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Steam data reveals PC gamers shifting from Windows to Linux (www.tweaktown.com)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/pcgaming@lemmy.ca
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[–] 47 points 1 year ago (51 children)

If all you do is game, outside of a few key games (Destiny 2, uhh,couple others) the experience on Linux is better for many folks.

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  • [–] 16 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    The success of Steam Deck has helped a lot. Prior to that Linux ports tended to be very perfunctory and they weren't tested or supported very well. I guess that now there are actual Linux gamers (via Steam Deck), that support has improved. That said, I think outside of Steam Deck and SteamOS, your experience of gaming is going to be extremely dependent on your GPU, driver support and a number of other factors. Things are far more likely to work well on Windows than they would for Linux.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    I could drill down into the work that went into DXVK before Proton came about, enabling the Steam Deck, but that's a boring history lesson. I will concede that newer bleeding edge hardware is far more likely to be plug and play on Windows, but one of the leading reasons I transitioned was Windows removing support for the audio chipset on the motherboard for my Ryzen 1600. Every time I rebooted, I'd have to unpack a zip file and reinstall the audio drivers, it was maddening.

    In my experience (so, totally anecdotal), my hardware is stable longer on Linux than Windows.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 child)

    My experience with Linux with Nvidia drivers was basically - hey execute this ".run" file and you get drivers. Okay that worked but then if the kernel updated, the drivers broke and had to be reinstalled. And if the dist upgraded to a new version then the drivers broke completely. And NVidia gave up providing drivers at all for their older GPUs and I was stuck with Noveau which is better than nothing but useless for gaming.

    Conversely, some dists are supported by graphics manufacturers with proper packages but there is always that gap where the driver dependencies and the kernel dependencies are out of sync. Or the graphics driver only works on the last couple of dists and support disappears after that. Or you upgrade the dist and then discover there are no drivers for it yet.

    I know it rankles some purists, but really there should be an long term, versioned ABI for graphics drivers on Linux. There is sort-of is one with Gallium3D but it's still not supported properly by all vendors.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    I just took an old Optiplex with a GTX1650 and got it going with Ubuntu 24.04 and my experience was mostly okay but I saw a number of issues which could confound a newbie. Firstly, I had to go to the command like to run the ubuntu-drivers auto install because the card wasn't set up properly. If I hadn't then games wouldn't run properly. But then I was able to install Steam and get some games going. Acceleration looked okay and I tested games which were running under Windows emulation and natively with some success - however there was a long delay launching some games, like it was having to transpile shaders or something. Still, when they worked they seemed to work well.

    The most egregious issue I had is that Ubuntu defaults to an X11 desktop and the desktop is slightly off but the games work well. If I change to a Wayland desktop, then the desktop is buttery smooth but the games are very choppy. I suspect that's the driver for this old card just doesn't work properly with the window manager for some reason in that mode, that the wm is not giving the game a proper surface to render in or is somehow interfering with performance.

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  • [–] 10 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    For flat games this is true, there is still work to be done for the VR side of things, even that has advanced by leaps and bounds in just the last 2 or 3 years

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (3 children)

    Are there really people playing VR stuff regularly? I only know 2 people in my circles that bought equipment for it, and both of them got sick of it after a couple weeks.

    I don't know, what I've tried was fun for about 10 minutes, but that's about all I could take before the headache starts.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago

    I have put over 9k hours of play time since i got my vive in 2018. usually play for about 2h at a stretch 7 times a week. VR has destroyed my ability to play flat games, I just can't put more than a half hour into them these days. Usually load a game, look at the main menu, may start the game then in a few mins, turn it off.

    I play mil sim, zombie shooter, vr mods of flat games I have enjoyed in the past like raft and The Forest.

    When I first started there was a time i couldn't play long but after a month 2h was no issue except for tiredness.

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