You haven't used Linux until you've accidentally destroyed your install. Reversible damage like uninstalling your shell or breaking your display server counts as partial credit.
Proton is a fork of Wine. It was created by Valve and they have done amazing work getting it to support basically everything. It's made the steam deck and amazing machine.
Vuncan, DXVK, and Proton are other open source projects that either make wine more capable or more user friendly. It's still wine under the hood, though.
It's not so much Linux catching up as it is making games compatible (and in most cases run just as well as native Linux games) that weren't made for Linux in the first place. And that's pretty insane. Thank you Valve 🙏😔
Right? All of these comments are like "it's just as easy as gaming on Windows. I just have to make sure I run these specific commands in my terminal or my PC bricks, nothing runs as well as on Windows unless you have 20 years of experience with Linux, and you still need to keep a dual boot of Windows for those pesky games that aren't Linux-friendly (re: 99.9% of games). I'm so much happier on Linux and will never look back!please shoot me in the face now and end my pain I'm so happy!"
Like whatever lies you guys need to tell yourselves lol. I'll stick with Windows until it's as easy as hitting play. Also would be nice if the UI didn't look straight out of 1995.
I daily drive Debian 12 on my desktop. In my massive library of steam games, I’ve yet to come across more than 3 that I haven’t been able to get to work, and the rest run remarkably better than on windows. Controller support has been more seamless than it was on windows, and I’ve gotten older games to work that never worked on windows 10. I’m not sure what experience you’re basing this on, maybe Optimus has some issues for laptops, but every desktop I’ve built in the last ~4 years has worked fine (and with nvidia GPUs, too)
Linus gaming got simple when steam dropped steamOS as a stand alone operating system. I went from windows 7 to steamOS. First was the steam piston, now I have a steam machine (Alienware / dell) and a steam deck. It's as easy as console gaming but with all the flexibility of PC gaming.
And before I get shit for prebuilts, sometimes you just want to play, and shit just works. Also am poor.
I mean if you want to be pandantic owning a computer for gaming excludes you from being poor. Otherwise, if we're doing cost relative to performance, you can pick up an alienware alpha for cost of the graphics card.
I made the switch to Linux a year ago, and I haven't looked back since. Of course, I still keep a dual boot for those pesky games that use Ring0 anticheat or are simply incompatible with Linux, like Fortnite or PUBG. But honestly, I don't find myself playing them as often anymore.
My current actual go-to games include Dota 2, CS:GO, Elden Ring, Sea of Thieves, Diablo 4, Street Fighter 6, Dead Cells, and Isaac.
Hmm I find that the performance gain on games like D4 and Elden Ring are significant enough for me to boot over to my windows disk (much to my chagrin). Do you have any specific tweaks for those games. The performance isn't always terrible for those games on my Linux system but it's enough to affect gameplay occasionally.
I don't rely on special settings; instead, I ensure that I have the latest Mesa driver installed for my 7900XTX. Additionally, I optimize my gaming experience by using a set of launch settings that work well for most of my games, with minor adjustments made to the RADV_PERFTEST environment variable. These are the launch settings I use :
Its shader compilation that made elden ring at launch a better experience on linux than windows, because the windows build had a broken shader compiler causing microstutters.
I am using a 1080 Ti and its meh, I sometimes have screen tearing issues, sleep/hibernate doesn't work anymore and letting it choose the iGPU and GPU based off of the current needs also does not work, so I just run the iGPU most of the time (it doesn't have the screen tearing issue).
I'm thinking of doing a fresh install, maybe a different distro, as the setup is quite old and bloated by now, but I'm not looking forward to reinstalling everything I actually need/use.
It's not Windows performance, Cyberpunk 2077 for instance was quite more unstable for me on Arch and it took quite a bit of tweaking to be able to launch it (it's a miracle that I can even play Cyberpunk with a 970 in both cases :P). Generally though I've had a pretty good experience, most games play out of the box with good performance, and I get to daily drive Linux finally
I use linux with nvidia hardware, and its not that bad. Just remember to click “allow proprietary software” when you install your OS.
Some software can get problematic, such as Hyprland and Sway, but games are fine.
I mean, I’d have a better experience with AMD, but even with nvidia, I’m having a better experience than windows. especially considering I don’t have to use their shitty driver downloader
True. There are even distros that do it for you. PopOS or EndeavourOS (has a nvidia boot option when installing). I just did a fresh EndeavourOS install and it's amazing. I have an RTX 3060 btw
But sure, AMD would be better still. Fuck Nvidia and all that 100%
I have a gtx1070 and it works well on Linux. I have only used debian based Linux systems though. Pop OS has been recommended and that is probably the easiest OS to start in. I really like Kubuntu though for having a windows-like environment.
Honestly, by now Gaming on Linux and macOS works without problems. Most games are published natively, and if not, it generally works fine with Wine or Proton.
As a guy that doesn't use Linux I must say, all the memes about it are making my brain hurt. Y'all are so much more knowledgeable on tech that I feel left out lol.
This one is pretty simple, if you want an explanation for it. Just pointing out all the wonderful under the hood improvements that valve, AMD and others have made to the state of Linux gaming, in meme form.
I've also noticed that since Linux is lighter weight compared to Windows games generally run faster. At least that is my experience when using a crummy $500 laptop.