I remember when Proton launched it was like magic playing games like Doom and Nier Automata straight from the Linux Steam client with excellent performance. I do not miss the days of having the Windows version of Steam installed separately.
AFAIK Doom runs natively
If I as an older person would like to start using linux, where would you recommend to start? Is there an easy guide I can follow on how to use linux?
I’ll recommend NobaraOS. It comes with everything set up out-of-the box and you can change interface to Windows or macOS style.
DO NOT SWITCH, until you’ve found that every software you use has a Linux version… Or an alternative which works on Linux as well as for you.
ALSO DO NOT SWITCH if you have the 30 or 40 series NVIDIA cards. Or any NVIDIA card for that matter.
YouTube channel recommendations - The Linux Experiment, Tech Hut, Gardiner Bryant (old videos, he just makes Steam Deck content now)
ALSO DO NOT SWITCH if you have the 30 or 40 series NVIDIA cards. Or any NVIDIA card for that matter.
Why? I’ve got a 3060, and it’s running perfectly under Mint. It’s worked on the half a dozen or so other distros I’ve live booted too.
If I had to guess OP is probably talking about DLSS 3+ which is not supported on Linux at the moment. And what other reason is there to buy an Nvidia 30 or 40 series card if not for that?
Anything that uses CUDA for a start
I had issues with my 4060 on the latest mint, but everything worked fine on Ubuntu 23.04. Everything can be fixed but Ubuntu worked out of the box.
Honestly, your question will get a ton of different answers because it’s so open to people’s preferences. It’s like asking “I want to start using a car, which one should I buy?” There will be so many different answers that it’s practically useless, from people recommending a toyota aygo since it’s cheap, easy and reliable to people recommending a Abrams tank “because it can handle everything”.
imo, try Linux Mint or Ubuntu since they are accessable and bring most software out of the box. But it’s up to you, you cannot really lose when picking a distro.
Linux Mint or wait for SteamOS
or wait for SteamOS
good luck with that
As noob, who is not interested in learning the core of linux, but only want it to just work, I would recommend the new openSuse slowroll (based on own experience with tumbleweed which should in theory be less stable than slowroll) and for apps I recommend going for flathubs. I’m not sure if slowroll already released.
As a fellow older gamer who is also technical, I’m using Fedora with KDE, and I install the Steam client and the Bottles app for non-Steam games.
If you’re not technical, then I would suggest something like Linux Mint or Ubuntu, but KDE gives you the closest experience to a Windows desktop regardless of which version of Linux you’re using (vs Gnome).
But as others have said, it doesn’t really matter (for the most part) which version of Linux you use, it really comes down to using Steam and Bottles for the game support.
If you go down this route, even as a noob, whatever tech issues you may run into, it will likely be easier to find command line interface [CLI] solutions that you can copy and paste into your terminal aka console.
I know it seems extra and harder because it looks like something a hacker would do. But telling someone where to click a mouse over and over again is so much harder than “copy this into a terminal app, and send back the output”
Linux Mint is often touted as the most similar looking GUI to windows, so if you want Linux, but looking like windows that might be your best bet. You will find many guides for how to install Linux. If you want to just try it out first (and not just overwrite windows), you’ll need to free up some disk space and create an empty partition to install Linux on.
Linux mint is just nice to deal with. I distro-hopped to see what was out there but I came back to mint. It plays my games and runs my AI and works with whatever old garbage i plug in without needing to download shifty drivers from a shifty site like with windows.
Cool could this be an engine that would allow someone using DamnSmallLinux to get better frame rates?
Proton is not an engine, it’s a compatibility layer and thus would decrease performance compared to native. However, sometimes it’s still faster on Linux because it has less overhead.
Iam using a Laptop with a thunderbolt connected gtx1070. Does someone have experience or tips using linux and gaming with a setup like that. That and (solidworks) are the last reasons i didn’t switch already.
Thunderbolt support in Linux is shit. I tried similar (but with an AMD card) and it was problem after problem when it came to the Thunderbolt stuff.
Thats sad to hear.
It really is. I want to use a laptop and dock with a good GPU to keep costs/power, etc down but damn its hard on Linux to do so.
because @clegko mentions shit support :( , maybe look at the framework laptop for your next upgrade? they are doing some stuff with replaceable parts, and the newest one even swappable gpu’s.
Sadly my current laptop is kinda new (half a year) and I searched way to long, because I have a weird taste. (I am used to hardware mouse buttons, so thinkpads are mostly the only option. I also dislike the odd haptic gummy feeling of premium thinkpads, which only some models don’t have (for example T490s, T14sG1 and G2) or the Yoga X1 series which is aluminum, which I gladly found a nice deal of the 2019 model.
This search went on for about a year. :O
lol i was playing WoW on wine when most people here were in the fecal exchange phase
please tell me how valve saved gaming
Congratulations, you played the only Windows game that consistently scored Platinum rankings on Wine’s AppDB in the mid to late 2000’s.
If you went past the tedious install process and didn’t mind the lack of Vsync on OpenGL, WoW ran like a dream on Linux and could actually pull higher framerates than on Windows.
Valve definitely deserve credit. No other games publisher has contributed as much to the Linux gaming community as them, and they did it because they perceived Microsoft as an existential threat to their storefront.
lol i was playing WoW on wine when most people here were in the fecal exchange phase
Then just like me you can remember how much harder it used to be.
please tell me how valve saved gaming
No need to be a snarky dick you know.
lol i was just anticipating the fanboys.
wow was literally wine wow.exe
Jesus Christ the losers in this sub
And I honestly love valve for taking wine which is an impressive project on it’s own and making it even better.
Faster than Windows? Is that based upon that one post with the single hardware configuration that used proton optimisations to basically calculate less in game? The one that can’t be replicated because of missing info?
Gee, I wonder why calculating less improves performance.
Next you going to tell me lowering the render distance also improves fps…
Valve literally went “you know what fuck the profits we need off Windows” and they did what nobody else has done before.
I’m not sure how Valve is seen to forfeit any Windows related profit.
They are still thoroughly supporting Windows. A Windows gaming system will have Steam on it, and most gamers still prefer Steam while on Windows.
When Windows 8 happened with the Microsoft store, Valve saw the writing on the wall for the eventual problems they would face, and did SteamOs and SteamBoxes. However, not much skin off their back, as they didn’t “bet the company” or anything. It then pretty much let those efforts die off when the Microsoft Store wasn’t quite the imminent existential threat it looked to be. However, the Xbox-ification of the Windows ecosystem may prove to be a more imminent and dire threat now that Microsoft realized that “hey, we actually do have a gaming brand that enjoys some popularity and is basically just a Windows box already”.
So Valve saw that the Nintendo Switch was such a hit and extrapolated to PC space. They could have had a horribly awkward device running Windows, which has forever sucked at serving this form factor and is not even vaguely amenable to ‘total controller control’. However they decided to revive the SteamOS efforts since it was moderately close to enable them to actually deliver a pad-first UI for a handheld, with Valve branding front and center rather than Microsoft.
So the closest I can see to that claim is that Steam Deck opted out of supporting a handful of games (that also likely don’t work well on the relatively low end specs anyway) rather than trying to make a Windows hand-held work against all the design points of Windows.
I think the implication is that pursuing Linux development has a high opportunity cost, that, if they just bought into Windows as the foundation, they could’ve used that time to build HL3 or whatever
It’s reinventing the wheel, kinda
Then you’d have a windows based steam deck. Valve got themselves into the mobile market by doing this. I imagine the Linux ecosystem will prove better for continuing mobile gaming in the long run.
Also, there are multiple scripts for HL3 and Portal3. They have all been rejected, considered not up to par as a third game in each series.
What profits did Valve say that to exactly? They were shipping a device that didn’t have an existing OS that worked for it. I know companies have been shipping handheld PCs since the 90s but they never took off because the experience of Windows on a mobile device sucks, full stop.
I’m very happy they did this and it will help lots of things, but it’s about as altruistic as Apple making WebKit open source. A massive boon to the community that did help everyone, but the goal wasn’t altruism. It was to create a software solution where one didn’t exist to improve a for-profit device.
Plus, not having to pay Microsoft for OEM Windows licenses helps too.
You are looking too short term. Valve has been very concerned about Microsoft for a long time (maybe a decade now?). They have traditionally been dependent on the Windows platform while Microsoft has a competing built-in store and the Xbox product line. This means that they are dependent on one of their biggest competitors. If Microsoft wasn’t concerned about anti-competitive legal action they probably would have smited them already.
Especially with macOS dying for gaming and iOS having no third-party stores they have made multiple pushes into Linux as a platform where they don’t depend on Microsoft. While the Steam Deck has been very successful, they have already blown money of failed attempts in the past and running Windows on the Steam Deck would likely not be a huge cost (bulk licenses are cheap and they are spending a lot of money on Linux development).
So whether or not they are making more or less money in the short term doesn’t appear to be Valve’s motivation. Their primary motivation is to unlock themselves from Microsoft, whether or not that is best for profits right now.
being on the hook for any license fees cuts into yacht decor. linux sets them free except required source releases. everyone benefits
https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Compiling_under_Linux
plus, more yacht decor
I agree but I don’t think that contradicts anything I said. This is definitely a long term plan to end up with a gaming focused OS that people can use instead of Windows to reduce their reliance on MIcrosoft. It’s definitely a long term decision.
However in the short term, a Steam Deck with Windows would have been far less exciting. Developing WebKit also was clearly a plan for a much better web landscape too and cost far more than Safari ever generated until it was in iOS.
I only take issue with this being cast as some altruistic act, which it isn’t. It’s just one of those situations where the goals of the community and the company align, because the company is very focused on delivering a good user experience above all else. This is a great move for everyone involved and Valve deserves praise for that. But that’s no reason to be naive to how this greatly benefits them.
Imagine how much else humanity could do if they said that. Even just once more, fuck the profits, let’s give people a 4 day work week with 6 hours per day.
Windows too busy using those cpu cycles to gather your usage metrics for sale to third parties.
Somewhat true, but the truth is that the CPU scheduler on Windows is just awful. It literally wastes performance because it doesn’t optimize instructions as efficiently as schedulers on other OSes.
Without going into details, we ported an application that I worked with that did complex scientific calculations to Linux. All the calculations code was done in C and C++ so it was 99.9% OS agnostic. We consistently got at least a 50% performance increase when running on Linux as opposed to Windows. We tested just about every edition of Windows from Windows 8/Server 2013 to Windows 10/Server 2019. The version of Windows that did best was Windows 7 and Linux was 50% faster. All the other editions were slower.
And the distro of Linux didn’t matter much. A few percent difference here and there, but all of them were astonishingly faster than Windows.
The only similar issue I faced seemed to be due to multithreading. I don’t know enough about the underlying architecture to point my finger at a specific ‘thing’ but I was beating my head against the wall seeing the same 50% drop in performance. The one way I was able to get comparable performance was if I limited the cores on the machine to 1. Windows was only a couple percent slower in that case. When I upped the cores windows couldn’t keep up. The weird part is that the utilization in task manager looked like all the cores were being utilized but the performance certainly didn’t reflect that. I was finally able to get the program manager off my ass but how they handled the situation really soured me on staying with the company so I left, feel bad for the next person to get hit with “get this application off Linux so we can be a 100% windows client shop” garbage.
They contracted the companies developers at over 600k for six months of support, I was dedicated to the effort for a year, and the CIO apparently instructed a PM that nothing else mattered and if it didn’t work I was personally responsible. Like MFers, I didn’t design the hardware, operating system, or the application, I’m doing everything I know how, how exactly is this shit my fault?!
Surely Microsoft knows this.I guess that is why they have gaming mode.
Oh they do, but I don’t know what the real reason it stays that way. The only things I could come up with is that they simply don’t care, backwards compatibility (that one doesn’t really make sense to me), or finally that they can’t come up with a better version due to the mathematically good ones already exist in Unix and Linux systems under the GPL.
I’ll be honest, I can’t see that last reason stopping them, but who knows.
This article really shows the differences:
https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/hpc/POV-ray-on-Quad-Xeon-and-Opteron-579/
It’s a bit old now, but the point still stands. I’m sure the schedulers across all systems have improved since, but it’s a fact the Unix/Linux systems are still better and more efficient.
TWD (Total Windows Death)
But as a person who uses both windows and linux, Windows is a super stable os if you do some powershell tweaks (for bloat, ads, updates) and you can also bring the best things from the linux world like package managers, stability etc.
Windows can run all games and i dont have to worry if a game is going to have proton problems.
Windows can run all games
Tell that to some of the games I want to play. Splinter Cell - Blacklist, I’m looking at you.
It can run all the telemetry and jankyass untested updates, too
I would have know this when i said this on Lemmy + linux community. I would actually consider my phone running android/ios to be a greater threat to my privacy than my gaming pc
With a powershell tweaks you never have to worry about those broken updates.
I run grapheneOS for that reason, though that’s besides the point. One thing being bad doesn’t make another less bad. And you’d still have to worry about janky updates, you’re just minimizing the risk, and mitigating the risk of bad updates by putting in a delay and only doing critical and security updates comes with a compromise to increasing vulnerability.
Bad OS is bad ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Just like Linux! But sadly Windows doesn’t deliver 3rd party backdoors and viruses automatically yet.
…yeah, Windows prefers delivering 1st party backdoors and viruses.
Jokes aside, what are you referring to with that, where are you pulling your packages from not be vetted?Thanks, that’s actually valid!
I think one of the commenters there said it best:It’s almost like the maintainers who curate a distribution repository have an important role preventing such a thing…
Repositories where anyone can release packages to the end-users may be convenient for developers who want more control over what the user gets, but it has a host of negative consequences for the user. It always ends in malware and anti-features getting distributed eventually.
And it looks like it’s being handled decently by Canonical. I don’t like Snap, but I gotta say they’re doing a good job overall
I still remember having to use Ubuntu back in 2007.
To cut a long story short, I used to have a crappy Packard Bell PC that was weirdly partitioned (the main C:\ partition named Programs had 20GB and D:\ named Data had 120GB allocated.)
A (obviously now former) friend at school who thought he was hot-shit with PCs nagged and pressured me into acquiring a copy of Norton PartitionMagic and merging the two partitions. Completely totalled the Windows XP installation and because I didn’t have any recovery media, I was forced to wipe everything and install Linux.
Gaming on Ubuntu back in 2007 was a nightmare. Only thing I managed to run that wasn’t some shitty FOSS game that looked like it was made for the Net Yaroze was WoW, and even then actually installing the damn game was a nightmare where I had to resort to literally copying files from each install CD because actually running the installer from the CD itself resulted in failure by Disc 3. Every other game I tried to run through Wine either refused to boot at all, had bugs that would soft-lock my PC, or put out 0.01 frames per second due to lack of OpenGL support.
Linux has evolved by leaps and bounds but still has some way to go before you could use it as a gaming OS. Hopefully the Steam Deck encourages more developers to support Linux.
Of course, some devs have turned their back on Linux, such as post-Fortnite Epic Games.
Only thing I managed to run that wasn’t some shitty FOSS game that looked like it was made for the Net Yaroze
I was going to say this feels like supertuxkart slander, but I looked up the release date and realised that it probably wasn’t released yet
Was more Tux Racer slander than anything else.
Also, Frets on Fire, which was a much shittier attempt at creating a freeware clone of Guitar Hero. Thankfully Clone Hero came out over a decade later.
Friends don’t have friends use Norton or McAfee software.
Windows will die if it cannot be pirated.
Ah, good times.
but [Linux] still has some way to go before you could use it as a gaming OS
maybe a nitpick, but I think it’s more accurate to say it has some way to go before everyone could use it as a gaming OS. many many people can use it as is right now. All the games I play work great on Linux so far, I removed windows from my gaming PC months ago.
if you’re already into Linux and you don’t care about competitive games with anti cheat, then Linux is ready to be your gaming OS right now imo
Yup. I’ve played everything I’ve wanted to play on Linux with only one minor stumble getting ea launcher to work, and it was literally just selecting a different version of proton than I had as default.
It amazes me how many people come to the Linux communities on lemmy just to tell people that Linux isn’t good enough and we have to still use windows…
It amazes me how many people come to the Linux communities on lemmy just to tell people that Linux isn’t good enough and we have to still use windows…
People, or “People”?
Between the Steam client and the Bottles app (for games not on Steam) I play every game I ever wanted to on Linux. I don’t even have a dual boot setup anymore.
I’ve overall had a decent experience playing games on my Steam Deck. A lot of incompatible games but the ones that not only do work but are verified have shocked me greatly.
Valve have single handedly evolved Linux gaming by leaps and bounds.
Absolutely! I play mainly two games. DayZ and Eve Online. Both run way faster on my Debian 12 rig compared to running on Windows 11.
Granted, it took a while to figure out how to self-sign the Nvidia driver (secure boot). But once that was sorted it was smooth sailing.
Proton has better 32 bit compatibility than windows itself
I’m just sad I have an Nvidia GPU 😢
I’m using an Nvidia GPU on my POP!_OS Gaming PC it runs mostly without issue. The few times there has been driver problems, there’s been an easy fix on System76’s homepage soon after
What is wrong with Nvidia gpus with regard to Linux? I have no issues with mine.
The nvidia drivers can be a pain, and some distributions don’t care about nVidia’s support schedule and push a kernel update and nVidia will no longer compile.
Also, the fact that a kernel update means the nvidia driver must recompile is a pain.
I’m holding out hope for the open drivers (they basically moved all the proprietary bits to run on the GPU) to eventually mean that the premiere nVidia experience is already integrated at some point in the future.
Oooooor you can use in-tree nvidia driver
Nouveau? I’ve not exactly had a very reliable experience, and as far as I can see Nvidia doesn’t really help to ensure that works in a timely way or a reliable way.
I’d rather shit in my hands and clap for entertainment
Because Nvidia is a bunch of dicks.
It’s trouble is in that it severely lacks features that it have on Windows, especially newest popular stream add-ons like voice and background blurring, troubles with Ray tracing and dlss, and most infamous problem is that Nvidia drivers absolutely would break your system updates eventually, and it can break your whole system Edit: source: i have laptop with Nvidia gpu
Lack of open source drivers and junk support from Nvidia.
I’m talking about the nvidia drivers themselves, not some hacked together drivers by a third party that barely work.
I talk not about hacked together drivers(GPL-shim) by a third party(Nvidia) that barely works too
Nouveau drivers are not made by Nvida? What are you even talking about? They are third party drivers that are not even fully functional because Nvida will not open source their own drivers for linux.
I am saying that Nvidia here is third party. Nvidia is not kernel developer.
Same. Luckily it’s gtx980 so it’s not I bought it recently. Next gpu shall be amd
I’ve got a GTX980ti, which runs fine with my POP_OS setup, but I’ll be switching to AMD for my next GPU as well. If for no other reason than to not support Nvidia.
