Even gamers nexus’ Steve today said that they’re about to start doing Linux games performance testing soon. It’s happening, y’all, the year of the Linux desktop is upon us. ᕕ(ᐛ)ᕗ
Edit: just wanted to clarify that Steve from GN didn’t precisely say they’re starting to test soon, he said they will start WHEN the steam OS releases and is adopted. Sorry about that.
To anyone reading this thinking “once SteamOS comes out, I’ll switch”, you should know:
Gaming on Linux is already here. Pick a distro and game. You can take advantage of Proton right now. You don’t need to wait for one specific distro.
I’ve personally been gaming on Linux exclusively for about 3 years. Windows games, not Linux games.
Edit: based on other commenters’ suggestions, I’ll give you some.
I have gamed for those three years on PopOS. It is a distro based on Debian, ultimately, which means it’s also related to Ubuntu and Mint. Realistically, you can pick any of those 4 and you should have a nice experience.
Arch is popular with the übergeeks, and I do use it on my laptop, BTW, but you shouldn’t use it as a first distro.
The concept of “distro” doesn’t really exist for Windows, because you pretty much get one monolithic product. But basically, it is a specific mix of software that works together and relies on the Linux kernel. Imagine it as a “version” of Windows with specific goals, some of which are overlapping (e.g. Mint and Ubuntu tend to cater to the same audience).
If you get far enough into it, the freedom that Linux allows means that you can turn any distro into any other distro.
“Pick a distro” is why they’re waiting for steamos, presumably.
I think that is perfectly valid and I’ll happily recommend steamos to newcomers. I’m only a little worried about it being locked to flatpaks by default though. Hopefully that will change, but for most users it will be a good start.
I wouldn’t say SteamOS for new folks, tbh. Flatpaks are very different from the typical Linux flow.
The typical linux flow is not important to learn for most and flatpak is easier for the vast majority of people to understand and deal with
furthermore flatpak is rapidly becoming the typical linux flow
Locked to flatpaks? aren’t they worried about the disk space?
One flatpak uses a lot of extra disk space, but for each additional flatpak you add to a system the disk space difference is much smaller because they share dependencies. When it’s system-wide for all user-installed packages, the difference is quite small.
I was under the impression the didn’t shared dependencies thus eating space.
They don’t share dependencies with the base system, but they do share dependencies with each other, so long as those dependencies are at the same version, which most of them are because flatpaks generally stay quite up to date.
It’s actually surprising how easy it is to use.
My wife was playing Baldur’s Gate 3 on her windows laptop (GOG version, DRM free) and I just wanted to see if I can run it on my Linux laptop.
Just copied the game folder from her laptop to my external SSD, plugged it into my laptop, ran through proton. Everything works without any issues. Simple as that.
I was pleasantly surprised. We could even join via LAN and had some co-op fun. After trying it out I think I’m buying the game.
Sons is mostly playing Valorant right now on Windows 11. I’m an old dude familiar with FreeBSD, and Debian. No clue about running games and stuff though. Would he be able to switch?
edit: thanks for the insight. Sounds like a no-go for now until anti-cheat stuff is supported outside windows.
Yes, anti-cheat specifically is a problem. That’s you fighting against the corpos, to be clear. Not really an issue with gaming on Linux itself.
Edit: not only against the corpos, but more generally against the idea of “kernel-level anti-cheat”. If you’re giving any corporation kernel-level access to your machine, you basically no longer control your machine. That’s true of Windows too.
It’s a big issue and the lack of support on Linux is a bit of a feature, not really a bug.