[HN Gopher] Linux gamers on Steam cross over the 3% mark
___________________________________________________________________
Linux gamers on Steam cross over the 3% mark
Author : haunter
Score : 420 points
Date : 2025-11-02 18:54 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.gamingonlinux.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.gamingonlinux.com)
| haunter wrote:
| 27% of that 3% is the Steam Deck / Lenovo Legion Go S. So most
| Linux players are in fact not on the Steam Deck.
| tredre3 wrote:
| > 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?
| Kudos wrote:
| Isn't the more obvious answer that the market research firm
| got their number wrong?
| niij wrote:
| #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.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| Alternative options:
|
| - 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.
| brianwawok wrote:
| I'm Linux gaming bazzite on my tower. Sees at least as many
| of us as steam decks.
| dm319 wrote:
| Another alternative
|
| - 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.
| zamadatix wrote:
| Even more likely: A sizable portion of Steam Decks sold are
| not played every month.
| Jach wrote:
| 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.
| rafaelmn wrote:
| 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.
| netule wrote:
| They likely stopped using them altogether.
| hamandcheese wrote:
| I have a Steam Deck. Haven't booted it up in months. It
| convinced me that I could game on Linux, now I game on my
| Desktop.
| ShinTakuya wrote:
| Or, you know, most steam deck users aren't using them
| constantly and so they don't get picked up in the survey.
| periodjet wrote:
| I honestly can't believe it's not much higher. It's so easy these
| days with SteamOS and Bazzite.
| haunter wrote:
| 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.
| WhereIsTheTruth wrote:
| https://www.protondb.com/explore?sort=playerCount
|
| 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
| IshKebab wrote:
| 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.
| jsheard wrote:
| 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.
| ThatPlayer wrote:
| 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.
| yerich wrote:
| 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.
| jsheard wrote:
| 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.
| ziml77 wrote:
| 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.
| BoredPositron wrote:
| Because people use their PCs as general computing devices.
| Immutable distros are irritating for people that are used to
| Windows or macOS.
| lawn wrote:
| Linux is miles better than Windows as a general computing
| device, it's not even close.
| BoredPositron wrote:
| Ignorance is bliss. We are not talking about general Linux
| in this chain.
| Dedime wrote:
| 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.
| dotancohen wrote:
| 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.
| Arech wrote:
| 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).
| ok123456 wrote:
| 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.
| macNchz wrote:
| 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!
| pacifika wrote:
| Interesting, why is that, considering macOS is itself
| immutable?
| BoredPositron wrote:
| It's not on the application boundary...
| snowram wrote:
| You over estimate the will/knowledge of everyday people to do
| anything else than buy a branded PC, install Steam and be done
| with it.
| yoz-y wrote:
| 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.
| andoando wrote:
| I mean that is how it should be. Im a huge nerd and even for
| me Im real tired having to go troubleshoot bunch of shit to
| get something working
| jeroenhd wrote:
| 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).
| AuthAuth wrote:
| Another Linux W, I love to see it. Thats 4 million gamer which is
| a sizable chunk of people to target
| keyringlight wrote:
| 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).
| nubinetwork wrote:
| 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.
| starkrights wrote:
| 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.
| IshKebab wrote:
| Yeah it's definitely not monthly.
| wiseowise wrote:
| Haters cheat sheet yo help you out, in case you've forgot your
| "arguments":
|
| * SteamOS is not real Linux, because normies only interact with
| Steam launcher
|
| * "Only 3%?"
|
| * Windows is still the biggest platform
| bobim wrote:
| I have a coworker who usually say that billions of flies can't
| be wrong. Maybe we should just start eating what they eat.
| dotancohen wrote:
| I've been saying it for years. Windows are for bugs.
| ErroneousBosh wrote:
| > * SteamOS is not real Linux, because normies only interact
| with Steam launcher
|
| 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.
| TACIXAT wrote:
| 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.
| SteveNuts wrote:
| 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.
| hamandcheese wrote:
| 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.
| PeaceTed wrote:
| 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.
| akho wrote:
| The issues people cite all primarily affect consumer
| desktops. I don't think they see decades of lifetime
| there; it's a dying market, so they milk it.
| bee_rider wrote:
| 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.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| I would be MORE than happy to pay for an un-enshittified
| version of Windows. They won't take my money.
| galangalalgol wrote:
| 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.
| tobyjsullivan wrote:
| 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.
| SteveNuts wrote:
| 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.
| doublerabbit wrote:
| I jumped ship when WSL came to be. I was more a Cygwin
| user, all the features of linux but done differently.
| Been using FreeBSD for years now.
| ThrowawayB7 wrote:
| > " _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(tm) 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?
| dangus wrote:
| 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.
| monocasa wrote:
| I think that's true for the consumer side, but I believe
| Micrsoft still sees value in truly owning a complete
| system software stack.
|
| Azure is still running on Hyper-V afaik for instance.
| bee_rider wrote:
| I think their earnings are detailed here:
|
| 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.
| dm319 wrote:
| 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'.
| SteveNuts wrote:
| And then you still have to wonder if "My Documents" is
| actually "My Office 364 One Drive Copilot Pro" or something
| marcodiego wrote:
| And people complained that GTK file picker didn't have
| thumbnails.
| dangus wrote:
| In what application is it like this? I don't find this true
| at all. It's a completely customizable sidebar.
| gmueckl wrote:
| 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.
| koakuma-chan wrote:
| I also stuggled with nvidia drivers on Linux until I
| discovered dkms.
| anonymars wrote:
| 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.
| dangus wrote:
| 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.
| evilduck wrote:
| > 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.
| shmeeed wrote:
| 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.
| andyjohnson0 wrote:
| > 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.
| kbenson wrote:
| 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.
| try_the_bass wrote:
| 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?
| shric wrote:
| 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.
| TACIXAT wrote:
| I run a 500hz monitor. Generally, you want your FPS to match
| your refresh rate.
| try_the_bass wrote:
| Huh, I didn't know those existed now. I think the last time
| I was shopping for a monitor, 144Hz was the new hotness.
|
| Things have come a long way since then!
| rkoten wrote:
| 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.
| hamdingers wrote:
| 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.
|
| Also, there are 540Hz displays.
| gf000 wrote:
| A game doesn't necessarily have to process input at the
| same rate as it displays frames, does it?
| nemomarx wrote:
| 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.
| hamdingers wrote:
| 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.
| adastra22 wrote:
| 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.
| hamdingers wrote:
| 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.
| adastra22 wrote:
| 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.
| fizzynut wrote:
| 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.
| Keyframe wrote:
| 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.
| try_the_bass wrote:
| > 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.
|
| Thanks for the explanation, it helps!
| mattmanser wrote:
| 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.
| badsectoracula wrote:
| > 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).
| omnimus wrote:
| 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.
| Jhsto wrote:
| 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.
| cwillu wrote:
| 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.
| try_the_bass wrote:
| 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
| layer8 wrote:
| Also, your input gets registered faster (happens earlier)
| in the game world.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| 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.
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > 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?
|
| The reason is triple buffering:
|
| > https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Multiple_bufferi
| n...
|
| 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."
| dustbunny wrote:
| I run mint as well and really love it's esthetic. I prefer AMD
| GPUs on Linux and they have always "just worked".
|
| I know how to use the terminal to enforce deep sleep on
| laptops, but thats about all I do setup wise.
| yxhuvud wrote:
| 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.
| PeaceTed wrote:
| 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.
| Zekio wrote:
| 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
| andoando wrote:
| 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
| marcosdumay wrote:
| I still don't understand how search just can't file files
| with the string I write in the search bar on the name. Or
| menu items either.
|
| Some file browsers on Linux have this problem too, and the
| KDE launcher had it for years (it's fixed now).
| 3eb7988a1663 wrote:
| For a look into a parallel universe of what could be, check
| out Everything[0]. Super fast search that should be
| embarrassing for Microsoft.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everything_(software)
| TACIXAT wrote:
| It is quite honestly faster to start WSL then use grep or
| find.
| Bolwin wrote:
| You don't need wsl, just install rigrep or the powershell
| equivalent of find
| abnercoimbre wrote:
| And there really is no excuse, take a look at this indie dev
| blowing the default explorer out of the water:
| https://filepilot.tech
| dangus wrote:
| The "Everything" application is what you want:
|
| https://www.voidtools.com/support/everything/
| Traubenfuchs wrote:
| One of the most powerful and unique tools for windows ever.
|
| The only thing I miss being on OSX, I hate its search.
| gambiting wrote:
| 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.
| eek2121 wrote:
| 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.
|
| Not really missing anything.
| ErroneousBosh wrote:
| > 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?
| baobun wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45793218
|
| 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).
| andyjohnson0 wrote:
| > 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?
| chrneu wrote:
| 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.
| chrneu wrote:
| Multimonitor support and bluetooth are the two biggest
| reasons I ditched windows a couple years ago.
|
| I have no idea how multimon got so, so bad on windows.
|
| Then bluetooth ...wtf? Again, how did they get so bad?
| hoten wrote:
| > React based start menu with visible lag
|
| That surprised me. But seems not true?
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44124688
| accoil wrote:
| The Windhawk Start Menu Style[1] uses XAML to modify the
| Start Menu, and I doubt that they are translating XAML to
| React
|
| [1]: https://windhawk.net/mods/windows-11-start-menu-styler
| cluckindan wrote:
| I wouldn't be so sure...
|
| https://github.com/microsoft/react-native-xaml
| monocasa wrote:
| 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.
| ffsm8 wrote:
| Does HDR work though?
| yxhuvud wrote:
| If using a modern variant of Wayland and if the app supports
| it: yes. Both, especially the latter are pretty big buts.
| formerly_proven wrote:
| Barely works on windows too, though
| paulbgd wrote:
| 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
| cedws wrote:
| 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.
| brians wrote:
| 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!
| bigyabai wrote:
| 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.
| formerly_proven wrote:
| > 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.
| TACIXAT wrote:
| 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.
| ok123456 wrote:
| 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.
| magicalhippo wrote:
| 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.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| 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.
| Hasz wrote:
| 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.
| happosai wrote:
| 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...
| TingPing wrote:
| Consoles support kb and mouse. Most popular fps games support
| it.
| encom wrote:
| 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.
| tmtvl wrote:
| Is SolydK not good enough? There's also Mageia if you can
| stomach RPM instead of Deb (I prefer RPMs, but recognize it's
| a matter of personal taste).
| Scramblejams wrote:
| Tried Mint?
| hu3 wrote:
| I didn't expect Linux to be above macOS despite Wine's
| awesomeness.
|
| - Windows 94.84%
|
| - Linux 3.05%
|
| - macOS 2.11%
| nurettin wrote:
| There is wide spread disrespect against people who play games
| on mac. It is a running meme.
| anothernewdude wrote:
| So few games support macOS that it is a real pain to find games
| to play on it.
| candiddevmike wrote:
| 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.
| p_ing wrote:
| Rosetta is supposed to stock around for game compatibility
| only.
| fainpul wrote:
| macOS is by far the worst gaming platform. I think most macOS
| users are fully aware of that.
| PeaceTed wrote:
| I mean by this point it should be expected. Apple hasn't
| really backed gaming in meaningful way since the original Mac
| in 1984.
| asmor wrote:
| 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.
| jsheard wrote:
| 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 Mac
| hardware 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 as a product 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, but Apple doesn't endorse or
| promote using it for that.
| pmarreck wrote:
| 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.
| TkTech wrote:
| 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.
| mariusor wrote:
| 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.
| viktorcode wrote:
| 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.
| apatheticonion wrote:
| > 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.
| bigyabai wrote:
| 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.
| mikkupikku wrote:
| > _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.
| encom wrote:
| >Games that want to support macs need to add Metal renderers.
|
| ...and ARM support. That's the bigger footgun, imo.
| hamdingers wrote:
| 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.
| TkTech wrote:
| 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.
| hamdingers wrote:
| I'm interested in alternate explanations if you have them,
| to be clear this is only my theory.
|
| While Valve might make up a big part of CodeWeavers book of
| business now, that was not true when the original contract
| was signed.
| asmor wrote:
| 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 also make a Linux build of CrossOver.
| hamdingers wrote:
| 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.
| viktorcode wrote:
| 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)
| dangus wrote:
| 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.
| p1necone wrote:
| 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.
| john01dav wrote:
| There's no game that I want to play badly enough to put up with
| DRM on consoles or rootkits (anti-chest) and DRM (windows) on
| my computer
| PeaceTed wrote:
| 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.
| twic wrote:
| 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.
| tombert wrote:
| This has been my experience as well.
|
| 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.
| shevy-java wrote:
| When I was younger I also was like that.
|
| 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".
| cannonpalms wrote:
| 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.
| ViewTrick1002 wrote:
| I am considering making the switch to Linux for my software +
| data science (primary) and gaming (secondary) setup.
|
| 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)?
| andoando wrote:
| Thats my exact setup and Ive had no issues so far. Running Arc
| Raiders on PopOS, Nvidia 5070ti highest settings on 120hz
| monitor with 120-200 fps.
|
| 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
| bigyabai wrote:
| It is shocking how well Arc Raiders handles ray tracing on
| Linux. I have a locked 60fps at 1440p on my 3070Ti, and tons
| of GPU headroom to spare.
|
| These Embark people... they scare me.
| ThatPlayer wrote:
| 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
| shadowpho wrote:
| Last I checked HDR was utterly broken on Linux. X had no plans
| to support it at all (!).
|
| Wayland supports it if you have the right version of gpu, gpu
| drivers, composer, kernel, state of the moon and hdr.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| 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.
| davet91 wrote:
| They do now: https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2025/06/steam-
| update-brings-ac...
| Rohansi wrote:
| 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)
| debugnik wrote:
| It already was the default for SteamOS, but not for overall
| Linux until recently, I believe.
| ivanjermakov wrote:
| I start non-Steam games with Wine and they run just as good.
|
| https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=category&i.
| ..
| Jach wrote:
| Sometimes also a game will have a native linux binary but the
| Windows version with Proton works better (or at all)
| anyway...
| andoando wrote:
| They do
| worble wrote:
| 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.
| justchill wrote:
| For me I have been enjoying bazzite os
| BolexNOLA wrote:
| It's fantastic! Truly enjoy using my machine now.
| 4ggr0 wrote:
| +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.
| Gigachad wrote:
| 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
|
| https://gitlab.steamos.cloud/holo/dirlock/-/wikis/Enabling-d.
| ..
| 4ggr0 wrote:
| If I could install SteamOS on my PC I'd do it!
| swilliamsio wrote:
| 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.
| kurtoid wrote:
| > 748 can run on Steam Assuming you mean on Linux?
| mikkupikku wrote:
| Probably meant "SteamOS" e.g. Linux.
| swilliamsio wrote:
| Yes, my bad. Fixed.
| mirpa wrote:
| 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.
| xrd wrote:
| 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.
|
| Is there an option for Fortnite on Linux?
| gausswho wrote:
| 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.
| xrd wrote:
| 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.
| zamadatix wrote:
| The problem is DRM, so there is no good answer.
| cheschire wrote:
| The problem is anti-cheat, not DRM.
| timpera wrote:
| This really sucks... Fortnite is a must-have for many people
| (myself included).
| throwaway106382 wrote:
| Fortnite is a problem because of kernel level anti-cheat,
| trying to get it work on Proton....will probably be a long
| time.
|
| The solution is: buy a Playstation.
| elashri wrote:
| 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?
| LelouBil wrote:
| I don't think this should over count because the steam hardware
| survey is done once per account each time.
|
| It just depends if you're booted into windows or into linux
| when you have the survey popup.
| shmerl wrote:
| Nice!
|
| 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).
| kloud wrote:
| That linear trend line does not seem to fit very well, I say we
| are looking at the beginning of a hockey stick :)
|
| Stopped dual-booting for games and formatted the partition some
| time after Windows 7 EOL. Thank you Wine contributors, Valve and
| lord Gaben.
| modeless wrote:
| Whoa, I thought Ubuntu was the most popular distribution. Arch
| and even Linux Mint are beating it?
| ShinTakuya wrote:
| The average Linux gamer is likely to have a very different
| setup to the average Linux user in general. It's a subset of a
| subset.
| currymj wrote:
| Steam Deck is Arch-based, that's most likely why.
| modeless wrote:
| SteamOS is counted separately.
| machomaster wrote:
| I wonder how much Omarchy (based on Arch) made a dent... DHH
| said that it has been downloaded hundreds of thousands of
| times.
| bigyabai wrote:
| 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.
| yoyohello13 wrote:
| Just don't use the AUR. Problem solved
| cheschire wrote:
| 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.
| Jach wrote:
| 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.
| rufugee wrote:
| I only wish Fortnite were possible. that's the only thing I keep
| windows around for.
| yoyohello13 wrote:
| Sweeney said Linux is cancer when they stopped Linux support
| for Rocket league, so probably unlikely.
| kittikitti wrote:
| 2026 WILL BE THE YEAR OF THE LINUX DESKTOP
| wtcactus wrote:
| 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.
| ewuhic wrote:
| Dare I suggest you use NixOS, or even better,
| https://github.com/Jovian-Experiments/Jovian-NixOS, so you
|
| 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.
| Jach wrote:
| 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.
| dingi wrote:
| 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!
| forrestthewoods wrote:
| 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.
| lokeg wrote:
| There is a somewhat famous post about this:
|
| 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.
| forrestthewoods wrote:
| > 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.
| andreldm wrote:
| 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.
| bblacher wrote:
| 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.
| andreldm wrote:
| 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.
| lwansbrough wrote:
| 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.
| broodbucket wrote:
| The anticheats themselves typically do support Linux, it's the
| devs that don't choose to use them
| lwansbrough wrote:
| Well EAC for example is user space only because it has to be,
| which some games decide is not an acceptable level of
| security.
| xcircle wrote:
| This weekend I finally freed my pc from Windows10 and installed
| cachyOS. It all worked better and easier than expected.
| cvoss wrote:
| 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.
| k__ wrote:
| I'm using Steam on Arch and am very happy with it.
|
| The recurring compilation of Vulcan shaders after every update
| bothers a bit, but it works very well.
| endgame wrote:
| 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?
| fastily wrote:
| 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
| throw2312321 wrote:
| 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.
| dralley wrote:
| 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.
| jjcm wrote:
| 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.
| dralley wrote:
| You don't really _have_ to use it. Not for most of the things
| that a typical desktop user would need to do. It helps though.
| strix_varius wrote:
| While you don't have to use it _much_ , if you spend a year
| daily driving Linux, it's a near certainty that you'll have
| to use the command line.
| kroaton wrote:
| Arch + Claude Code has been working amazingly well for me. I
| tried switching from Windows in the past and it never clicked.
| Now it's been great.
| echelon wrote:
| Windows coasted on decades of entrenched users from two
| sources: games and Microsoft Office.
| jjcm wrote:
| 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.
| shevy-java wrote:
| Guys, we can do it!
|
| LET'S GO FOR BROKE!!!
|
| LET'S BREAK THE 3.5% BARRIER BEFORE GNU HURD WINS NEXT YEAR!!!!
| pmarreck wrote:
| 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.
| amiga-workbench wrote:
| 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.
| shaggie76 wrote:
| 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!
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