I was totally blown away by how good Proton is in the post Steam Deck world. I now play Steam games on my Linux laptop almost daily because they “just work” even when the only listed supported platform is Windows
After hearing people be ecstatic, I thought I’d go full-in on Linux gaming. I have a pretty bog-standard gaming PC that is very Linux-compatible (Intel i5 + Radeon 6800XT) and on there Apex Legends has horrid frame pacing issues, Mirror’s Edge doesn’t work with wireless Xbox controllers. You lose out on a lot of GPU suite features that Windows has. Gnome doesn’t support VRR. Etc etc.
There’s so many small issues it’s held me back from deleting my Windows partition. Maybe in a year or two?
That said, these things work flawlessly on the Deck.
Yeah, except I prefer the cleanliness of Gnome over how scattershot and buggy KDE feels, so I’m SoL. I’ve even looked into launching games into their own little Gamescope instance, but if you don’t run Gamescope as your main window manager, you lose most of its benefits.
> For Mirror's Edge, were you using Steam Input?
Yes. The problem lies in the fact that only the Xone driver properly supports the Xbox wireless adapter, but it doesn’t play nice with Mirror’s Edge. Xpad and XpadNeo do work, but those require USB or Bluetooth.
And me having to tweak a million things tells why gaming on Linux still sucks, aside from Deck’s blessed config. I don’t want to deal with a thousand papercuts, I want to boot my system and play. Windows is still closer to that experience than Linux.
> Yeah, except I prefer the cleanliness of Gnome over how scattershot and buggy KDE feels
But if it's the difference between gaming working or not for you, wouldn't you rather use it? Surely you barely interact with it anyway while gaming, only to get into Steam?
If this is a machine you use for something else too, you could just have a gaming user that logs in to KDE and your normal user that uses Gnome?
> Surely you barely interact with it anyway while gaming, only to get into Steam?
I'm a Linux desktop user and I drop into a game once in a while while I'm waiting for another meeting or waiting for a build to finish or whatever. My work desktop doesn't use VRR (the just-for-games PC uses Windows), otherwise I'd be in the same boat as 'jorvi because it quite matters to me that games on my desktop integrate into everything else at a passable level. For me, GNOME does a better job of integrating my different activities than KDE (which wasn't always the case! I was a KDE3 user for a long time!), so I use GNOME. And it remains an unsolved pain in the ass that the Linux desktop experience isn't coherent enough to mean that we should only be thinking about desktop environments if we want to.
Coherent, holistic switching between tasks is a thing that people are allowed to want and attempting to convince people that they don't is a bad look.
> If this is a machine you use for something else too, you could just have a gaming user that logs in to KDE and your normal user that uses Gnome?
This is a really sad observation on the state of the Linux desktop. Still.
>> If this is a machine you use for something else too, you could just have a gaming user that logs in to KDE and your normal user that uses Gnome?
> This is a really sad observation on the state of the Linux desktop. Still.
It seems like a somewhat odd observation, is it really necessary to have another user to do this? I can easily switch between Gnome, i3, and Sway on my system, I mean that’s going between X and Wayland, no issues… maybe KDE and Gnome have some specific incompatibility though? Odd.
Anyway, at least there’s a workaround. If Gnome is a hard requirement, how is Windows even a candidate?
Honestly it's the reverse for me, but I guess that's down to personal preference. "Gnome" apps keep updating with the "new" GTK style, which means the title bar becomes a conglomeration of a bunch of weird controls, the familiar dropdown menus vanish, everything gets moved into a tiny little hamburger menu and, often, the layout breaks in subtle ways.
The calculator app just recently did this, and now I have to type and enter one line of numbers before the text control realizes it's too small and resizes itself. That first line of numbers is nearly invisible. Happens again every time it's opened.
I'm not sure who decided that desktop apps need to look and feel like touchscreen-first mobile apps, but I don't particularly like it. KDE still feels like a desktop environment, so it's my strong preference. I'll put up with a very slightly less polished experience if it means stuff stops rearranging itself just for the sake of change every couple of weeks.
(Aside from KDE, Cinnamon is pretty solid and less feature packed, maybe give it a whirl?)
Hamburger menus are among my greatest gripes with GNOME. In apps with any functionality at all they end up being poorly organized junk drawers filled with odds and ends, and because they have to be somewhat short to be effective, functions that don’t fit in them either get buried or cut.
What makes this all worse is that GNOME has acres of space reserved at the top of the screen with its statusbar, most of which is empty and doing absolutely nothing. It could house a macOS-style global menubar (as Unity did for fullscreened windows) with room to spare… Though global menubars aren’t everybody’s cup of tea I think many would agree they’re better than the alternative of oversimplified hamburger menus, and they would help achieve the clean look GNOME is going for without so dramatically impeding functionality.
The calculator app just recently did this, and now I have to type and enter one line of numbers before the text control realizes it's too small and resizes itself. That first line of numbers is nearly invisible. Happens again every time it's opened.
OT, but I recently started using a Python REPL as a calculator, leaving it open full time in a window. It's pretty great. Haven't touched an actual calculator, or a calculator app, in weeks.
>Yeah, except I prefer the cleanliness of Gnome over how scattershot and buggy KDE feels, so I’m SoL.
You know that linux distros are multiusers/multiseats systems right? You can perfectly use Gnome as default desktop and live switch to a dedicated gaming user with kde plasma desktop that is only used to launch games.
Kde plasma shoudln't be buggy if only used as a game launcher and disable baloo file indexing if you want to limit kde memory usage to minimum.
Windows users always find a reason not to switch to Linux because some missing feature. In two years? There will be another new feature or game on Windows. I remember people insisting on using Windows because it support their „3D-Shutter glasses“ or their card from Nvidia.
Either you want use Linux or not :)
Why are many features initially only available on Windows?
First. That is wrong. Important features like cgroups, namespace and containers/Flatpak where novelly developed upon Linux.
Second? MBAs only look at past numbers. So Windows often get traditional Windows stuff first. You make guess it, innovative companies care about what will be possible in future. Valve for example.
The MBA style thinking is also in many consumers. Still buying Nvidia? Because they were faster in the paper sheet? I prefer the cards which works well with Linux, so AMD or Intel. Frames actually generated are more worth than problems with proprietary drivers.
PS: Linux has maybe won the war against drives. Seems like Nvidia open most stuff slowly and feature land in the nouveau-module or mesa. A decade to late. I’m already in Team AMD ;)
You're using the phrase "MBA thinking" to mean "making decisions based on your personal use case and identifying solutions which match".
I'm not sure how this is a bad thing. I don't run Linux to run games because Windows is a better supported platform for running games. I'm not "looking at past numbers", I'm looking at the situation in front of me as it exists, setting aside my personal feeling on what might have been and instead focusing on what actually exists, today, for the problem I am looking to solve today.
Why don’t people like Linux? Because it takes 8 bloody commands to do something as simple as add a new drive whereas Windows you can just open disk utility and format. I bounced off Linux a few weeks ago over this. It’s for people who want to tinker more than actually use the system.
That's untrue though. Linux has a disk utility (I use gparted personally). And you can surely do it on the command line in a single command.
On Linux you could automate that task. How would you propose automating "open disk utility and click a few buttons" on Windows?
This is less of a "Linux can't" issue and more of a "I quickly know how to do it on Windows after years of experience and I don't know how to do it on Linux." Linux not being identical to Windows isn't a flaw. No one blames you for not wanting to relearn, but pretending like Linux is bad because your Windows muscle memory doesn't apply is nonsense.
On Gnome, you open the disk manager. You click format.
In fact a lot of things are easier. On windows, you need a third party tool to install an iso onto a disk. On Gnome, you open disk manager, right click disk, click restore from image.
Looking back, that may have been my switching point: when setting up my distro of choice took less time then windows after a fresh install. Life without package managers, even now that there is chocolatey, is just unnecessary pain. And as a DE, windows had no edge over something like KDE.
>Windows users always find a reason not to switch to Linux because some missing feature.
Because the OS is a tool, not a religious/political statement.
Therefore I'll use it if it works the way I need it and it solves my problem, or not use it if it doesn't work the way I want it and ends up creating more problems for me than it solves. Simple.
>First. That is wrong. Important features like cgroups, namespace and containers/Flatpak where novelly developed upon Linux.
I get your overall point, but the first "process containers" code that later became cgroups was merged to the kernel in 2007. Windows came out with the Job Objects API in Windows 2000 (NT 5.0) in 2000.
IMO, the Job Objects API was not really suitable to use in production settings; it had many weird edge cases, so although it looked similar to cgroups it often broke in strange and unpredictable ways.
Steam Input is rapidly becoming the Google Play Services of the desktop linux world. On Steam Deck for a long time you couldn't even use the touchpads without the Steam client running.
Did you try out 'gamescope'? This is something you find on the Deck but not 'for free' with Steam on other Linux.
I find it helps with pacing. It also supports VRR with a commandline argument, '--adaptive-sync'.
VRR may need support in the environment to work, I'm not sure. Sway/wlroots does it fine. Presumably KDE does/can too since that's what the Deck uses in 'desktop' mode (otherwise, gamescope).
edit: I see in another post - you have! Agreed on KDE being scattershot. I hope the Gnome people clear things up for you. I wouldn't go so far as to suggest i3/Sway, even though I'm happy with them
Could you provide details on how you got gamescope working with sway? What is the full command line you used? I believe I ran into problems with it conflicting with XWayland or something like that.
Cannot relate much. My 5800x3D and 6800XT deliver an outstanding Linux gaming experience. I don't play EA games, though. I do play some fast paced shooters that don't need VRR since you can manually cap fps to your liking.
Also, it was my understanding that gnome has support for adaptive sync.
May i ask what driver features are you missing? I only want some decent fan control instead of relying on random scripts off github. AMD has to release some sort of GUI panel for sure.
> I only want some decent fan control instead of relying on random scripts off github. AMD has to release some sort of GUI panel for sure.
Have you tried CoreCtrl [0]?
> My 5800x3D and 6800XT deliver an outstanding Linux gaming experience.
I have a 7900XTX and performance under Linux has been at least on par with Windows, sometimes better (though not by much).
> May i ask what driver features are you missing?
I'm not GP but I'd love to see frame gen and stuff like anti-lag and upscaling integrated into amdgpu with some sort of official way of setting it (though looking at Adrenaline it might actually be best if it's left up to the community to create the GUIs).
Similar specs but run Windows here, part of the reason being that I noticed that the ray tracing performance is just awful on Linux compared to Windows. I found I get slightly better framerates in most games in Linux, but anything that uses raytracing goes from "just about usable with FSR" on Windows to "totally unplayable" on Linux.
I'm told it's better in Mesa 23.3 though, haven't tested.
> After hearing people be ecstatic, I thought I’d go full-in on Linux gaming. I have a pretty bog-standard gaming PC that is very Linux-compatible (Intel i5 + Radeon 6800XT) and on there Apex Legends has horrid frame pacing issues
Apex Legends run flawlessly for me, but only on KDE/X11 with Nvidia reflex enabled[0].
If you are on Radeon though, I bet the problem is your window manager. I have the frame pacing issues on:
- hyprland/wayland (even with no_direct_scanout = true; and floating game windows)
- KDE/wayland
I also had a weird issue using gamescope as my DM where apex got resized into a tiny frame in the top left that was like 200 pixels or so wide.
> That said, these things work flawlessly on the Deck.
Likely due to running into these graphics driver -> WM and similar compatibility issues and fixing them. The other performance improvements from kernel changes probably don't hurt either.
I’m not sure why people are trying to convince you; Linux is free so there really isn’t any benefit to us Linux users or to the Linux developers if you switch…
Valve should be the only one that is worried about your opinion here. I think they develop SteamOS as a backup plan, though, in case Microsoft ever starts to take their own App Store seriously.
That is surely part of the consideration, but certainly not all. Some engineers at Valve (especially the head honcho Gabe Newell) are legit Linux people (Debian IIRC). They believe in it, and I love them for it
I don't dispute your claims, but I remember very clearly that back then it seemed obvious that SteamOS was a response to the Microsoft Store and a fear that Microsoft would mandate that all software on Windows come from the Microsoft Store.
While that was obviously speculation, at least the dates match up (October 26, 2012 for Microsft Store launch and December 13, 2013 from SteamOS launch according to Wikipedia)
Agree based on my memory. I think the Microsoft store threat is what finally tipped the scale. It took it from "we kind of support linux because we like it" to "we support linux because it's important business insurance for us in case Microsoft goes Apple (or Xbox or whatever example you want) and monopolizes app distribution on Windows.
And it left them well-positioned for the steam deck, I wonder if they were thinking about that when they started steamOS, or if it is just an example of the natural advantage that openness gives you.
Anyway, agree—I wasn’t trying to belittle Valve’s motivations, just wanted to include a thought about why they seem to be happy serving both platforms.
Yep. DRM’d online stuff and VR mainstays (Beat Saber, primarily) are the two sets of games that are keeping me tethered to Windows at the moment. VR games can be played via a Windows VM with GPU passthrough but for DRM’d online games you don’t really have any other option, at least if you don’t want to get banned.
I also run a Windows VM for gaming. One thing to note is that some games have (robust!) VM detection checks on launch, so you can’t even run them in the first place. Valorant is one example.
What do you use for the VM? Last time I checked, I couldn't find any free/FOSS VM tooling that allows me to do GPU pass-through on a Linux Host to Windows Guest.
It seems like you haven't looked into it much since it's was feasible for last 7-8 years..
Linux hosts had GPU passthrough working well before commercial software had such options. Nowadays it's just work out-of-box with Virt-Manager that just run QEMU under KVM.
It's been working for years for 99.9% of games excluding some invasive anti-cheats that ban you for VMs, but there literally only a few games that have issue with virtualization.
I use Proxmox and GPU passthrough works just fine (via QEMU). Note that Nvidia GPUs have less issues with passthrough, at least last I checked. See this guide: https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/PCI_Passthrough
But if you’re running a standard distro, there are guides for most them.
Last thing to note is that your motherboard can make the process easier if it has good IOMMU support. Basically, you want a MB that puts your PCI slot in a separate IOMMU group. You can find examples by searching for “(MB name) IOMMU groups”.
Do you mean the presence of anti-cheat software makes them anti-player? Because I’d disagree. It’s a lot of work and expense to combat cheats, but is very much appreciated by many players (when it works)
Or they could just not trust the clients, instead of throwing the problem over the wall. A lot of these games with fancy anti cheat protection the cheat tools basically just tell the server "spawn me a vehicle right here" and the server just does it. Garbage.
> A lot of these games with fancy anti cheat protection the cheat tools basically just tell the server "spawn me a vehicle right here" and the server just does it.
Citation needed. I'd be quite surprised if it were common for servers of professional games to trust the client in that sense (i.e. allowing it to decide game logic like what gets spawned where).
As far as I'm aware the most common types of multiplayer cheats are
* wall hacks, which you could probably prevent by not sending the client any information about objects that the player can't see, but that would require the server to calculate the line of sight for every player/object,
* and aim bots, which I don't think you could prevent at all on the server side since they don't rely on the bot having access to any information that the player isn't supposed to have. They just rely on the bot being better at aiming. I suppose if you did all rendering server side and only sent the rendered graphics to the client (i.e. streaming), that would make it harder for the bot because it'd now have to do image recognition to find the target, but that just makes it harder, not impossible. Plus, game streaming wasn't well received for a reason and anyway, I don't think that's what you had in mind when you talked about "not trusting the client".
Look up BF2. Cheat tools would just disable limits locally on ammo requests, vehicle requests, artillery strikes, and so on. Server didn't check anything. It had fancy anti-cheat tech. Which was bypassed by just writing and restoring executable memory changes faster than the anti cheat detected.
Things are certainly not always as professional as they appear to be.
Visibility test is definitely feasible against wallhacks, it's not that expensive.
Aimbot is an assist cheat, which technically does not violate the physical rules of the game, so you are right that it's more difficult to detect. One solution to detect this class of cheating is to record the player's movement, and rely on a combination of outlier scores and outlier movement behavior to detect abuse. It's not watertight, but neither are any of these client side anti-cheat detection schemes.
Wow, it’s awesome you’ve solved the entirety of multiplayer gaming. Here I was thinking anti-cheating measures was a complex topic but it’s great you’ve elucidated me.
"just" is (tongue in cheek) a forbidden word in HN. Next thing you might find yourself claiming is that Dropbox is a worthless idea because it's "just" FTP.
Btw tell me exactly how an aimbot that takes the visuals from the player's screen and tilts the player's cursor so (or not so) slightly towards identified moving targets, are to be avoided from the server. Modern cheating is already a hard-ass problem to solve, much more so if no client-level monitoring is desired.
> Btw tell me exactly how an aimbot that takes the visuals from the player's screen and tilts the player's cursor so (or not so) slightly towards identified moving targets, are to be avoided from the server. Modern cheating is already a hard-ass problem to solve, much more so if no client-level monitoring is desired.
The very same way that you'd do it on the client. If I run an aimbot on an nvidia jetson devkit, using HDMI in to get the screen image and USB emulation to send inputs, your anticheat has to do the same work regardless if it's on the client or the server.
Dropbox is a worthless idea (long term) because it's not running on my own server. :')
And exactly. You cannot detect that with client-side anti-cheat nonsense either. Record on the HDMI and output a fake USB mouse, why not? Botting doesn't break the physical rules of the game, so you're right that it's hard to detect. One "solution" is to record player movement on the server and detect outliers in behavior and scores. Not perfect (and also very difficult), but just as unreliable as client-side anti cheat nonsense.
it's anti-player when it is security theatre, which in 95% of cases it is.
When I start a game and I see an Easy Anti-Cheat banner I think to myself "Great now I can be killed by an aimbot while simultaneously hosting a root-kit voluntarily."
Why do you think these systems are advertised like that, at the forefront of the game load? It's so that the developers create a false trust in the playerbase that they're doing their damnedest to prevent cheaters, when the reality is that they paid a small amount of cash to a third party to use a system that does a piss-poor job at everything aside from being a symbol of effort and adding incompatibilities where there shouldn't be.
eac bypassing is trivial to a laymen, that doesn't bode well as a defense against people that have made cheating their hobby.
and to be clear : I use EAC as the example because to me it symbolizes the 'security theatre' side of the effort. Real anti-cheat efforts exist, and those should be applauded. EAC ain't it, but it's the industry standard... worrisome.
I personally would far rather have the occasional cheater than have the game install literal rootkits. It's absolutely bonkers that people are willing to accept that.
There's nothing "esports" about wanting to avoid wallhacks/aimbots in games like Tarkov, Rust, or Destiny, which completely ruin the entire game for every player in the lobby in an instant. It has nothing to do with "esports" and everything to do with actually being able to play the game. Do you also think it's because of "esports" when you're forbidden from cheating at a game of chess in person? When my friend plays Rust and gets upset because a flying aimbot hacker raids his base, gets banned, and comes back 1 hour later (buying a hot key off some shady 3rd party site), is he thinking "Damn, esports is really ruining this game"? No. The players are expected to fundamentally abide by the same rules. That's what a game is.
Realistically these days with how expensive most of these games are to run and make, if you do not keep cheaters away it can tank the entire project, e.g. Cycle: The Frontier basically had to shut down because they couldn't keep cheaters at bay, in a system that heavily relies on player count to remain healthy and fun. Once the cheating gets bad enough, people stop playing the game, which leads to a death spiral: it starts with bad queue times, which leads to people playing other games, and that spiral further diminishes the playerbase beyond a point of no return. Cycle barely made it 12 months and the result was a multi-million dollar project getting flushed down the drain.
A kernel level invasion of privacy is required to stop flying players? That doesn't sound right to me. Not to mention that apparently it isn't working if your friend is witnessing it.
So players of those games are sacrificing privacy for no security at all by the sounds of it.
I am glad that Bungie is going with fog of war for Marathon. And heck, given the features Marathon is getting, maybe someday Destiny can have those nice things too. We'll see...
I assumed that cheating is way more widespread amongst multiplayer gamers? There is a lot less anonymity in esports and if you get caught and blacklisted.. well you just wasted thousands or tens of thousands of hours.
It's pretty hard to have fun when the server is full of cheaters.
> I assumed that cheating is way more widespread amongst multiplayer gamers?
I mean, hard to call cheating in a multiplayer game the same as cheating in a singleplayer game. The former ruins the experience of others, the latter just affects your own session. Hard to be against cheating in a singleplayer context.
The Valorant community is incredibly in favor of the Vangard anti-cheat that loads as an early kernel mode driver, and the pro/pro-am Counter-Strike scene plays on FACEIT because they have a strong Kernel-based anticheat. VAC, and server-side VACnet just doesn't cut it.
The only thing incredible is how upset people are for pointing out that it’s hostile to tell someone the game they enjoy playing is garbage and is not worth playing because it has anticheat.
You are conflating ideas. I don’t think it will be a productive discussion to go down the road of anticheat systems and DRM. We can all have opinions that are different.
What is productive is calling out hostile behavior and comments that do nothing but hurt the ecosystem. I see these type of strong negative opinions in a lot of areas of the Linux community. “Oh you do X, that’s stupid you should not be using the product like that”
The best possible, most correct, most defensible, most world-improving advice to give for dealing with a user-hostile product or service, is to have the strength of will to reject it and live without it, and live the example to show that it's possible and you won't die.
Or at the very least, it is AT LEAST as defensible a stance as "The more pragmatic/adult approach is to give the bully whatever they want than to go without their product or service".
That philosophy is not remotely automatically more correct or more adult or nuanced or any of the self-serving words anyone typically uses to try to grant their idea more legitimacy than it deserves.
Calling the principled stance "hostile" is itself hostile.
You can phrase it in a way that sounds emotional and shortsighted and jeuvenile, and certainly there are many juveniles who are guilty of that.
Never the less, rejecting a bad deal is still fundamentally a reaction not an action, a defense not an offense.
The publisher promulgating a user-hostile deal is inarguably the offender, the initial hostile actor.
You can decide that the bad deal is tolerable for yourself, but that is entirely your weakness and does not make that policy smarter or more correct than that of those that decline.
> What is productive is calling out hostile behavior
Okay; anti-cheat is user-hostile.
> “Oh you do X, that’s stupid you should not be using the product like that”
Okay, the thing I want is to use a game that I paid for, play it on the machine I own, and run it without giving it any special privileges (certainly not modifying my kernel). I trust that you will support that and not be negative about the way I want to use it?
The players of the game are willing to put up with DRM and anticheat in order to get the game. By taking a hardline stance against these, the Linux community is being user-hostile.
They are not, but both are symptoms of a consumer-disrespecting mindset.
- DRM does not serve the consumer, but the producer.
- Anti-cheat only serves the consumer if it is well-designed. However, if someone is able to design a game (technically) well, anti-cheat is unnecessary. And if someone cannot design a game, their anti-cheat is often a disservice to the consumer.
I don't like either DRM or anti-cheat solutions, not because I am not willing to pay the producers, but because I have been burned too many times by dysfunctional solutions.
Well if cheating is going to make the game almost unplayable the outcome is pretty much the same as you deciding to never install it in the first place due to disliking anticheat systems. So I don't really see the problem.
Obviously, you haven't been in a position where you had to patch the anti-cheat solution yourself in order to play the game you paid for.
Well-designed games offer limited potential for cheaters by design. An anti-cheat software can help to eliminate the little potential that is left, but often games are designed without cheating in mind and some anti-cheat software is put in place to solve all the issues that were produced by the bad design.
I think that there are very few tasks in competitive multiplayer games that humans perform better than machines[1], I don't think your statement holds true unless you exclude a huge amount of game genres or you take all the fun out of them. (E.g. no FPSs or ..FPSs with no aiming?)
[1] Unless we're talking about captcha solving competitions, for now, maybe. :)
It varies by game. https://areweanticheatyet.com/ is an interesting resource for that because they also track announcements by developers about whether or not linux support is eventually planned.
You’re missing the bigger picture. Yes, developers really appreciate that their games work seamlessly on the Steam Deck and Linux with no effort on their part. But there are a couple of knock on effects.
One is that developers now a specific hardware + software combo to test their games with. Even if it’s the same build they’re sending out, they’re still testing their game on the Deck and fixing issues, leading to a better (but not perfect) experience for Linux gamers. Here’s a video of Swen Vincke, CEO of Larian studios playing a game released by his studio on the Steam Deck - https://youtu.be/kzfEkSGa45k. He’s very pleased and promises to test future games released by his studio on the Deck. And he stuck to that promise - Larian released several fixes specifically for the Steam Deck to make Baldur’s Gate III run better. Linux gamers benefit from that.
Second, this increases the % of gamers using Linux. After the Deck’s success in the last couple of years Linux is at 1.91% of the respondents of the Steam Hardware Survey for Nov 2023. Linux was at 1.15% 18 months ago. Doesn’t sound impressive, but if that growth continues and it reaches 3-4%, at that point developers will find shipping native Linux builds more attractive.
Valve adocates are the ones failing to learn from OS/2 history, "it does Windows better than Windows".
Studios don't care about native GNU/Linux, despite the games being shipped with Android/NDK, PlayStation POSIX environment, and the available APIs on Switch OS.
All of them much easier than porting from Windows/XBox, almost straight ports if coming from Android/NDK.
Having a desktop OS was a big thing 30 years ago, but now nobody cares anymore. Who interacts with their OS other than launching browsers or apps based on browsers? Not even most coders these days.
OSes are irrelevant these days and having basically libwindows.so these days only underlines that.
Pity that Khronos never got the support they needed to make cross-platform raster APIs a reality. I mean really, what an enormous and crying shame that a successor to a highly-demanded API like OpenGL never emerged. It's really quite sad that users never had a corporate champion to resist the allure of a proprietary graphics API. The stage was set for every modern OS to be unified under a new raster library, but the setting was dashed for a petty buck. Quite a tragedy.
Ah well, it's funny to see people complaining because it really solos out the OS you're using. Windows users have native DirectX, Linux users have near-flawless DXVK, and Mac users... well, Mac users get what Apple gives them, and they have to learn to be happy with it.
Exactly because of my past history with the games industry 20 years ago, and some contacts I still have, I know much better than random HN commenter ranting about why studios don't care.
Food for thought, not even the studios targeting Android/NDK care about GNU/Linux, despite both platforms having the same 3D, audio and device API relevant for games.
It isn't the APIs that make them not care about GNU/Linux.
Totally, duly noted. Do try out Digital Combat Simulator when Mac figures out the whole DirectX thing though, it's a must-see on recent machines. Ciao!
Valve inventing a portable game runtime that just works on all Linux distros without game studios needing an entire department to handle the dependency hell of Linux NIHisn would solve that issue.
Does it actually work though? Ironically my experience is that windows api + proton are a more stable target than anything linux native. Even valve doesn't get it always right when shipping linux versions of their own games. See https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=30358... for example.
After hearing people be ecstatic, I thought I’d go full-in on Linux gaming. I have a pretty bog-standard gaming PC that is very Linux-compatible (Intel i5 + Radeon 6800XT) and on there Apex Legends has horrid frame pacing issues, Mirror’s Edge doesn’t work with wireless Xbox controllers. You lose out on a lot of GPU suite features that Windows has. Gnome doesn’t support VRR. Etc etc.
There’s so many small issues it’s held me back from deleting my Windows partition. Maybe in a year or two?
That said, these things work flawlessly on the Deck.