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.
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.
Did you remember to screw in the antennas to the motherboard?
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.
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)
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...
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
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.
In real life: systemd IS useful, Wayland is becoming (has become?) the default, ubuntu is the most popular desktop distro family.
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.)
Citation very much needed for this claim.
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
If you want stable, reproducible systems Nix is a serious option now. Ubuntu isn't dead. You pick the distro that breaks your workflow the slowest, then backfill the choice with a story about freedom or community to make the packge manager choice seem less accidental.
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.
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.
*unless the developers explicitly enabled linux userspace support which some do
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
It is clearly getting better globally, so I expect in 3 years or so things will be ready for me to try again.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
As far I know, this bugs happens on Windows too.
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/
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.
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.
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.
This was for Slippi Melee, so even though I'm not super good at the game, the lag was too annoying.
Llm -> manual research -> apply
But no one has the time to validate everything llm writes via manually researching it unfortunately /s
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.
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.
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.
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
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%
https://radar.cloudflare.com/explorer?dataSet=http&groupBy=o...
Fun tidbits, Finland is at ~10% (!), and Germany at 6.3%.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Firefox/Privacy
https://www.gamingonlinux.com/steam-tracker/
'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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.