tbf, data shows that less than 60% valve games release this year runs on linux with no issue and 30% runs with major or minor issues. This stat is stables for years, so we could generalize it; however it do not represents actual gamers experience; very few games represent the majority of gametime, and a lot of them do not run on linux.
Moreover, when the hardware hardly meet the requirements, some people experience crash on linux where stable on windows.
do not represents actual gamers experience
My experience gaming on Linux the past few years is that I have not encountered a single game that hasn’t worked. And 90%+ work with no tinkering whatsoever.
some people experience crash on linux where stable on windows.
FUD much? I’m not saying it’s not true… but like the opposite has to be true too. So without actual data to say it’s significant it’s really just not help much in any way, just creating doubt.
very few games represent the majority of gametime, and a lot of them do not run on linux.
Same, which ones? What’s your dataset?
But not League of Legends 🫠 Thanks anticheat
Thank god. Now nobody can try to convince me to play it. “You should give it a shot. I think you might like it” “sorry, I use Linux. Can’t do it…oh well”
As someone who chiefly plays single player games: yup, that tracks. I’ve played Cyberpunk 2077, Nioh, Yakuza Kiwami 1 & 2, the list goes on. All on Linux, no issues. In fact, over the past two years the only game that absolutely refused to run is an obscure title called DeathSprint 66.
What’s the best distro for my desktop? I’ve been mucking around with some on an old laptop but haven’t attempted any gaming on it outside of some simple emulation.
Mint or CachyOS.
CachyOS runs 10% faster but it’s Arch-based so it’s not as easy as Mint.
Good to know, I’m hesitant to go 100% arch on everything until I have a better handle on CLI.
Bazzite seems to be the go-to answer for linux gaming.
Though, shouldn’t it not matter? It’s all linux. It should all perform just the same.
To me Bazzite is for game-box console-like PC you leave in your living room. If you want to also have a desktop experience, pick a desktop OS. EndeavorOS for rolling release. Anything Ubuntu or Debian based for stability. LMDE comes to mind.
In any event running games through steam/proton will be mostly plug and play anyways. Kernel mods are a thing but pretty much just extra and not really necessary.
bazzite is a perfect desktop os and development os and is also a rolling release
and you can rollback releases unlike most other distros, in the unlikely event you have a bad update
This is a great start, I’m using arch on my laptop which has been working for me but sometimes I spend more time troubleshooting settings than actually doing anything productive.
And yea I hear a lot of good things about Bazzite but the form-factor feels maybe just a bit too steam-machine/game oriented.
Bazzite isn’t really limited in any way, there are just different ways to do certain things because it’s immutable.
Assuming that’s what your meant by “form factor.” Aside from that, it just runs like any other distro with KDE
it’s a perfect desktop os
i think they have installed too many extensions to the desktop environment to make it appear console-like, but i disabled almost all of them and use mine for development and everything desktop-oriented
it just happens to do gaming flawlessly at the same time unlike many other distros i’ve tried over the years
Bazzite is great for a desktop PC
It doesn’t all perform the same. The kernel itself is extremely configurable, and some distros tweak it for stability, others for performance. Others again largely just leave it alone. Some distros also apply their own or other third party patches to the kernel.
Ive had the least trouble with kubuntu. Im running steam vr and it doesnt officially support all wayland distros.
https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/18A4-1E10-8A94-3DDAYou can either get a usb with ventoy with Fedora, bazzite and Cachy is and try them all out or there’s a website that lets you use any of the distros from your browser, it’s called distrosea
Amazing, thank you!
Linux mint installs easily (to be fair they all do), is familiar to Windows interface and has a big button to install nvidia drivers.
Is that last 10% all about DRM and anti-cheat?
I tried playing the BC Piezophile demo recently but it kept crashing on the main menu.
I’m someone who doesn’t do tinkering. If it doesn’t work then I move on to a different game until it or proton updates.
I would recommend checking protondb once if something isn’t working. Simply using a different proton version or adding a launch parameter that others share can often work. I don’t understand half the stuff I copy paste but it does work well so worth spending a minute to check it.
I don’t have the patience for even that minimal amount of troubleshooting. So I just leave it be until it fixes itself.
Basically yes.
Probably… with many cases of “we could support Linux without any problem but we don’t do because we just don’t want to” included.
Game devs don’t need to do much, or anything. Proton, wine, DXVK ecosystem supports almost everything out of the box.
That’s my point. It would often just run so they go out of their way to not support Linux.
If they run fine, then what is the problem?
I’ve seen native linux ports of games that ran worse than the win/proton version.
there is a single game i can think of that straight up refuses to run under wine for actual technical reasons and that’s gnoll hack because it apparently uses some extremely specific parts of the .net library that wine can’t do
