[prhn]

I want to buy one just to raise the signal that Linux support is important.

When these machines were announced I switched to Fedora as a daily driver on my high end gaming rig.

It’s been awesome. I still have to go back to Windows for music production unfortunately. I may switch to Mac for that so I can completely abandon Windows.

I run an optical HDMI cable from my office to my TV and get to play games and use Linux in 77”.

Something feels awesome about that.

[whazor]

The Steam Machines raises the bar on PC Console gaming.

Because:

- GPUs don't support HDMI CEC by default, nor does the operating system offer it

- Suspend mode on motherboards often suck

- Many game controllers with 2.4Ghz don't properly import USB Wake events. Or the motherboard didn't implement it properly

I see the Steam Machine as an expensive open source concept car that moves the needle for us PC gamers.

[mlrtime]

Hasn't all this been mostly solved on the Nvidia Shield Pro for ~7 years now?

[4chandaily]

Sure, and this also solves those things while having better hardware. I have a shield pro, it hasn't seen a hardware update in a long time. I can game one it, but I need to use the steam link app, not run the games natively. These devices serve similar, but different markets.

[c0n5pir4cy]

Not really - it's not a PC.

[soundworlds]

I also work in music production (for video games) and fully switched to Linux + FOSS about a year ago.

I'd say it is a lot more doable if you make electronic styles of music. Harder if you make classical styles, as many of the big sample libraries don't support Linux yet.

Just in case you're interested, here's a list of everything I use: https://johnoestmannmusic.com/tooling/

[Parae]

If you make electronic music using only virtual instruments and effects, it's ok. But if you play live, record live bands with lot's of mics and need to use physical hardware. Neither Mac nor Linux are an option.

Lot's of interface simply work best with Window.

[pkwy]

That is just categorically false (re: Mac not an option).

I’ve been doing all of those things professionally on Macs for almost 20 years. I can’t actually think of a single one of my peers that uses Windows.

[Parae]

That's great to read. I've used Windows for years for music production and recording, due to lot's of audio interfaces which performed best on Windows than on Mac and Linux.

In lot's of recording studio I went, they almost always have Windows with Cubase in a case of something wrong with Mac and Pro Tools.

[gonzalohm]

You are lucky. A lot of the games I play with friends use kernel level anticheat crap that doesn't work on Linux

[dijit]

I work in AAA; more people using Linux means we'll actually get buy-in for working with Linux as a platform.

Right now Producers and HQ don't want to support it because "theres no money there" and they're bolstered by a crew of developers who have only ever touched Windows who will reinforce the notion that Windows is all you need (because they've sunk their entire career into the platform).

I remember bringing this topic up a decade ago and basically being laughed out of the room, slowly those laughs will become uncomfortable silences, then token support from the passionate, then proper initiatives.

It takes time, yeah, but we're so much further today already than we were 10+years ago.

[Atotalnoob]

Even if AAA supports Linux, it’s got to be without kernel anticheat. That’s a non starter for myself and many others

[justaregulanerd]

I don't think that will be the case sadly, just because the majority of gamers don't actually know or care about software having root or kernel level access. In a world where Linux becomes mainstream, AAA games will aim for those users, not hobbyists and enthusiasts like us.

[0x262d]

What is the downside of this if I trust the software provider (eg Riot Games or presumably Valve if this ever comes to Linux)? I have recently come around in support of Riot's anticheat because multiplayer competitive games are so damaged without it, even though I use Linux 95% of the time.

[frollogaston]

It's hard to trust. I have a spare Windows PC where I install whatever on it, and the EA Javelin anticheat has screwed things up before. Wouldn't be doing that on a computer I care about.

Could the kernel have something built in to help with this? Like it can tell a program that nothing else is looking at its memory. And then secure boot attests that the kernel isn't tampered with.

[justaregulanerd]

My thinking would be that because the anticheat is closed source, it makes it a trust exercise in the developer where you've allowed them root access to your machine.

I'd also think outside of the developer's motives, and into any potential vulnerabilities that could use the anticheat as a privilege escalation point or the anticheat itself being given a bad / malicious update.

[aiisjustanif]

Thankfully that has been improving [1] and non-kernel is 100% possible today [2] with valve has so much on documentation and support for game and anti cheat developers to accomplish this.

[1]: https://www.gamingonlinux.com/anticheat/ [2]: https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/steamdeck/proton

[zamalek]

Unfortunately many of these developers believe that kernel-level is mandatory (by virtue of believing that it actually works to prevent _all_ cheating, which we know it doesn't).

[Kuraj]

Kernel level anticheat doesn't make sense on Linux because the kernel is open. There's simply no incentive to do that

[debugnik]

An open source kernel doesn't prevent attestation mechanisms. Anticheats on Windows increasingly require Secure Boot, and all others drivers to be signed/whitelisted; they could try to put similar restrictions on supported distros.

[B-Con]

Yeah, I imagine Linux support would be more like a supported Linux distro rather than generic Linux support. Something like SteamOS but with kernel anti-cheat and secure boot from the start.

Big question is whether they can make craching the anti-cheat it hard/unpredictable enough that the publishers will trust it. If the publishers release such a platform and someone releases a live distro that can crack it with 3 mouse clicks, that's a lot of wasted effort.

I have no idea how effective the Windows anti-cheat is, but I imagine that Linux tooling in general is going to make it harder to lock a user out of controlling their own machine.

[cwillu]

Yeah, the nightmare scenario. I'm actually a little bit worried that we will look back on the last few years as the Golden Years of Gaming on Linux

[frollogaston]

In fact Android has secure boot plus its own stricter thing. Probably the most commonly running software based on the Linux kernel.

[grimleech]

it's a non starter to even have kernel level anticheat, it's the worst idea pushed on the consumers since browser level drms.

[Gareth321]

I strongly disagree. There have only ever been a handful of data exploits attributable to kernel-level anti-cheats. On the other hand, developers report that they significantly reduce cheating. As someone who plays online games, this is a tradeoff I gladly make.

I often feel these comments are made by people whose preferred games are not ruined by cheaters. This is happening right now in Arc Raiders, and it's really sad to watch. The developer, Embark, is now investigating using KLAC to reduce the number of cheaters.

[allarm]

As someone who doesn't play online games this is not a trade off I gladly make. Fortunately, however, KLAC will never become part of the Linux kernel, because adding it to an open-source system simply doesn't make sense.

[eptcyka]

Sure, but maybe this is a different battle? First party Linux support is orthogonal to games not using kernel level anti-cheat solutions.

Tangentially, I wouldn't use kernel level anti-cheats, but if Valve's solution is indicative of the SotA in userspace anti-cheat solutions, there's a lot of room for improvement.

[Zetaphor]

Exactly, no game is worth installing a rootkit for

[DanielHB]

How much do you rely on Steam hardware survey? I am doing my part reporting my Linux usage.

[connicpu]

I'm somewhat lucky in that I didn't have to be the one to force that issue, another friend in my gaming group already made the decision that he would switch to Linux and no longer play any games that did not work on Linux/Proton. So it was pretty easy for me to just switch last year.

[dd8601fn]

My thinking was that I’ll use the Steam Machine for whatever I can. If there’s some title that friends really want to play and that requires kernel anticheat, and it exists in geforce now, I’ll do that from the steam machine.

If it’s something even less doable than that… well I’ll do without.

[marcus_holmes]

But you're playing with friends, right? So you don't actually need anticheat at all. Or are you playing with friends and random assholes from the internet?

I'm curious because if a game requires anticheat that means there's an intention that I'd be playing with people who would cheat if they could. And I don't want to have anything to do with people like that. I don't really understand why anyone wants to spend their time playing games with assholes from the internet.

[vel0city]

> But you're playing with friends, right? So you don't actually need anticheat at all.

There are a lot of games out there where a group of friends parties up and then goes against other parties of friends out there. Sometimes I want to play with my friends against others instead of only against my friends. Its been a pretty common kind of game style for decades.

> I don't really understand why anyone wants to spend their time playing games with assholes from the internet.

Yeah, it'd be nice to somehow exclude those assholes who would cheat. Maybe if there was some kind of technology which could limit the ability for people to use cheats, some kind of "anti-cheat". It would probably have to be pretty low level in the system to properly enforce this "anti-cheating" integrity, maybe in the kernel and hardware level?

[theshackleford]

> And I don't want to have anything to do with people like that.

And nobody is forcing you too.

> I don't really understand why anyone wants to spend their time playing games with assholes from the internet.

Maybe your experience and preference is not shared equally by all? HN users in particular to seem to struggle with this concept for some reason.

[gonzalohm]

That's assuming the game you play allows custom servers. That's pretty rare in 2026

[frollogaston]

I've only ever played a couple of games with kernel-level anticheat. The rest have some other reason they don't work in Linux.

[TonyStr]

I'm curious which ones you had trouble with? I switched last week, and have been testing all the games in my library. I'm quite impressed with how all of them just work with zero or little tinkering. The only games I haven't been able to play are the ones with anti cheat that explicitly deny Linux.

[frollogaston]

In Proton: Age of Empires 2 DE multiplayer went out of sync which ends the game. BeamNG Drive (now Linux native but wasn't a year ago) took 20min to preprocess shaders, then was laggy compared to Windows on the same machine, then reproducibly crashed from a memleak. Both were known issues on ProtonDB, but the rating still said "gold," so I stopped trusting the ratings.

Dolphin is Linux native. Works fine except for the huge input lag using GameCube controllers (via wii u adapter which is the only solid way), which means I can't really use it. Known issue with some driver, I tried a kmod to overclock it but no dice.

[GZGavinZhao]

*sad poro noises

[bitmasher9]

It’s always fantastic to read a success story of migrating to Linux gaming from Windows. As Windows gets worse and worse there will be more people joining us.

Even without buying you can send Linux gaming signals by playing on Linux and participating in the hardware survey.

[awesomeusername]

I just did this at home, and my 9 year old, without my bias or prompting, was pointing out that sea of thieves and MSFS are both microsoft games but run better on Linux

I can't believe what a non-event it was switching the kids over

[d3Xt3r]

I too want to buy one to support the ecosystem, but sadly, Valve doesn't want me to.

> This item is not available for purchase in your region

[archagon]

How do you use a controller with your TV? Do you route USB over there as well?

[hypertexthero]

Ditto.

I use Macs for work and PC for games, and this little box seems a good opportunity to play The Legend of Linux on a desktop or a couch, and make it true.

[ActorNightly]

All it would take for Linux to be equal is nvidia getting their shit together and putting together drivers for Linux.

But because everyone in the world wants to give them money right now, chances are that is not going to happen.

[inigyou]

Let me guess, DAWs? Have you tried Reaper (FOSS) or Bitwig Studio (commercial)?

[Melonai]

As a sibling comment pointed out, Reaper is not FOSS, it's fully proprietary. What makes it stand out is its great Linux support, and very generous licensing.

If you want to venture into the FOSS DAW realm on Linux you have to go to LMMS and Ardour. I've played around with them, they're a little bare-bones, but they do work. Issue is I haven't been able to use them properly, because I just can't stand to look at them, they are afflicted with the medium-size open-source project curse of looking particularly horrid. I hope this isn't taken as an affront to any of the developers behind these projects, a DAW is a hard task, but I keep asking myself, out of the set of developers who work on these projects, is there really no one who feels the same way as me? Am I just afflicted with some weird pixel-peeping autism-esque disorder that makes me stare at the constantly-reocurring-throughout-all-FOSS-applications clump of jarringly gradient-ed grey buttons with white icons on them, their round corners contrasting with each other because they're clearly placed way too close together than they were meant to be? (I swear I see this in every mid-scale project using QT and older GTK!)

And I also need to confirm, this isn't just a "slight annoyance" for me, I have genuine issues when I have to concentrate on a project within some application that is suffering from the FOSS UI affliction, my mind wanders to looking at those buttons again, or those #00FF00 greens, or at some label that has clearly seeped a few pixels downwards out-of-alignment with the button it was placed in...

Ugh, I know I have some issues for sure, but I know someone else has to care about this too? It's the main reason why I fail at using non-textual FOSS software, and have to resort to Logic Pro or Ableton!

Sorry for the rant, I had to get it out of me. I wish I had more time in a day, then perhaps I could go to these projects and help out with UI, but I have a feeling my proposals will be rejected, even if I had the time to make them, I have found most FOSS developers are quite happy with how their UI usually looks like, including many people here on this forum.

[yolo_420]

No, Ardour is disgustingly ugly, so is Gimp and other FOSS apps stuck in the 90s. Some people dig that though I guess.

Also isn’t the case with Ardour that they essentially want you to pay for the binary because compiling it is a PiTA and there are no instructions on how to do so?

[bschwindHN]

You're not alone, I'm also constantly pixel peeping and disappointed with the UIs of many open source (and closed source!) tools.

[intrikate]

Reaper is neither Free nor Open Source.

[tuvix]

Seconding Reaper, great software. Renoise is also extremely fun to use if you’re comfortable with trackers (for midi input not that they track you) and you make electronic music

[JopV]

A much better way to raise that signal, is to use that money to buy native Linux games instead.

[sourcegrift]

Please buy pinephone instead.