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) parsing files to display metadata before listing them, mysterious memory leaks not reflected in task manager processes.
I installed Linux Mint. While it didn't just work (TM), and I had to go into recovery mode to install Nvidia drivers, it worked well enough. I can run Overwatch via Steam and pull comparable FPS to Windows (500 FPS on a 3090 with dips into the 400s). Memory usage is stable and at a very low baseline.
It is nice to come back to Linux, and with games I don't really have a need to run Windows anymore.
The only thing windows has focused on has been dark patterns to force users towards cloud and figuring out more and more ways to collect data to sell ads.
I’m not naive, I know a ton of huge enterprises still run huge fleets of windows “servers” but I still find it hilarious that a supposedly serious server OS would default to showing you the weather and ads in the start menu.
> The only thing windows has focused on has been dark patterns to force users towards cloud and figuring out more and more ways to collect data to sell ads.
And backwards compatibility.
They're really good at it. And I'd say that's the reason Windows is still dominant. There's this unfathomably long tail of niche software that people need or want to run.
They are getting worse at this. I bought a Surface Laptop Studio 2 two years ago. Windows Mail and Windows Calendar, two nice minimalist programs from Microsoft, were actively killed in this time. If you open them, it will redirect you to a new ad-laden Outlook app. If you somehow get a workaround going through the registry, they still fuck with it because the (incredibly simple) UI somehow has network dependencies.
I use MailSpring for email and no longer have a native calendar on my fairly expensive laptop from Microsoft. This is actually what drove me over the edge to switch to Linux for my workstation. Unclear exactly what I'll do for my next laptop but it won't be from MS.
That's not a lack of backwards compatibility, that's an app purposefully self-destructing itself!
What I'm talking about is, if your widget factory uses some app to calibrate all the widgets which was written by a contractor in 2005, it probably still works fine on Windows 11.
That detail is definitely true, I just think that in practice the frustration with behavior like this from MS will trickle down(/up/whatever direction). Like the benefit of Windows as a regular user or power user was also that after the pain of dealing with whatever shit MS decided, you could configure it more-or-less however you wanted and it would not change. It will be delayed in the corporate world but it will happen.
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 years. No amount of tweaking could make it perfectly smooth and have comparable battery life and cooling.
New apple-silicon Macbooks also get such good battery life and performance now that if you are switching from Windows to a Unix-y personal computer, is is increasingly hard to not say that you should go to Mac.
> 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 seems very deliberate to undermine Linux. And it's plausible given Microsoft's bottomless pockets.
So it wouldn't surprise me that these companies are actively hindering Linux compatibility. So much for a free market with open competition.
Windows has changed the kernel interface more often than Linux.
This fact alone throws this commonly held belief to the wind.
Glibc provides binary compatibility to newer versions too.
Shims exist in both, “windows compatibility layer” for example, but pulseaudio can emulate ALSA- and pipewire can emulate pulseaudio and ALSA.
It’s actually a quagmire, but I would contend that either has solid story for backwards compatibility depending on the exact lens you’re looking at. Microsoft is worse than Linux in many ways.
Microsoft sort of only wins in the closed-source, “run this arbitrary binary” race - if you totally ignore the w10/11 UWP migration that killed a lot of win32 applications, but drivers for older hardware are much more long lived under linux.
Yep! I can compile a program on Windows and expect it to work on any Windows OS from the past ~15 years that has the same CPU architecture. Linux? Each binary is more provincial. I want to try some of the tricks like MUSL though; haven't explored the space beyond default compiler options.
My favorite has to be the Windows 8 era UI disaster.
How do most people log into a server? With a high-res physical touchscreen, or remote desktop?
So let's make a whole bunch of functionality impossible to access, because you have to bump up against a non-existent edge of a windowed remote screen, and literally make the UI not fit into common server screen resolutions at the time. I don't remember if 1024x768 was the minimum resolution that worked, or the maximum resolution that still didn't work. But it was an absolute comedy case.
I want to say that with only the basic VGA display drivers installed, screen resolution was too small to even get to the settings to fix it, but it's been a while and I can't find the info to prove it.
I curious how profitable it has been for Microsoft so far. Are they making billions and billions from these dark patterns? I feel like they'd have to be making a fortune for it to be worth throwing their brand in the gutter like they have been doing.
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/revenue-extraction mode from here on.
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 kernel.
Jokes aside, this chest-thumping is incredibly ironic for those of us who lived through the 1990s-2000s. First it was, "FOSS will eliminate all proprietary software and M$ (sic) will be crushed and Bill Gates will go to the poorhouse. Hooray!" Later, it became "Well, we haven't killed proprietary software but at least Linux / LAMP and Firefox are succeeding at taking down Windows and Internet Explorer. Hooray!" Now it's "Maybe Microsoft will consider switching its kernel to Windows. Probably. Someday. Hooray?" What's the backpedaling of the 2030s going to be?
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 messengers, Zoom, various IDEs, etc.
So Linux indeed won to a large extent. Just not in the way people expected it.
I don't see that making much sense, honestly. Windows kernel is super solid and well architectured. There are thousands of drivers for every peripheral on the Earth. And I don't believe that Microsoft spends that much on kernel development to be incentivised to cut it.
If anything, they invested into the opposite: possibility to run Linux binaries on top of Windows kernel.
I disagree. I think the end of the “world revolves around Windows” era of Microsoft has been hugely beneficial to the OS. Microsoft is way less hostile to other platforms now that their main revenue source is Azure, not Windows, Visual Studio, and SQL Server licenses.
It seems like the Windows team has been freed to add features that they want rather than adding features that fit into a narrative.
WSL, pre-installing git, adding POSIX aliases to PowerShell, iPhone/Android integration, PowerShell/.net/VSCode/Edge on Mac/Linux, not making Office on Mac complete afterthought shit on purpose, etc.
I disagree that Microsoft benefits the end user. Their IoT which took over the Embedded version of Windows is completely bloated in 10 and higher. Version 7 allowed for only installing necessities where their successors force XBox and other built in forced features. Windows 11 IoT is also forcing the creation of a Microsoft account instead of allowing an local account. IoT / Embedded does not mean it is connect and often air gaped. They are also often used to host products and should not have a Microsoft account assigned.
Microsoft's standards for quality keep going down hill. Windows 11 does not even allow the moving of the task bar from the bottom of the screen. Microsoft is end user hostile just like Google.
> now that their main revenue source is Azure, not Windows, Visual Studio, and SQL Server licenses.
Funnily enough, opening their stack to Linux probably made it easier to sell licenses for everything except Windows, since now you don't have to commit to a potentially unfamiliar hosting environment. Even SQL Server runs on Linux now.
One would assume but I do wonder how much long term damage they are doing for short term gains with this drive?
I'm not a believer in "the year of linux desktop!?!!?" and all that, but it achieved a level of robustness about 5-10ish years ago that I openly encourage non technical users to give it a try. For the few people that actually did try, they did stick with it.
At this point it is Microsoft's position to lose through quality degradation rather than Linux to openly out wit. There is still a long way to go and MS could turn their boat around but they would have to stop chasing this data scrapping scheme of theirs to begin with. But how addicted are they to that cash flow? They are probably far more interested in keep share holders happy short term than customers long term and that is not a brilliant strategy if you want to have a life time of decades.
I don’t much like MS, but in their defense they are trying to sell operating systems in a market where the going out-of-pocket price is $0. The development of their competition is ad supported, community supported, or built into the price of hardware.
Turn the boat around? To where? Nobody would be willing to pay for their product even if they were to start trying to make it appealing.
None of their products have a decent moat left, and all are heavily competed. Focusing on making azure competitive while accepting it is a commodity industry with commodity margins is how they stick around. But they will be a value stock, not a growth stock. That is ok, as long as you know that is what you are.
Using Windows as a server feels like using your lounge room as a commercial kitchen. I can never shake the feeling that this isn't a serious place to do business.
I have this impression from years of using both Windows and linux servers in prod.
I wonder how much of it is to collect data and sell ads compared to just getting people to start utilizing what is now Microsoft's core resource, which is cloud services.
For them, getting you using onedrive is a (huge) step towards getting you to pay them for more storage using onedrive, and to also allowing them to use their advantage as the OS provider to get you using features that both keep you from moving away from Windows and keep you from moving to dropbox or another cloud competitor that normal consumers commonly use. For example, onedrive desktop sync tied to your Microsoft login, so you can log into a new system and have it put your preferences and files in place.
Having more data to monetize people is useful, but I would bet that they value the the lock-in of integrated services far more, as that's where they can possibly grow (by offering more services once you're less likely to leave), and growth is king.
It's the same thing Google does (and Samsung also attempts to do with their custom apps and store) with Android, but at the desktop level. Apple is able to do it for both desktop and mobile.
I don't think Windows Server has ads by default in the menu (don't remember for the weather though), the default are pretty sensible there since it's a minority OS that has to compete while desktop Windows is a monopoly free to inflict whatever it wants onto users without having to fear any kind of consequence.
> but I still find it hilarious that a supposedly serious server OS would default to showing you the weather and ads in the start menu.
In my experience thats just not true. Microsoft's client OSs like Win 11 and 10 include these consumer-oriented "features" [1] but they're not present on servet versions of Windows.
[1] I agree that the weather widget etc is annoying, even though it is easy to disable.
Goodness the file save dialog(s) on Windows - it makes it so hard to save a file into my personal space. It's unintuitive and you need to click through, I think a couple of dialog boxes before you get to 'Your Documents'.
Two things can be bad! But the GTK file picker has improved and now has thumbnails, while you can't really trust MS not to continue to damage its file picker
Office has a particularly annoying dark pattern when saving a file. It hides the regular save dialog behind a tiny button in a confusing UI embedded in the main window that is designed to misdirect the user into saving files on OneDrive.
Many other programs do still open the standard file dialog directly, but even there, the local drive amd directory hierarchy is hidden behind a folded "This Computer" node in the tree view that is itself below the fold most of the time.
While I agree that Microsoft has not been the greatest at delivering customer-friendly stuff, and has built in a lot of revenue streams to their (mostly not-paying) users like Bing and cloud upsells, I think that your take is overly cynical to the software.
Windows 11 has some really legitimate improvements that make it a really solid OS.
It’s not surprising that Microsoft isn’t focusing on Windows as a server OS as they don’t expect anyone to deploy it in a new environment. They know it has already lost to Linux and that’s why .NET Core is on Linux and Mac, why WSL exists, etc. Azure is how Microsoft makes revenue from servers, Windows Server is a legacy product.
The whole “server OS has the weather app installed” thing is pretty irrelevant since enterprises have their own customized image building processes and don’t ever run the default payload. It’s really not worth Microsoft’s
time to customize the server version knowing that their enterprise customers already have.
Microsoft knows the strength of Windows lies in the desktop environment for workstations, casual laptop use, and gaming systems, and it is excellent at all those things. They’ve delivered a whole lot of really nice and generally innovative features to those spaces. Windows has really nice gaming features, smartphone integrations including with iPhones, even doing some long-overdue work on small details like notepad and the command line.
I don’t find that windows has forced me to cloud or done anything like that.
> Microsoft knows the strength of Windows lies in the desktop environment for workstations, casual laptop use, and gaming systems, and it is excellent at all those things.
Sure, Microsoft seems to have some great developers behind Windows and those developers are improving the underlying operating system. The trouble is that Microsoft is also using Windows to push their other products. Coming from a Linux environment, I find that pushiness unbearably crass.
On top of that, Windows' main strength has always been application support. I don't even know if that is relevant anymore with commercial developers shifting to subscription models (for native applications) and web based applications (for everything else). The latter makes Windows nearly irrelevant. The former makes open source more desirable to at least some people.
I've also noticed that things appear to flipping when comparing Linux to Windows. I can take a distribution that is intended for desktops, install it, and expect almost everything to work out of the box. It doesn't seem to matter whether it is printer or video drivers or pre-installed applications. Meanwhile, I'm finding that I have to copy drivers to a USB drive and drop to the command line to get something as simple as a trackpad or touchscreen to work under Windows. Worse yet, I've had something similar happen with network adapters. Short of bypassing the OOBE, a Windows installation will not complete without a working network adapter and Internet connection. Similar tales can be told for applications: there is a never ending stream of barriers to climb to get software to install ("look, we care about privacy since we are asking you half a dozen questions about what you're willing to share," while ignoring dozens of other settings that affect your privacy) or prevent advertising from popping up. You don't deal with that nonsense under Linux.
I don't know what the future of Windows is. I don't much care, as long as I get to use the operating system I want to use in peace. That seems to be much more true today than it did 20 years ago.
It was interesting to read your comment and find myself disagreeing with every single point you made. I'm not invested enough to argue about anything of it, it's really just a meta observation that stood out to me: Obviously it's still possible to have substantially different points of view on even the most basic aspects. I guess that's a good thing, at least it feels kinda reassuring to me. We could both be right, and the truth is probably somewhere in the middle.
> I don’t find that windows has forced me to cloud
Have you tried performing a fresh Home install recently without command line hacks? It's now impossible for a normal person to set up Windows without creating a MS account, forcing them to dip a toe into their cloud service connectivity and facilitate taking the next step towards paying them. They don't "force" you, but they sure will nag you incessantly about it, plopping that shit in Explorer, the Start Menu, tossing One Drive in the menubar at startup, shoving it in your face on login after a big update, etc. It's a pathetic cash grab everywhere you look.
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 affected. On Linux, a DXVK config change solves the bug.
> No real bugs beyond incorrect monitor positioning
Windows really needs to catch up with this. Multiple monitors have been a thing in Linux pretty much since the beginning of X.
Why can't I plug a Windows laptop into a docking station, and expect the screens to come up in the same order they were in last time? Why is it so hard?
> Why can't I plug a Windows laptop into a docking station, and expect the screens to come up in the same order they were in last time? Why is it so hard?
I regularly move my work Win 11 Pro laptop between three different multi-monitor (hdmi) setups, and it works flawlessly. I don't recall any problems with Win10 over many years either.
My last 2 laptops have really struggled with win10/11 multimonitor support. Explorer would often crash, taskbars would not populate, behaviors weren't consistent, taskbars would reset themselves, settings would change randomly after reboots, not including updates resetting all my settings and having no real way to disable updates cuz windows would re-enable them.
did i mention explorer would crash pretty often? like, half the time I plugged in a docking station it would crash explorer. That then reset all the settings. lol just a mess.
Pop OS! is a simple plug and play on any setup i've tried it on, over usb3 or hdmi/dpi. Works great.
> Why can't I plug a Windows laptop into a docking station, and expect the screens to come up in the same order they were in last time? Why is it so hard?
I've never seen this work correctly. My work dock breaks monitor ordering on MacOS reliably and Gnome+Wayland frequently. I don't remember if it broke for Xorg. My home monitor setup breaks mouse behavior in borderless fullscreen and libreoffice scaling on KDE+Wayland.
> and some tinkering needed for Diablo 4/Battle.net
Funnily this is the same thing I tried to do just last month, Installed CachyOS after not having Linux on my desktop for a very long time, tried installing Battle.net and just ran into too many issues and haven't come back yet (to be honest I didn't try too many avenues to fix it).
If you don't mind me asking what was the tinkering you had to do to make this work? Thanks!
CreateProcessA() on Windows is very slow. A significant portion of the perceived speedup for development tasks is that fork() takes on the order of microseconds, but creating a Windows process takes ~50ms, sometimes several times that if DEP is enabled. This is VERY painful if you try to use fork-based multiprocessing programs directly.
Interesting, I wonder why DEP would degrade process creation performance. My understanding is it's just a flag in page table entries to forbid execution, I am not sure how this could impact performance so much (except that data and code now have to be mapped separately).
I recently converted a large SVN repository to Git using git-svn.
Started on Windows. After five days it failed for some reason so I had to rerun it (forgot an author or along those lines, trivial fix). Meanwhile I looked into why it was so slow, and saw git-svn spun up perl commands like crazy.
Decided to spin up a Linux VM. After fixing the trivial issue it completed in literally a couple of hours.
Clicking through to their source, it seems true enough despite their protests.
Its not entirely built with React Native, but React Native does seem to be responsible for at least one element of the start menu that appears initially when the menu is presented.
Uh, AMD drivers have most assuredly not always not just worked. They do now, and they have for something like 10 years, but before that they were a steaming pile of locked in garbage.
not to split hairs, but I think the parent is justified in saying they “always worked” if they’ve been this good for a decade.
If I was 10 years younger than I am today, my perspective would have been that it “always worked” and at some point we have to acknowledge that there has been good work done and things are quite stable in the modern day. 10y is not a small amount of time to prove it out.
I never understood why file search is SOOO bad on windows (mac too). Its so damn slow and even feature wise I never figured out why it was so difficult to just search for files in this directory
"Everything" is another that puts the default search to shame. I've also seen people who just have a script that pumps all new files into a txt file every so often and runs bruteforce ripgrep on it, which gives instant interactive results. It's really hard to imagine coming up with a search routine that is as slow and unreliable as what ships with mainstream OS file managers.
It regressed compared to Windows 10 too - I have a folder with photos, I normally have them sorted by date taken. On windows 10 I would open the folder and they were always sorted correctly the moment I opened the folder. Maybe there was a point in time at the start there the system had to sort them for the first time but ever since they were always shown correctly the second I opened the folder. On windows 11? Every single time it opens unsorted, the photos are in some random god knows what order, and literally 10 seconds(!!!!) later they suddenly move themselves to the correct position. Every single time. That's with maybe 200 photos? On a machine with 16 cores and 64GB of ram. People coding on 16kHz chips decades ago could do this faster than whatever microsoft is doing.
I did the same, I had jumped into POP OS instead, which is also Ubuntu based, then a year back I got into EndeavourOS an Arch based distro, and have not looked back since. I use it on everything I can put Linux on.
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.
> even though you won't see the action for up to 16.67 milliseconds later
Note that this is only the case if you have vsync enabled. Without vsync you will see the action (or some reaction anyway) +2ms later instead of +16.67ms, just not the full frame. This will manifest as screen tearing though if the screen changes are big - though it is up to personal preference if it bothers you or not.
Personally i always disable vsync even my high refresh rate monitor as i like having the fastest feedback possible (i do not even run a desktop compositor because of that) and i do not mind screen tearing (though tearing is much less visible with a high refresh monitor than a 60Hz one).
> 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.
Okay I think I follow this, but I think I'd frame it a little differently. I guess it makes more sense to me if I think about your statement as "the frame I'm seeing is only 2ms old, instead of 16.67ms old". I'm still not seeing the action for 16.67ms since the last frame I saw, but I'm seeing a frame that was produced _much_ more recently than 16.67ms ago.
This is mostly like high fidelity audio equipment, or extreme coffee preparation. Waste of time for most people.
I used to play CS:Go at a pretty high level (MGE - LE depending on free time), putting me in the top 10%. Same with Overwatch.
Most of the time you're not dying in a clutch both pulling the trigger situation. You missed, they didn't, is what usually happens.
I never bothered with any of that stuff, it doesn't make a meaningful difference unless you're a top 1%.
But there's a huge number of people who play these games who THINK it does. The reason they're losing isn't because of 2ms command registrations, it's because they made a mistake and want to blame something else.
That's correct, and the most competitive multiplayer games tend to have fixed tick rates on the server, but the higher FPS is still beneficial (again, theoretically for all but the highest level of competition) because your client side inputs are sampled more frequently and your rendered frames are at most a couple ms old.
I think you're missing the point. The game could be processing input and doing a state update at 1000Hz, while still rendering a mere 60fps. There doesn't have to be any correlation whatsoever between frame rate and input processing. Furthermore, this would actually have less latency because there won't be a pipeline of frame buffers being worked on.
Tying the input loop to the render loop is a totally arbitrary decision that the game industry is needlessly perpetuating.
No, I'm explaining how most games work in practice.
You're right a game could be made that works that way. I'm not aware of one, but I don't have exhaustive knowledge and it wouldn't surprise me if examples exist, but that was not the question.
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.
On most modern engines there is already a fixed-step that runs at a fixed speed to make physics calculation deterministic, so this independence is possible.
However, while it is technically possible to run the state updates at a higher frequency, this isn't done in practice because the rendering part wouldn't be able to consume that extra precision anyway.
That's mainly because the game state kinda needs to remain locked while: 1) Rendering a frame to avoid visual artifacts (eg: the character and its weapon are rendered at different places because the weapon started rendering after a state change), or even crashes (due to reading partially modified data); 2) while fixed step physics updates are being applied and 3) if there's any kind of work in different threads (common in high FPS games).
You could technically copy the game-state functional-style when it needs to be used, but the benefits would be minimal: input/state changes are extremely fast compared to anything else. Doing this "too early" can even cause input lag. So the simple solution is just to do state change it at the beginning of the while loop, at the last possible moment before this data is processed.
Source: worked professionally with games in a past life and been in a lot of those discussions!
Doing that will increase input latency, not decrease it.
There are many tick rates that happen at the same time in a game, but generally grabbing the latest input at the last possible moment before updating the camera position/rotation is the best way to reduce latency.
It doesn't matter if you're processing input at 1000hz if the rendered output is going to have 16ms of latency embedded in it. If you can render the game in 1ms then the image generated has 1ms of latency embedded in to it.
In a magical ideal world if you know how long a frame is going to take to render, you could schedule it to execute at a specific time to minimise input latency, but it introduces a lot of other problems like both being very vulnerable to jitter and also software scheduling is jittery.
It doesn't and well programmed games won't be tied to fps that way. I'm not sure anything past 300 fps plausibly matters for overwatch even with the best monitor available.
Game has to process the input, but it also has to update the "world" (which might also involve separate processing like physics) and then also render it both visually and audio. With network and server updates in-between things get even more complex. Input to screen lag and latency is a hardcore topic. I've been diving into that on and off for the past few years. One thing that would be really sweet of hardware/OS/driver guys would be an info when the frame was displayed. There's no such thing yet available to my knowledge.
You want your minimum FPS to be your refresh rate. You won't notice when you're over it, but you likely will if you go below it.
In Counter-Strike, smoke grenades used to (and still do, to an extent) dip your FPS into a slideshow. You want to ensure your opponent can't exploit these things.
Not OP but got quite a bit of experience with this playing competitive FPS for a decade. You're right that refresh rate sets the physical truth of it, e.g. 180 FPS on a 160 Hz monitor won't give you much advantage over 160 FPS if at all. However reaching full multiples of your refresh rate in FPS – 320 in this instance, 480, and so on – will, and not only in theory but you'll feel it subjectively too. I get ~500-600 FPS in counter-strike and I have my FPS capped to 480 to get the most of my current hardware (160 Hz). Getting a 240 Hz monitor would make it smoother. Upgrading the PC to get more multiples would also.
To certain extent for online games it can be advantage (atleast it feels like it to me). AFAIK The server updates state between players at some (tick) rate when you have FPS above tick rate then the game interpolates between the states. The issue is that frames and networking might not be constantly synced so you are juggling between fps, screen refresh rate, ping and tick rate. In other words more frames you have higher the chance you will "get lucky" with latency of the game.
>
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?
I just quote the central relevant sentences of this section:
"For frames that are completed much faster than interval between refreshes, it is possible to replace a back buffers' frames with newer iterations multiple times before copying. This means frames may be written to the back buffer that are never used at all before being overwritten by successive frames."
Tying the input and simulation rates to the screen refresh rate is an old "best practice" that is still used in some games. In fact, a long time ago it was even an actual good practice.
I think it was just to show that the performance is comparable to Windows, implying that it also will be fine for games/settings where fps is in the range that does matter.
osu (music beat-clicking game) has a built-in screen frequency a/b test, and despite running on a 60hz screen I can reliably pass that test up to 240hz. It's not just having 60 frames ready per second, it's what's in those frames.
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 recently than the last frame you actually saw
Does anybody have security concerns about running games with Proton/Wine? Games already have a massive attack surface and I can imagine there are some nasty bugs lurking in the compat layer that would enable RCEs not possible on Windows. This is kind of holding me back from making the jump.
There are. But there are many more such bugs in DirectX on Windows, and it’s a much bigger target. If a national intelligence organization wants to burn a Proton zero-day on my Steam Deck, cool!
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 freaked out. No command line needed.
That being said, I just run Steam natively on NixOS and have never seen any issues. The biggest RCEs I'm worried about are Ring 0 anticheat nuking my desktop like CloudStrike.
>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.
An aside based on what you have mentioned. What the heck happened to Windows file manager? I mean it used to be that Windows was rock solid while Linux variants had various parsing performance/stability issues. Now it feels like it is the complete opposite.
In Win 11 I am constantly finding the whole explorer locking up just copying files via USB because of reasons unknown. Where as on my Linux machines, I have absolute faith that it will just handle it or at the very least not just stop spinning in the background in zombie land, not dead enough to die but not alive enough to do anything. Windows is in a very unfortunate place right now, I do hope they will wake up and try to get things back on the road but I am very doubtful considering the leader ship they have nowadays.
if you haven't enabled the checkbox starting explorer in a new process which isn't super easy to find, it will basically be one process running most of the windows ui, which means when they write shoddy code, the ui tends to hang
> file Explorer (buggily) parsing files to display metadata before listing them
It's crazy, open a directory full of .mp4s and sometimes the list briefly appears but then it goes completely blank, just to start listing them again one-by-one taking about one second per entry, while being unresponsive to input.
I have this exact same problem with OGG files. Either their parser has some insane bugs or they are starting an isolation VM per file to run the parse. Either way, unusable.
On Wayland+gnome/plasma I’ve had great luck with games, Firefox is almost there with some bugginess, and video playing apps that use mpv like plex work great. It’s definitely not perfect and you may dive into configuring per app flags to make them utilize hdr, but the easy stuff generally works
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 a crapshoot when something new and multiplayer launches. My backup plan for those if I really want to play them is to just get them on PS5.
Meanwhile nothing epic will work on mint (at least I can’t get them working), there are frequently broken components of games (eg. phasmophobia mic won’t work), most multiplayer stuff with anti-cheat won’t work.
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.
The other day I tried Midtown madness, something that has become a bit of an issue to run on Windows. It took less than a minute to install and booted first time via Wine. It is amazing seeing just how well it works and feels almost like a native binary.
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.
As I got older, my interests in games decreased. That and also because I am too dumb to make wine work with games nowadays; it was easier in the 32bit era. :\
But the real problem is lack of time. There are so many things to do and so little time. Today's games are also not as interesting IMO. Most of them are just "who has the better 3D engine".
Games these days, just as before, are fantastic. Outer Wilds, Disco Elysium, Expedition 33, Baldur's Gate 3, Elden Ring(Nightreign), etc. And I've not even listed quite a few of my favorites cause they're not popular enough for most people to have heard of them.
Weird to say you don't game these days but also make blanket statements about games these days :p
For 90+ percent of Windows-only games I wanna play, the process for getting them to work on Linux is the following:
1. Hit the download button in Steam
2. Wait for it to download
3. Hit the play button
Granted, my taste in games doesn't include things like generic AAA first person military shooters, which are the ones which tend to be the most difficult to get to work due to stuff like anti cheat. But it sounds like your taste doesn't include those either,
and for me, the one (rather niche, I might add) game that didn't "just work" was working just fine after trying a different Proton version - which is literally as simple as opening the "Properties" page and using a drop-down menu.
There are a lot of indie or other types of games that escape this. I mostly play games with local multiplayer, so I'm hanging out with people and playing at the same time. Recently got into Brotato, which has no 3d engine at all lol
I don't play a ton of modern games, but my wife and I played through the HD remakes of Myst and Riven, released in 2021 and 2024 respectively. I didn't even look at the Proton compatibility before buying the games because for single-player stuff then Proton has gotten so good that I almost never have to worry about it. I don't really play multiplayer games (outside of the original Doom or Minecraft with a friend or my wife, both of which have native Linux clients), so there hasn't ever been an issue for me.
My gaming box is a NixOS JovianOS thing, and I even get very good results using the official Microsoft adapter for Xbox One controllers. I really feel no desire to go back to Windows at this point.
The majority of popular PvP shooters use anti-cheat which does not work on Proton, so "almost all modern games" seems like overselling it to me.
But the stuff that does work, works well. I play Helldivers 2 via Proton on Fedora, and i experience far fewer crashes and instances of weird behaviour than friends on Windows or Xbox.
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 pretty well versed in linux sysadmin things, but LLMs make it so easy I don't even bother trying to solve things myself first.
I have a few people in my friend group who aren't well versed, but they're able to navigate linux just fine by doing this same approach.
There's still friction, don't get me wrong, but it's a different type of friction. On Windows there are far fewer bugs, but there's friction introduced due to it being non-unix based (especially when it comes to code/doing any sort of model training) and due to anti-patterns Windows keeps shipping into the OS. On linux, the friction is just bugs. You can address / fix bugs for the most part, but you can't fix Windows' friction points.
disagree. it depends heavily on what the user is doing.
that's like saying if you daily drive windows it's a near certainty you'll have to edit the registry or use powershell/cmd.
It's useful if you know what you're doing but it isn't required anymore at all for most people. Most people just use their machines for the browser or office software. No reason to use command line for them, ever.
You’re being practical, but papering over the archaic terminal interface by automating it with LLMs is basically a dystopia. Technologists should fundamentally innovate terminals instead, such that the CLI is friendly even towards newcomers.
I agree with your first statement, but raise an eyebrow at the second. The desktop already is the "friendly" version of the CLI.
I am skeptical there could be any magical technological innovation that would make terminals friendlier. That space has already been thoroughly explored. There are dozens of terminal variants with various quality of life improvements, but the fundamental user experience of a command line interface will always be daunting to a non-technical user, no matter how "innovated".
NixOS has been even better since it sees my whole system config and doesn’t need to derive the state from queries. I started with hello world and iterated into my perfect desktop env over a week.
I zeroed my (last ever) Windows gaming rig just yesterday. I’ve been eyeing Bazzite but ended up going with Pop, since I’ve previously had good experience on it with Nvidia.
What finally let me do it was moving all my social gaming to PS5. Ime it’s really only games with anti-cheat requirements that can be a crapshoot on Linux. I can’t really recall ever running into other issues with anything on my (Linux-based) Steam Deck over the past couple of years. I’ve emigrated from my home country so gaming is important to me as a way of staying in touch with friends and family - something I wasn’t willing to risk by switching away from a working setup. A PS5 is a convenient and reasonably economical way to address that.
Feels pretty great to know that after 40+ years of relying on it - some good but a lot bad - I’ll never have to touch Windows again.
As strange as it sounds, I think Valve is extremely well-positioned to ship what becomes one of the first true Linux desktop experiences. There's a huge demand for gaming x ai development, both of which have similar hardware requirements, and Valve is already polishing their linux experience with Steam Deck. If they launch their own desktop with a properly managed OS and hardware, I think it would legitimately become a contender among a very wide range of users.
The problem is still the desktop itself. Basically none of the existing Linux desktop components are mature, either design or technical wise and more often than not, both.
Deck works because most games are self contained, allowing them to have a default game mode that bypasses the desktop entirely.
They can ship the same destop/window manager combo they ship on the Steam Deck, where you can switch between the "full screen mode" (don't remember what it's called) and a proper desktop. I'm sure most people stay in the full-screen mode, it has all the settings and everything, even works with an cursor if I'm not mistaken, but can fallback when you need a terminal or whatever.
As I understood GP's comment, the crux is "a very wide range of users."
Right now Steam Deck works because of a focus on a very specific use and users. A general purpose desktop requires a lot more, and right now even the most mature linux desktop (GNOME, Plasma etc) have their rough edges and learning curve.
I think that comes with risks, they will need to do a lot of work to manage expectations which is likely to be an unending uphill battle getting users to read and absorb any notice you put in front of them. If there's ever an official version of SteamOS that installs as broadly as most other linux distros along with a general/minimally trained audience, they can't do Deck certified on how well each game works on your system, and I can see challenges for "why does this game I bought on the steam store not work on my steam system?" especially if it's the hot new multiplayer game that targets windows with windows-only anticheat.
PC does have a fair amount of users that want it to operate in a console-like way when it comes to usability, the moment you tell them to fiddle with a runtime or experiment with the command line variables you lose them. That's to say nothing about handling stuff that lives outside steam, because PC gaming shouldn't equal Valve. The Deck is a nice manageable subset to deal with and fairly small enthusiast audience
If they make their own distro, though, they're not really gaining more control. They're just enabling even more choice for someone who's looking for alternatives.
Let's say, hypothetically, that Valve releases SteamOS to the general public, and it's received generally well, and it becomes much more common for people to use "that Linux thing" than it is today. Then let's say, hypothetically, that Valve turns evil and... I dunno, starts charging money for updates? At that point you've got a large population already using Linux, I'm sure there would be a pretty big migration to Ubuntu or some other mainstream Linux desktop.
These things go slowly an then all at once. The catalyst will be one or a few of the AAA November titles shipping with Linux support. That will eliminate most of the gaming crowd's last reason to cling to Microsoft.
It may even kill console gaming because the Steam Deck is already a fantastic experience just waiting for more games.
It's not a small demographic either, it's something like 40% of males age 18-35, plus all of the people in their circles who come to them for tech support.
Once market share gets up to 30% or so it becomes a cool trend, that other gamers want to emulate, streamers and influencers get involved.
Then around 50% market share the bullying starts. "Windows is for people too stupid to figure out Linux" says a Linux Mint enjoyer to a Windows 11 plebian.
Valve has done a great job getting things started, but it's the studios' turn to make a move now.
I was really proud that my kids (8,10,12) all have used linux for gaming for the last several years. Steam runs perfectly for most games.
And, they know how to to use "flatpak update" to update the sober runtime for Roblox (I know this is not steam, but it is an example of how well other things run on linux). I'm so proud (and ashamed they play Roblox, but choose your battles).
But, Fortnite.
I tried to run a Windows VM, but that was a poor substitute.
Fortnite might be a battle worth choosing. I wouldn't want to carve my children's gray matter into grooves of cosmetic microtransactions of psychological warfare.
I actually totally agree. This was because a friend who lives a thousand miles away also plays it (and his parents have different views on what Fortnite means). I'm sure gaming companies optimize for peer pressure effects, because that's so powerful.
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.
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 for modern, multiplayer games.
Reliable Anticheat rootkits are just not possible on Open PC platforms. Consoles should just add proper keyboard+mouse support and competitive online players can move over...
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.
It's weird how Steam doesn't automatically set the toggle that lets you play most Windows games through Proton instead of having that be an opt-in you need to know about. It really is extremely stable and polished these days.
I just wish they had to toggle to use proton by default for all games, regardless of if a Linux version exists. There have been several games where I ended up with the buggy abandoned Linux version (Rocket League is a particularly egregious example of this) instead of the much better supported Windows + Proton version.
I've only ever needed to enable Proton for non-Steam games. Are there Steam games that don't have Proton enabled and need it to be manually enabled by the user? (I've only used it on the Steam Deck)
I've been running Fedora at home for about a decade now, and I've been doing my gaming on it for the majority of that period.
I've been running Fedora at work for about 6-7 years now too, with few issues. Work binned Adobe XD and moved to Figma which has made it even more viable.
The one and only holdout I keep a Windows 11 install around for is VR. With Valve's new headset due to release any week now, we will hopefully have a bunch of Linux SteamVR patches on the way to sand the remaining sharp edges off.
I recently played Age of Empires 4 on Bazzite on a Framework and I was surprised at how well everything worked. I didn't have to wade through a forest of permission dialogs and popups. Compared to macOS, Steam even opened up faster.
The minor things were wonky default graphics and mouse acceleration settings, but these were easily fixed from the game menus.
> That's always been positioned to me as the one for hackers and experimentalists
I thought so too, that's why I mostly used Ubuntu up until 22.04 sometime, used Ubuntu since I moved before that. Then I moved to Arch, and everything just got so much easier. Upgrading Ubuntu versions was a bit hit-or-miss, especially if you'd changed configs for one reason or another. And after 22.04>22.10 failed for whatever reason, I restarted with Arch then never looked back.
Probably it helped that I already knew Arch by the time I started using it, compared to starting to use Ubuntu coming from Windows and not knowing squat.
But now with an installer, good defaults, and a helpful community (maybe slightly controversial) I think Arch can be a pretty good beginner OS, as long as you want to understand how your system is put together.
I was about to comment that SteamOS is based on Arch, but after looking at the actual graphs, they've got SteamOS as its own separate category.
I wonder how much of that is "hackers and experimentalists", versus random gamers* preferring Arch Linux's bleeding-edge latest-and-greatest packaging approach versus Ubuntu's seemingly-slower-paced development?
* though I suspect even the most casual 25% of PC gamers are probably significantly more tech-savvy than the average PC user of the population in general.
> 27% of that 3% is the Steam Deck / Lenovo Legion Go S. So most Linux players are in fact not on the Steam Deck.
If that is true then one of those other two claims has to be false:
1. Using the latest months recorded share (Oct-2025 - 3.05%): 4,026,000 estimated "monthly active users" for Linux+Steam.
2. Market research firm International Data Corporation estimated that between 3.7 and 4 million Steam Decks had been sold by the third anniversary of the device in February 2025.
27% of 4M gives us 1M Steam Deck + Legion users. Yet 4M were sold. That begs the question: How could it be? Do 75% of Steam Deck users run Windows? Have 75% of Steam Decks ended up in the landfill? Are the sale figures estimates wildly off-base?
Why would it be strange that there are steam decks that sit unused ? I have a switch and a PS 5 that go untouched for months (even with a 4 year old who I occasionally let play some games). I think most people in my friend group are similar in that they have some gaming gear but rarely the time to use it. Still nice to have once you do.
- International Data Corporation is overestimating the amount of shipped Steam Decks.
- Modified Steam Decks (i.e. running Bazzite) don't report themselves to be Steam Decks
- Most likely: most Steam Deck users opt out of participating in the Steam Hardware survey/analytics.
Last year, I didn't participate in the Steam Hardware survey on my Deck, only on my PC. This year, I participated on my Deck and my desktop, but not my laptop. I still have three devices running Steam. To any survey, it'll look like the amount of Steam devices doubled even though I'm only reporting 67% of my devices to analytics.
The third is close but it's even more likely that they just weren't prompted to survey at all rather than opting out. They're surveys, not automatic data harvesting, they don't represent things like Facebook's "total monthly active users". They're just a random sample of users, not a population count. Steam does sometimes report things like monthly active users in their annual reports, but haven't ever broken that down I don't think, but you can just infer it from the surveys.
I also have steam on multiple devices including a steam deck. On desktop I'm pretty much always logged in and I play games frequently, but most months I'm not selected for a survey. I use my steam deck less frequently and have maybe only gotten the survey prompt on it once or twice.
I haven't looked at the article or their methodology, but if they were measuring over a certain period of time, a few hours, or even 24 hours, it will still likely only pick up a proportion of Steam owners.
#1 Is MAU. I wouldn't find it out of the realm of possibility that only 25% of owners played in the prior month. I wonder what this is for other consoles. I personally contribute to bursts of playing then months of not even touching some of my consoles.
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.
The only sure-fire way to defeat cheats is with something like Counter Strike's overwatch system: have humans vet replays. Cheats are a ludicrous business, there is simply far too much incentive to defeat software-based systems.
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 it to detect outliers, classify some outliers as cheaters and start grouping them all together in lobbies.
Another idea would be to conduct automated experiments on players at random. Such as manifesting "fake" entities behind cover and measure player reactions - of which there should be none. Spawn bots (from the beginning of the game) that a compromised client (cheats) cannot discriminate from players and have them always remain in cover and gauge player behavior relative to them, despawn them if a [presumably real] player is about to detect them.
It all requires work and imagination which is in short supply in the industry. But given how cheaters kill certain types of games maybe someone will eventually do it.
> I suspect the answer to cheating will ultimately be big brother and hiding information from the client.
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?
The anti-cheat creators other than Valve aren't bothered to invest into making a Linux kernel anti-cheat, and most Linux users would be unwilling to allow one to be installed either.
It looks like attestation. Linux needs to be able to assure game developers that the kernel their game is running on is actually protecting the security of their game.
Those are generally not the same anticheats with the same levels of functionality. As an analogy it's like saying Excel supports iPad. Or a gaming example that used to be way more common: Tony Hawk Pro Skater 2 is supported on Game Boy Advance.
It's a game and it is Tony Hawk, but it's not really comparable as Tony Hawk on PS1.
they have the tools they need to defeat cheaters, they just choose to go about it in very invasive and lazy ways because people still buy their product.
then people complain when the product sucks and is invasive.
Evidently it's not all Steam Deck either; I checked our internal stats and on PC yesterday 1.24% of Warframe players were using WINE and another 0.76% were playing on Deck!
My son (8yo) and I have been running bazzite on mid tier AMD hardware for almost a year. It was so solid and such a good experience that I just upgraded us to a desktop with an nvidia 5080. Bazzite deck mode (beta) has been glitchy, but desktop mode has been rock solid. This is a total game changer. I gave up my Xbox subscription and am so happy to be back on Steam without having to tolerate windows.
Steam Deck on the go, Bazzite for desktop. Match made in heaven.
After many years playing on Linux, first struggling with Wine then with Proton when it came out, had to install Windows on my gaming pc. I mostly play Overwatch 2 with friends on my very short free time, thanks to a Steam bug (https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux/issues/1028...), on every single evening I had to wait forever (seriously, 15+ min) for shaders to compile or start the game immediately but suffer on every match beginning (different map) with stuttering.
That’s a deal breaker for me, I tried a fresh Bazzite install (from Arch) before giving up, exact same issue.
I wish Valve comes around one day and fixes that, I’ll kick Windows out of life in a heartbeat.
How old is your GPU/does it/the driver support async shader compilation? I've turned off shader pre-comp like two years ago because of this bug, never had any problems/lags with any games.
RTX 3060 mobile, nvidia blobs, default settings from the distro. Indeed, I disabled the shader cache at some point, for most single player games it was a good workaround, that was not the case for OW2 for some reason.
I play OW2 on Linux with Steam + Proton and I was having this issue a while back but somehow fixed it. I think it was by increasing the shader cache size! Happy to find the exact instructions that I did to fix it once I’m back on that PC.
Made the switch to Mint recently. Steam says that of 750 games on my account, 748 can run on Linux, and I've had no problems with the dozen or so I've played lately.
I am a big fan of gaming on Linux, but I've been running into weird bugs with some of my favorite games.
For example, a couple months ago, my install of TW:WH3 started to crash after 20-30 seconds in the main game. I think it started happening after a minor patch. Another example is Battle Brothers. The game ran flawlessly. Then I installed and played a copy on a Windows laptop using the same Steam account. After that the game stopped booting properly on Linux. (Maybe a coincidence.)
As a result, I still boot into Windows now and again to play these games. I am dual-booting.
The frustrating thing is that it's very difficult to figure out why a game is crashing unless you run Steam from a terminal. The logs are hard to find otherwise - at least if you're using the Flatpak version of Steam.
I’m using steam on Ubuntu 24.04 with 9y old hardware (which was mid-tier when new), playing mostly 2d platformer games and older resident evil titles. Never had any issues, this setup runs like a champ
Coming from being a Windows power user for decades, Mint just felt like more of a natural shift for my daily driving than Ubuntu. I wonder if that's a common opinion or if there's another driver.
The survey only shows Ubuntu 24.04.3 LTS and Ubuntu Core 22 for 8.25% vs Mint's 22.1 and 22.2 at 9.21%. There's a whole 18.04% hiding in the "Other" category that I suspect contains a lot of other Ubuntu interim and older LTS releases.
The hard part is never installing an Arch-like distro, it's making it past 5 sudo pacman -syu iterations without an AUR package going thermonuclear and requiring 45,000 pinned dependencies.
+1, now using Bazzite as my main OS in general and for gaming, and only use the dualbooted Windows on a separate SSD when I have to play a game which contains a rootkit. There've been two of those, and I can live without them. Rotate games quite frequently, mostly just works.
I think if you like checking it out and customizing the settings of your OS, then try it out! Or at least look up the games you care about on ProtonDB.
Even encrypted the Bazzite SSD just out of paranoia caused by Windows. Even partner-proof so far.
Only ever used Nvidia so far, probably going to switch to AMD in 1-2 years, as I hear that they're better on Linux.
I discovered that you can actually encrypt the home directory on SteamOS as well, its a kind of ultra beta feature but it actually seems to work fairly reliably aside from requiring you to set it up via SSH from another computer
It is always with great fear and trepidation that I install the drivers for my discrete GPU on my Ubuntu system and configure the system to use it. The state of affairs might be better these days, but I remember it rarely working and having a high likelihood of horribly breaking the configuration, and trying to rectify it in the terminal while frantically searching forums on my phone.
I never update ANYTHING on my Linux system without a very good reason. The strike rate of updates causing damage to my system and costing me hours of debugging is not worth it.
Again, I should mention that Linux users usually only see the survey once a year, if you want to get the survey once a month (like it does on windows), you have to close steam monthly and edit your config.vdf file to set the survey date to last year.
Are you saying that windows users are supposed get the steam hardware once a month?
I’ve had steam installed on (and more/less used daily on) probably 4-5 different windows installs since roughly 2016, and I’ve never seen it more than once a year.
I doubt I was included in this survey but I finally wiped my Windows partition and went all in on CachyOS on my gaming PC this week. Gaming Copilot spying on me in Windows 11 was the last straw.
My son and I made the cut over to Fedora about a year an a half ago.
Neither of us miss windows at all. There are some games we cant play but at the end of the day... I dont really want what they offer (in the kernel level shenanigans.), so I cant say I miss them much.
There have been a few mentions in this thread of portable gaming PCs like the Steam Deck and the ROG Ally. Has anyone here tried using them as a primary machine? I've been thinking that since I travel with a portable keyboard and mouse anyway, maybe one of those machines might not be too bad for actual work?
I started using Proton recently and it is quite impressive. Some games have native support, some use Vulkan, others want to run on SteamDeck. I haven't booted Win 11 in more than a month. Not having to dual boot any time I want to switch work/fun is great - even if reboot doesn't take that long these days. I tend to play older, single player games, not everything is perfect, but I like it much more than being frustrated by Windows - using Fedora btw.
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?
I suspect that if this number gets much higher and I also suspect it will, MS is going to deploy nuclear options to break Proton and, with it, Valve's Linux ambitions.
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.
Some of those ratings are generous to say the least. Apex Legends is probably the worst example, it's still clinging to its Silver rating despite being completely unplayable on Linux since last November.
Similar with GTA V. Still very popular, but the multiplayer doesn't work anymore. Singleplayer works though and that's enough for some people to rate it good.
Rust is also similar: multiplayer community servers with anticheat do not work. When the majority of players are on those servers, switching to Linux is not an option. But people on Linux looking for servers think it's good enough that you can play on servers with anticheat disabled.
I have no idea where that list is coming from but many top games are missing. Fortnite, League of Legends, Valorant, Roblox, FC26, and Battlefield 6 all do not run at all on Linux due to anti-cheat.
It's based on Steams numbers, so yeah games like Fortnite, LoL, Valorant and Roblox won't show up at all since they aren't distributed through Steam. Battlefield 6 should be on there though, maybe ProtonDB just hasn't refreshed the stats in the few weeks since that came out.
That doesn't cover games not on Steam, is incorrect in at least one case about playability, and an analysis of currently active players does not account for people who play multiple games.
6 out of 50 is a huge number in terms of annoyance.
It's the same reason alternative web browser engines like Ladybird are probably never going to take off. It might support 99.99% of web features - which sounds amazing! - but that probably means it's going to fail in some way on like 0.1% of sites which in practice is extremely frustrating.
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 messing up.
I hope Valve can get something similar to a Steam Machine programme off the ground now that games actually run on Linux. Unfortunately, I kind of doubt any vendors will bother to go through the effort of supporting their hardware on a firmware level for anything but Windows (and even at that level Windows is full of ACPI patches and driver workarounds to clean up their trash).
When I decided to get back into PC gaming during covid, I built a PC put Windows on it and installed GOG, Steam and Epic to turn it into a glorified console. It has been like that ever since. For anything other than gaming I use a Macbook.
If you got the means and space, I think it's the easiest solution. I do play some games on the Mac, but the experience has been rather poor outside of indie games which usually work very well.
That said, the controller support on windows constantly sucks. On macOS though, it's really easy to set up. Go figure.
I wouldn't say it's perfect quite yet. I just installed Debian on my Framework, and my microphone isn't working. Debugging it for the last 30 minutes has gotten me nowhere, and half the answers on the internet don't apply to my distro. Until basic issues like this go away or have easy solutions, it's hard to recommend it to anyone.
Audio has always been overengineered and brittle. Vanilla alsa was the sweetspot, but things like pulseaudio and all the projects that followed it to "fix" it have too many things that can go wrong.
I don't seem to have any issues with audio anymore since Pipewire became default on Ubuntu, as a non-professional but fairly demanding user with a bunch of wired headphones plus bluetooth. I definitely used to have plenty of annoyances!
Is it a normal mic, or bluetooth? I think, Trixie have some regressions in bluetooth stack of Cinnamon - it worked nicely in Bookworm, but I had weird issues on Trixie that just disappeared once I switched to KDE (didn't try Gnome).
I'm going to be shown the door for this suggestion, but go consult with ChatGPT about your mic. ChatGPT had been very good for debugging Linux usability issues and papercuts in my experience.
Apple really shot themselves in the foot with their insistence on dropping OpenGL and not having an in house Vulkan implementation. Games that want to support macs need to add Metal renderers.
Seems this kind of comments will keep coming no matter what. Nevertheless, here's some points on the matter:
Apple was the company that boosted OpenGL popularity by using it as the graphics API for OS X. In Apple platforms world there's only one graphics API that is guaranteed to work across their hardware, so it was a big deal. However, they could not keep up with OpenGL updates, as they overlapped poorly with their products map, i.e. switching new OS X to newer OpenGL revision would require to drop support for older Macs.
Out of that need (and also to address multiple shortcomings of OpenGL) Metal was born. OpenGL support layer was implemented on Metal.
Metal was released before Vulkan API was finalised. There was never need for Apple to support Vulkan. Vulkan, as the OpenGL before it, has the same downsides for Apple, but bringing nothing to the table compared to Metal.
Very few games have custom written Vulkan rendering pipeline. Majority rely on game engines, and if the engine supports Vulkan rendering, it is almost certain to also supports Metal.
So, instead of relying on supporting 3rd party rendering APIs Apple spends resources on helping with porting games to Macs natively.
> Apple was the company that boosted OpenGL popularity by using it as the graphics API for OS X
Certainly they were a company that boosted OpenGL, but the company? During the early years OSX had less market share than Linux does today, and OpenGL was already well established by gaming and professional software before OSX ever came out. Quake supported it (not on release), Quake II and Half Life supported it on release, Quake III required it. Heck, Quake III released on Linux shortly before MacOS (classic), making it arguably as influential then, and of course the OSX port of that only came a few years later. But point is, that Id dared to release their new flagship with only OpenGL support shows that OpenGL was already firmly established and supported before OSX existed.
> So, instead of relying on supporting 3rd party rendering APIs Apple spends resources on helping with porting games to Macs natively.
I have been using a MacBook Pro for decades (Linux/Windows PC for gaming). I haven't seen this happening.
Apple have, in recent years, sponsored a few triple A titles to add MacOS ports but the vast majority of games don't run or run so poorly it doesn't matter.
With CrossOver there are a handful of games that work well, most don't. I tried to play Fallout New Vegas and it wouldn't start. Tried to play Raft with some friends and it didn't start. Borderlands 2/3 didn't start. Democracy 4 started but ran at 2 fps.
Some games like EU4 and Dark Souls 1 remastered work pretty well. I ended up buying an ROG Aly because I travel a lot and want a portable gaming experience. I use game streaming to my MacBook to play games - I wouldn't have bought the Ally if my MacBook could just game.
IMO - if the Asahi team were able to implement Vulkan with no documentation or references - Apple could do so in a weekend if they so desired. I'd like to see Apple write Windows or Linux drivers for their hardware so we can use official Bootcamp and run games on platforms that care about it.
Games on Mac are a multifaceted problem, but IMO the main issue stems from Apple treating games like they do apps. They expect developers to continue to support them, to update them as APIs get depreciated.
Apple can spend all the resources they want, but they'll never be able to convince enough developers to foster a gaming ecosystem that could ever be taken seriously when there's other platforms that have 20+ years of back catalogue titles available. This has largely been enabled on Linux through wrapping D3D to Vulkan and if Apple put in the work to support Vulkan all that work could be used for free. Or if they more permissively licensed GPTK's D3D>Metal wrapper, but as it stands it's still not as good as DXVK/VKD3D. Practically speaking Steam on Mac would be considerably more useful if there was native Vulkan support.
Of course, Apple wouldn't want that given their desire for vertical control of software distribution, though notably they don't do the same for video or audio. I mean they support MP3s right? That's what games should be treated as, a piece of media. MP3 might not be the best quality, most would prefer AAC or FLAC, but sometimes an MP3 is all a user might have, so they should let users play it. But they can't seem to break free from this delusion that game software should be treated the same as Uber Eats.
First, due to substantial differences in graphics hardware, that is tiled-based deferred rendering for Apple Silicon and immediate mode rendering for NVIDIA and AMD the software simulation or translation layer will never be as good as DXVK/VKD3D, which essentially do rendering on exactly same GPUs. In case of using TBDR the pipeline must be rewritten to get the benefits. Simply put, for Apple hardware every Windows game wrapped in a translation layer will be significantly worse off than a native port. That’s why it’s important for Apple to push for that.
Second, Apple is the owner of the biggest game storefront in terms of revenue. They don’t have to ask for game developers to come, they are already here. The market we are talking about is AAA games market. And this market is characterised by dedicated hardware: consoles and gaming PC. So I think this is where lies the actual problem: Apple doesn’t make dedicated hardware for games.
> First, due to substantial differences in graphics hardware, that is tiled-based deferred rendering for Apple Silicon and immediate mode rendering for NVIDIA and AMD the software simulation or translation layer will never be as good as DXVK/VKD3D, which essentially do rendering on exactly same GPUs. In case of using TBDR the pipeline must be rewritten to get the benefits. Simply put, for Apple hardware every Windows game wrapped in a translation layer will be significantly worse off than a native port. That’s why it’s important for Apple to push for that.
Doesn't matter for the back catalogue, which is the thing that is missing that makes the platform a running joke re: gaming. It's also an issue that affects Adreno on Snapdragon, but it isn't stopping Valve from planning to ship a version of Proton for that platform. Having personally talked to a DXVK developer about this specifically, the overhead, while existent, I understand isn't necessarily as severe as you make it out to be either.
> Second, Apple is the owner of the biggest game storefront in terms of revenue. They don’t have to ask for game developers to come, they are already here. The market we are talking about is AAA games market. And this market is characterised by dedicated hardware: consoles and gaming PC. So I think this is where lies the actual problem: Apple doesn’t make dedicated hardware for games.
Not just AAA, but most everything outside of the F2P/casual sphere. Speaking as someone who actually likes games as a form of art, the App Store's library is the video games equivalent of reality TV and home shopping. It's mostly exploitative trash. Maybe Apple is happy with cornering the market on exploitative trash though, good for them.
> However, they could not keep up with OpenGL updates, as they overlapped poorly with their products map, i.e. switching new OS X to newer OpenGL revision would require to drop support for older Macs.
It seems like these sorts of defenses will be written even when Nvidia is worth $2 trillion more than Apple. Here's a reminder why people are mad:
Apple can support both. There's no reason they shouldn't, as a competitor on the open market; AMD, Nvidia and even Qualcomm are supporting both DirectX and Vulkan in software. It would not require Apple to retool their hardware (as Asahi has shown) and would not require them to depreciate Metal (as their OpenGL support shows). The only significant sacrifice Apple has to make is their unforgiving monopoly on modern GPU APIs that they have meted out against everyone's will but their own.
macOS will be depreciated on Apple's roadmap by the time developers take it seriously as a gaming platform. It's outrageous that people like me have to abandon the Mac because Apple expects me to satisfy myself with iPad games instead of the full range of experiences available on the software market. They have a monopoly, Apple is throwing a temper tantrum because they know Steam has the better experience and they can't compete any better than Microsoft does. Their best strategy is to kill the Mac and pretend the iPad is a console with computer-like features, which should outright terrify you if you own a Mac.
I think part of this is just laptop vs desktop. Everyone I know has a macbook, not a soul I know has a mac desktop. Everyone has either a console or a separate "gaming" desktop.
Baldur's Gate 3 looks absolutely fantastic on it due to the HDR rendering and high screen quality on Apple hardware though.
It's sad for me as a long-time Mac fan and gaming fan that Apple has always had hardware and OS that was technically superior when it comes to gaming, but neither Jobs nor Cook ever cared about gaming except as a checkbox, so it all went to waste.
The amusing thing to me is that so many productive things have come OUT of pursuing gaming, such as graphics cards being useful for mining and then AI.
Releasing Game Porting Toolkit aimed at developers wanting to make a quick and dirty shim and not users getting their own windows games working is such typical Apple hubris.
The Game Porting Toolkit is weird because despite first appearances it doesn't actually help developers make quick ports. Apple built a pretty robust DirectX-to-Metal shim, but they only licensed it for "evaluation purposes", so its only value to developers is in seeing whether their Windows game runs well enough on Macs to be worth porting. If they do decide to port they still have to do it the hard way, they're not allowed to ship Apples shim to users.
It's kind of baffling because it does almost nothing to help the game developers that it's ostensibly aimed at, while it does help end-users play unmodified Windows games on their Mac, which Apple doesn't endorse.
I believe Proton does not/will not be integrated into Steam on Mac because it would compete with CrossOver, the paid product from CodeWeavers that essentially funds Wine development.
I don't really believe this to be an issue - Valve directly contracts CodeWeavers, they developed Proton together, and they've been pretty clear from recent hiring bursts that it was specifically to work on Proton. I have to imagine the income from Valve is exponentially higher than the relative niche of CrossOver. They're basically a subdivision of Valve now.
Crossover isn't aimed at the gaming crowd, but productivity software. Their builds favor stability over new and shiny compatibility/feature support. I just had a license because I like supporting CodeWeavers.
They advertise gaming as a use case for CrossOver (there used to be a separate CrossOver Games product, even, which I was a customer of), and it would not surprise me if the linux build of CrossOver sells so little they wouldn't care.
Wonder what will happen with that percentage once they sunset Rosetta. I think steam has a native client, but the Mac support for most/all games is x86 based AFAIK.
I believe the statistics doesn't count Windows version of Steam games running on Mac via Crossover. And of course Steam is not the only store to purchase games on Mac (in last couple of years bought 2 games via App Store and none via Steam)
For some, it is the only real legal option given windows 11 licensing.
Apple M3/M4 are a great chip, but they EOL the hardware ecosystem every 12 years on average. Few companies can tolerate that level of development liability, and Apple users benefit from the FOSS ecosystems cross-platform efforts. =3
This isn’t surprising at all. In this context, “Linux” means “Steam Deck,” which is basically a plug and play console being sold at cost for $300-500.
Macs actually run a lot less of the Steam library without doing pretty involved workarounds like hsing CrossOver. Since Valve sells the Steam Deck they put a lot of work into getting Windows games to run on Linux automatically. They didn’t put that effort into the Mac platform.
He said that the market share wasn't worth it. Yet they support MacOS (which has had a lower market share compared to Linux in this segment for a while).
Meanwhile Wine fixed 32-bit OpenGL path performance problem in new wow64 mode, so now you don't need 32-bit Linux dependencies to run 32-bit games in Wine anymore (that affects DX7 games for example that run through OpenGL via WineD3D).
Good. Hopefully it will tip to 95% in a few years. I'm so sick and tired of the Windows dependency. Microsoft doesn't give 2 fucks about games unless they can make money off it. I have a few Steam games I can only play on Linux now, ironically.
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 nightmare fuel.
Essentially stating that Linux users disproportionately care to actually report bugs they encounter rather than ignoring them. I find that very plausible.
> Essentially stating that Linux users disproportionately care to actually report bugs they encounter rather than ignoring them. I find that very plausible.
In my lived experience, this 100% pure unadultered copium. It’s the wishful thinking lie that Linux people tell themselves to support their preferred choice of OS software which is, for some reason, part of their identity.
Supporting “Linux” isn’t too bad in 2025 if all you care about is SteamOS and Ubuntu. But distributing pre-compiled binaries and getting them to run on an unbounded range of system configurations is a nightmare.
Linux users do at least expect to run into problems. So they’re willing to fight through errors for several hours before asking for help. And the Linux gamer community is willing to help each other out to jump through all these hoops.
But none of that changes the fact that supporting Linux is an additional mountain of work. Although in 2025 you should definitely support SteamDeck via either Proton or native.
I like the idea of Linux-native games but I've honestly never gotten it to work. Not on Ubuntu, not on Fedora, not on NixOS. The Steam Runtime is supposed to remove the distro from the equation - but, again, I've never seen it work. Proton is the sane target.
That's awesome! I've come to take "the year of the Linux desktop" as a prophecy of sorts. It might take another 20 years, or desktops might vanish, but it is going to happen. Slow and steady wins the race. Best regards from a decade-plus Linux full-timer!
About every 3 months or so, I install some gaming Linux distro (or, if I'm in the mood, install Linux Mint from scratch and try to configure it for gaming) and get solely disappointed and return to windows.
Most of the Linux hurdles in day to day work can be overcome (mostly is the lack of the apps I normally use that cause some attrition, but with some compromises and some work I can get around it). But for gaming (at least in NVIDIA GPUs) it keeps failing.
I have very limited time for gaming (around 2-4h per week), I don't want to keep having to eternally fiddle with game settings, fixing bugs, fixing launchers, try different Proton versions, etc, etc, etc, every time I sit down for a bit of gaming. And Linux, unfortunately, is just not really there.
What games do you play? I really wonder about experiences like these since they differ so much to my own. The only time I mess with linux-specific things like proton versions is if a newly purchased game doesn't launch with the default proton for some reason. It's annoying, sure, but pretty rare nowadays and I usually anticipate it by checking protondb before buying a game rather than after, and it's not like it's much effort to change the version to experimental or hotfix or add a launch option. Only a handful of games have required anything more complicated like using protontricks to get extra dlls (something I've had to do on Windows for various games anyway) or the GloriousEggroll proton fork, which are easy to install with my distro's package manager. But once it's setup and working, either out of the box or after some tweaks, I don't have to mess with it ever again. I still have one game using Proton 5.0-10 from 2020 that I still play occasionally. (Current stable version is 9.0-4 from last December.) No need to change it if it's not broken.
I game a lot so there's other stuff I'll do like tweak the actual game settings to get visual/performance/control qualities I want, or use steamtinkerlaunch as a way to more easily install mods, or let my distro update my nvidia drivers (which I've found more stable than AMD's in the past on linux, but I use the proprietary ones) but that's all normal gamer stuff regardless of OS.
nvidia 4080 here. I dont have any issues on Pop OS!. Drivers install and update just fine. Games just work. Bazzite is another popular gaming OS.
My steam library is like 120 games with several pretty popular ones. Again, no issues outside of anti-cheat but I'll uninstall those games so i dont care.
nvidia's drivers have gotten a lot better and their support docs are pretty decent. i had a mild issue a few months ago getting ollama running properly. All i had to do was update the nvidia toolkit, worked fine after that.
I think the issue is more about how other games handle ray tracing. For games that just treat ray tracing as an "ultra quality" setting, there's no point of making a low quality ray tracing option, because then you'd just turn it off when non-RT options look just as good.
But Arc Raiders (and their previous game, The Finals) does use RTGI for good effects. And that low quality RT setting is still going to be better than no RT because of its realtime nature. https://youtu.be/MxkRJ_7sg8Y shows that off to good effect.
You can see this kinda performance on Indiana Jones and Doom Dark Ages, which have switched to workflows that require RT. Low quality RT in these games is performant enough to run on Linux AMD drivers which run RT in software on cards that do not have hardware for it: https://youtu.be/44XaGU01J84
It's one of those scenarios where I've felt for years that the steam survey doesn't break things down enough to be useful for anything besides the broadest generalizations. The PC gaming market is huge, but there's going to be a lot of variety and sub-groups within it and I expect few developers are trying to target 'everyone' (the opposite of targeting).
Windows just seems to have zero focus on performance though. React based start menu with visible lag, file Explorer (buggily) parsing files to display metadata before listing them, mysterious memory leaks not reflected in task manager processes.
I installed Linux Mint. While it didn't just work (TM), and I had to go into recovery mode to install Nvidia drivers, it worked well enough. I can run Overwatch via Steam and pull comparable FPS to Windows (500 FPS on a 3090 with dips into the 400s). Memory usage is stable and at a very low baseline.
It is nice to come back to Linux, and with games I don't really have a need to run Windows anymore.
I’m not naive, I know a ton of huge enterprises still run huge fleets of windows “servers” but I still find it hilarious that a supposedly serious server OS would default to showing you the weather and ads in the start menu.
And backwards compatibility.
They're really good at it. And I'd say that's the reason Windows is still dominant. There's this unfathomably long tail of niche software that people need or want to run.
They are getting worse at this. I bought a Surface Laptop Studio 2 two years ago. Windows Mail and Windows Calendar, two nice minimalist programs from Microsoft, were actively killed in this time. If you open them, it will redirect you to a new ad-laden Outlook app. If you somehow get a workaround going through the registry, they still fuck with it because the (incredibly simple) UI somehow has network dependencies.
I use MailSpring for email and no longer have a native calendar on my fairly expensive laptop from Microsoft. This is actually what drove me over the edge to switch to Linux for my workstation. Unclear exactly what I'll do for my next laptop but it won't be from MS.
What I'm talking about is, if your widget factory uses some app to calibrate all the widgets which was written by a contractor in 2005, it probably still works fine on Windows 11.
New apple-silicon Macbooks also get such good battery life and performance now that if you are switching from Windows to a Unix-y personal computer, is is increasingly hard to not say that you should go to Mac.
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 seems very deliberate to undermine Linux. And it's plausible given Microsoft's bottomless pockets.
So it wouldn't surprise me that these companies are actively hindering Linux compatibility. So much for a free market with open competition.
This fact alone throws this commonly held belief to the wind.
Glibc provides binary compatibility to newer versions too.
Shims exist in both, “windows compatibility layer” for example, but pulseaudio can emulate ALSA- and pipewire can emulate pulseaudio and ALSA.
It’s actually a quagmire, but I would contend that either has solid story for backwards compatibility depending on the exact lens you’re looking at. Microsoft is worse than Linux in many ways.
Microsoft sort of only wins in the closed-source, “run this arbitrary binary” race - if you totally ignore the w10/11 UWP migration that killed a lot of win32 applications, but drivers for older hardware are much more long lived under linux.
How do most people log into a server? With a high-res physical touchscreen, or remote desktop?
So let's make a whole bunch of functionality impossible to access, because you have to bump up against a non-existent edge of a windowed remote screen, and literally make the UI not fit into common server screen resolutions at the time. I don't remember if 1024x768 was the minimum resolution that worked, or the maximum resolution that still didn't work. But it was an absolute comedy case.
I want to say that with only the basic VGA display drivers installed, screen resolution was too small to even get to the settings to fix it, but it's been a while and I can't find the info to prove it.
I’m sure windows will continue to exist and maybe be relevant for at least a decade. But it will be in zombie/revenue-extraction mode from here on.
I think we’re only half joking though, I could see it happening.
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 kernel.
Jokes aside, this chest-thumping is incredibly ironic for those of us who lived through the 1990s-2000s. First it was, "FOSS will eliminate all proprietary software and M$ (sic) will be crushed and Bill Gates will go to the poorhouse. Hooray!" Later, it became "Well, we haven't killed proprietary software but at least Linux / LAMP and Firefox are succeeding at taking down Windows and Internet Explorer. Hooray!" Now it's "Maybe Microsoft will consider switching its kernel to Windows. Probably. Someday. Hooray?" What's the backpedaling of the 2030s going to be?
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.
If anything, they invested into the opposite: possibility to run Linux binaries on top of Windows kernel.
Azure is still running on Hyper-V afaik for instance.
It seems like the Windows team has been freed to add features that they want rather than adding features that fit into a narrative.
WSL, pre-installing git, adding POSIX aliases to PowerShell, iPhone/Android integration, PowerShell/.net/VSCode/Edge on Mac/Linux, not making Office on Mac complete afterthought shit on purpose, etc.
Microsoft's standards for quality keep going down hill. Windows 11 does not even allow the moving of the task bar from the bottom of the screen. Microsoft is end user hostile just like Google.
Funnily enough, opening their stack to Linux probably made it easier to sell licenses for everything except Windows, since now you don't have to commit to a potentially unfamiliar hosting environment. Even SQL Server runs on Linux now.
I'm not a believer in "the year of linux desktop!?!!?" and all that, but it achieved a level of robustness about 5-10ish years ago that I openly encourage non technical users to give it a try. For the few people that actually did try, they did stick with it.
At this point it is Microsoft's position to lose through quality degradation rather than Linux to openly out wit. There is still a long way to go and MS could turn their boat around but they would have to stop chasing this data scrapping scheme of theirs to begin with. But how addicted are they to that cash flow? They are probably far more interested in keep share holders happy short term than customers long term and that is not a brilliant strategy if you want to have a life time of decades.
Turn the boat around? To where? Nobody would be willing to pay for their product even if they were to start trying to make it appealing.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/Investor/earnings/FY-2025-Q3...
IIRC Windows is considered “more personal computing.” It looks like that also includes:
> Search and news advertising, comprising Bing (including Copilot), Microsoft News, Microsoft Edge, and third-party affiliates
So, maybe that’s where they get their enshittification revenue.
But yeah, the Azure company should be worried about associating with this unfortunate legacy Windows thing.
I have this impression from years of using both Windows and linux servers in prod.
For them, getting you using onedrive is a (huge) step towards getting you to pay them for more storage using onedrive, and to also allowing them to use their advantage as the OS provider to get you using features that both keep you from moving away from Windows and keep you from moving to dropbox or another cloud competitor that normal consumers commonly use. For example, onedrive desktop sync tied to your Microsoft login, so you can log into a new system and have it put your preferences and files in place.
Having more data to monetize people is useful, but I would bet that they value the the lock-in of integrated services far more, as that's where they can possibly grow (by offering more services once you're less likely to leave), and growth is king.
It's the same thing Google does (and Samsung also attempts to do with their custom apps and store) with Android, but at the desktop level. Apple is able to do it for both desktop and mobile.
In my experience thats just not true. Microsoft's client OSs like Win 11 and 10 include these consumer-oriented "features" [1] but they're not present on servet versions of Windows.
[1] I agree that the weather widget etc is annoying, even though it is easy to disable.
Many other programs do still open the standard file dialog directly, but even there, the local drive amd directory hierarchy is hidden behind a folded "This Computer" node in the tree view that is itself below the fold most of the time.
Windows 11 has some really legitimate improvements that make it a really solid OS.
It’s not surprising that Microsoft isn’t focusing on Windows as a server OS as they don’t expect anyone to deploy it in a new environment. They know it has already lost to Linux and that’s why .NET Core is on Linux and Mac, why WSL exists, etc. Azure is how Microsoft makes revenue from servers, Windows Server is a legacy product.
The whole “server OS has the weather app installed” thing is pretty irrelevant since enterprises have their own customized image building processes and don’t ever run the default payload. It’s really not worth Microsoft’s time to customize the server version knowing that their enterprise customers already have.
Microsoft knows the strength of Windows lies in the desktop environment for workstations, casual laptop use, and gaming systems, and it is excellent at all those things. They’ve delivered a whole lot of really nice and generally innovative features to those spaces. Windows has really nice gaming features, smartphone integrations including with iPhones, even doing some long-overdue work on small details like notepad and the command line.
I don’t find that windows has forced me to cloud or done anything like that.
Sure, Microsoft seems to have some great developers behind Windows and those developers are improving the underlying operating system. The trouble is that Microsoft is also using Windows to push their other products. Coming from a Linux environment, I find that pushiness unbearably crass.
On top of that, Windows' main strength has always been application support. I don't even know if that is relevant anymore with commercial developers shifting to subscription models (for native applications) and web based applications (for everything else). The latter makes Windows nearly irrelevant. The former makes open source more desirable to at least some people.
I've also noticed that things appear to flipping when comparing Linux to Windows. I can take a distribution that is intended for desktops, install it, and expect almost everything to work out of the box. It doesn't seem to matter whether it is printer or video drivers or pre-installed applications. Meanwhile, I'm finding that I have to copy drivers to a USB drive and drop to the command line to get something as simple as a trackpad or touchscreen to work under Windows. Worse yet, I've had something similar happen with network adapters. Short of bypassing the OOBE, a Windows installation will not complete without a working network adapter and Internet connection. Similar tales can be told for applications: there is a never ending stream of barriers to climb to get software to install ("look, we care about privacy since we are asking you half a dozen questions about what you're willing to share," while ignoring dozens of other settings that affect your privacy) or prevent advertising from popping up. You don't deal with that nonsense under Linux.
I don't know what the future of Windows is. I don't much care, as long as I get to use the operating system I want to use in peace. That seems to be much more true today than it did 20 years ago.
Have you tried performing a fresh Home install recently without command line hacks? It's now impossible for a normal person to set up Windows without creating a MS account, forcing them to dip a toe into their cloud service connectivity and facilitate taking the next step towards paying them. They don't "force" you, but they sure will nag you incessantly about it, plopping that shit in Explorer, the Start Menu, tossing One Drive in the menubar at startup, shoving it in your face on login after a big update, etc. It's a pathetic cash grab everywhere you look.
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 affected. On Linux, a DXVK config change solves the bug.
Not really missing anything.
Windows really needs to catch up with this. Multiple monitors have been a thing in Linux pretty much since the beginning of X.
Why can't I plug a Windows laptop into a docking station, and expect the screens to come up in the same order they were in last time? Why is it so hard?
I regularly move my work Win 11 Pro laptop between three different multi-monitor (hdmi) setups, and it works flawlessly. I don't recall any problems with Win10 over many years either.
What am I missing out on?
did i mention explorer would crash pretty often? like, half the time I plugged in a docking station it would crash explorer. That then reset all the settings. lol just a mess.
Pop OS! is a simple plug and play on any setup i've tried it on, over usb3 or hdmi/dpi. Works great.
I've never seen this work correctly. My work dock breaks monitor ordering on MacOS reliably and Gnome+Wayland frequently. I don't remember if it broke for Xorg. My home monitor setup breaks mouse behavior in borderless fullscreen and libreoffice scaling on KDE+Wayland.
Don't hold your breath... This is configurable in Linux (at least I recall Xfce and KDE having display position config built in for years).
I have no idea how multimon got so, so bad on windows.
Then bluetooth ...wtf? Again, how did they get so bad?
Funnily this is the same thing I tried to do just last month, Installed CachyOS after not having Linux on my desktop for a very long time, tried installing Battle.net and just ran into too many issues and haven't come back yet (to be honest I didn't try too many avenues to fix it).
If you don't mind me asking what was the tinkering you had to do to make this work? Thanks!
Started on Windows. After five days it failed for some reason so I had to rerun it (forgot an author or along those lines, trivial fix). Meanwhile I looked into why it was so slow, and saw git-svn spun up perl commands like crazy.
Decided to spin up a Linux VM. After fixing the trivial issue it completed in literally a couple of hours.
That surprised me. But seems not true? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44124688
Its not entirely built with React Native, but React Native does seem to be responsible for at least one element of the start menu that appears initially when the menu is presented.
[1]: https://windhawk.net/mods/windows-11-start-menu-styler
https://github.com/microsoft/react-native-xaml
I know how to use the terminal to enforce deep sleep on laptops, but thats about all I do setup wise.
If I was 10 years younger than I am today, my perspective would have been that it “always worked” and at some point we have to acknowledge that there has been good work done and things are quite stable in the modern day. 10y is not a small amount of time to prove it out.
Some file browsers on Linux have this problem too, and the KDE launcher had it for years (it's fixed now).
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everything_(software)
https://www.voidtools.com/support/everything/
The only thing I miss being on OSX, I hate its search.
Also, there are 540Hz displays.
Note that this is only the case if you have vsync enabled. Without vsync you will see the action (or some reaction anyway) +2ms later instead of +16.67ms, just not the full frame. This will manifest as screen tearing though if the screen changes are big - though it is up to personal preference if it bothers you or not.
Personally i always disable vsync even my high refresh rate monitor as i like having the fastest feedback possible (i do not even run a desktop compositor because of that) and i do not mind screen tearing (though tearing is much less visible with a high refresh monitor than a 60Hz one).
Okay I think I follow this, but I think I'd frame it a little differently. I guess it makes more sense to me if I think about your statement as "the frame I'm seeing is only 2ms old, instead of 16.67ms old". I'm still not seeing the action for 16.67ms since the last frame I saw, but I'm seeing a frame that was produced _much_ more recently than 16.67ms ago.
Thanks for the explanation, it helps!
I used to play CS:Go at a pretty high level (MGE - LE depending on free time), putting me in the top 10%. Same with Overwatch.
Most of the time you're not dying in a clutch both pulling the trigger situation. You missed, they didn't, is what usually happens.
I never bothered with any of that stuff, it doesn't make a meaningful difference unless you're a top 1%.
But there's a huge number of people who play these games who THINK it does. The reason they're losing isn't because of 2ms command registrations, it's because they made a mistake and want to blame something else.
Tying the input loop to the render loop is a totally arbitrary decision that the game industry is needlessly perpetuating.
You're right a game could be made that works that way. I'm not aware of one, but I don't have exhaustive knowledge and it wouldn't surprise me if examples exist, but that was not the question.
But a greenfield code shouldn't be perpetuating this mistake.
On most modern engines there is already a fixed-step that runs at a fixed speed to make physics calculation deterministic, so this independence is possible.
However, while it is technically possible to run the state updates at a higher frequency, this isn't done in practice because the rendering part wouldn't be able to consume that extra precision anyway.
That's mainly because the game state kinda needs to remain locked while: 1) Rendering a frame to avoid visual artifacts (eg: the character and its weapon are rendered at different places because the weapon started rendering after a state change), or even crashes (due to reading partially modified data); 2) while fixed step physics updates are being applied and 3) if there's any kind of work in different threads (common in high FPS games).
You could technically copy the game-state functional-style when it needs to be used, but the benefits would be minimal: input/state changes are extremely fast compared to anything else. Doing this "too early" can even cause input lag. So the simple solution is just to do state change it at the beginning of the while loop, at the last possible moment before this data is processed.
Source: worked professionally with games in a past life and been in a lot of those discussions!
There are many tick rates that happen at the same time in a game, but generally grabbing the latest input at the last possible moment before updating the camera position/rotation is the best way to reduce latency.
It doesn't matter if you're processing input at 1000hz if the rendered output is going to have 16ms of latency embedded in it. If you can render the game in 1ms then the image generated has 1ms of latency embedded in to it.
In a magical ideal world if you know how long a frame is going to take to render, you could schedule it to execute at a specific time to minimise input latency, but it introduces a lot of other problems like both being very vulnerable to jitter and also software scheduling is jittery.
In Counter-Strike, smoke grenades used to (and still do, to an extent) dip your FPS into a slideshow. You want to ensure your opponent can't exploit these things.
The reason is triple buffering:
> https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Multiple_bufferin...
I just quote the central relevant sentences of this section:
"For frames that are completed much faster than interval between refreshes, it is possible to replace a back buffers' frames with newer iterations multiple times before copying. This means frames may be written to the back buffer that are never used at all before being overwritten by successive frames."
Things have come a long way since then!
[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 recently than the last frame you actually saw
That being said, I just run Steam natively on NixOS and have never seen any issues. The biggest RCEs I'm worried about are Ring 0 anticheat nuking my desktop like CloudStrike.
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.
In Win 11 I am constantly finding the whole explorer locking up just copying files via USB because of reasons unknown. Where as on my Linux machines, I have absolute faith that it will just handle it or at the very least not just stop spinning in the background in zombie land, not dead enough to die but not alive enough to do anything. Windows is in a very unfortunate place right now, I do hope they will wake up and try to get things back on the road but I am very doubtful considering the leader ship they have nowadays.
There is a regkey to go back to the Windows 10 explorer, but you'd have to google that.
Mint is seriously going to sabotage the momentum Linux is having right now.
It's crazy, open a directory full of .mp4s and sometimes the list briefly appears but then it goes completely blank, just to start listing them again one-by-one taking about one second per entry, while being unresponsive to input.
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 a crapshoot when something new and multiplayer launches. My backup plan for those if I really want to play them is to just get them on PS5.
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.
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.
There exist a gazillion of other games too, without anti-cheat.
As I got older, my interests in games decreased. That and also because I am too dumb to make wine work with games nowadays; it was easier in the 32bit era. :\
But the real problem is lack of time. There are so many things to do and so little time. Today's games are also not as interesting IMO. Most of them are just "who has the better 3D engine".
Weird to say you don't game these days but also make blanket statements about games these days :p
1. Hit the download button in Steam
2. Wait for it to download
3. Hit the play button
Granted, my taste in games doesn't include things like generic AAA first person military shooters, which are the ones which tend to be the most difficult to get to work due to stuff like anti cheat. But it sounds like your taste doesn't include those either,
I don't play a ton of modern games, but my wife and I played through the HD remakes of Myst and Riven, released in 2021 and 2024 respectively. I didn't even look at the Proton compatibility before buying the games because for single-player stuff then Proton has gotten so good that I almost never have to worry about it. I don't really play multiplayer games (outside of the original Doom or Minecraft with a friend or my wife, both of which have native Linux clients), so there hasn't ever been an issue for me.
My gaming box is a NixOS JovianOS thing, and I even get very good results using the official Microsoft adapter for Xbox One controllers. I really feel no desire to go back to Windows at this point.
But the stuff that does work, works well. I play Helldivers 2 via Proton on Fedora, and i experience far fewer crashes and instances of weird behaviour than friends on Windows or Xbox.
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 pretty well versed in linux sysadmin things, but LLMs make it so easy I don't even bother trying to solve things myself first.
I have a few people in my friend group who aren't well versed, but they're able to navigate linux just fine by doing this same approach.
There's still friction, don't get me wrong, but it's a different type of friction. On Windows there are far fewer bugs, but there's friction introduced due to it being non-unix based (especially when it comes to code/doing any sort of model training) and due to anti-patterns Windows keeps shipping into the OS. On linux, the friction is just bugs. You can address / fix bugs for the most part, but you can't fix Windows' friction points.
that's like saying if you daily drive windows it's a near certainty you'll have to edit the registry or use powershell/cmd.
It's useful if you know what you're doing but it isn't required anymore at all for most people. Most people just use their machines for the browser or office software. No reason to use command line for them, ever.
I am skeptical there could be any magical technological innovation that would make terminals friendlier. That space has already been thoroughly explored. There are dozens of terminal variants with various quality of life improvements, but the fundamental user experience of a command line interface will always be daunting to a non-technical user, no matter how "innovated".
Google docs demolished one of those.
What finally let me do it was moving all my social gaming to PS5. Ime it’s really only games with anti-cheat requirements that can be a crapshoot on Linux. I can’t really recall ever running into other issues with anything on my (Linux-based) Steam Deck over the past couple of years. I’ve emigrated from my home country so gaming is important to me as a way of staying in touch with friends and family - something I wasn’t willing to risk by switching away from a working setup. A PS5 is a convenient and reasonably economical way to address that.
Feels pretty great to know that after 40+ years of relying on it - some good but a lot bad - I’ll never have to touch Windows again.
Deck works because most games are self contained, allowing them to have a default game mode that bypasses the desktop entirely.
Right now Steam Deck works because of a focus on a very specific use and users. A general purpose desktop requires a lot more, and right now even the most mature linux desktop (GNOME, Plasma etc) have their rough edges and learning curve.
PC does have a fair amount of users that want it to operate in a console-like way when it comes to usability, the moment you tell them to fiddle with a runtime or experiment with the command line variables you lose them. That's to say nothing about handling stuff that lives outside steam, because PC gaming shouldn't equal Valve. The Deck is a nice manageable subset to deal with and fairly small enthusiast audience
Let's say, hypothetically, that Valve releases SteamOS to the general public, and it's received generally well, and it becomes much more common for people to use "that Linux thing" than it is today. Then let's say, hypothetically, that Valve turns evil and... I dunno, starts charging money for updates? At that point you've got a large population already using Linux, I'm sure there would be a pretty big migration to Ubuntu or some other mainstream Linux desktop.
It may even kill console gaming because the Steam Deck is already a fantastic experience just waiting for more games. It's not a small demographic either, it's something like 40% of males age 18-35, plus all of the people in their circles who come to them for tech support. Once market share gets up to 30% or so it becomes a cool trend, that other gamers want to emulate, streamers and influencers get involved. Then around 50% market share the bullying starts. "Windows is for people too stupid to figure out Linux" says a Linux Mint enjoyer to a Windows 11 plebian.
Valve has done a great job getting things started, but it's the studios' turn to make a move now.
And, they know how to to use "flatpak update" to update the sober runtime for Roblox (I know this is not steam, but it is an example of how well other things run on linux). I'm so proud (and ashamed they play Roblox, but choose your battles).
But, Fortnite.
I tried to run a Windows VM, but that was a poor substitute.
Is there an option for Fortnite on Linux?
The solution is: buy a Playstation.
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 for modern, multiplayer games.
https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=category&i...
I've been running Fedora at work for about 6-7 years now too, with few issues. Work binned Adobe XD and moved to Figma which has made it even more viable.
The one and only holdout I keep a Windows 11 install around for is VR. With Valve's new headset due to release any week now, we will hopefully have a bunch of Linux SteamVR patches on the way to sand the remaining sharp edges off.
The minor things were wonky default graphics and mouse acceleration settings, but these were easily fixed from the game menus.
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 thought so too, that's why I mostly used Ubuntu up until 22.04 sometime, used Ubuntu since I moved before that. Then I moved to Arch, and everything just got so much easier. Upgrading Ubuntu versions was a bit hit-or-miss, especially if you'd changed configs for one reason or another. And after 22.04>22.10 failed for whatever reason, I restarted with Arch then never looked back.
Probably it helped that I already knew Arch by the time I started using it, compared to starting to use Ubuntu coming from Windows and not knowing squat.
But now with an installer, good defaults, and a helpful community (maybe slightly controversial) I think Arch can be a pretty good beginner OS, as long as you want to understand how your system is put together.
I wonder how much of that is "hackers and experimentalists", versus random gamers* preferring Arch Linux's bleeding-edge latest-and-greatest packaging approach versus Ubuntu's seemingly-slower-paced development?
* though I suspect even the most casual 25% of PC gamers are probably significantly more tech-savvy than the average PC user of the population in general.
Install is (now?) relatively easy as well and there's enough of a community around it.
If that is true then one of those other two claims has to be false:
1. Using the latest months recorded share (Oct-2025 - 3.05%): 4,026,000 estimated "monthly active users" for Linux+Steam.
2. Market research firm International Data Corporation estimated that between 3.7 and 4 million Steam Decks had been sold by the third anniversary of the device in February 2025.
27% of 4M gives us 1M Steam Deck + Legion users. Yet 4M were sold. That begs the question: How could it be? Do 75% of Steam Deck users run Windows? Have 75% of Steam Decks ended up in the landfill? Are the sale figures estimates wildly off-base?
- International Data Corporation is overestimating the amount of shipped Steam Decks.
- Modified Steam Decks (i.e. running Bazzite) don't report themselves to be Steam Decks
- Most likely: most Steam Deck users opt out of participating in the Steam Hardware survey/analytics.
Last year, I didn't participate in the Steam Hardware survey on my Deck, only on my PC. This year, I participated on my Deck and my desktop, but not my laptop. I still have three devices running Steam. To any survey, it'll look like the amount of Steam devices doubled even though I'm only reporting 67% of my devices to analytics.
I also have steam on multiple devices including a steam deck. On desktop I'm pretty much always logged in and I play games frequently, but most months I'm not selected for a survey. I use my steam deck less frequently and have maybe only gotten the survey prompt on it once or twice.
- may depend on the period being measured.
I haven't looked at the article or their methodology, but if they were measuring over a certain period of time, a few hours, or even 24 hours, it will still likely only pick up a proportion of Steam owners.
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.
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 it to detect outliers, classify some outliers as cheaters and start grouping them all together in lobbies.
Another idea would be to conduct automated experiments on players at random. Such as manifesting "fake" entities behind cover and measure player reactions - of which there should be none. Spawn bots (from the beginning of the game) that a compromised client (cheats) cannot discriminate from players and have them always remain in cover and gauge player behavior relative to them, despawn them if a [presumably real] player is about to detect them.
It all requires work and imagination which is in short supply in the industry. But given how cheaters kill certain types of games maybe someone will eventually do it.
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?
It looks like attestation. Linux needs to be able to assure game developers that the kernel their game is running on is actually protecting the security of their game.
It's a game and it is Tony Hawk, but it's not really comparable as Tony Hawk on PS1.
then people complain when the product sucks and is invasive.
Kudos to the team for keeping us in the loop, I apologize for the strange crashlogs my OOM killer sent.
Steam Deck on the go, Bazzite for desktop. Match made in heaven.
That’s a deal breaker for me, I tried a fresh Bazzite install (from Arch) before giving up, exact same issue.
I wish Valve comes around one day and fixes that, I’ll kick Windows out of life in a heartbeat.
For example, a couple months ago, my install of TW:WH3 started to crash after 20-30 seconds in the main game. I think it started happening after a minor patch. Another example is Battle Brothers. The game ran flawlessly. Then I installed and played a copy on a Windows laptop using the same Steam account. After that the game stopped booting properly on Linux. (Maybe a coincidence.)
As a result, I still boot into Windows now and again to play these games. I am dual-booting.
This helps a LOT with games, especially new ones needing the latest drivers or hardware support.
Stopped dual-booting for games and formatted the partition some time after Windows 7 EOL. Thank you Wine contributors, Valve and lord Gaben.
I think if you like checking it out and customizing the settings of your OS, then try it out! Or at least look up the games you care about on ProtonDB.
Even encrypted the Bazzite SSD just out of paranoia caused by Windows. Even partner-proof so far.
Only ever used Nvidia so far, probably going to switch to AMD in 1-2 years, as I hear that they're better on Linux.
https://gitlab.steamos.cloud/holo/dirlock/-/wikis/Enabling-d...
I’ve had steam installed on (and more/less used daily on) probably 4-5 different windows installs since roughly 2016, and I’ve never seen it more than once a year.
Neither of us miss windows at all. There are some games we cant play but at the end of the day... I dont really want what they offer (in the kernel level shenanigans.), so I cant say I miss them much.
It just depends if you're booted into windows or into linux when you have the survey popup.
The recurring compilation of Vulcan shaders after every update bothers a bit, but it works very well.
only 6 out of the 50 most played right now aren't working
10 millions players ingame, 90% of players are not playing these titles
Rust is also similar: multiplayer community servers with anticheat do not work. When the majority of players are on those servers, switching to Linux is not an option. But people on Linux looking for servers think it's good enough that you can play on servers with anticheat disabled.
It's the same reason alternative web browser engines like Ladybird are probably never going to take off. It might support 99.99% of web features - which sounds amazing! - but that probably means it's going to fail in some way on like 0.1% of sites which in practice is extremely frustrating.
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 messing up.
I hope Valve can get something similar to a Steam Machine programme off the ground now that games actually run on Linux. Unfortunately, I kind of doubt any vendors will bother to go through the effort of supporting their hardware on a firmware level for anything but Windows (and even at that level Windows is full of ACPI patches and driver workarounds to clean up their trash).
If you got the means and space, I think it's the easiest solution. I do play some games on the Mac, but the experience has been rather poor outside of indie games which usually work very well.
That said, the controller support on windows constantly sucks. On macOS though, it's really easy to set up. Go figure.
- Windows 94.84%
- Linux 3.05%
- macOS 2.11%
Apple was the company that boosted OpenGL popularity by using it as the graphics API for OS X. In Apple platforms world there's only one graphics API that is guaranteed to work across their hardware, so it was a big deal. However, they could not keep up with OpenGL updates, as they overlapped poorly with their products map, i.e. switching new OS X to newer OpenGL revision would require to drop support for older Macs.
Out of that need (and also to address multiple shortcomings of OpenGL) Metal was born. OpenGL support layer was implemented on Metal.
Metal was released before Vulkan API was finalised. There was never need for Apple to support Vulkan. Vulkan, as the OpenGL before it, has the same downsides for Apple, but bringing nothing to the table compared to Metal.
Very few games have custom written Vulkan rendering pipeline. Majority rely on game engines, and if the engine supports Vulkan rendering, it is almost certain to also supports Metal.
So, instead of relying on supporting 3rd party rendering APIs Apple spends resources on helping with porting games to Macs natively.
Certainly they were a company that boosted OpenGL, but the company? During the early years OSX had less market share than Linux does today, and OpenGL was already well established by gaming and professional software before OSX ever came out. Quake supported it (not on release), Quake II and Half Life supported it on release, Quake III required it. Heck, Quake III released on Linux shortly before MacOS (classic), making it arguably as influential then, and of course the OSX port of that only came a few years later. But point is, that Id dared to release their new flagship with only OpenGL support shows that OpenGL was already firmly established and supported before OSX existed.
I have been using a MacBook Pro for decades (Linux/Windows PC for gaming). I haven't seen this happening.
Apple have, in recent years, sponsored a few triple A titles to add MacOS ports but the vast majority of games don't run or run so poorly it doesn't matter.
With CrossOver there are a handful of games that work well, most don't. I tried to play Fallout New Vegas and it wouldn't start. Tried to play Raft with some friends and it didn't start. Borderlands 2/3 didn't start. Democracy 4 started but ran at 2 fps.
Some games like EU4 and Dark Souls 1 remastered work pretty well. I ended up buying an ROG Aly because I travel a lot and want a portable gaming experience. I use game streaming to my MacBook to play games - I wouldn't have bought the Ally if my MacBook could just game.
IMO - if the Asahi team were able to implement Vulkan with no documentation or references - Apple could do so in a weekend if they so desired. I'd like to see Apple write Windows or Linux drivers for their hardware so we can use official Bootcamp and run games on platforms that care about it.
Apple can spend all the resources they want, but they'll never be able to convince enough developers to foster a gaming ecosystem that could ever be taken seriously when there's other platforms that have 20+ years of back catalogue titles available. This has largely been enabled on Linux through wrapping D3D to Vulkan and if Apple put in the work to support Vulkan all that work could be used for free. Or if they more permissively licensed GPTK's D3D>Metal wrapper, but as it stands it's still not as good as DXVK/VKD3D. Practically speaking Steam on Mac would be considerably more useful if there was native Vulkan support.
Of course, Apple wouldn't want that given their desire for vertical control of software distribution, though notably they don't do the same for video or audio. I mean they support MP3s right? That's what games should be treated as, a piece of media. MP3 might not be the best quality, most would prefer AAC or FLAC, but sometimes an MP3 is all a user might have, so they should let users play it. But they can't seem to break free from this delusion that game software should be treated the same as Uber Eats.
First, due to substantial differences in graphics hardware, that is tiled-based deferred rendering for Apple Silicon and immediate mode rendering for NVIDIA and AMD the software simulation or translation layer will never be as good as DXVK/VKD3D, which essentially do rendering on exactly same GPUs. In case of using TBDR the pipeline must be rewritten to get the benefits. Simply put, for Apple hardware every Windows game wrapped in a translation layer will be significantly worse off than a native port. That’s why it’s important for Apple to push for that.
Second, Apple is the owner of the biggest game storefront in terms of revenue. They don’t have to ask for game developers to come, they are already here. The market we are talking about is AAA games market. And this market is characterised by dedicated hardware: consoles and gaming PC. So I think this is where lies the actual problem: Apple doesn’t make dedicated hardware for games.
Doesn't matter for the back catalogue, which is the thing that is missing that makes the platform a running joke re: gaming. It's also an issue that affects Adreno on Snapdragon, but it isn't stopping Valve from planning to ship a version of Proton for that platform. Having personally talked to a DXVK developer about this specifically, the overhead, while existent, I understand isn't necessarily as severe as you make it out to be either.
> Second, Apple is the owner of the biggest game storefront in terms of revenue. They don’t have to ask for game developers to come, they are already here. The market we are talking about is AAA games market. And this market is characterised by dedicated hardware: consoles and gaming PC. So I think this is where lies the actual problem: Apple doesn’t make dedicated hardware for games.
Not just AAA, but most everything outside of the F2P/casual sphere. Speaking as someone who actually likes games as a form of art, the App Store's library is the video games equivalent of reality TV and home shopping. It's mostly exploitative trash. Maybe Apple is happy with cornering the market on exploitative trash though, good for them.
How does mesa manage then if apple cannot?
Apple can support both. There's no reason they shouldn't, as a competitor on the open market; AMD, Nvidia and even Qualcomm are supporting both DirectX and Vulkan in software. It would not require Apple to retool their hardware (as Asahi has shown) and would not require them to depreciate Metal (as their OpenGL support shows). The only significant sacrifice Apple has to make is their unforgiving monopoly on modern GPU APIs that they have meted out against everyone's will but their own.
macOS will be depreciated on Apple's roadmap by the time developers take it seriously as a gaming platform. It's outrageous that people like me have to abandon the Mac because Apple expects me to satisfy myself with iPad games instead of the full range of experiences available on the software market. They have a monopoly, Apple is throwing a temper tantrum because they know Steam has the better experience and they can't compete any better than Microsoft does. Their best strategy is to kill the Mac and pretend the iPad is a console with computer-like features, which should outright terrify you if you own a Mac.
...and ARM support. That's the bigger footgun, imo.
It's sad for me as a long-time Mac fan and gaming fan that Apple has always had hardware and OS that was technically superior when it comes to gaming, but neither Jobs nor Cook ever cared about gaming except as a checkbox, so it all went to waste.
The amusing thing to me is that so many productive things have come OUT of pursuing gaming, such as graphics cards being useful for mining and then AI.
It's kind of baffling because it does almost nothing to help the game developers that it's ostensibly aimed at, while it does help end-users play unmodified Windows games on their Mac, which Apple doesn't endorse.
While Valve might make up a big part of CodeWeavers book of business now, that was not true when the original contract was signed.
They also make a Linux build of CrossOver.
https://github.com/86Box/86Box/releases
For some, it is the only real legal option given windows 11 licensing.
Apple M3/M4 are a great chip, but they EOL the hardware ecosystem every 12 years on average. Few companies can tolerate that level of development liability, and Apple users benefit from the FOSS ecosystems cross-platform efforts. =3
Macs actually run a lot less of the Steam library without doing pretty involved workarounds like hsing CrossOver. Since Valve sells the Steam Deck they put a lot of work into getting Windows games to run on Linux automatically. They didn’t put that effort into the Mac platform.
Meanwhile Wine fixed 32-bit OpenGL path performance problem in new wow64 mode, so now you don't need 32-bit Linux dependencies to run 32-bit games in Wine anymore (that affects DX7 games for example that run through OpenGL via WineD3D).
LET'S GO FOR BROKE!!!
LET'S BREAK THE 3.5% BARRIER BEFORE GNU HURD WINS NEXT YEAR!!!!
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 nightmare fuel.
https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/qeqn3b/despite_hav...
Essentially stating that Linux users disproportionately care to actually report bugs they encounter rather than ignoring them. I find that very plausible.
In my lived experience, this 100% pure unadultered copium. It’s the wishful thinking lie that Linux people tell themselves to support their preferred choice of OS software which is, for some reason, part of their identity.
Supporting “Linux” isn’t too bad in 2025 if all you care about is SteamOS and Ubuntu. But distributing pre-compiled binaries and getting them to run on an unbounded range of system configurations is a nightmare.
Linux users do at least expect to run into problems. So they’re willing to fight through errors for several hours before asking for help. And the Linux gamer community is willing to help each other out to jump through all these hoops.
But none of that changes the fact that supporting Linux is an additional mountain of work. Although in 2025 you should definitely support SteamDeck via either Proton or native.
Most of the Linux hurdles in day to day work can be overcome (mostly is the lack of the apps I normally use that cause some attrition, but with some compromises and some work I can get around it). But for gaming (at least in NVIDIA GPUs) it keeps failing.
I have very limited time for gaming (around 2-4h per week), I don't want to keep having to eternally fiddle with game settings, fixing bugs, fixing launchers, try different Proton versions, etc, etc, etc, every time I sit down for a bit of gaming. And Linux, unfortunately, is just not really there.
I game a lot so there's other stuff I'll do like tweak the actual game settings to get visual/performance/control qualities I want, or use steamtinkerlaunch as a way to more easily install mods, or let my distro update my nvidia drivers (which I've found more stable than AMD's in the past on linux, but I use the proprietary ones) but that's all normal gamer stuff regardless of OS.
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 out there among all the distros.
Hope I did well on selling NixOS to you.
My steam library is like 120 games with several pretty popular ones. Again, no issues outside of anti-cheat but I'll uninstall those games so i dont care.
nvidia's drivers have gotten a lot better and their support docs are pretty decent. i had a mild issue a few months ago getting ollama running properly. All i had to do was update the nvidia toolkit, worked fine after that.
I use a LG OLED TV as screen, so no displayport inputs. Only HDMI 2.1.
How is the support for Linux + HDR + HDMI 2.1 + 120 Hz + VRR + Nvidia (5000 series)?
Can always dual boot, so its worth a shot. I have windows just for a few games like BF6 which wont work on linux cause of its anticheat
These Embark people... they scare me.
But Arc Raiders (and their previous game, The Finals) does use RTGI for good effects. And that low quality RT setting is still going to be better than no RT because of its realtime nature. https://youtu.be/MxkRJ_7sg8Y shows that off to good effect.
You can see this kinda performance on Indiana Jones and Doom Dark Ages, which have switched to workflows that require RT. Low quality RT in these games is performant enough to run on Linux AMD drivers which run RT in software on cards that do not have hardware for it: https://youtu.be/44XaGU01J84
Wayland supports it if you have the right version of gpu, gpu drivers, composer, kernel, state of the moon and hdr.
* SteamOS is not real Linux, because normies only interact with Steam launcher
* “Only 3%?”
* Windows is still the biggest platform
Not quite sure what your point is.
Not sure you are either.
> * Windows is still the biggest platform
100% of Windows users are using Linux every single day.