Haven't checked the news itself, but been following the hardware surveys from Valve for some years now, and on average, Linux is on a slow but constant growth. Also, been checking US's official analytics site every now and then for some months now, and there, Linux oscilates between 3 and 6% of users per system.
5% at the end of the decade is quite a pessimistic take 😉
Looking at the graph 1% was crossed mid/late 2021, while 2% was crossed mid 2024, so almost 3 years later. Now 3% is crossed a little more than a year later. Next year we would be likely to have crossed 4% and 5% should be no later than 2027, even if it doesn’t speed up much further.
I joined that group today, but it wasn’t necessarily this support thing. I hated Windows update most of the time anyway. Mostly I just needed to buy a new SSD so I could dual boot, which will allow me to transition at my own pace while getting comfortable. I bought a cheap 500gb Saturday.
The other issue is my version of decision paralysis on choosing a distro, which generally is paralysis up until I suddenly just bite the bullet. I went with Nobara since it looked easiest to support my hardware and get into my games quickly.
So far I’ve gotten FFXIV, Warframe, and Enshouded running the way I want, and am slowly downloading my other current games. I have to keep a 200mpbs download limit because I’m working too. I also wiped one of my 2tb drives that mostly had games I was planning to play soon or just started playing to make it exFAT. I’ll probably eventually convert the others but may need to buy another 2tb drive for transfers if needed.
Update: exFAT gave me issues with another game so I ended up just making it a btrfs drive.
It can be a slow transition, but I did the same. I had equal space for Windows and Linux in 2017, predating the Proton years. When I built a machine in 2021, I saw how much I was using each OS, and it ended up being 1.5TB Linux and 500GB Windows. Whenever I build my next PC, I’m quite confident I won’t have any reason to use Windows at all, seeing as I haven’t even booted that partition in about a year. If there is some odd use case, like a firmware update utility for a peripheral that requires Windows or something, I’ll just install Windows briefly on a cheap mini PC I’ve got and then set it back to Bazzite when I’m done.
Yeah, filesystem is a slow battle of forfeiture. Everyone wants to say “I’ll just use FAT, or NTFS, because both Windows and Linux support them!” And then it inevitably gives them performance issues among other problems.
I still use either for the drives where both of my dual boot OS’s need to access them, but I recognize it’s not a good place for games (I have some old, light ones that I’m not worried about accessing on NTFS, but big ones like Helldivers are out). It may even be a good excuse to learn more detailed partitioning so you can slowly shrink/eliminate what’s still using the two compatibility formats.
Distro choice is a tricky problem. I say that as someone that kinda settled on one; my own experience has not always matched others. But I will admit, it’s nice to stay on an interface not too far from Windows’ taskbar.
I do have an edge there as I’m actually pretty technically inclined (I do tech support for living, and at the risk of sounding like touting my own horn, I’m high up the escalation path for my company). So partitions and stuff are common things I work with, and this isn’t nearly my first brush with Linux. It’s just more getting games and a bunch of small unique software working is somewhat different from working with business servers where you have either stricter policies on what gets installed or vendor backup if necessary.
Still, much of my actual work involves solving issues by looking up errors and symptoms, so figuring out the issues here aren’t that hard for me either. While I do appreciate the GUI making it an easy switch from Windows, I’m no stranger to CLI either and feel quite comfortable using it, and documentation for a lot of what I’ve messed with so far has been pretty easy to find and follow.
As for my plans, I’ll probably eventually limit NTFS to one 1tb drive, or maybe do what you said and repetition it down to maybe 500gb, and hopefully most of what I do will be in Linux. I am the type to force myself to learn by force, so I haven’t actually booted back into Windows except for an issue where I couldn’t delete the NTFS partition from Linux. And I’ll probably hardly boot into Windows going forward either.
I was always under the assumption that I cannot run Windows games on Linux, and that in order for games to work on Linux they need to be compiled for Linux and not windows.
All the pirated games are windows games. I haven’t seen pirated games for Linux specifically.
So do I understand correctly that I can download pirated games for windows and run them on Linux?
And I assume running wine adds overhead and makes games run slower?
So I can only run pirated games by going through extra hoops and even then the level of success is varying?
See that’s what’s been preventing me from switching to linux for years and years and it seems this hasn’t changed really :(
I support indie devs and buy their games, but most often I can’t afford AAA games or simply don’t want to support greedy devs ruining the gaming industry, so I pirate them.
I mean really it’s like one more step and it’s pretty much just as easy as running a game on Windows I mean I don’t know what to tell you other than dual boot install or grab a laptop install or something else so you can just throw an instance on and give it a try you might be surprised
I assume, it is often more easy to get games running without (or removed) drm, as drm may be the one tricky thing that is hard to get working with wine 🤔
I’m kinda in the same boat. I have an old gaming laptop that just barley didn’t make the win11 arbitrary cut. Not because it was below spec, it was way above. Just because it was too “old”. I installed Bazzite. But I do have a top tier premium gaming PC I built recently that’s still on Win11 with Dualboot with Bazzite.
Bazzite is great, but it still has the failure(maybe it’s not failure to you and me, but the average gamer) is that most stuff isn’t just, download .exe, run that .exe there are loops and frameworks that need to be installed through command lines. The average user will give up there really quickly.
Haven’t used bazzite, but there is an App Store you can get all of the apps anyone would need.
No longer do we live in the days of visiting a vendors website to download their executables. They are conveniently packaged for us in the App Store (package manager).
Haven’t used bazzite, but there is an App Store you can get all of the apps anyone would need.
Its one of the quirks of a lot of the atomic distros. Because they are specifically built around the idea of having a specific set of packages at a specific range of versions for every rev of the distro itself… adding more packages is kind of a clusterfuck.
For flatpaks (and I think appimages too?), it is seamless. For anything else you are googling the commands to add packages as “layers” and so forth
And, to be fair to Bazzite (which I use for my HTPC and love it on there), I have had zero issues with actual gaming. Steam out of the box and Heroic is one flatpak away. But holy shit was adding iperf3 to test some network infrastructure tweaks a Thing.
Its why I personally recommend to friends to just raw dog Fedora rather than use one of the atomic distros. Atomic distros make a lot of sense for deployed machines but for anything someone is going to use as “their” computer? Just learn to not type sudo before every command you run… and maybe get a jetkvm so your tech savvy friend can fix your computer after an nvidia driver update.
Bazzite is great, but it still has the failure(maybe it’s not failure to you and me, but the average gamer) is that most stuff isn’t just, download .exe, run that .exe there are loops and frameworks that need to be installed through command line
Strong disagree on “most”
For the vast majority of users? Everything they need is in Steam and MAYBE Heroic, which is the same as on Windows.
In terms of non-gaming? I… have very strong Thoughts on atomic distros and the hoops Bazzite et al make you jump through with regard to layering and the like, but they are in Discover and the like. So “app store” experience.
I personally don’t think Bazzite is a good desktop OS (but I love it for my HTPC). But any of the user friendly distros (e.g. Fedora, Mint, and Ubuntu) should be almost zero command line usage unless you have a reason to use it.
the hoops… [they]… make you jump through with regard to layering
I played around with a few atomic distros and it seems like rather than layering, running things in containers is the preferred solution.
It won’t be the solution for everything that layering could “fix”, depending on your situation, but it is something that I wasn’t initially aware of when I started playing with Bazzite, Fedora Atomic, and now Aurora.
Basically, if you could just run whatever you need to run in a container, that might be another solution.
Also fuck giving saudi arabia money. Sometimes its unavoidable, but this is a video game. There are other video games, but there is no regime worse than the saudi regime.
“bUt ThEy DoNt OwN tHeM yEt”
The price has been settled on, so any success from here on out absolutely does directly benefit the saudis.
It’s frustrating because kernel level doesn’t actually help. The cheats and cheaters can also do that and do! I soured on competitive multiplayer because it’s become impossible to ignore that every popular PvP game is infested eith cheaters and that anti cheat is the equivalent of the TSA at Airports but even less effective. It’s security theater.
The only real prevention is consoles in games without cross play and that haven’t been cracked/exploited yet. Even then there’s man…AI In The Middle external cheats now that record the display output and can aim bot with controller input splicing hardware. But that’s not as easy to set up so way less cheaters.
Except then you’re gaming on a console which usually aim bots for you anyways because joysticks are inaccurate crap. Labeled “aim assist.” Halo Infinite for example was so egregious you couldn’t compete with controller players because of aim assist vs mouse and keyboard. That’s built into the fucking game!
I spent the last two days building a machine from old parts and installing Linux Mint. It’s my first time using Linux and I am really surprised at how lovely it is. I am still learning, but I can easily see it replacing my home gaming PC. I have yet to find something I can’t get to work.
It’s sad in a way but I kinda feel like proton is going to near wipe out the very few Linux native ports we get. It’s so much easier and more stable than trying to build and package for Linux.
Yeah, even more casual games like Balatro are proof of that, despite how easily you can port a game of that nature otherwise, people will choose to use proton because it’s still able to sync with their progress and symlinking is too inconvenient to consider unless you’re running like 2gb ram or something.
And, I totally get that! It’s like yeah, I know how to setup a symlink to probably make that work, but you know what’s a lot easier than that… Just not doing that and just having it work.
I’ve tried playing Steam games, but my hard drives are all NTFS and the Linux (Mint) partition is exFat, and it seems like they don’t play nicely together. Since i don’t want to move all my steam games to an exFat partition, I’m holding off on switching. But until I get around to overhauling my storage and go single drive, I’m gonna stick with Windows using as many FOSS apps as possible.
When I switched over my home desktop to Mint, it was a very short time before I looked at Windows and said “I’m too old for this shit.” I mean, the reason I am a Mint fan in the first place is that I am a FOSS loving nerd but with a family and pets and hobbies and a career and a middle aged energy level. The decades I’ve spent fixing Windows based PCs is enough for a lifetime, thx.
I say consolidate old files you want to keep. Shuffle them between drives as necessary to be able to format everything. Go all ext4 on the drives you already have. (once you’re ready)
They can play nicely, it just requires some work. The NTFS-3G driver can map Windows users to Linux users and translate the permissions so that it basically Just Works™️ under both operating systems.
Here’s some documentation. There are also tools you can use under both Windows and Linux to generate UserMapping files. I wish I could help more, but I did this a couple years ago and have forgotten the details since then
I feel you. I have my old PC with quiet an “ancient” chipset. Installed an NVMe and installed Linux on it… Just to find out that my AHCI controller isn’t supported by it with all my Windows hard drives. It’s either booting that NVMe with the Linux one or booting the deprecated Windows ones from BIOS. 12-13 years of reliable hardware… :/ Hope there is a kernel patch supporting it again
What makes the chart “only” on 3% is Chinese users. English Linux user alone has more than 6% percentage of Linux users.
We need Chinese government for their independent tech stack to include Linux further. At the moment, there are already several Chinese distro with big companies porting their basic apps to Linux (like chat app, office app, etc).
If Chinese gov force gaming company to support Linux as well, we will see a huge surge evenmore. There are a huge number of Chinese game that never made out of China, and exclusive to PC only.
I wish there was a graphic that showed English users with SteamOS separated from non-SteamOS users, because I think if we get 5% of non-SteamOS users, we should start to see devs pay a lot more attention. We’re starting to see devs make SteamOS-specific versions (e.g. THPS 1&2 offline mode), so the next step is getting Linux-specific adjustments for more games.
THPS offline mode is the same version as elsewhere, but it magically allows itself to operate offline when it thinks it’s running on a Steam Deck, which you can do with a launch parameter. Baldur’s Gate 3 actually has a native Linux version that is only officially supported for Steam Deck, and that might be closer to what you’re referring to.
My point is they built functionality specifically for a Linux-based system. In THPS, that meant offline mode, but for other games it could be anti-cheat, where to store game saves, or default settings (I think Cyberpunk some?).
My point is that Linux is getting on the radar of game devs, and that’ll increase a lot at some level of adoption. I think that level is 5% on desktop Linux.
Baldur’s Gate 3 is a unicorn in a lot of ways, so that’s not exactly what I’m talking about, but it’s related. I’m not going to expect BG3-level of support from devs, THPS 1&2 would be so much more than we’re currently getting.
It’s possible, but it’s also possible that they already had that offline segregation built into the code to support the Switch version, and that it was trivial to enable.
On a separate note, the BG3 native Linux version is so strange. Larian is threating the SteamDeck like a console. As if it is a bundled OS+HW system with only one available game store and only one useable OS. So they are only releasing it in steam, not on any other store. As if that means it can only be installed on SteamDeck and not on other Linux systems on different Hardware. They forget that anyone can install other Linux distributions or even windows in SteamDecks or use other game stores.
This decision is so strange, because it disadvantages people that bought the game for PC elsewhere and own a SteamDeck.
Like will they make performance patches to their games gated behind which which store the game was bought from?
So 93% of the Linux users use English steam. I wonder how much of that is because Linux users just don’t bother to set system language (I am one of them), or maybe the language was not detected correctly.
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