[chao-]

>the only remaining use case for me is a gaming PC

More and more it seems people don't even find it necessary for that.

I'm "the Linux friend" for a lot of my friends, and over the last year-ish a surprising number of them have asked about advice for switching to Linux. I've helped four people attempt the switch, and three out of the four have stuck with Linux so far.

[rekoil]

All the damn developers keep turning off online play for Linux users though... I play two games a lot currently, Apex Legends and Battlefield 6, both block Linux players from online play thanks to their shitty kernel rootkits not supporting Linux.

Apex Legends at least was running fine on Steam Deck prior to november 2024 when they instituted this change, and I can tell you from personal experience it had very little impact on cheaters, which was their excuse for the change (supposedly most cheaters were connecting via Linux clients).

[newdee]

> supposedly most cheaters were connecting via Linux clients

I always find this so hard to believe, mainly because the majority of players are on Windows, which means that the market for cheats is there and statistically most likely to happen there.

I just don’t play games by devs that snub Linux. There are many to choose from.

[quadruple]

The thing with Linux cheats is that they were significantly easier to make(you didn't have to think about bypassing the anticheat at all, you could just read the game's memory or LD_PRELOAD your cheat in), and a lot more were publicly available(in true FOSS fashion, a lot of Linux cheats were open-source). A cheat that could cost $30-$60 a month on Windows could be free as in freedom(and free beer) on Linux.

[fragmede]

But the anti-cheat technology on Windows is more through, so it's harder to cheat on Windows.

[happymellon]

If the number of cheaters hasn't changed, but Linux users are now blocked, then your premise is flawed.

[rekoil]

I'm sure the number probably changed a bit, but I can tell you for a fact it isn't like cheaters disappeared overnight just because they banned Linux clients.

[exhumet]

yup i am too, steamdeck helped convert me fully. this year my goal is to move my main gaming desktop to linux with tiny spare ssd for windows to run the odd anticheat game on.

[toomuchtodo]

How do you like the steam deck? Do you feel like it was worth the cost?

[RandomChance]

Absolutely love it, the wife and I have hundreds of hours between us on our steam decks and it has consistently performed better than I expected.

[exographicskip]

cachyos has been nearly flawless for a non-steam deck (gpd win mini 2). Upgrades broke my tv being set to the primary display under gamemode but that was an easy fix.

The other game changer (heh) was going all in on amd: cpu, integrated gpu, and discrete gpu via oculink.

Nvidia may be the best overall performance for gaming and ai workloads, it still doesn't play nice with linux gaming

[bigyabai]

I don't think that's Nvidia's fault, I've never seen an eGPU enclosure system of any type work seamlessly on Linux.

[happymellon]

> I don't think that's Nvidia's fault

Most issues on Linux come from fighting the community, which historically Nvidia has done a lot of.