazzite.

Look at the most played games, half of them won't work under Linux because of the online components / anti cheat system. BF6, PUBG, Rust, GTAV Online etc.

Then it is our responsibility not to buy these games and send game studios a clear message. I would have almost certainly bought BF6 if it ran well on Proton, but EA decided to punish Linux users and also killed games that previously ran without issues when they "upgraded" their anticheat.

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

#419

Post by tommica »

cannonpalms wrote: post #252
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.

How did you find out that you had a rootkit?

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

#420

Post by drnick1 »

jeroenhd wrote: post #27
periodjet wrote: post #3

I honestly can’t believe it’s not much higher. It’s so easy these days with SteamOS and Bazzite.

The lack of accessible devices with first party support make mainstream Linux gaming rather annoying. For many games, people prefer Nvidias's graphical tricks over AMD's, making AMD cards a worse deal, while at the same time Nvidia's Linux support remains abysmal for most cards. It's not impossible to use their hardware anymore, but you need to know of their bullshit beforehand and even then you run the risk of messi…

> Nvidia's Linux support remains abysmal for most cards.

I can't relate. My 3090 works flawlessly on Arch, and I can play any game that does not intentionally ban Linux users through anticheat.

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