only 6 out of the 50 most played right now aren't working
10 millions players ingame, 90% of players are not playing these titles
It's the same reason alternative web browser engines like Ladybird are probably never going to take off. It might support 99.99% of web features - which sounds amazing! - but that probably means it's going to fail in some way on like 0.1% of sites which in practice is extremely frustrating.
Rust is also similar: multiplayer community servers with anticheat do not work. When the majority of players are on those servers, switching to Linux is not an option. But people on Linux looking for servers think it's good enough that you can play on servers with anticheat disabled.
If you got the means and space, I think it's the easiest solution. I do play some games on the Mac, but the experience has been rather poor outside of indie games which usually work very well.
That said, the controller support on windows constantly sucks. On macOS though, it's really easy to set up. Go figure.
For many games, people prefer Nvidias's graphical tricks over AMD's, making AMD cards a worse deal, while at the same time Nvidia's Linux support remains abysmal for most cards. It's not impossible to use their hardware anymore, but you need to know of their bullshit beforehand and even then you run the risk of messing up.
I hope Valve can get something similar to a Steam Machine programme off the ground now that games actually run on Linux. Unfortunately, I kind of doubt any vendors will bother to go through the effort of supporting their hardware on a firmware level for anything but Windows (and even at that level Windows is full of ACPI patches and driver workarounds to clean up their trash).
I’ve had steam installed on (and more/less used daily on) probably 4-5 different windows installs since roughly 2016, and I’ve never seen it more than once a year.
* SteamOS is not real Linux, because normies only interact with Steam launcher
* “Only 3%?”
* Windows is still the biggest platform
Not quite sure what your point is.
Not sure you are either.
> * Windows is still the biggest platform
100% of Windows users are using Linux every single day.
Windows just seems to have zero focus on performance though. React based start menu with visible lag, file Explorer (buggily) parsing files to display metadata before listing them, mysterious memory leaks not reflected in task manager processes.
I installed Linux Mint. While it didn't just work (TM), and I had to go into recovery mode to install Nvidia drivers, it worked well enough. I can run Overwatch via Steam and pull comparable FPS to Windows (500 FPS on a 3090 with dips into the 400s). Memory usage is stable and at a very low baseline.
It is nice to come back to Linux, and with games I don't really have a need to run Windows anymore.
I’m not naive, I know a ton of huge enterprises still run huge fleets of windows “servers” but I still find it hilarious that a supposedly serious server OS would default to showing you the weather and ads in the start menu.
I'm not a believer in "the year of linux desktop!?!!?" and all that, but it achieved a level of robustness about 5-10ish years ago that I openly encourage non technical users to give it a try. For the few people that actually did try, they did stick with it.
At this point it is Microsoft's position to lose through quality degradation rather than Linux to openly out wit. There is still a long way to go and MS could turn their boat around but they would have to stop chasing this data scrapping scheme of theirs to begin with. But how addicted are they to that cash flow? They are probably far more interested in keep share holders happy short term than customers long term and that is not a brilliant strategy if you want to have a life time of decades.
Turn the boat around? To where? Nobody would be willing to pay for their product even if they were to start trying to make it appealing.
I’m sure windows will continue to exist and maybe be relevant for at least a decade. But it will be in zombie/revenue-extraction mode from here on.
I think we’re only half joking though, I could see it happening.
There's no need because the Year Of Linux On The Desktop™ already happened and it's called WSL2. Meanwhile, the opposite has also already actually happened: SteamOS + Proton is a distro whose main purpose is to be a launcher for Windows apps on a Linux kernel.
Jokes aside, this chest-thumping is incredibly ironic for those of us who lived through the 1990s-2000s. First it was, "FOSS will eliminate all proprietary software and M$ (sic) will be crushed and Bill Gates will go to the poorhouse. Hooray!" Later, it became "Well, we haven't killed proprietary software but at least Linux / LAMP and Firefox are succeeding at taking down Windows and Internet Explorer. Hooray!" Now it's "Maybe Microsoft will consider switching its kernel to Windows. Probably. Someday. Hooray?" What's the backpedaling of the 2030s going to be?
Windows also comprehensively lost the "exclusivity" moat. Most of popular apps are now cross-platform, because they need to run on Android/iOS/macOS. So desktop Linux is often an easy addition: Slack, Discord, all the messengers, Zoom, various IDEs, etc.
So Linux indeed won to a large extent. Just not in the way people expected it.
If anything, they invested into the opposite: possibility to run Linux binaries on top of Windows kernel.
It seems like the Windows team has been freed to add features that they want rather than adding features that fit into a narrative.
WSL, pre-installing git, adding POSIX aliases to PowerShell, iPhone/Android integration, PowerShell/.net/VSCode/Edge on Mac/Linux, not making Office on Mac complete afterthought shit on purpose, etc.
Microsoft's standards for quality keep going down hill. Windows 11 does not even allow the moving of the task bar from the bottom of the screen. Microsoft is end user hostile just like Google.
Funnily enough, opening their stack to Linux probably made it easier to sell licenses for everything except Windows, since now you don't have to commit to a potentially unfamiliar hosting environment. Even SQL Server runs on Linux now.
Azure is still running on Hyper-V afaik for instance.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/Investor/earnings/FY-2025-Q3...
IIRC Windows is considered “more personal computing.” It looks like that also includes:
> Search and news advertising, comprising Bing (including Copilot), Microsoft News, Microsoft Edge, and third-party affiliates
So, maybe that’s where they get their enshittification revenue.
But yeah, the Azure company should be worried about associating with this unfortunate legacy Windows thing.
Many other programs do still open the standard file dialog directly, but even there, the local drive amd directory hierarchy is hidden behind a folded "This Computer" node in the tree view that is itself below the fold most of the time.
The median Office user is using it at work and your employer doesn’t want you saving documents in places you will lose them.
Ditto for universities and schools that provide 365.
How do most people log into a server? With a high-res physical touchscreen, or remote desktop?
So let's make a whole bunch of functionality impossible to access, because you have to bump up against a non-existent edge of a windowed remote screen, and literally make the UI not fit into common server screen resolutions at the time. I don't remember if 1024x768 was the minimum resolution that worked, or the maximum resolution that still didn't work. But it was an absolute comedy case.
I want to say that with only the basic VGA display drivers installed, screen resolution was too small to even get to the settings to fix it, but it's been a while and I can't find the info to prove it.
Windows 11 has some really legitimate improvements that make it a really solid OS.
It’s not surprising that Microsoft isn’t focusing on Windows as a server OS as they don’t expect anyone to deploy it in a new environment. They know it has already lost to Linux and that’s why .NET Core is on Linux and Mac, why WSL exists, etc. Azure is how Microsoft makes revenue from servers, Windows Server is a legacy product.
The whole “server OS has the weather app installed” thing is pretty irrelevant since enterprises have their own customized image building processes and don’t ever run the default payload. It’s really not worth Microsoft’s time to customize the server version knowing that their enterprise customers already have.
Microsoft knows the strength of Windows lies in the desktop environment for workstations, casual laptop use, and gaming systems, and it is excellent at all those things. They’ve delivered a whole lot of really nice and generally innovative features to those spaces. Windows has really nice gaming features, smartphone integrations including with iPhones, even doing some long-overdue work on small details like notepad and the command line.
I don’t find that windows has forced me to cloud or done anything like that.
Have you tried performing a fresh Home install recently without command line hacks? It's now impossible for a normal person to set up Windows without creating a MS account, forcing them to dip a toe into their cloud service connectivity and facilitate taking the next step towards paying them. They don't "force" you, but they sure will nag you incessantly about it, plopping that shit in Explorer, the Start Menu, tossing One Drive in the menubar at startup, shoving it in your face on login after a big update, etc. It's a pathetic cash grab everywhere you look.
- I have had my Microsoft account connected since early in the Windows 10 days so that I can use my Xbox library. For my personal use case it doesn't really bother me that I have to login. Sure, most competing commercial OSes don't straight up force you to login, but as an example I never really used my Mac laptop without the Apple ID logged in because it has some pretty clear benefits and essentially no discernible downsides. It has some downsides that mostly boil down to what-if scenarios and thought experiments. To me, Microsoft forcing you to login with an account is not a big deal in the context of commercial paid software with a paid license. I can certainly understand why it might be a big deal in a different context. I can certainly see why my own Linux laptop is more appealing to not have this requirement. However, I specifically use Windows for a lot of commercial stuff - Steam, Xbox, etc. Being logged in was going to happen anyway, at least for me.
- As far as being nagged to pay, use Edge/Bing, or buy cloud stuff from Microsoft, all of that has been extremely easy to dismiss permanently. I have not needed to use any power user tools or scripts.
- It's an outdated notion that OneDrive is tossed in the menu bar forever. In Windows 11, OneDrive can be uninstalled entirely like a standard app. When I open my Start Menu and search for "OneDrive," nothing comes up besides an obscure tangentially-related system setting. It's literally not there.
- Sure, various new things have been presented to me along with new updates, like Copilot and the like, but I have been forced into none of it. When I visit Settings > Apps > AI Components, nothing is installed. When I type "Copilot" into the Start Menu, nothing comes up besids Windows Store search suggestions (apps I have not installed) and a keyboard key customization setting. Copilot is literally not there.
- I think there’s actually a good argument that upsells like OneDrive/Copilot (again, in my experience easy to dismiss once a year and uninstall permanently) that solve complicated problems for the median user (secure backups, document storage, AI assistant) is a decently tasteful way to fund a commercial operating system. All of that stuff is optional, and I can just say no, while paying for annual point releases (e.g. Mac OS X) kinda sucked.
Sure, Microsoft seems to have some great developers behind Windows and those developers are improving the underlying operating system. The trouble is that Microsoft is also using Windows to push their other products. Coming from a Linux environment, I find that pushiness unbearably crass.
On top of that, Windows' main strength has always been application support. I don't even know if that is relevant anymore with commercial developers shifting to subscription models (for native applications) and web based applications (for everything else). The latter makes Windows nearly irrelevant. The former makes open source more desirable to at least some people.
I've also noticed that things appear to flipping when comparing Linux to Windows. I can take a distribution that is intended for desktops, install it, and expect almost everything to work out of the box. It doesn't seem to matter whether it is printer or video drivers or pre-installed applications. Meanwhile, I'm finding that I have to copy drivers to a USB drive and drop to the command line to get something as simple as a trackpad or touchscreen to work under Windows. Worse yet, I've had something similar happen with network adapters. Short of bypassing the OOBE, a Windows installation will not complete without a working network adapter and Internet connection. Similar tales can be told for applications: there is a never ending stream of barriers to climb to get software to install ("look, we care about privacy since we are asking you half a dozen questions about what you're willing to share," while ignoring dozens of other settings that affect your privacy) or prevent advertising from popping up. You don't deal with that nonsense under Linux.
I don't know what the future of Windows is. I don't much care, as long as I get to use the operating system I want to use in peace. That seems to be much more true today than it did 20 years ago.
In my experience thats just not true. Microsoft's client OSs like Win 11 and 10 include these consumer-oriented "features" [1] but they're not present on servet versions of Windows.
[1] I agree that the weather widget etc is annoying, even though it is easy to disable.
For them, getting you using onedrive is a (huge) step towards getting you to pay them for more storage using onedrive, and to also allowing them to use their advantage as the OS provider to get you using features that both keep you from moving away from Windows and keep you from moving to dropbox or another cloud competitor that normal consumers commonly use. For example, onedrive desktop sync tied to your Microsoft login, so you can log into a new system and have it put your preferences and files in place.
Having more data to monetize people is useful, but I would bet that they value the the lock-in of integrated services far more, as that's where they can possibly grow (by offering more services once you're less likely to leave), and growth is king.
It's the same thing Google does (and Samsung also attempts to do with their custom apps and store) with Android, but at the desktop level. Apple is able to do it for both desktop and mobile.
And backwards compatibility.
They're really good at it. And I'd say that's the reason Windows is still dominant. There's this unfathomably long tail of niche software that people need or want to run.
They are getting worse at this. I bought a Surface Laptop Studio 2 two years ago. Windows Mail and Windows Calendar, two nice minimalist programs from Microsoft, were actively killed in this time. If you open them, it will redirect you to a new ad-laden Outlook app. If you somehow get a workaround going through the registry, they still fuck with it because the (incredibly simple) UI somehow has network dependencies.
I use MailSpring for email and no longer have a native calendar on my fairly expensive laptop from Microsoft. This is actually what drove me over the edge to switch to Linux for my workstation. Unclear exactly what I'll do for my next laptop but it won't be from MS.
What I'm talking about is, if your widget factory uses some app to calibrate all the widgets which was written by a contractor in 2005, it probably still works fine on Windows 11.
Since M$ is doing away with simple free apps (such as Mail) and forcing users to move to cloud-based expensive apps, you can use FOSS (Free and Open Source) alternatives -- especially the Portable ones (e.g., apps from PortableApps.com) that don't need an install, they can run off a USB drive, and app+userdata can be easily backed up without fuss.
https://alternativeto.net/software/mail-calendar-people-and-...
This fact alone throws this commonly held belief to the wind.
Glibc provides binary compatibility to newer versions too.
Shims exist in both, “windows compatibility layer” for example, but pulseaudio can emulate ALSA- and pipewire can emulate pulseaudio and ALSA.
It’s actually a quagmire, but I would contend that either has solid story for backwards compatibility depending on the exact lens you’re looking at. Microsoft is worse than Linux in many ways.
Microsoft sort of only wins in the closed-source, “run this arbitrary binary” race - if you totally ignore the w10/11 UWP migration that killed a lot of win32 applications, but drivers for older hardware are much more long lived under linux.
New apple-silicon Macbooks also get such good battery life and performance now that if you are switching from Windows to a Unix-y personal computer, is is increasingly hard to not say that you should go to Mac.
I once had to patch uvc to support a webcam that wouldn't work natively on Linux. It would advertise one version of the API but implement another. That didn't affect windows which probably already knew and had proper patched drivers for it.
We can all but wonder why, but my guess isn't that there is some sloppy dev there and windows is just making up for it. It all seems very deliberate to undermine Linux. And it's plausible given Microsoft's bottomless pockets.
So it wouldn't surprise me that these companies are actively hindering Linux compatibility. So much for a free market with open competition.
I have this impression from years of using both Windows and linux servers in prod.
Server and LTSC SKUs don’t do that :)
Things have come a long way since then!
Also, there are 540Hz displays.
Tying the input loop to the render loop is a totally arbitrary decision that the game industry is needlessly perpetuating.
You're right a game could be made that works that way. I'm not aware of one, but I don't have exhaustive knowledge and it wouldn't surprise me if examples exist, but that was not the question.
But a greenfield code shouldn't be perpetuating this mistake.
On most modern engines there is already a fixed-step that runs at a fixed speed to make physics calculation deterministic, so this independence is possible.
However, while it is technically possible to run the state updates at a higher frequency, this isn't done in practice because the rendering part wouldn't be able to consume that extra precision anyway.
That's mainly because the game state kinda needs to remain locked while: 1) Rendering a frame to avoid visual artifacts (eg: the character and its weapon are rendered at different places because the weapon started rendering after a state change), or even crashes (due to reading partially modified data); 2) while fixed step physics updates are being applied and 3) if there's any kind of work in different threads (common in high FPS games).
You could technically copy the game-state functional-style when it needs to be used, but the benefits would be minimal: input/state changes are extremely fast compared to anything else. Doing this "too early" can even cause input lag. So the simple solution is just to do state change it at the beginning of the while loop, at the last possible moment before this data is processed.
Source: worked professionally with games in a past life and been in a lot of those discussions!
There are many tick rates that happen at the same time in a game, but generally grabbing the latest input at the last possible moment before updating the camera position/rotation is the best way to reduce latency.
It doesn't matter if you're processing input at 1000hz if the rendered output is going to have 16ms of latency embedded in it. If you can render the game in 1ms then the image generated has 1ms of latency embedded in to it.
In a magical ideal world if you know how long a frame is going to take to render, you could schedule it to execute at a specific time to minimise input latency, but it introduces a lot of other problems like both being very vulnerable to jitter and also software scheduling is jittery.
Okay I think I follow this, but I think I'd frame it a little differently. I guess it makes more sense to me if I think about your statement as "the frame I'm seeing is only 2ms old, instead of 16.67ms old". I'm still not seeing the action for 16.67ms since the last frame I saw, but I'm seeing a frame that was produced _much_ more recently than 16.67ms ago.
Thanks for the explanation, it helps!
I used to play CS:Go at a pretty high level (MGE - LE depending on free time), putting me in the top 10%. Same with Overwatch.
Most of the time you're not dying in a clutch both pulling the trigger situation. You missed, they didn't, is what usually happens.
I never bothered with any of that stuff, it doesn't make a meaningful difference unless you're a top 1%.
But there's a huge number of people who play these games who THINK it does. The reason they're losing isn't because of 2ms command registrations, it's because they made a mistake and want to blame something else.
Note that this is only the case if you have vsync enabled. Without vsync you will see the action (or some reaction anyway) +2ms later instead of +16.67ms, just not the full frame. This will manifest as screen tearing though if the screen changes are big - though it is up to personal preference if it bothers you or not.
Personally i always disable vsync even my high refresh rate monitor as i like having the fastest feedback possible (i do not even run a desktop compositor because of that) and i do not mind screen tearing (though tearing is much less visible with a high refresh monitor than a 60Hz one).
In Counter-Strike, smoke grenades used to (and still do, to an extent) dip your FPS into a slideshow. You want to ensure your opponent can't exploit these things.
[E] Answered my own question elsewhere: the difference is the "freshness" of the frame. Higher frame rates mean the frame you do end up seeing was produced more recently than the last frame you actually saw
The reason is triple buffering:
> https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Multiple_bufferin...
I just quote the central relevant sentences of this section:
"For frames that are completed much faster than interval between refreshes, it is possible to replace a back buffers' frames with newer iterations multiple times before copying. This means frames may be written to the back buffer that are never used at all before being overwritten by successive frames."
I know how to use the terminal to enforce deep sleep on laptops, but thats about all I do setup wise.
If I was 10 years younger than I am today, my perspective would have been that it “always worked” and at some point we have to acknowledge that there has been good work done and things are quite stable in the modern day. 10y is not a small amount of time to prove it out.
In Win 11 I am constantly finding the whole explorer locking up just copying files via USB because of reasons unknown. Where as on my Linux machines, I have absolute faith that it will just handle it or at the very least not just stop spinning in the background in zombie land, not dead enough to die but not alive enough to do anything. Windows is in a very unfortunate place right now, I do hope they will wake up and try to get things back on the road but I am very doubtful considering the leader ship they have nowadays.
There is a regkey to go back to the Windows 10 explorer, but you'd have to google that.
Some file browsers on Linux have this problem too, and the KDE launcher had it for years (it's fixed now).
The only thing I miss being on OSX, I hate its search.
I installed CachyOS and all of my hardware just worked, including NVIDIA/Wayland. No real bugs beyond incorrect monitor positioning, and some tinkering needed for Diablo 4/Battle.net.
The Diablo 4 issue is present on Windows as well, and ironically, there isn't a fix on Windows for those affected. On Linux, a DXVK config change solves the bug.
Not really missing anything.
Windows really needs to catch up with this. Multiple monitors have been a thing in Linux pretty much since the beginning of X.
Why can't I plug a Windows laptop into a docking station, and expect the screens to come up in the same order they were in last time? Why is it so hard?
Don't hold your breath... This is configurable in Linux (at least I recall Xfce and KDE having display position config built in for years).
I regularly move my work Win 11 Pro laptop between three different multi-monitor (hdmi) setups, and it works flawlessly. I don't recall any problems with Win10 over many years either.
What am I missing out on?
did i mention explorer would crash pretty often? like, half the time I plugged in a docking station it would crash explorer. That then reset all the settings. lol just a mess.
Pop OS! is a simple plug and play on any setup i've tried it on, over usb3 or hdmi/dpi. Works great.
Adobe Acrobat in particular takes multiple seconds to drag a window from the laptop screen to one of the attached displays when a PDF is open. Now, this is on a 6 year old laptop due to be replaced, but it was fairly high spec when it was purchased (64 GB, RTX 2060, NVMe SSD). It really shouldn't be making me wait on 2d rendering of a document.
If I switch that monitor to the other machine, Windows re-arranges ALL windows to appear on the new "primary" portrait-oriented screen#1, some maximised to fill the screen, some not. They stay there after the other screen is reconnected.
Possibly because the screen being switched is the "primary" screen? At least it's consistent behaviour between both Win10 AND Win11, which is nice.
I have no idea how multimon got so, so bad on windows.
Then bluetooth ...wtf? Again, how did they get so bad?
But I don't recall a time when Bluetooth was "good" on Windows -- like, at all. I've spent somewhere in the realm of 20 years now dinking around with it. As far as I can tell, it has always been a miserable experience.
I've never seen this work correctly. My work dock breaks monitor ordering on MacOS reliably and Gnome+Wayland frequently. I don't remember if it broke for Xorg. My home monitor setup breaks mouse behavior in borderless fullscreen and libreoffice scaling on KDE+Wayland.
Funnily this is the same thing I tried to do just last month, Installed CachyOS after not having Linux on my desktop for a very long time, tried installing Battle.net and just ran into too many issues and haven't come back yet (to be honest I didn't try too many avenues to fix it).
If you don't mind me asking what was the tinkering you had to do to make this work? Thanks!
That surprised me. But seems not true? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44124688
Its not entirely built with React Native, but React Native does seem to be responsible for at least one element of the start menu that appears initially when the menu is presented.
That being said, I just run Steam natively on NixOS and have never seen any issues. The biggest RCEs I'm worried about are Ring 0 anticheat nuking my desktop like CloudStrike.
In reality that isn't true. Flatpak steam runs like poo for a lot of people. Really, flatpak should be avoided if there are other installation methods, in general.
It's crazy, open a directory full of .mp4s and sometimes the list briefly appears but then it goes completely blank, just to start listing them again one-by-one taking about one second per entry, while being unresponsive to input.
Started on Windows. After five days it failed for some reason so I had to rerun it (forgot an author or along those lines, trivial fix). Meanwhile I looked into why it was so slow, and saw git-svn spun up perl commands like crazy.
Decided to spin up a Linux VM. After fixing the trivial issue it completed in literally a couple of hours.
Mint is seriously going to sabotage the momentum Linux is having right now.
I am playing mostly single player campaign type games (Assassins creed, RDR2, etc) which certainly improves the picture.
If steam really wanted to put a knife in games on windows, it would develop an anticheat and give it away for free. That is AFAICT the only thing keeping people on windows for modern, multiplayer games.
- Windows 94.84%
- Linux 3.05%
- macOS 2.11%
https://github.com/86Box/86Box/releases
For some, it is the only real legal option given windows 11 licensing.
Apple M3/M4 are a great chip, but they EOL the hardware ecosystem every 12 years on average. Few companies can tolerate that level of development liability, and Apple users benefit from the FOSS ecosystems cross-platform efforts. =3
It's kind of baffling because it does almost nothing to help the game developers that it's ostensibly aimed at, while it does help end-users play unmodified Windows games on their Mac, which Apple doesn't endorse.
It's sad for me as a long-time Mac fan and gaming fan that Apple has always had hardware and OS that was technically superior when it comes to gaming, but neither Jobs nor Cook ever cared about gaming except as a checkbox, so it all went to waste.
The amusing thing to me is that so many productive things have come OUT of pursuing gaming, such as graphics cards being useful for mining and then AI.
Apple was the company that boosted OpenGL popularity by using it as the graphics API for OS X. In Apple platforms world there's only one graphics API that is guaranteed to work across their hardware, so it was a big deal. However, they could not keep up with OpenGL updates, as they overlapped poorly with their products map, i.e. switching new OS X to newer OpenGL revision would require to drop support for older Macs.
Out of that need (and also to address multiple shortcomings of OpenGL) Metal was born. OpenGL support layer was implemented on Metal.
Metal was released before Vulkan API was finalised. There was never need for Apple to support Vulkan. Vulkan, as the OpenGL before it, has the same downsides for Apple, but bringing nothing to the table compared to Metal.
Very few games have custom written Vulkan rendering pipeline. Majority rely on game engines, and if the engine supports Vulkan rendering, it is almost certain to also supports Metal.
So, instead of relying on supporting 3rd party rendering APIs Apple spends resources on helping with porting games to Macs natively.
I have been using a MacBook Pro for decades (Linux/Windows PC for gaming). I haven't seen this happening.
Apple have, in recent years, sponsored a few triple A titles to add MacOS ports but the vast majority of games don't run or run so poorly it doesn't matter.
With CrossOver there are a handful of games that work well, most don't. I tried to play Fallout New Vegas and it wouldn't start. Tried to play Raft with some friends and it didn't start. Borderlands 2/3 didn't start. Democracy 4 started but ran at 2 fps.
Some games like EU4 and Dark Souls 1 remastered work pretty well. I ended up buying an ROG Aly because I travel a lot and want a portable gaming experience. I use game streaming to my MacBook to play games - I wouldn't have bought the Ally if my MacBook could just game.
IMO - if the Asahi team were able to implement Vulkan with no documentation or references - Apple could do so in a weekend if they so desired. I'd like to see Apple write Windows or Linux drivers for their hardware so we can use official Bootcamp and run games on platforms that care about it.
Apple can support both. There's no reason they shouldn't, as a competitor on the open market; AMD, Nvidia and even Qualcomm are supporting both DirectX and Vulkan in software. It would not require Apple to retool their hardware (as Asahi has shown) and would not require them to depreciate Metal (as their OpenGL support shows). The only significant sacrifice Apple has to make is their unforgiving monopoly on modern GPU APIs that they have meted out against everyone's will but their own.
macOS will be depreciated on Apple's roadmap by the time developers take it seriously as a gaming platform. It's outrageous that people like me have to abandon the Mac because Apple expects me to satisfy myself with iPad games instead of the full range of experiences available on the software market. They have a monopoly, Apple is throwing a temper tantrum because they know Steam has the better experience and they can't compete any better than Microsoft does. Their best strategy is to kill the Mac and pretend the iPad is a console with computer-like features, which should outright terrify you if you own a Mac.
Certainly they were a company that boosted OpenGL, but the company? During the early years OSX had less market share than Linux does today, and OpenGL was already well established by gaming and professional software before OSX ever came out. Quake supported it (not on release), Quake II and Half Life supported it on release, Quake III required it. Heck, Quake III released on Linux shortly before MacOS (classic), making it arguably as influential then, and of course the OSX port of that only came a few years later. But point is, that Id dared to release their new flagship with only OpenGL support shows that OpenGL was already firmly established and supported before OSX existed.
Without quake and a few other popular games, it is likely direct3d would've been the only thing supported by non professional graphics cards.
How does mesa manage then if apple cannot?
Apple can spend all the resources they want, but they'll never be able to convince enough developers to foster a gaming ecosystem that could ever be taken seriously when there's other platforms that have 20+ years of back catalogue titles available. This has largely been enabled on Linux through wrapping D3D to Vulkan and if Apple put in the work to support Vulkan all that work could be used for free. Or if they more permissively licensed GPTK's D3D>Metal wrapper, but as it stands it's still not as good as DXVK/VKD3D. Practically speaking Steam on Mac would be considerably more useful if there was native Vulkan support.
Of course, Apple wouldn't want that given their desire for vertical control of software distribution, though notably they don't do the same for video or audio. I mean they support MP3s right? That's what games should be treated as, a piece of media. MP3 might not be the best quality, most would prefer AAC or FLAC, but sometimes an MP3 is all a user might have, so they should let users play it. But they can't seem to break free from this delusion that game software should be treated the same as Uber Eats.
First, due to substantial differences in graphics hardware, that is tiled-based deferred rendering for Apple Silicon and immediate mode rendering for NVIDIA and AMD the software simulation or translation layer will never be as good as DXVK/VKD3D, which essentially do rendering on exactly same GPUs. In case of using TBDR the pipeline must be rewritten to get the benefits. Simply put, for Apple hardware every Windows game wrapped in a translation layer will be significantly worse off than a native port. That’s why it’s important for Apple to push for that.
Second, Apple is the owner of the biggest game storefront in terms of revenue. They don’t have to ask for game developers to come, they are already here. The market we are talking about is AAA games market. And this market is characterised by dedicated hardware: consoles and gaming PC. So I think this is where lies the actual problem: Apple doesn’t make dedicated hardware for games.
Doesn't matter for the back catalogue, which is the thing that is missing that makes the platform a running joke re: gaming. It's also an issue that affects Adreno on Snapdragon, but it isn't stopping Valve from planning to ship a version of Proton for that platform. Having personally talked to a DXVK developer about this specifically, the overhead, while existent, I understand isn't necessarily as severe as you make it out to be either.
> Second, Apple is the owner of the biggest game storefront in terms of revenue. They don’t have to ask for game developers to come, they are already here. The market we are talking about is AAA games market. And this market is characterised by dedicated hardware: consoles and gaming PC. So I think this is where lies the actual problem: Apple doesn’t make dedicated hardware for games.
Not just AAA, but most everything outside of the F2P/casual sphere. Speaking as someone who actually likes games as a form of art, the App Store's library is the video games equivalent of reality TV and home shopping. It's mostly exploitative trash. Maybe Apple is happy with cornering the market on exploitative trash though, good for them.
> every Windows game wrapped in a translation layer will be significantly worse
That's not wholly accurate, though. Apple Silicon has reverse-engineered drivers that do perfectly well keeping up with immediate-mode multiple-pass graphics pipelines, MoltenVK is not SOTA anymore: https://youtu.be/BbJMPfXTbbE?t=447
You're correct that tile-based deferred rendering is more efficient. That's not the issue, though. Apple can (and already does) support traditional raster APIs on the desktop, because they have to for compatibility's sake. Thousands of Mac apps will never use TBDR or Metal and will never be updated to use it. And there's no good reason to stop supporting those applications, because OpenGL runs perfectly well on Apple Silicon. The same goes for DirectX, whether you're willing to acknowledge it or not.
There are hundreds of thousands of games that do not support TBDR and will never be ported to Mac in their lifetime; and Mac owners could be playing them regardless. The only one holding them back is Apple, because they'd rather Mac owners play Genshin Impact and earn Tim a few RSUs with a gachapon pull.
...and ARM support. That's the bigger footgun, imo.
While Valve might make up a big part of CodeWeavers book of business now, that was not true when the original contract was signed.
They also make a Linux build of CrossOver.
Macs actually run a lot less of the Steam library without doing pretty involved workarounds like hsing CrossOver. Since Valve sells the Steam Deck they put a lot of work into getting Windows games to run on Linux automatically. They didn’t put that effort into the Mac platform.
Almost all modern games work flawlessly through proton and I get better compatibility for really old stuff through lutris than I ever did on windows (I used to have to run a win 3.1/95/98 vm to play certain older games, now I just use lutris/wine).
The only stuff that doesn't work is multiplayer games with unsupported anticheat - it's always a crapshoot when something new and multiplayer launches. My backup plan for those if I really want to play them is to just get them on PS5.
But the stuff that does work, works well. I play Helldivers 2 via Proton on Fedora, and i experience far fewer crashes and instances of weird behaviour than friends on Windows or Xbox.
I don't play a ton of modern games, but my wife and I played through the HD remakes of Myst and Riven, released in 2021 and 2024 respectively. I didn't even look at the Proton compatibility before buying the games because for single-player stuff then Proton has gotten so good that I almost never have to worry about it. I don't really play multiplayer games (outside of the original Doom or Minecraft with a friend or my wife, both of which have native Linux clients), so there hasn't ever been an issue for me.
My gaming box is a NixOS JovianOS thing, and I even get very good results using the official Microsoft adapter for Xbox One controllers. I really feel no desire to go back to Windows at this point.
As I got older, my interests in games decreased. That and also because I am too dumb to make wine work with games nowadays; it was easier in the 32bit era. :\
But the real problem is lack of time. There are so many things to do and so little time. Today's games are also not as interesting IMO. Most of them are just "who has the better 3D engine".
Weird to say you don't game these days but also make blanket statements about games these days :p
1. Hit the download button in Steam
2. Wait for it to download
3. Hit the play button
Granted, my taste in games doesn't include things like generic AAA first person military shooters, which are the ones which tend to be the most difficult to get to work due to stuff like anti cheat. But it sounds like your taste doesn't include those either,
As an aside, I recently found Riot Games' Vanguard installed on my Linux ESP partition... after having installed the game on my windows partition. It rooted every OS it could find mounted. Incredible.
There exist a gazillion of other games too, without anti-cheat.
Whenever I see someone say “most modern games work flawlessly” I know they’re full of shit or just don’t do much gaming.
Don't get me wrong, I’m not going back to windows, but it’s not the panacea that people pretend it is. Often enough it doesn’t “just work” and you have to hunt down some additional command line args to get games to run.
I use a LG OLED TV as screen, so no displayport inputs. Only HDMI 2.1.
How is the support for Linux + HDR + HDMI 2.1 + 120 Hz + VRR + Nvidia (5000 series)?
Can always dual boot, so its worth a shot. I have windows just for a few games like BF6 which wont work on linux cause of its anticheat
These Embark people... they scare me.
But Arc Raiders (and their previous game, The Finals) does use RTGI for good effects. And that low quality RT setting is still going to be better than no RT because of its realtime nature. https://youtu.be/MxkRJ_7sg8Y shows that off to good effect.
You can see this kinda performance on Indiana Jones and Doom Dark Ages, which have switched to workflows that require RT. Low quality RT in these games is performant enough to run on Linux AMD drivers which run RT in software on cards that do not have hardware for it: https://youtu.be/44XaGU01J84
Wayland supports it if you have the right version of gpu, gpu drivers, composer, kernel, state of the moon and hdr.
https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=category&i...
I think if you like checking it out and customizing the settings of your OS, then try it out! Or at least look up the games you care about on ProtonDB.
Even encrypted the Bazzite SSD just out of paranoia caused by Windows. Even partner-proof so far.
Only ever used Nvidia so far, probably going to switch to AMD in 1-2 years, as I hear that they're better on Linux.
https://gitlab.steamos.cloud/holo/dirlock/-/wikis/Enabling-d...
And, they know how to to use "flatpak update" to update the sober runtime for Roblox (I know this is not steam, but it is an example of how well other things run on linux). I'm so proud (and ashamed they play Roblox, but choose your battles).
But, Fortnite.
I tried to run a Windows VM, but that was a poor substitute.
Is there an option for Fortnite on Linux?
But yes - the problem is Epic doesn't target Linux with it, not that it would be infeasible for Epic to support playing Fortnite on Linux if they changed their minds.
There is probably more nuance behind that decision than I’m giving them credit for, but from a technical standpoint it’s just a checkbox.
[1] https://dev.epicgames.com/docs/game-services/anti-cheat/usin...
The solution is: buy a Playstation.
It just depends if you're booted into windows or into linux when you have the survey popup.
Meanwhile Wine fixed 32-bit OpenGL path performance problem in new wow64 mode, so now you don't need 32-bit Linux dependencies to run 32-bit games in Wine anymore (that affects DX7 games for example that run through OpenGL via WineD3D).
Stopped dual-booting for games and formatted the partition some time after Windows 7 EOL. Thank you Wine contributors, Valve and lord Gaben.
This helps a LOT with games, especially new ones needing the latest drivers or hardware support.
Most of the Linux hurdles in day to day work can be overcome (mostly is the lack of the apps I normally use that cause some attrition, but with some compromises and some work I can get around it). But for gaming (at least in NVIDIA GPUs) it keeps failing.
I have very limited time for gaming (around 2-4h per week), I don't want to keep having to eternally fiddle with game settings, fixing bugs, fixing launchers, try different Proton versions, etc, etc, etc, every time I sit down for a bit of gaming. And Linux, unfortunately, is just not really there.
1) get a working setup in minutes by following just https://nixos.wiki/wiki/Jovian_NixOS;
2) if something does not work, you don't start from scratch next time you have an urge to try again;
3) have best-in-class community support;
4) overcome lack of apps by plugging into nixpkgs - the biggest repo of packages out there among all the distros.
Hope I did well on selling NixOS to you.
I game a lot so there's other stuff I'll do like tweak the actual game settings to get visual/performance/control qualities I want, or use steamtinkerlaunch as a way to more easily install mods, or let my distro update my nvidia drivers (which I've found more stable than AMD's in the past on linux, but I use the proprietary ones) but that's all normal gamer stuff regardless of OS.
My steam library is like 120 games with several pretty popular ones. Again, no issues outside of anti-cheat but I'll uninstall those games so i dont care.
nvidia's drivers have gotten a lot better and their support docs are pretty decent. i had a mild issue a few months ago getting ollama running properly. All i had to do was update the nvidia toolkit, worked fine after that.
I suppose it’s probably better in 2025 now that the best API for Linux gaming is Win32. Proton is genuinely spectacular.
I love my Steamdeck. SteamOS is great. Supporting one distro is easy. It’s supporting a million unique permutations that is pure nightmare fuel.
https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/qeqn3b/despite_hav...
Essentially stating that Linux users disproportionately care to actually report bugs they encounter rather than ignoring them. I find that very plausible.
In my lived experience, this 100% pure unadultered copium. It’s the wishful thinking lie that Linux people tell themselves to support their preferred choice of OS software which is, for some reason, part of their identity.
Supporting “Linux” isn’t too bad in 2025 if all you care about is SteamOS and Ubuntu. But distributing pre-compiled binaries and getting them to run on an unbounded range of system configurations is a nightmare.
Linux users do at least expect to run into problems. So they’re willing to fight through errors for several hours before asking for help. And the Linux gamer community is willing to help each other out to jump through all these hoops.
But none of that changes the fact that supporting Linux is an additional mountain of work. Although in 2025 you should definitely support SteamDeck via either Proton or native.
That’s a deal breaker for me, I tried a fresh Bazzite install (from Arch) before giving up, exact same issue.
I wish Valve comes around one day and fixes that, I’ll kick Windows out of life in a heartbeat.
Contrary to most Linux advocates I’m a big believer in giving studios the tools they need to defeat cheaters and I don’t care much about system integrity if it means fairer games.
It's a game and it is Tony Hawk, but it's not really comparable as Tony Hawk on PS1.
then people complain when the product sucks and is invasive.
It looks like attestation. Linux needs to be able to assure game developers that the kernel their game is running on is actually protecting the security of their game.
I suspect the answer to cheating will ultimately be big brother and hiding information from the client.
The server should stop sending positions of undetected enemies - this requires rethinking game engines due to the predictions they perform.
The server should log every single action by every single player (full replays) in perpetuity, train models on it to detect outliers, classify some outliers as cheaters and start grouping them all together in lobbies.
Another idea would be to conduct automated experiments on players at random. Such as manifesting "fake" entities behind cover and measure player reactions - of which there should be none. Spawn bots (from the beginning of the game) that a compromised client (cheats) cannot discriminate from players and have them always remain in cover and gauge player behavior relative to them, despawn them if a [presumably real] player is about to detect them.
It all requires work and imagination which is in short supply in the industry. But given how cheaters kill certain types of games maybe someone will eventually do it.
The speed of light makes this _marginally_ problematic to do. It is possible that a unit might move out of the fog of war, or out of cover, during the latency to the client (or between server ticks). You'd effectively have pop-in during some scenarios - but it would be minor and the net benefit would probably make it worth it.
I recall one of the MOBAs adding this during its lifecycle, HoN I think?
That's the biggest problem with Linux on the desktop: outside of Red Hat and Canonical (neither of whose business has anything to do with gaming), there is basically no well-funded company that cares about it at all. Linux already works great for the use cases that matter to the people who develop Linux, who mostly are not trying to compete with Microsoft or Apple.
It probably would have to be an isolated environment to run in. Something like the Secure VM efforts adopted for desktops, perhaps with a small trusted hypervisor instead of CPU vendor extensions. Anything else I can think of starts to restrain what software you can run on your machine, or becomes highly invasive in ways similar to Anti-Cheats on Windows, both of which would be rejected by the general Linux community. (Through, it's not like anyone was asking Microsoft either before implementing anti-cheat and trampling on system integrity, at least until Microsoft started requiring signed drivers)
However, given that a generic blackbox implementation enables DRM and binary encryption there will probably still be opposition. It gets particularly nasty if it's given access to something like a full TPM to unlock application data in the same way a TPM can unlock an encrypted drive for your OS. That would make it the penultimate closed source application, which is really anti-ethical to a number of communities. (open source, modding, game/app preservation...)
The recurring compilation of Vulcan shaders after every update bothers a bit, but it works very well.
For example, a couple months ago, my install of TW:WH3 started to crash after 20-30 seconds in the main game. I think it started happening after a minor patch. Another example is Battle Brothers. The game ran flawlessly. Then I installed and played a copy on a Windows laptop using the same Steam account. After that the game stopped booting properly on Linux. (Maybe a coincidence.)
As a result, I still boot into Windows now and again to play these games. I am dual-booting.
I also have switched my primary desktop from Windows to Linux, and now when I have an issue, I just ask an LLM. I play pretty fast and loose with just chucking commands it gives me into the command line. I'm pretty well versed in linux sysadmin things, but LLMs make it so easy I don't even bother trying to solve things myself first.
I have a few people in my friend group who aren't well versed, but they're able to navigate linux just fine by doing this same approach.
There's still friction, don't get me wrong, but it's a different type of friction. On Windows there are far fewer bugs, but there's friction introduced due to it being non-unix based (especially when it comes to code/doing any sort of model training) and due to anti-patterns Windows keeps shipping into the OS. On linux, the friction is just bugs. You can address / fix bugs for the most part, but you can't fix Windows' friction points.
that's like saying if you daily drive windows it's a near certainty you'll have to edit the registry or use powershell/cmd.
It's useful if you know what you're doing but it isn't required anymore at all for most people. Most people just use their machines for the browser or office software. No reason to use command line for them, ever.
That hasn't been my experience. I suspect that most others who also daily drive linux would find it remarkable if someone used Linux every day for a year and never needed to open a terminal to install anything, fix anything, reset anything, update anything, follow any instructions given by any software they found and wanted to use, etc.
Google docs demolished one of those.
I reckon it was MS. I can't believe how confusing/confounding/frustrating the modern MS Office and it's cloud integration is. I swear Office 2003 was miles better. And it seems that way with the UX of just about all their stuff now.
I would run into little functionality limitations/frustrations with the Google suite, but I wasn't prepared for how far ahead the UX is compared to MS tools.
I am skeptical there could be any magical technological innovation that would make terminals friendlier. That space has already been thoroughly explored. There are dozens of terminal variants with various quality of life improvements, but the fundamental user experience of a command line interface will always be daunting to a non-technical user, no matter how "innovated".
You’re right for now… what I currently have won’t magically put noobs at ease. This is a really tough nut to crack.
Let's say, hypothetically, that Valve releases SteamOS to the general public, and it's received generally well, and it becomes much more common for people to use "that Linux thing" than it is today. Then let's say, hypothetically, that Valve turns evil and... I dunno, starts charging money for updates? At that point you've got a large population already using Linux, I'm sure there would be a pretty big migration to Ubuntu or some other mainstream Linux desktop.
PC does have a fair amount of users that want it to operate in a console-like way when it comes to usability, the moment you tell them to fiddle with a runtime or experiment with the command line variables you lose them. That's to say nothing about handling stuff that lives outside steam, because PC gaming shouldn't equal Valve. The Deck is a nice manageable subset to deal with and fairly small enthusiast audience
Deck works because most games are self contained, allowing them to have a default game mode that bypasses the desktop entirely.
Right now Steam Deck works because of a focus on a very specific use and users. A general purpose desktop requires a lot more, and right now even the most mature linux desktop (GNOME, Plasma etc) have their rough edges and learning curve.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pzl1B7nB9Kc
I'm not really following desktop Linux, is Linus' assessment still accurate?
Churn (and consequent ongoing immaturity) seems to be the price we've paid in the last 10-15yrs of "progress" making them suck less. I hope it settles down a bit soon and we get to enjoy more longer term polish on these improvements though.
LET'S GO FOR BROKE!!!
LET'S BREAK THE 3.5% BARRIER BEFORE GNU HURD WINS NEXT YEAR!!!!
I've been running Fedora at work for about 6-7 years now too, with few issues. Work binned Adobe XD and moved to Figma which has made it even more viable.
The one and only holdout I keep a Windows 11 install around for is VR. With Valve's new headset due to release any week now, we will hopefully have a bunch of Linux SteamVR patches on the way to sand the remaining sharp edges off.
Kudos to the team for keeping us in the loop, I apologize for the strange crashlogs my OOM killer sent.
That's always been positioned to me as the one for hackers and experimentalists. You'd think the more 'user-friendly' distros would be higher.
I thought so too, that's why I mostly used Ubuntu up until 22.04 sometime, used Ubuntu since I moved before that. Then I moved to Arch, and everything just got so much easier. Upgrading Ubuntu versions was a bit hit-or-miss, especially if you'd changed configs for one reason or another. And after 22.04>22.10 failed for whatever reason, I restarted with Arch then never looked back.
Probably it helped that I already knew Arch by the time I started using it, compared to starting to use Ubuntu coming from Windows and not knowing squat.
But now with an installer, good defaults, and a helpful community (maybe slightly controversial) I think Arch can be a pretty good beginner OS, as long as you want to understand how your system is put together.
I wonder how much of that is "hackers and experimentalists", versus random gamers* preferring Arch Linux's bleeding-edge latest-and-greatest packaging approach versus Ubuntu's seemingly-slower-paced development?
* though I suspect even the most casual 25% of PC gamers are probably significantly more tech-savvy than the average PC user of the population in general.
Install is (now?) relatively easy as well and there's enough of a community around it.
The minor things were wonky default graphics and mouse acceleration settings, but these were easily fixed from the game menus.
What finally let me do it was moving all my social gaming to PS5. Ime it’s really only games with anti-cheat requirements that can be a crapshoot on Linux. I can’t really recall ever running into other issues with anything on my (Linux-based) Steam Deck over the past couple of years. I’ve emigrated from my home country so gaming is important to me as a way of staying in touch with friends and family - something I wasn’t willing to risk by switching away from a working setup. A PS5 is a convenient and reasonably economical way to address that.
Feels pretty great to know that after 40+ years of relying on it - some good but a lot bad - I’ll never have to touch Windows again.
Steam Deck on the go, Bazzite for desktop. Match made in heaven.
It may even kill console gaming because the Steam Deck is already a fantastic experience just waiting for more games. It's not a small demographic either, it's something like 40% of males age 18-35, plus all of the people in their circles who come to them for tech support. Once market share gets up to 30% or so it becomes a cool trend, that other gamers want to emulate, streamers and influencers get involved. Then around 50% market share the bullying starts. "Windows is for people too stupid to figure out Linux" says a Linux Mint enjoyer to a Windows 11 plebian.
Valve has done a great job getting things started, but it's the studios' turn to make a move now.
Neither of us miss windows at all. There are some games we cant play but at the end of the day... I dont really want what they offer (in the kernel level shenanigans.), so I cant say I miss them much.
haunter•10h ago
tredre3•9h ago
If that is true then one of those other two claims has to be false:
1. Using the latest months recorded share (Oct-2025 - 3.05%): 4,026,000 estimated "monthly active users" for Linux+Steam.
2. Market research firm International Data Corporation estimated that between 3.7 and 4 million Steam Decks had been sold by the third anniversary of the device in February 2025.
27% of 4M gives us 1M Steam Deck + Legion users. Yet 4M were sold. That begs the question: How could it be? Do 75% of Steam Deck users run Windows? Have 75% of Steam Decks ended up in the landfill? Are the sale figures estimates wildly off-base?
Kudos•9h ago
niij•9h ago
jeroenhd•9h ago
- International Data Corporation is overestimating the amount of shipped Steam Decks.
- Modified Steam Decks (i.e. running Bazzite) don't report themselves to be Steam Decks
- Most likely: most Steam Deck users opt out of participating in the Steam Hardware survey/analytics.
Last year, I didn't participate in the Steam Hardware survey on my Deck, only on my PC. This year, I participated on my Deck and my desktop, but not my laptop. I still have three devices running Steam. To any survey, it'll look like the amount of Steam devices doubled even though I'm only reporting 67% of my devices to analytics.
brianwawok•8h ago
dm319•8h ago
- may depend on the period being measured.
I haven't looked at the article or their methodology, but if they were measuring over a certain period of time, a few hours, or even 24 hours, it will still likely only pick up a proportion of Steam owners.
zamadatix•8h ago
Jach•6h ago
I also have steam on multiple devices including a steam deck. On desktop I'm pretty much always logged in and I play games frequently, but most months I'm not selected for a survey. I use my steam deck less frequently and have maybe only gotten the survey prompt on it once or twice.
rafaelmn•9h ago
netule•9h ago
hamandcheese•8h ago
ShinTakuya•7h ago