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I like linux but this is stoopid.
The “quit having fun” meme is ironically becoming as cringey as the thing it is originally complaining about.
You will help the community more by telling non-Linux people why Linux gaming is better, and this meme is doing the exact opposite of it – “oh Linux can’t play some games, yada yada. But we are still better! Switch over!” – like what’s the logic of it?
What’s the purpose of this meme other than circlejerking?
Disclamer: I am a Linux user myself, started with Debian and is now using Arch Linux.
I will share some advantages I experienced in Linux gaming:
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Alt-tabbing old fullscreened games won’t mess with my monitor.
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The compatibility of Wine when it comes to some older games is wild. SimCity 4 actually crashed less when I played it on Linux.
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Better performance across the board. Granted it’s just a mere 5% difference but I will take it, why not.
Linux’s main selling point has become “It’s not Windows”. That was a boring line five years ago, but Microsoft has eagerly been trying to invent new ways to make their flagship OS worse and worse.
This meme is a cringe within cringe. The original situation is unbearable and the meme itself too. Quit laughing.
I have absolutely no problem gaming on Linux. I do have a problem with Rusty’s Retirement not letting me use my desktop while the game runs though. Nothing I can do about that one.
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Good thing I have no interest in playing online with randos (or with anyone else at all, really) or paying through the nose for AAA games full of bugs, then!
I dunno. I’ll probably get hate for this, but it’s not ready. It’s better. But Linux isn’t a good replacement for Windows yet. I love Linux. Love the customization, the *NIX filesystem makes sense, and it’s beautiful. Also no ads in my start menu!
I want to use Linux regularly, and I tried last week. It failed. Kind of miserably.
I need to pick a distro. Mint and Pop_OS were consensus recommendations.
Try mint: Installing dual boot alongside windows was beautiful. But no internet connection, says cable is unplugged (it’s not). Realize I downloaded an earlier version (20). Get the most recent version, and problem resolved. It’s kind of odd to me that even a pretty recent version wouldn’t support my adapter, but whatever. I tried to update and install Nvidia drivers: update fails because dependencies were not installed. Okay… Why not prompt me to install them? Why make me apt-get all the dependencies by hand? I don’t expect handholding, but some things should be. If I NEED something as a pre-req for what I’m trying to do, queue it up!
Fuck it. Let me try Pop_OS, instead - that has some gaming chops, right? Dual boot was more challenging to stand up, but it all worked. Nice. Fire up game: get ~20 fps drop compared to windows (108 from 130) with the same settings. I don’t want to troubleshoot the performance hit. It should just work. I want a tool not a project.
Never mind if you want HDR support. That seems to vary by distro. Variable refresh rate also seemed to be spotty from what I read in gaming distro recommendations. ALSO, do you need UEFI support? RIP. Enjoy toggling that on and off when you have to jump back and forth between Windows and Linux. Nvidia driver support I chalk up to those arseholes only now starting to open source some things.
And I don’t care that you were able to run everything fine. You had a flawless experience: great. Love that for you. I didn’t. I’m not a computer novice - I know to Google shit and how to implement it. I remember trying to fuck around with Ubuntu back in 2002.
I’m gonna continue trying to stand up Linux for everyday use because I love Linux and I want to use it, but it’s pretty clear that even as someone that wants to use Linux. I’ve been trying to switch to Linux every few years for decades. It’s still far short of being ready for average users.
This comment is tough because in its wrongness, it reveals a greater problem with Linux gaming. I think you’re right that it’s probably not ready outside of SteamOS. But it’s not correct to say it’s not ready in general. They are several distros that have all the latest features for modern gaming, the issue is you weren’t recommended even one of them. Pop_OS is currently outdated since they are working on their new desktop and mint is on the Ubuntu LTS version meaning they are both significantly behind. The community needs to take that into account when recommending things. That’s the reason I only recommend Bazzite. Cause it’s the closest to a SteamOS experience.
thanks, your objective experiences are wrong too
Wrong? Is this about me using the word wrongness? In retrospect it was poor word choice but I did not mean to offend. I just meant that the situation is more complicated than what OP may have initially thought. You know what this explains the downvotes.
Shouldn’t Arch be the recommended gaming distro? Not because any focus on gaming but because it is the distro SteeamOS is based on?
I will check out Bazzite over the weekend. Someone told me about Pop OS but this seems less of a tinkering hassle
I appreciate your comment! I’ll take a look at Bazzite. How does it do with everyday tasks? Any other distros you’d recommend?
If what I said was so wrong, I feel even more like there’s a fragmentation issue with Linux (or something). This is especially true if some of the most well known distros have issues with gaming. It only fuels my urge to make a table of features for each distro and then evaluate pros and cons of what distro has what. But distro choice shouldn’t matter outside of UI, pre-installed programs, and maybe package management.
I was just super bummed that I didn’t have one of the perfect experiences that I had seen so many people talking about lately.
Honestly Bazzite does great with pretty much everything I’ve had it do. Some things were difficult in the beginning (I’ve been on it since nearly the beginnimg), but these days everything just works. It’s really matured. I’d also like to make an honorable mention for VanillaOS which would be my second pick for general stuff and my number one for development and sysadmin.
Distro choice really shouldn’t matter but unfortunately not all systems are created equal. There’s tradeoffs to everything. What you get by having the latest features you sacrifice in compatibility with older hardware. The stability benefits you get from waiting update packages may cause you to miss out on needed performances improvements or bug fixes. Tradeoffs to everything. Immutable distros handle most of those problems fairly elegantly, but lose out somewhat when it comes to ease of package installation.
I hope in the future you get to have a perfect experience friend.
Hey! Sorry you had these bad experiences.
My setup is on Debian
testingand is documented on this blog post: https://blog.c10l.cc/09122023-debian-gamingI don’t have an Nvidia card but other than that, this should give you a head start, including virtual surround on headphones if that’s your thing!
I promise it’s not a lot of work and I tried to make it all easy to follow (feedback welcome though!).
If you decide to give it a go, let me know how it went!
Thanks, I’ll take a look!
Maybe, but as someone who spent a summer school breaks worth of time in 2002 getting drivers for a Nvidia GeForce 2 card to run under Mandrake (oh the kernel panics…) to play counter-strike 1.X on wine… It’s come a long fucking way.
I use Debian for everyday work and on my private machine nowadays and struggle with the shitty experience of windows when helping someone out now and then. Granted, I don’t have much time for games these days, and often fire up the PS for that, but I feel experience can vary as long as you know what you want and manage expectations.
What e-sports have kernel level anti-cheat? Isn’t it just the crap published by Riot? I know both CS and Dota 2 work on Linux, I’m pretty sure you can get Overwatch 2 running. You can’t exactly play Smash on a Windows PC either, but I think the other major fighting games like Tekken and Street Fighter work. Are there any other serious contenders for a major esport I’m just forgetting?
Personally, I see incompatibility with kernel-level anti-cheat as a feature rather than a limitation.
People can still cheat without involving any software on their PC because the game needs to display something to the user (which can be analyzed by another device, either intercepting the stream before sending it along to the monitor or even by using a camera to grab the pixels from the monitor, if there’s encryption used on the signal to prevent mitm). And it needs to accept input from the user, which another device connected to the device analysing the display can adjust to improve aim, prevent friendly fire, or just auto shoot when you’re pointed at a target. You could even write a full bot using that.
On the other hand, kernel level anti-cheat can be an attack vector to get into your machine in a way that existing malware detection will have a hard time detecting. Kernel modification is the level rootkits work at and an arbitrary code execution flaw could mean your hardware is forever compromised, or at least anything with flashable firmware storage (especially if that firmware also implements the flash capabilities, since it could then add its own code to any new firmware you try to flash).
I just don’t play many multiplayer games these days to avoid the cheating. And if I do get back into multiplayer games, I’ll either do it on a console where I don’t care as much about the kernel getting exploited or I’ll play a game where the servers are managed in a way that cheaters will get banned because an admin can see what they are doing.
It’s just the usual “AAA” suspects
Valorant Battlefield 2042 Rainbow Six League
Even CS technically if you play competitive on faceit, which is still pretty dumb.
There’s plenty that actually work though, even with anticheat: https://areweanticheatyet.com
Anti cheat preventing gaming on Linux is honestly an outlier at this stage. It just means the devs don’t want to deal with working with an additional OS which several other devs and valve itself has shown is not a major issue anymore. Both EAC and BattleEye have had linux userspace clients for years, and both support WINE now.
Also because they probably can’t convince linux users to install a kernel level anti cheat as if that isn’t rootkit spyware lol. Akmod and dkms devs would probably laugh if Riot tried such a thing.
Steam deck has entered the chat.
Legit Steam Deck has me almost convinced to switch my desktop to Linux
It successfully convinced me to switch over.
I’m buying a new laptop to test out a Linux environment and make sure all my shit works and everything is backed up, then I’ll port it to my desktop.
I don’t even own one and it convinced me.
I still rely on Windows for a few important things (namely a Club Penguin Singleplayer Client that I’m not sure works on Linux), but I absolutely will switch to Linux as soon as I’m fully ready to take the leap.
Debian seems like a nice distro (am I the only one who calls it “deebian”?)
Only way to find out is to try it. Something like Club Penguin shouldn’t give you much trouble especially if you use a launcher like Lutris.
I heard Houdini has a Linux version. I might try that out, especially since it does have ActionScript 3 support (which Club Penguin started using in 2011)
what’s the club penguin client called?
It’s just CPSC. It requires a very specific version of XAMPP to be installed (the latest version won’t work).
I would never install a rootkit on my system to play a video game anyway.
I’m quite sad as a VR and HDR gamer because I really do want to switch. I have a steam deck, it works great for flatscreen gaming, but general HDR support across the linux ecosystem is apparently lacking and my headset manufacturer told me that they don’t support linux and couldn’t until the VR ecosystem they rely on supports it
I’m all up in that VR and sad the way it’s been treated.
Except a lot of anti cheat now supports Linux. Destiny 2 doesn’t run on Linux only because Bungie refuses to allow it, their AC supports Linux just fine now
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there is also other games that dont run on linux
Roblox (sober works which is a workaround),Fortnite (Tim Sweeney hates linux from what i heard),and more
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true but ngl linux has a low market share but its slowly growing tho
Unfortunately there is a lack of awareness how Microsoft treats Windows for desktop PCs and notebooks and how the future strategy looks like. Otherwise many people would move away faster.
Hmm how about the non tech savvy
They should listen to the tech savvy.
agree
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True
Exactly this, the community has proven it will put the effort to make it work, and a lot of things that don’t still are because the companies resist it intentionally
I hope steam can fix big picture mode with nvidia. It’s sooo slow.
That’s nvidias burdon. But I’m sure RedHat/Canonical will coach them to an ideal outcome.
If it’s not open source then it’s an advertisement not an esport
If someone goes to host a tournament and they can’t choose the patch or modify it then it’s not an even playing field between organizers. Think like 2 people go to host on consecutive weekends and there’s a patch between them now the person who hosted first has an unfair advantage in game quality as the players know how to play it
Also if the studio/publisher is hosting an event it’s just an advertisement
What? So if a sports federation changes the rules all independently organized events are disadvantaged? By that logic the Olympics are just an advertisement for the sports not a competition, as the federation usually don’t change rules 6 months prior.
Nope, the leagues are allowed to have different rules
Sports are open source, for instance not every football competition has to use blue cards or a competition made a patch to use blue cards…depending how you want to view it
I remember seeing someone in a comments section say why bother use linux for gaming bro got destroyed by the replies lol he also called linux users ekittens 💀
Mfing world of goo 2 offers an appimage file instead of a flatpack, so I have to monkey around with the console or lutris to get it to work on steamdeck.
I just want to play my puzzle game, not puzzle how to play my game. Ah well
The sheer power of instantly switching desktops in Linux makes the windows user afraid.
But I have seen a lot of old windows heads look at Linux for gaming performance where Microsoft is failing them with bloatware such as copilot.
I don’t think the rootkit anti cheats would ever work to a level windows games developers want it to on Linux though.
It doesn’t matter to me if games that use rootkit anticheat don’t work on Linux. I would never install anything that requires a rootkit.
Anticheat will have to just come from other methods that people will also hate.
Imagine, for example, if they required a form of government issued ID and the account was tied to you specifically. Despite privacy nightmare that it is (plus other issues, especially around globally accessed games), bans would have significantly larger impact if they’re tied to a real-world identity.
Yeah, AC overall is very anti OSS philosophies
Personally haven’t encountered a game that wouldn’t run, so as far as I’m concerned it runs anything. I’m not going to shed any tears over Fortnite.
Weirdly enough, the only game I tried to play that didn’t run was this random Indy game. Didn’t even have fancy graphics, it was one step up from macromedia flash games
The AAA games I’ve played are fine on Linux. Baulders Gate, No Mans Sky, Fallout 76, Cyberpunk 2077, Crusader Kings III.
Fun fact, the Steam Deck discord has subcommunities designed for indie developers to group with Deck-owning volunteers; since not all indie devs own a Steam Deck, they can take a look at preview builds and inform the devs about any particular issues.
It’s just too bad that Riot seems so inherently against supporting Linux. I still enjoy playing ARAMs for watching YouTube on the side and the occasional Val session. Obviously for Val I can just boot over but I do play league about daily.
Inb4 “just don’t play league, it’s bad anyway” yeah thanks, solid solution
The good thing about Valorant is you can just play (the better) Counter Strike instead and it doesn’t try to install a rootkit. I guess for LoL you could play one of the alternatives too, but I don’t know if any if them are good. They aren’t my thing.
Val was one of the reasons I still dual boot Win10 (plus VR gaming), but now that it released on PS5, I’d rather just relearn the game for controller.
I’ve been experimenting recently and while most games run fine and VRR & HDR & Multimonitor somewhat work after some experimenting & tweaks I still have problems with a few games.
Some recent examples would be Noita stuttering and running in slow motion. Getting anything from Ubisoft running (when it does run it runs great though). And modding is very hit & miss.
If Dual Boot with windows (especially if running Bitlocker) wasn’t such a PITA I would likely use Linux as my main OS.
