Steam on Linux Use Skyrocketed Above 5% in March(phoronix.com) |
Steam on Linux Use Skyrocketed Above 5% in March(phoronix.com) |
[1] GameNative, GameHub (and GameHub lite)
Its only a matter of time before majority of playerbase switches to linux ecosystem.
Work on proton and steamos are just the beginning.
They can be bypassed on Windows, but with too much work (custom hypervisor etc.)
To bypass them on Linux, a lot more easier.
It's really the only opposing force to Microsoft's enshittification of Windows.
In addition, the development of LLMs has greatly lowered the barrier to using the Linux command line. Problems that used to take a full day to solve can now be handled easily by anyone who can write a prompt—just ask, copy, and paste. This has even made Windows’ command line unfriendly by comparison, despite its own major improvements in recent years, turning it into a significant drawback.
On Linux instead of replacing the driver, you have to add an udev rule that allows applications to communicate with the USB device directly: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-devices/blob/master/6... And you can see in this list, it's not the only controller with that requirement.
SteamOS includes this by default.
Llm -> manual research -> apply
But no one has the time to validate everything llm writes via manually researching it unfortunately /s
Older/smaller models were far worse
e.x. ChatGPT-5.4 Thinking, Claude Opus 4.6
Linus has said on a few occasions that the main thing holding back user adoption for desktop is a single distro with a clear focus. What Android did for mobile.
It's clear that SteamOS could be "that guy" if Valve wants it to be.
But yes, SteamOS makes ~25% of the users. Though, thinking about, do they collect per account, or per device? I do have a Steamdeck, but mainly play on the big desktop running on debian, so I'm curious if I'm appearing as one or two entries in that stat.
How about grasshopper-ed above 5%?
Though, it's a longer process, not something that suddenly happened immediately. The combination of Steamdeck, proton, good gaming-distributions and Windows 10 phasing out, while Windows 11 sucks and becoming an AI+Ads-infested mess, seems to have pushed this trend. So let's see how high this sky will be.
Edit: Found a good visualization: https://www.gamingonlinux.com/steam-tracker/
Straight out of Linux Foundation, https://www.zephyrproject.org/
There are no Linux kernels on Sony PlayStation nor Nintendo's Switch, or even Microsoft's XBox.
Windows with its 80% market share has no Linux kernel.
Zero Linux kernel running on the ca 15% Apple desktops.
Zero Linux kernels running on iOS and iPadOS.
No Linux kernels on Arduino or ESP32, althought they certainly can run ESP-IDF and FreeRTOS.
And then there are INTEGRITY, vxWorks, QNX, NutXX, FreeBSD, OpenBDS, DragonFly, IBM i, z/OS, ClearPath MCP, OS 2200, ThreadX, SphereOS, Fuchsia,.... and plenty more I won't bother to list, none of them with Linux kernel.
Like yes it is Linux. But SteamDeck is a completely different beast from desktop Linux. They might as well be entirely different OS’s. Especially if the SteamDeck is being used to play Win32 binaries!
It's really not; SteamOS is just another GNU/Linux, and pretty close to vanilla Arch Linux for that matter.
> Especially if the SteamDeck is being used to play Win32 binaries!
Proton works fine on other distros.
if you are a gamedev considering support for SteamOS and considering support for generic Linux desktop they really really really REALLY are not the same. At all.
SteamOS is so very much linux that even WebOS and Androids pale in comparisom.
It's "just" immutable Arch that defaults to Steam's console mode interface.
Bazzite and a few others provide a similar console-style experience.
Absolutely not. If you ever actually used it you would know that the only difference is a custom big picture mode like interface. Anything else is literally the same code.
This was for Slippi Melee, so even though I'm not super good at the game, the lag was too annoying.
PlayStation and Roblox have the same MAU as Steam, that says it all
Steam's MAU probably includes people who boot their PC and have steam open in the systray
Except the ones in the network cards and SSD, and probably a bunch of other embedded components.
The year of Linux Everywhere was decades ago.
In all your posts I haven't seen you actually explain what it is that's so different about it.
SteamDeck is a very specific set of hardware running a very specific OS with a specific runtime. This is very easy. The fact that it is Linux is almost immaterial. If it were not Linux at all it would require a similar amount of effort. Might as well be a Nintendo Switch.
Now let’s imagine you want to support generic Linux desktop with a native Linux exe. May God have mercy on your soul. Deploying pre-compiled binaries that run on an infinite number of hardware variations running an infinite number of local variables env permutations is an unfathomable nightmare.
Once upon a time I shipped a native Linux binary (Planetary Annihilation). Somewhat infamously our Linux users were less than 1% of users but ~50% of bug reports. And no it wasn’t because Linux users simply report more general gameplay bugs.
These days you can support Linux by just giving them a Win32 binary. Which is objectively hilarious.
In any case. It would be profoundly fascinating to know the number of gameplay hours played across OSs. And I would imagine that SteamDeck accounts for over 90% of Linux gaming hours.
The Year of the Linux Desktop is still not here. Not yet. IMHO. YMMV.
You're right about native Linux binaries, but the rub is that you don't need to create generic binaries, there's a bunch of options that use containers to deal with environmental permutations and given the Linux version of Planetary Annihilation uses the Steam Linux Runtime environment, you know this.
It is funny that supporting Linux is as easy as providing a win32 binary, but it's not a joke. This is the case because it works.
I think your experience is a little out of date, or you've somehow been missing what's been happening over the last half decade, because in practice gaming on Linux is now absolutely fantastic. Not just on Steam Deck, as since Valve is using the same general software stack that every other distro uses, all the improvements they've made have permeated out to the rest of the ecosystem. On my CachyOS PC with an RTX 3090, the only games that consistently give me problems anymore are titles that ship with kernel-level anti-cheat. Otherwise when I buy something from Steam I simply assume that it'll work.
Steam Deck sales have actually softened quite a bit over the last couple of years, all this recent explosive growth has been driven by desktop users.
Pretty sure I kickstarter'd that! But also never actually played it.
One of the interesting consequences of Kickstarter is you get hard locked into “promises” even if those ideas turn out to be bad. Naval was so bad but it was a stretch goal so had to ship it. Lesson learned!
I've been following this all pretty closely, it's been exciting. The year of the linux desktop is kind of a punchline, but it's sort of a misnomer anyway. It was never going to happen in the span of a year. But it has been happening; when online discussion spaces can never seem to shut the hell up about all these new idiot users asking all these stupid questions, that's when you know you're seeing a lot of growth.
The clue is already in the article itself. The author notes that "part of the jump at least appears to be explained by Valve correcting again the Steam China numbers." If you actually think about what that implies, it raises more questions than answers. A 31.85% monthly drop is obviously not organic, so yes, it makes sense to call it a "correction." But then why was the previous month's data so far off in the first place? Is there something fundamentally flawed in the survey methodology, like sampling bias, non-uniform distribution, regional skew, or something else?
And if this kind of correction happens this month, what's stopping it from happening in previous months? The reality is: it does happen all the time. You can usually spot at least one clearly unrealistic data point in almost every release.
At that point, it's hard to argue there's any real value in trying to analyze these results in a rigorous way.
It happened in last year's March stats too: https://web.archive.org/web/20250404061527/https://store.ste... -25%
I’m not talking about the Feb number that is reported in March.
https://radar.cloudflare.com/explorer?dataSet=http&groupBy=o...
Fun tidbits, Finland is at ~10% (!), and Germany at 6.3%.
Saying that one source of data should be discarded because it contains nuance is.. a take.
'Valve correcting again the Steam China numbers.'
This seemingly is a common problem with the Steam Hardware Report, with Chinese users being erroneously represented. It constantly gets fixed, although takes a bit. It could be the hardware surveys are sent out at a different time compared to the rest of the world, then combined in the following month.
This is proven by "Ended 2025 at around a 3.5% marketshare, dipped a bit in January, and fell to 2.23% in February."
Linux was already stable enough 10 years ago as daily driver, i used Arch.
everything worked just fine, i remember only having issue with graphic drivers and glitches
I never really wanted anything more from it but when i moved to Mac, i saw how it prevents me from opening apps i downloaded from trusted site and every now and then i need to set xattr to open the files, and go through bunch of lockdowns.
Now freecad has improved so much, with all AI coding and all opensource will improve DRASTICALLY and very fast.
using AI which stole everyone's code to develop OpenSource is morally right thing to do vs using it at private companies. It will attract more devs.
- Microsoft has worked tirelessly to make the windows compute experience an evermore intrusive and soul crushing experience for the average gamer. artificially outmoded hardware at a time of GPU scarcity means consumers cant comply with redmonds increasingly arbitrary hardware edicts even if they wanted to. at the same time, linux has become ever easier to install and use as an alternative. there is likely an inflection point for a lot of gamers that are just looking to access their library.
- console gaming has become hideously overpriced. madatory tie-ins with playstation network, high costs for all consoles, and the potential for the console stocks to simply not be available at time of release make for a frictional and frustrating experience. Microslop is embracing the same playstation style enshittification that routinely brings sony to its knees. neither juggernaut seems genuinely interested in the end user with the exception of Nintendo, whos quality control issues and pricing as well with switch hardware make it a nonstarter for anyone but the most diehard zelda fan.
- steam + linux offers a largely seamless experience for the casual gamer. steam sales are fun and engaging. the community is generally well rounded. gabe newell is generally well respected by gamers and visibly interested in gaming and the community. Valve has contributed significantly to Linux since their push to obliterate the Windows store and shows no sign of retreat anytime soon. Steam + Linux is free and works with your existing hardware in a time of high prices, inflation, and scarcity in the western world.
Agreed.
January and February are school vacations in South America. The whole month. Kids have a lot more free hours to tinker and play video games. That might not be the cause of the spike in this particular case, but there's probably dozens of similar random facts that can affect statistics on any month in unexpected ways.
Proton's updates is a game changer, Windows 11's absolutely garbage buggy slop is frustrating more and more people. OS' like CachyOS and Bazzite etc making the transition far more approachable than ever.
The future is bright.
Loads of people switch to Linux but I do wonder how many are still there a year later? I say this as someone that been a Linux daily runner since about 2010.
This is all fine (and might even be true) but not having to fill in the gaps with anecdotal data and wishful thinking is precisely what good statistics are for. Bad statistics, on the other hand, make for a bad conversation starter because everyone is confused and it gets worse from there.
Everyone who bought a gaming PC last year, only to be told it has to be scrapped now because Windows 11 doesn't like the colour of the power cable.
That felt like an indicator to me. I only switched to Linux a year or two ago and haven't mentioned it to her once, so she got the idea from somewhere else, and had enough impetus from whatever she disliked about Windows to actually go through with the change. If I was in marketing at Microsoft I'd be shitting myself over that, assuming Windows even still fits into their long term plans somehow. It's one thing for 100,000 techies to preach Linux across the web, but if random normies start using it without fanfare, that's real change.
the one caveat was, ubuntu 24.04 LTS still didn't recognise my xbox wireless controller out of the box, and I needed to get xone and compile it and install the driver, a minor inconvenience, but something that would be beyond one of my daughtrs or wife. I've since moved back to debian though but already armed with that knowledge so it wasn't any kind of surprise.
next step will be to migrate my work machine, but that one is more difficult because the primary dev is in Delphi, so it'll probably be a case of linux on the hardware, and virtualbox running a win10 VM to do compilations, the other parts of the job are basically all o/s independent python dev, so no problem there.. although I will miss toad for oracle.
Other than that, I am still waiting for when I can buy a Dell, Asus, HP laptop on Media Markt or FNAC, with GNU/Linux pre-installed having 100% of the hardware being supported.
The most annoying thing I encountered was the Switch controller support being rather poor. Every button press was somehow interpreted as two different buttons at the same time and I had to figure out which commands to run on Terminal to stop it from happening. Even then, the bluetooth connection on my PC was so bad that I had to stay within 3 feet lest the controller disconnects. I don't really think this is a Linux issue per se, but I recommend people buy a couple of 8bitdo controllers on Amazon which come with USB dongles if they want to go this route.
I will miss games that I can only play with mouse and keyboard, but I think there are enough games out there with controller support that this is not going to be an issue.
When it updated and started shoving AI down my throat, with no easy way to turn it off and suddenly lots of data I don't consent to sharing getting used, 11 became the last Windows OS I'll ever use.
Whenever the next version comes out, Im moving fully to *buntu.
My main laptop already uses it and Steam on Linux has been fantastic. Any bugs or issues Ive experience have been due to my very unusual setup (like an eGPU over Thunderbolt)
It's fully open! It has a KDE desktop that I can access any time! I can shove in any size of SSD I like!
And I'm playing Halo 3... on Linux... on hardware made by Steam. If you spoke that sentence to me in 2009, I'd suggest you ought to be sectioned.
People need to get their hands on real, working, consumer-friendly devices running Linux out-of-the-box.
Feb 2026:
31.58% Other
23.83% SteamOS Holo 64 bit
9.07% ArchLinux 64 bit
8.59% CachyOS 64 bit
6.62% Linux Mint 22.3 64 bit
5.79% Bazzite 64 bit
5.26% Freedesktop SDK 25.08
3.82% Ubuntu Core 24 64 bit
2.83% Ubuntu 24.04.03 LTS 64 bit
2.59% Linux Mint 22.2 64 bit
25.64% Other
24.48% SteamOS Holo 64 bit
17.60% 0 64 bit
8.78% Arch Linux 64 bit
8.01% 64 bit
6.90% Linux Mint 22.3 64 bit
3.58% Ubuntu Core 24 64 bit
1.90% Linux Mint 22.2 64 bit
1.67% Ubuntu 25.10 64 bit
1.45% Manjoro Linux 64 bit
I really wish that Valve would increase the number of distros they report, or stop breaking out individual versions. The purpose of having multiple versions is to see how quickly people are upgrading and when to stop supporting older ones, but the current presentation doesn't actually let you do that since there is so much churn in which releases make the top 10 cut.
I'm using CachyOS with a PS2 controller or mouse and keyboard. I had to do virtually zero tinkering.
I wish you were right, though
And those games are easily ignored, as they should be.
However I'm very thankful for the work Valve has done, as this has made Wine much much better.
I can now just download a game from GOG, set it up with a winetricks one-liner, and expect it to work. Even the latest games that just came out.
Although to be fair I usually wait a couple months to get a good discount. But, before, you had to wait years for support, if any at all.
I'm also seeing some studios releasing support for Vulkan either day one or in updates, which is great.
Rocket League performance on Linux used to be the other big reason but about 4 months ago I fired it up and found it ran smoother (the random stutters I have suffered through on Windows are not there on Linux).
Now that those two are no longer relevant I can finally reclaim that wasted SSD storage.
This also goes without saying that the more adoption we see, the better these alternatives will get as we see consumers and businesses view Linux as worth the investment.
"OS disruptor 5Xs in 3 years thanks to innovative new multi-platform solution, securing unprecedented market share."
No company big enough has decided to heavily invest in Linux desktop for end users yet. The community is composed of techies and they make products for techies.
Valve's solution is to use their own semi proprietary Steam Big Screen as the default interface of SteamOS.
Using proton, I regularly see crash reports where games want to report that I was running some version of windows, which is a result of how proton implements wine. I never send such reports as they are of little use to developers.
https://github.com/valvesoftware/proton
"Proton is a tool for use with the Steam client which allows games which are exclusive to Windows to run on the Linux operating system. It uses Wine to facilitate this."
I have a suspicion, that somehow Steam has issues when Guix is installed, which I am always using, but then the question is, why Steam is incapable of just shipping with whatever it needs and using the things it shipped with properly, instead of getting confused by Guix, which only puts things in the GNU store, and not in a place that Steam should ever look at. But like I said, it is only a hunch or suspicion, and I need Guix more than Steam on Linux.
Then there are games that just work, like Stardew Valley. And maybe Terraria. I suspect, that it is somehow also about what engine the games use and what those engines rely on. But these games are very few, and most bigger mainstream games like AoE2 simple won't start, like I described.
So for me it still seems, that it is not actually working that reliably on just any GNU/Linux system, and that there are still blind spots, that Valve or whoever is clearly not seeing or considering in their whole Proton development or how Proton is used by Steam. Probably some isolation thing that they are completely missing for several years now.
My setup is basically Arch Linux, ProtonUp-Qt (to easily install specific versions of Proton, the compatibility layer), Steam, and the proprietary Nvidia drivers/Vulkan. I generally have no issues with Easy Anti-Cheat games like Arc Raiders, but obviously anything that requires secure boot attestation like Arena Breakout Infinite won’t play. I’ve not bothered to try setting up full secure boot as the games that require it aren’t typically in my wheelhouse.
I hope Linux adoption continues for my own, very self-serving, interests. I get the sense that those who primarily use their computer for gaming are the frogs slowly being boiled by Microsoft who continues to back their these customers into uncomfortable, unnecessary corners.
I don't think secure boot will help. I use Arch, and have secure boot set up, but don't see how it would help with kernel-level anticheat. The issue is that anyone can sign their own kernels, so while secure boot is valuable from a security point of view, it does not really certify anything from the point of view of a third party.
I have a feeling it's just wine things. Can anybody understand what happens and maybe explain it a little?
I remember that 13 years ago I did everything on Linux and only switched to Windows to play eve online. Now the game works beautifully (graphics and all) on Linux with just one slight modification in the "run command" in Steam.
This is nothing, as anybody who tried to play games on Linux using wine can attest. It used to be a hell of modifications, dependency hunting and obscure hacks to get any windows game to work.
Proton and Vulcan are Awesome.
Was/is this a distro thing, or an actual issue?
Every Nvidia I've used [1] has worked perfectly, from the change for Xfree86 to Xorg, through the Compiz desktop wobbly window craze, to the introduction of GPGPU APIs like CUDA/OpenCL and recently Vulkan.
I do recall once helping a friend setup a Debian and a Ubuntu machine with Nvidia (which I never used before) and it took some figuring-out of how to install non-free drivers, so maybe my choices of Gentoo and Arch (not being as conservative towards non-free licenses as Debian/Ubuntu) always made it a non-issue?
[1] 6800 Ultra, 7800 GTX , 7900 GTX, 8800 GTX, GTX 280, GTX 480, GTX 680, GTX 760 Ti, RTX 2080, RTX 4080... probably missed some.
It could also be lucky consequence of what games you play and what else you do with your computer.
I was a long-time Nvidia user, and had plenty of problems with their drivers. They ranged from minor annoyances when switching between virtual consoles (which some people never do) to total system freezes when playing a particular game (which some people never play). It would have been be easy for someone else to never encounter these problems.
Since switching to AMD a couple years ago, I have been much happier.
Now, I think it's no big issue so long as you are using a distro that supports up to date drivers. That should be about everyone now as I think even debian stable currently has decent drivers.
I still ran in a few snags:
- DKMS can break, e.g I had a kernel bump to 6.18 or 6.19 and the nvidia driver wasn't ready yet so the build failed. A mainline driver will always win this one.
- Suspend almost always works, but sometimes fails on lid close which is of course when you can't see it fail and my laptop battery dies unexpectedly. You'd say use hybrid sleep but that reliably always fails with the nvidia driver too. Both work flawlessly with Nouveau.
Since I don't need the extra perf on this laptop I just use Nouveau to drive the the dGPU + the AMD iGPU most of the time which is powerful enough for my non-desk needs.
There's too much TPM/SecureBoot/Enroll key hoops you have to jump through that a lot of distros just haven't bothered with.
If I'm being completely real, I'd be running FreeBSD 15. I just could not get a working nvidia driver going in 15 and get a working X installation. Supposedly 15.1 fixes it, we'll see in June. I've always preferred the BSD design, fs layout, etc, and I would love to have a FreeBSD desktop with a wine 11 install that actually plays games.. the dream!
Did you remember to screw in the antennas to the motherboard?
This is the way.
I did the same with an ITX AMD APU system. Thankfully well before the AI crunch. Running Debian because I just want it to work. Best keyboard for this setup is the Logitech Wireless Touch K400. Audio is through an older Sony receiver driving two of the floor standing Magnepan mid size speakers with a 10" sealed sub fed by a USB DAC. Mainly for music listening so no surround. The only thing I am missing is a nice wireless game pad.
I have a low power FreeBSD server running a 20TB raid z5 which serves all my media. I don't use any software contraptions like media centers or databases. I just mount file system and open a playlist in media player like god intended. Steam just works, though I haven't really gamed on this other than testing - that is what my desktop beast is for. I had issues with Hulu or whatever streaming thing in Fire Fox but had no trouble with any of them in Chrome. I know you don't get 4k but I don't care.
edit: > I will miss games that I can only play with mouse and keyboard
When I first setup the PC I had a full wireless KB & mouse, installed Half Life lost coast and played the demo using a TV table as a stand in front of the couch. NOT ideal but would work better with a proper adjustable TV table/tray thing. My friend has one and used it to work from home on his big ass 80+ inch TV.
I have included a link from my notes, I have not actually tested it much beyond seeing that the gyro does work in steams "configure controller" thing, never got around to correctly mapping any game.
wine translates win API -> Linux. Then DXVK converts DirectX calls into Vulkan in real time, and VKD3D-Proton for DX 12. so it always native Vulkan.. no wonder performance is even better than in windows!
this laid it out it for me visually - https://vectree.io/c/how-proton-runs-windows-games-on-linux-...
Every "benchmark" I've seen from someone claiming a game performs better on Linux via Proton than on Windows was written by someone that doesn't know anything about running benchmarks or how statistics work.
On all of my machines bar one, windows is completely gone. I have a simrig, currently running win10, but the hardware there, simucube base, simucube pedals, require some drivers I don't believe exist under linux, and/or don't work properly, and then there is iracing with it's easy anti cheat usage, from my understanding I'm screwed there as well. So it'll live on Windows 10 until the day iRacing stops supporting windows 10, or start supporting linux.
after having written that, I wonder if the simucube tools will just work under linux anyways, the UI is all written in QT, maybe simucube has/is developing linux drivers, given they're finland based :) .. I'll need to test it out
0: https://granitedevices.com/wiki/Using_Simucube_wheel_base_in...
You can install battlenet under Steam and use all the proton magic to make it work. Starcraft 2 and diablo 2 both work very well (those are the only two I've tried). At least for SC2, anti-cheat did not cause any issues if it's even there at all.
Also, I really dislike cricut as a company. Such a scammy business model.
Windows 10 was already pretty bad, but it felt fast and stable. I think they started putting content in the start menu, and I think I did regedit stuff I can no longer remember to get rid of it.
Windows 11 they made us upgrade with a gun to the back of our heads, they made it feel sluggish, they hid settings in such a way that you're expected to use Search to find the setting (although Apple has that issue too), and somehow the Search wants to include the whole Internet instead of what's local.
But the AI agentic force-feeding was the last straw. What am I, at work?
And then HN insisted Linux gaming was ready and they were right! Someone wrote to me in a comment, "join us, brother" and I'm glad I did, it's brought joy back to using my machine and playing around again.
Canonical announced that they are no longer using Debian as a base, but the unvetted packages compiled and uploaded by random people on Snap.
Please switch to Linux, but find a distro that actually wants you as a user.
Citation very much needed for this claim.
In real life: systemd IS useful, Wayland is becoming (has become?) the default, ubuntu is the most popular desktop distro family.
When was that? I don't disagree that it appears to be the case (especially with replacing coreutils/sudo/etc and the... varied approach to .deb vs snaps) but I'm not aware of them saying it explicitly in those terms?
You're not wrong, but tbh I'd move upstream to Debian. I use Termux on my phone (Z Fold) with Debian and XFCE, and have been extremely pleased with the performance. Combined with a folding keyboard and some AirNeo's, it's become a fantastic micro-development system that fits in a hand bag.
Not that I don't like Arch, it has a very few (subtle!) things that Ubuntu has solved recently, like eGPU hotplugging
i would imagine eac on linux will have to be addressed once steam machines drop, but for now i look at it like, if a game requires eac, at this point the game studio is just too lazy or cheap [0] to be linux compatible so we just play something else. far too many great games.
[0] its even more silly considering eac doesnt seem to stop cheaters at all. every single popular game that requires eac is still absolutely overflowing with more than obvious cheaters.
So yeah Pewdiepie is part of it, but I honestly think that's only because Microsoft has done such a poor job at maintaining their operating system.
I have been a linux user for work for a decade, but still ran Windows for a gaming PC. But with Win11 dropping the ball so hard, and the general hype around Proton and where linux gaming was it, it was not hard to make the decision to switch.
I haven't regretted it a single bit.
Granted, I have SponsorBlock installed, so the occasional predatory supplement stuff gets cut, but he also kinda made clear he's rich enough and not in it for the money anymore - and I tend to believe him. PewDiePie won life, chose sanity and took the anti-corruption path. Bless him and his family, and God please, let it be real!
Correction: GIMP is annoying/difficult to learn well, but not nearly as bad as Photoshop because it is organized logically and isn't burdened with sacred historical cruft, advertisements and product tie-ins.
The difference is that once you learn Photoshop it is a skill you can use at many jobs, and GIMP is not. Using this post as an excuse to rant, I've always thought that GIMP's priorities should be to be usable for print (mainly color management, which I think is almost totally fixed and becoming smooth) and to improve compatibility between it and vector drawing software (like Illustrator/Inkscape[0]), and layout software (like InDesign/Scribus[1].)[2]
If you're a European government or an individual rich person and you are really serious about software independence from the US, or if you're China/Russia/etc. and we know you're serious about it, you should throw about 50M at the problem. I think it would threaten Adobe so much that the US might lob a missile at you.
-----
[0] Inkscape also hated print, and the possibility of real exact colors and real exact measurements, and basically prioritized web icons and art. They also have a UI that requires a ton of memorization of hotkeys (which was part of the motivation for creating the software in the first place.) They seem to have wised up and made serious improvements in all of those areas.
[1] The only problem that Scribus has is a clunky UI that requires a lot of unnecessary clicks, which makes me suspect that it has deeper architectural problems. I think very few people work on it. It's ideally positioned, in the age of all books being online data, to create/become the future typesetting standard for people who want definitive versions of books rather than flowy ebook things which are not a significant improvement over .txt files. You could take a classic book and encode its typesetting, and rather than having 10M of blurry page scans combined with OCR info, you could just have 500K of text, fonts and typesetting information. With this, you could professionally print a perfect copy of the book, and as it looked when it was printed originally.
[2] Inkscape and Scribus, in turn, should be concentrating on pdf compatability, and also a way to sneak into print shops would be to write a good FOSS imposer (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imposition) that integrated well with Inkscape/Scribus.
Also the hope is that when the Linux share of the market grows and more multi-platform engines like Unreal are used then we'll get native versions instead of using Wine/Proton.
On top of that Windows is now basically unusable in many ways so for me at least there is no alternative (MacOS is really bad compared to a well configured Linux desktop, could never get past it treating me as an idiot).
You might want to enable Proton logging and have a look at what it says is going on.
https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/?tab=readme-ov-file#...
There have only been a handful of games that I haven't been able to play, like Hitman Absolution. But other AAA games like RD2 and Witcher1-3 run without issue. Even Starcraft2, run through proton, works well.
It is clearly getting better globally, so I expect in 3 years or so things will be ready for me to try again.
I actually have more luck getting games to run when I myself make WINE prefixes using WINE and try running games that way, than running any games on Steam. Only very few games work with Steam on Linux for me. This is also part of the reason, why I think something Steam does with Proton prefixes might be the reason it is broken.
I also tried things like not putting games in my Steam library on an NTFS drive that is shared with Windows, and instead put them on my GNU/Linux partition in a new Steam library. Didn't help. Tried various Proton versions, including experimental ones. Didn't help. Simply nothing seems to make a difference.
Then in steam itself, you can swap different versions of proton. I like to set the base version to one of the newer versions, but if a game doesn't work, I check on protondb which versions work so I override it per game. You can also give lutris a try as it has a few extra advanced levers that you can to get things working.
I use Debian stable on my laptop and testing on desktop. It is fine. Only the newest games that need a specific 0 day patch may suffer a bit but that's only for 1-2 weeks even on testing. You want a stable system first, then to unlock the full performance out of everything, and most bleeding edge fail in the former and are a coin toss on the later.
Not sure I agree. I've been gaming on Debian since 2005, and while it certainly was some work in the beginning, it's been pretty painless for the last five years or so. I'm on Debian stable (mostly) at the moment, and don't really know what "bleeding edge" packages I would be missing.
> Honestly, don't use debian for gaming, as it is too far behind. Gaming stuff needs a bit more bleeding edge packages.
Please stop spreading this misconception. There are only a tiny handful of packages that a Debian gamer might need to update, and those are generally available in Debian Backports. It's not what I would call a beginner distro for any purpose, but gaming on it is perfectly viable.
I'm having a good time in games, still getting other computing tasks done, and enjoying Debian's low-maintenance respect for my time. AMA.
Only have had 1 snafu with Steam i386 dependencies causing issues with x86_64 packages. I think there's a Flatpak of Steam available that should help isolate that but iirc there was some caveat
Debian will ship with old pieces of software that are updated and fixed on a daily basis upstream. Some of those changes and bug fixes really are showstoppers and you'll be stuck with them for months/years. Same thing with older kernels.
Debian is great for servers, but if you're doing graphics, sound or multimedia heavy tasks, you want the latest Wayland, Pipewire and driver support at the bare minimum.
As far I know, this bugs happens on Windows too.
I spent a lot of time squashing bugs like this.
Windows has one window manager. Linux has dozens. Windows apps are written to make assumptions about how the Windows window manager works. Things like windowing event message sequences, side-effects on values returned by other APIs, the exact sequence of fullscreen status side-effects such as window size and mouse cursor capture and window chrome presence. That's valid because those always work the same way on Windows. But Linux window managers all do all of those things differently, and trying to get all dozens of window managers to behave exactly the same way as Windows's does is near impossible.
Another possibility is it's just how the game works, even on Windows. It was pretty common to get windowing bugs reported, test them on Windows, and see the exact same behavior as we had on Linux.
There may be an option called mouse stealing prevention or something, but if you have a look you should hopefully see it. On xfce it's in its own tab in the mouse menu
From the normies I know, they only vaguely know what chatgpt is and sure don't use it.
It launches proton, it is not itself running on proton.
I'm guessing it's because the laptops are popular enough that there's a dedicated group of people that make it work [0].
I'm still on X11, dunno what the story is like with Wayland though.
The one sample i know of first hand is an amd/nvidia laptop that never obeys the settings about which GPU to use. In Windows.
I don't have a laptop with an nvidia card, but I often suspend the linux gaming machine on my living room, and sometimes it doesn't come back from sleep, while my steam deck never failed to.
grafx2 provides a decent alternative
Protondb is the definitive guide to what works and what doesn’t and the numbers will align with the above.
I know that Nvidia is integrated into the kernel and that wayland is talking to nvidia through the kernel. I also know that for accelerated rendering, wayland is talking directly to the nvidia drivers (bypassing the kernel? IDK).
But I also know that in the nvidia release notes, they've mentioned changes to improve support and functionality of wayland.
This is out of the question on Linux, where there's probably 100,000 distro kernel binaries floating around, plus the ability to build your own with whatever modules you wish.
The only plausible solution is to force everyone to use the same kernel image. "To run Valorant, please apt install linux-vanguard-botnet-bin!"
Unfortunately this is a plausable enough outcome, and those games are so absurdly popular, that people will do it, especially given that having support for these games will likely drive new users to Linux.
If enough people do it, this opens the door for other software to latch onto it and start requiring a "verified kernel", so I'd rather just never see these games on Linux.
Would be hilarious, if all gaming ultimately settles on a hardware independent console platform running on a locked-down linux! This would really please and piss off every faction at the same time. But honestly, not the worst compromise IMO.
And then games that wish for anticheat start a separate VM in hypervisor with complete secure boot chain of trust. Would require GPUs to support SR-IOV though.
Of course this all is based on the assumption that the local AI can do this fast enough with enough precision.
*unless the developers explicitly enabled linux userspace support which some do
Note that this is a much less robust form of anti-cheat, which is why many developers do not enable it.
But, especially for children, a lot of these games are a big part of their social lives. Paragraphs could be expended on the vices of these games, but I disagree with considering them easily ignored.
As others have noted though, a surprising lot of these games with anticheat do work on Linux. It's not even rareOverwatch, Halo, and Helldivers to name a few.
Sure Linux also works with a lot of games nowadays, and you can ignore whatever doesn't. I use a Mac and accept that it'll run even fewer games. Not my priority.
Some games support gyro directly, but even then AFAIK people prefer Steam Input due to how configurable it is.
https://youtu.be/CiSS5OsNCNU from the creator explains it (and older gyro controls).
With gyro you have 1:1 proportional camera position input, like with mice.
It's more or less about possibility of developing muscle memory. With (linear) gyro/mice you could sharply snap camera to a point you see on screen without much overshoot. You could turn 180 degrees in split second with eyes closed (actually with gyro people often use flick stick for such big rotations, turning instantly -- but that's besides the point)
With controller stick? Well you could try to time that 180 turn takes 1.5 seconds of holding at full deflection -- good luck developing a feeling for all the speeds inbetween zero and full deflection.
Generally speaking, you don't need rock-solid stability on a gaming rig or even a "workstation," since uptime isn't really a consideration. I run Debian on my home server, but my other machines, including a backup laptop, all run Arch. A good Arch setup is incredibly solid.
No, not missing out. Just waiting a few weeks longer than I would on a rolling distro, until the improvements arrive in Debian Backports. (If I'm really impatient, I can install something manually or make my own backport, but I'm assuming most people won't do that.) I have experienced cases like you describe, such as when I bought an RDNA3 GPU shortly after the platform was released, but they have been infrequent in my experience, and never so urgent that I couldn't wait a few weeks.
> you don't need rock-solid stability on a gaming rig or even a "workstation," since uptime isn't really a consideration.
System uptime is a consideration whenever I need my computer for something immediately, but my choice of Debian is not only about that. It's also about my time. Debian generally requires attention less often than other distros. Less time spent troubleshooting when things break. Less time re-learning things or adjusting workflows when new software versions change their behavior or interface. Fewer annoying interruptions. A low-maintenance system leaves me more time to get work done, or play games.
Also worth noting: These days, a lot of the components that games use are provided by the likes of Steam or Flatpak, which means they will be at exactly the same version and updated exactly as often on every Linux distro.
Maybe you should try Arch on one of your machines. I have a lot of experience with both Debian and Arch, having used both extensively on all kinds of hardware over long periods of time, and have found Arch to be ideal on desktop. Having access to the latest software and drivers is a huge plus with recent hardware. I have never encountered breaking changes.
Or a game example: I have Minecraft (Bedrock) on my phone so therefore I should be able to do the same things as Minecraft (Java) on Windows. The problem is they're the same names for different software with similar, but not the same, functionality.
I would definitely prefer to go the GE-Proton route. To clarify, what do you mean by “fresh”? Just the most recent release or something more specific?
Hop on either matrix or discord listed at https://simracingonlinux.com and one of us will be happy to help you work through the issue.
picture of my rig https://www.arcturus.com.au/rig.jpg
Also cheat HUD elements can be simply rendered outside of game window (or even on another device like smartphone).
But as you say if it is local then you can essentially run anything on the computer and modify what is ran on it. That basically means it is impossible to make an anti-cheat that is 100% bulletproof aside from something strange like buying a locked-in camera which you need to place behind you as it records everything you do on the PC and then the AI thing happens as I explained.
Maybe for pro play and tournaments that would be acceptable but not for the average player.
It's also a weird choice for servers running Ubuntu. I recall some CLI utilities being moved to Snap and you can't install them with apt anymore.
(And it used to be that Ubuntu was still a defensible choice for maximizing the chance of getting help online, but LLMs have effectively neutralized this advantage.)
Maybe Xorg is inherently better than Wayland, but that doesn't matter, the ship has sailed and the community evidently doesn't have time to properly support both.
I guess I just need to try it some more.
I guess you've used some strange gyro to stick emulation (never heard of such thing, but sounds like it).
Bazzite is an immutible os which is absolutely the future of linux. Your install will never break on updates since rather than a normal update migration process, it simply boots the next version of the OS image, which if it doesn't work will just revert back to the old image where you can wait for the bug to be fixed to update again.
Can't do it in Windows 11 for some reason. No option to label them in the new settings app and the option to label them in the old control panel does not work. They all got saved as "Dualsense Controller" and you just had to guess which one you were reconnecting.
There's a lot of stuff that I do which does not have a flatpak or package baked in. To get around this, I've been using distrobox to run these things in Ubuntu containers. So I will do "distrobox enter sdr" to have a terminal open up in that environment. You can export applications so that they show up in the applications list. It really takes some experience to shift your mindset, but it was worth it for me.
Call me nitpicky, but this is why Linux desktop is not ready yet. If anything, I'm a firm believer that SteamOS will be Linux Desktop
Where can I find more information on that? I use CachyOS but never heard of that. Googling didn't find a single result (surprisingly, not even your comment)
there is also something to be said, negatively, for the number of distros now, cambrian explosion since the good old days of slack, deb, redhat, suse lol
Debian, Arch, Fedora, Gentoo, Ubuntu, Nix, etc are all better choices than Catchy, Manjaro, Bazzite or whatever else niche distro exists.
I commonly find myself running into weird issues that I would of never run into otherwise. Bazzite for example by default, opens Steam on boot. This caused my games drives to not be mapped in Steam. (I assume Steam somehow booted before my drives were properly mapped) I helped my friend for hours troubleshooting his fstab config, rebooting, etc, but then realized it was just a default that he never set.
He quit Linux because of this (and some other minor gripes) and I don't think the gaming distros do much to properly help.
Non primary devices more likely to run Linux. Primary still windows.
Messing with the UA header is going to get you flagged by every bot detection tool because when you change your header from "Firefox on Linux" to "Chrome on Windows" your fingerprints don't add up anymore and you look exactly like a poorly written bot. You're likely going to see more captchas, you might get blocked or rate limited more often, and get placed under increased scrutiny, orders held for verification, silently filtered or shadow banned, etc.
It any case, it would be silly to assume services measuring OS popularity would put up such limitations. And more likely than not, people are changing their UA as a work-around on a case-by-case basis than make it a default, since that's gonna cause trouble.
In the last decade, the only time, I actually had to touch the UA is when breaking ToS with curl :D
> "Changing the user agent without changing to a corresponding platform will make your browser nearly unique."
Sorry, I am not sure, if arguing about nuanced reality is the battleground, where I see you thriving.
[1] https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/ (browser test since 2014)
The GUI layout of Cinnamon vs KDE vs w/e seems like the main thing people argue about, but it doesn't matter compared to this. Anyone who even knows what an OS is enough to go install Linux will figure out how to use whatever GUI you give them, provided it works. The bar needs to be at making sure stuff isn't straight up broken.
I definitely agree that KDE vs Cinnamon probably doesn't matter. But I'm afraid I don't think particularly highly of any KDE-first distro; it's great from, for example, OpenSUSE, but that's not a distro I'd recommend to new users for other reasons.
The problem I've got with Ubuntu is they keep doing weird shit like submitting desktop searches to Amazon or putting ads in the motd. They're an erratic organization and I think it's a mistake to send new users in their direction. Mint may not be perfect, but I think it's broadly inoffensive and mild, a good distro to leave a good first impression on a new user fumbling through the process themself.
But well, I haven't had to spoof my browser's UA for a few years. If some site refuses it, I'll just move on. (Including some that started doing it after I brought thousands of dollars worth of stuff from them.)
Cloudflare captcha = infinite loop of captchas (if it doesn't work on the first try). You can give up the moment that happens, because you will never get to the website itself.
Imo Ubuntu deserved to lose its users when they switched to Unity, not because Unity sucks (it does) but because it's unacceptable for a newbie-focused OS to rug-pull its entire GUI like that for any reason. But it's still #1, so realistically the leader is going be either Ubuntu or something corp-supported like SteamOS.
I don't think this is a problem at all. I tend to install Debian from the command line (Arch-style), but from what I remember GNOME is the default DE. DEs are largely a matter of opinion, but I find GNOME to be more polished overall. I do use a few extensions however to recreate a desktop-centric UX (Dock, boot to desktop and a few other tweaks).
I mean I really do love Debian, if not OpenSUSE I would be using Debian now, but it's not a great distro to suggest for absolute novices.
