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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

#461

Post by rossy »

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.

The more I think about it, the harder it is to recommend anything else for the average Windows gamer/prosumer but first-time Linux user.

- Rolling release, so you don't have to do a major upgrade twice a year - which would otherwise be much more often than Windows.

- Latest kernel and graphics drivers, so it works with newly released hardware with the best performance.

- Steam, NVIDIA drivers, H.264/H.265 codecs, Gamescope, GameMode, MangoHud, etc. all in the default repos - a huge boon for new Linux users compared to having them in an external repo like RPM Fusion or having to install them manually, which can otherwise cause confusing dependency problems over the life of the installation.

- Nothing unusual about it that would be confusing or cause compatibility problems. It's just a normal mutable binary distro with a normal package manager, upstream packages, glibc and systemd.

The biggest issue is the lack of an official graphical installer, but while the install process is intimidating, it's not very difficult for people who are patient, can follow detailed instructions, and have a vague idea of what a partition and a bootloader is.

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

#462

Post by Yoric »

gchamonlive wrote: post #361
krferriter wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linux also doesn't have as good hardware support. While Linux will probably run on most hardware. It doesn't run well. Like you may just immediately give up half or more of your laptop battery life if you switch from Windows to Linux on a particular machine, even if you use a lightweight and up-to-date environment and use TLP and whatever else to tweak kernel settings. I used Linux on my personal laptops for many yea…

> Linux also doesn't have as good hardware support. I once had to patch uvc to support a webcam that wouldn't work natively on Linux. It would advertise one version of the API but implement another. That didn't affect windows which probably already knew and had proper patched drivers for it. We can all but wonder why, but my guess isn't that there is some sloppy dev there and windows is just making up for it. It all…

I believe that Linux is just a low-priority target. There are so few users on Linux that it's not worth investing in Linux support unless you specifically target Linux crowds.

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

#463

Post by pjmlp »

cyberax wrote: post #342
ThrowawayB7 wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> " 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…

Linux has won on phones (Android) and on the server side. I don't think Windows Server is seriously used for anything but Exchange/AD these days, outside of hosting specialized or legacy apps. 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 messenger…

The Linux kernel won on phones, there is hardly any GNU/Linux on a Java based userspace.

And everyone that tries to force GNU/Linux via NDK, discovers that not everything Linux is supported.

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

#464

Post by pjmlp »

monocasa wrote: post #188
tobyjsullivan wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everything I’ve seen suggests that Microsoft has entered the metaphorical private equity phase of investment in Windows. They’ve already given up any expectation of it being a viable competitor long-term and are purely focused on milking as much short-term revenue from the product as possible before it dies. I’m sure windows will continue to exist and maybe be relevant for at least a decade. But it will be in zombie/…

I think that's true for the consumer side, but I believe Micrsoft still sees value in truly owning a complete system software stack. Azure is still running on Hyper-V afaik for instance.

It does, https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/windowsosplatform/a...

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

#465

Post by npteljes »

Gaming on Linux is great. I do it on PC and my Steam Deck handheld, on my laptop, with Steam, Heroic Launcher, and sometimes plain Wine. For anti-cheat multiplayer stuff, I reboot to my Win 10 LTSC, and that's about it for my Windows usage for the last 10 years.

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

#466

Post by n_kr »

encom wrote: post #153
Hasz wrote: post #29

Steam and Ubuntu has worked really well for me, big picture mode + hdmi switch has made for a very-close-to-console experience I am playing mostly single player campaign type games (Assassins creed, RDR2, etc) which certainly improves the picture. If steam really wanted to put a knife in games on windows, it would develop an anticheat and give it away for free. That is AFAICT the only thing keeping people on windows…

I really wish there was an (k)Ubuntu-like Linux distro - apt-based, semi-annual updates, kde default or selectable - but without all the stupid Ubuntu-isms like snap and alpha quality rust coreutils and whatnot. I run Gentoo and Debian for myself, but I'd like something normie-friendly I can put on other peoples machines and not get a ton of support questions.

That is exactly Linux Mint ( https://linuxmint.com/ ) . I encourage you to give it a try. It is what I have settled on after 25 years of using linux, and trying near about every distro in existence.

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

#467

Post by adastra22 »

vintermann wrote: post #451
adastra22 wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would not at all be surprised that there are examples out there, although I don't know of them. Tying the game state to the render loop is decision made very deep in the game engine, so you'd have to do extensive modifications to change any of the mainstream engines to do something else. Not worth the effort. But a greenfield code shouldn't be perpetuating this mistake.

I can give an example. I'd heard that Super Meat Boy was hard, and it was, but it turned out, if you ran it at the 60hz it was designed for instead of 75hz, it was considerably easier. At 120hz it was unplayable. You kind of understand how the game loop is tied to the refresh rate in games like this, though. Practicing "pixel perfect" jumps must be challenging if the engine updates aren't necessarily in sync with wha…

In the model I am describing there would be whole game state updates on every tick cycle, completely decoupling the frame rate from the response latency and prediction steps.

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

#468

Post by apple1417 »

drnick1 wrote: post #442
nicce wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am having 20 fps more in Linux with 4k screen when compared to 2k in Windows. Didn’t believe my old GPU could get better over time.

I find this hard to believe. Generally speaking, games run slightly slower on Linux (that's on Arch with latest Nvidia drivers). Usually, the difference isn't really noticeable, and several rigorous benchmark show that even though average FPS is single digits lower, the standard deviation is also smaller. This may be due to Nvidia not performing as well on Linux, the worst impact I have seen is on Helldivers 2 (at le…

If you have an older game which still uses dx9, dxvk can give a decent little performance boost - even if you're running on Windows. It's kind of magical that adding a translation layer is able to improve performance.

In more modern games using dx11/12, I've always noticed a small loss like you'd expect. I haven't properly benchmarked any but I suspect a game with native Vulkan support would do pretty similarly, and might come out on top due to CPU load.

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

#469

Post by TheCoelacanth »

cheschire wrote: post #169
zamadatix wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is DRM, so there is no good answer.

The problem is anti-cheat, not DRM.

Anti-cheat is effectively the same thing as DRM. Both are just ways for the software publisher to override the user's control of their machine.

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

#470

Post by brettermeier »

ndsipa_pomu wrote: post #449
krferriter wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linux also doesn't have as good hardware support. While Linux will probably run on most hardware. It doesn't run well. Like you may just immediately give up half or more of your laptop battery life if you switch from Windows to Linux on a particular machine, even if you use a lightweight and up-to-date environment and use TLP and whatever else to tweak kernel settings. I used Linux on my personal laptops for many yea…

> Linux also doesn't have as good hardware support My experience has been that I can generally just install Linux on a machine and pretty much everything will just work straight away, but with Windows, I have to go and find the relevant Windows drivers to get things like iSCSI working.

When did you install your last Windows? Like 20 years ago?
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