7 ms·

Just putting this out there, since the post mentions he basically can't switch to Linux because of gaming: gaming on Linux is pretty great right now. 6mo ago, I

by chaps 5y ago

Just putting this out there, since the post mentions he basically can't switch to Linux because of gaming: gaming on Linux is pretty great right now. 6mo ago, I could play maybe 80% of games. Today, all single player* games work flawlessly (through steam+proton, I can't comment much on others). So if gaming is what's stopping you from going to Linux full time... it's not a bad time to really consider switching. *That said, there are some games do extremely invasive windows kernel level anti-cheat stuff.. so, some games' multiplayer won't work. Apex legends and doom eternal's multiplayer are two I've tried and failed to play in the past 3mo. Though doom eternal single player works swimmingly.

lodovic 5y ago
Is it possible to play SteamVR games on Linux?
- eptcyka 5y ago
  With a Vive or Valve's Index, yes. The Occulus pricks dropped Linux support as soon as they delivered a consumer product.
ayane_m 5y ago
I don't understand why anti-cheat requires invasive software. Encryption can be used to communicate with the server, and the server can then authenticate the client's state. The application itself can use tokens to prevent the user from prying in its address space via a rigged kernel.
- 0x0 5y ago
  How do you "use tokens" to prevent prying in its address space?
- golergka 5y ago
  > server can then authenticate the client's state I'm sorry, but how exactly would it work? Do you mean that the server would authenticate the whole memory of the client's process, a few hundred megabytes at least, in order to make sure that there's no code that switches alpha of the wall textures to 0 every 5th frame, for example?
  - creshal 5y ago
    That has always be the promise behind Trusted Computing, yes. Maybe in another 20 years Intel will actually deliver a reliable implementation of it.
- robbedpeter 5y ago
  Anti cheat is the excuse used to collect saleable or exploitable private data, and as a mechanism to perpetuate walled gardens. Centralizing accounts and identities to enforce ban lists, associate payment methods, target advertising, enable microtransactions, and so on are the reason for the security theater. Rent seekers will extract as much cash and time from players as can be gotten away with. Server level ban lists and competent game referees and volunteers could be a powerful answer to the problem, but there's not a lot of incentive to innovate away from rent seeking, as the big studios and stores crush any threats to their success.
  - johncolanduoni 5y ago
    Server level ban lists and competent game referees could perhaps solve this for high level play, but there’s no way you could scale that out so that the average player of a first person shooter doesn’t have to deal with cheating. That said, I’m not really a fan of things like Vanguard if for no other reason than it’s not clear that they have helped much beyond making cheats somewhat more expensive but not enough to be much rarer. It’s also worth noting that multiplayer games without anti-cheat have had centralized accounts and microtransactions for a long time, so I’m not sure I understand how the anti-cheat measures are furthering those.
    - camjohnson26 5y ago
      I wonder if more low tech solutions could work. What if you added random short screen blackouts or unexpected lags and see if perfect input still comes through. Anything that a human would react to but a bot won’t.
      - johncolanduoni 5y ago
        If your shooter intentionally drops frames or adds network or input lag, nobody is going to want to play it. This is the genre that generates most of the consumer demand for > 60 Hz refresh rate monitors.
    - drdaeman 5y ago
- bob1029 5y ago
  The client can just lie about its state. The only solution that is deterministic would be to move all rendering server-side. You could guarantee a fair match as long as participants are within some reasonable distance to the server. Note that this has other massive benefits if you can build for it natively...
- dspillett 5y ago
  Not sure why you are being downvoted for not understanding and asking a question to fix that, as the matter is relevant to the post you replied to... Essentially anti-cheat code needs that level of access to detect/circumvent cheat enabling code that has that level of access - it is a protracted arms race. There is money and kudos to be made through gaming, so people will cheat by any means necessary. You can't remotely prove the entire state of the client unless you entirely control the client, and no current OS can offer the level of sandboxing required to offer that assurance. If you can't 100% trust the state of the client then no transport level encryption and such will fix that - you are just guaranteeing the faked data is transported safely at that point. Of course that level of control being required for single player games is much more dubious, so there is a grain of truth in the more tin-foil-hat sounding theories about identity tracking & such on the part of the publishers.
- creshal 5y ago
  "Thanks" to competitive gaming involving real money incentives these days, cheats have reached the level of custom PCIe cards directly accessing kernel memory via DMA. So a kernel rootkit is the bare minimum to try and detect these attacks, preventing them isn't even on the table any more. In the distant future, you might be able to bypass it with hardware-authenticated homomorphic encryption, but that's still way off.
- oliwarner 5y ago
  Doesn't require it. Anticheat for multilayer could all be done server-side, by peers (started by vote), on demand or by peers on demand; all by just checking the player could do what their client claimed to do. It's just event logging and replay. But checking drivers and secure connections is easier.
  - majormajor 5y ago
    How does checking if the client claimed to do something possible answer questions about if the player had the skill to actually do what they could have possibly done?
    - oliwarner 5y ago
      Because many cheaters do things which are impossible. This is low hanging fruit that we're told we need a ring0 driver to have access to EVERYTHING. Stupid things like tracking other players through walls. Still common because it's so damned easy. You play back their events and you see the cheater always knows where to go, where to hide. There are also exploits. These can all be unit tested away. But there are cheats like kickback compensation, hitbox tracking. You can apply statistical models and find unlikely consistency but it's hard to say for certain.
  - bob1029 5y ago
    Event logging is irrelevant if you have incorporated certain optimizations into your game. For instance, many forms of netcode necessitate revealing slightly more information to players than you otherwise would want to. The world coordinates of player footstep sounds is almost certainly some information flowing across the network. All you would need to do is intercept this information on the network and view it on an entirely decoupled system in a 3d coordinate space - potentially one synchronized to your player character using similar snooping tactics. Valve has done a pretty good job at making this harder with asymmetric encryption, but its still something the client can ultimately decode or otherwise you wouldn't hear shit during a multiplayer match. Trying to lock down/validate the actual gamer's PC is a fool's errand. Just go back to first principles in information theory to see what a joke this is. If a certain fact made its way to a player's computer (or simply their home network), you should assume that they know it in the most adversarial way possible and model for that outcome. Obfuscation is just playing yourself in the long run.
samvher 5y ago
Interesting - is performance comparable to Windows or is there a significant hit?
- Kim_Bruning 5y ago
  It depends on the game, but of the ones I've tried so far, most are fairly comparable! Separately; GOG.com has a large selection of games that run Linux native; though not necessarily the most popular ones.
  - creshal 5y ago
    It also depends on your kernel, the FUTEX_WAIT_MULTIPLE patch solves a specific Wine/Proton bottleneck that native software doesn't care about¹, but delivers a significant performance improvement if compiled in. ¹: https://lwn.net/Articles/811696/ https://lwn.net/Articles/811696/
Tenoke 5y ago
Even for single player games it's never certain everything will work and with multi-player there's too many that don't. At any rate, I barely game and it's still super disappointing when the random thing I want to play turns out to not quite work.
- creshal 5y ago
  > Even for single player games it's never certain everything will work 100% compatibility isn't guaranteed for Windows either, you can always get screwed by random driver bugs. For that, you need a console.
the_cramer 5y ago
Is there any collector site that states what titles are Linux compatible and what are not? I'd like switching and gaming is keeping me from it. Browsing to all developer studios websites for my favourite 50 steam titles is a bit tedious... in other words... I'm lazy.
- b0afc375b5 5y ago
  Perhaps protondb fits your needs? https://www.protondb.com/ https://www.protondb.com/
  - Kim_Bruning 5y ago
    With steam+proton you can almost just buy whatever; but it does help to check the db before you pay. For those who are not (always) on steam there's also the original wine: https://appdb.winehq.org/ https://appdb.winehq.org/
    - alpaca128 5y ago
      > With steam+proton you can almost just buy whatever Unless you don't have a magically compatible hardware setup. On my laptop like half my Steam library won't start, only shows a black screen or crashes instantly. Not even all official Linux releases reliably work. The last time I tried Ubuntu I couldn't even install Steam out of the box. Yes, Steam+Proton has improved the situation immensely. It's still a different kind of experience than on Windows, though. I just went the console route. Not perfect, but I like that it basically guarantees the hardware will be compatible with new games for 5+ years. The slightly better visuals aren't worth it to me, most games look good enough nowadays (or rather, the best-looking games tend to not be the most enjoyable ones on average).
      - Kim_Bruning 5y ago
        Hilariously, NixOS actually gets steam set up perfectly every time, all the time. Of course this presupposes you got NixOS set up at all in the first place. And I'm not ENTIRELY sure I'd recommend it for your daily driver. But a friend of mine talked me into it all; and despite the warts at times it just seems like it's the least worst distro (to praise it with faint damns)
lawik 5y ago
I did say I use Windows for gaming, I don't think I said I couldn't switch but you have the right idea. I haven't tried Linux gaming in some time (ages). At a base level I don't mind having Windows for certain things, such as gaming and using Win or Mac for some media workloads. If they could just stop with the egregious overstepping I'd be pretty okay with using Win for gaming, accounting and a few other things. I'll likely have Win around for the foreseeable future, not just me in the household :) I appreciate the update on Linux gaming though, haven't really looked in a long time.
- spondyl 5y ago
  As someone who stuck with Windows begrudingly for game support (but was comfortable with Linux), Valve's Proton is basically black magic. I ended up running pop_OS! (Ubuntu) as my main OS for a solid year or so before selling my desktop. The fact you can play GTA V at 60 FPS like it's nothing is pretty mind blowing. Even more surprising was the ability to play Final Fantasy 14. Primarily because I expect anything with a custom launcher to be dead on arrival with Linux. If you find Windows frustrating, I highly recommend trying out pop_OS! just since everything Just Worked out of the box, even VR
- creshal 5y ago
  It's still a bit rough around the edges, as the best compatibility is found in community Proton forks you need to install manually, plus the need for out-of-tree drivers and non-standard bluetooth module config flags to get game controllers to work reliably. (OTOH, you're stuck with a similar driver mess if you want a DualShock or JoyCon on Windows, so w/e) But it's gotten a lot better than it used to be.
  - notemaker 5y ago
    > (OTOH, you're stuck with a similar driver mess if you want a DualShock or JoyCon on Windows, so w/e) Recently bought a PS5 controller and while not supported natively on either Linux/Windows, Steam does pick it up without any configuration (on both OS:es). It's really leveled up my PC gaming experience: I get the same feeling as playing on console with the freedom of PC.
ff86033e-9382 5y ago
I no longer evangelize for Linux. The hardware support is good enough that it just works, and has been for a decade. In that period I've seen the desktop become worse and worse in the name of 'accessibility'. Since I can't get the people in RedHat to stop making the desktop worse my next best alternative is to make Linux toxic enough that there is no financial incentive for them to continue and simply leave. Anyone non-technical who ask about windows alternatives I merely tell them that Linux is too hard and they should stick to Windows. Gate keeping is a virtue that we need to practice more of.
- kaba0 5y ago
  What accessibility? It has never had much support. Linux is terrible at that.
ginko 5y ago
I'm not much of a gamer these days, but aren't consoles pretty good these days? I guess it depends on what kind of games you like, but afaik the difference in available content for PC vs console is a lot smaller than it used to be.
- creshal 5y ago
  Smaller, yes, relatively speaking. But in absolute terms, the gap is still vast, and not exactly closing. (If anything, widening, as we keep getting more and more reliable emulators on PC that give access to hundreds of older console exclusive titles.) Plus, individual consoles are still randomly cockblocked by exclusive contracts, so you'd need 3 consoles to get all possible content, vs. a multiple accounts on one machine for all the various PC game shops.
  - majewsky 5y ago
    > all possible content The path to happiness for me has been realizing that I don't have time to consume all possible content anyway, especially right now (cf. "Peak Content"). So I just pick one platform every few years and choose from the games available on the platform. Over the years, I've gone from PC to PS2 to Wii to PC and right now, I'm gaming on a Switch (plus Minecraft on the PC that I already have). And if there were ever a PS5 or XSX exclusive that I'm interested in, I can always watch a let's-play first and see if I'm still interested later. (Which has not even happened to me so far because I don't actively seek out news for games that are not on the platform I own.)
  - Ashanmaril 5y ago
    You won't get all content on PC though because not every game gets ported there. I think a lot of people are pretty happy with a PC + Switch combo, since there's straight up no hope of Nintendo porting their games to PC in any time soon. And a Switch is relatively inexpensive (especially if you go for the Lite model) Sony also has a lot of exclusives on their systems (Bloodborne, Spider-Man, Uncharted, Last of Us, God of War, etc)
- rhn_mk1 5y ago
  Consoles aren't any better than Windows in terms of control. They are fully controlled by the respective manufacturer, and if you're not getting permission dialogues, it's because you agreed to them when you first started the console. (Disclosure: I don't actually know if modern consoles spam permission dialogues or ads.)
swiley 5y ago
Windows is literally just uber for malware at this point.
pjmlp 5y ago
Gaming is great as long as GNU/Linux keeps pretending to be Windows. I rather have the original deal without additional layers.
- blooalien 5y ago
  As you apparently already know WINE/Proton is just for games that are not available in native Linux versions. My own Steam library is packed with games (thousands of them with many thousands more available for purchase at any given time), and very few of those require the use of Proton, but it sure is nice to have available, since it adds the ability to play games which would otherwise bit-rot there in my library.
  - pjmlp 5y ago
    Windows and game consoles raise a couple of thousands more and pay to see the cards, if we are playing quantities game. If on the other hand we are playing the quality card, or what everyone else is actually paying for, then down Proton it goes. Isn't ironic that while most Android games are NDK based, so basically ISO C, ISO C++, OpenGL, OpenSL, Vulkan, they don't get ported to GNU/Linux? Or Stadia ones for that matter (regardless of its possible future).
    - chaps 5y ago
      All fair points, but honestly? I fully expect comparability layers to be at least somewhat flawed and I adjust the way I do things accordingly. Game doesn't work 100%? Whatever, I have other games to play. At the end of the day, I don't want to reboot just to play a game. I personally don't see the need to be a comparability purist here.
alexgmcm 5y ago
Also many developers are creating native Linux versions - Paradox Games Studio comes to mind where their Grand Strategy games are available native on Linux. Rimworld and Factorio as well. Nowadays I'm very unlikely to buy a game that doesn't have a native Linux version.
II2II 5y ago
It's also worth noting that Steam brings in some of the tactics of the untrustworthy world of commercial software. By requiring the installation of Steam to install games purchased through Steam, they are forcing the installation of a marketing tool. While Steam may be mostly benevolent at present and they have made enormous contributions to Linux for gamers, it doesn't change the fact that they are using their position to sell people more games when they go to launch a game. It also doesn't diminish the possibility that Steam could integrate user-hostile features at any time. (Remember, there was a time when Google was considered benevolent.)
- Fire-Dragon-DoL 5y ago
  Unfortunately steam also limits library usage to one person at a time. For those with hundreds of games, this is very limiting nowdays if you have a family. I switched to GoG whenever possible.
  - shoemakersteve 5y ago
    Steam actually has a family share feature, and while you "can't" play games if your library is being used by someone else, you can just go into offline mode to bypass that. So if you want to play single-player games, that works pretty well.
    - Fire-Dragon-DoL 5y ago
      I'm aware and that's a bug, not a feature. If you are online and go Offline with the explicit button (instead of unplug the cable) and actually keep the cable connected (not sure if LAN or internet at this point) and start a second Steam client and use the library (not sure if online or offline for the second one), the offline one will not be able to use the library because already in use. The workaround is, indeed, pull the cable or firewall steam, go offline, plug the cable. So the concern becomes "what if the protection becomes stronger".
    - swiley 5y ago
      I used to live somewhere with terrible internet. Offline mode seems to work about 10% of the time and your better off pretending it doesn't exist.
tuismuggler 5y ago
Linux gaming is fantastic. I couldn't play dragon age origins on my windows 10 PC. Was a nightmare just to get it to launch and then it would just crash all the time. Tried it on my Linux machine and bam it worked no sweat. I should add the hardware was different so I can't rule out the game not working on rtx20 series or 9-10 gen i7. Couldn't believe it. (I also got it running on windows 7 before I decided to try my mint is).

by chaps 5y ago

lodovic 5y ago

Is it possible to play SteamVR games on Linux?

eptcyka 5y ago
With a Vive or Valve's Index, yes. The Occulus pricks dropped Linux support as soon as they delivered a consumer product.

ayane_m 5y ago

I don't understand why anti-cheat requires invasive software. Encryption can be used to communicate with the server, and the server can then authenticate the client's state. The application itself can use tokens to prevent the user from prying in its address space via a rigged kernel.

0x0 5y ago
How do you "use tokens" to prevent prying in its address space?
golergka 5y ago
> server can then authenticate the client's state I'm sorry, but how exactly would it work? Do you mean that the server would authenticate the whole memory of the client's process, a few hundred megabytes at least, in order to make sure that there's no code that switches alpha of the wall textures to 0 every 5th frame, for example?
- creshal 5y ago
  That has always be the promise behind Trusted Computing, yes. Maybe in another 20 years Intel will actually deliver a reliable implementation of it.
robbedpeter 5y ago
Anti cheat is the excuse used to collect saleable or exploitable private data, and as a mechanism to perpetuate walled gardens. Centralizing accounts and identities to enforce ban lists, associate payment methods, target advertising, enable microtransactions, and so on are the reason for the security theater. Rent seekers will extract as much cash and time from players as can be gotten away with. Server level ban lists and competent game referees and volunteers could be a powerful answer to the problem, but there's not a lot of incentive to innovate away from rent seeking, as the big studios and stores crush any threats to their success.
- johncolanduoni 5y ago
  Server level ban lists and competent game referees could perhaps solve this for high level play, but there’s no way you could scale that out so that the average player of a first person shooter doesn’t have to deal with cheating. That said, I’m not really a fan of things like Vanguard if for no other reason than it’s not clear that they have helped much beyond making cheats somewhat more expensive but not enough to be much rarer. It’s also worth noting that multiplayer games without anti-cheat have had centralized accounts and microtransactions for a long time, so I’m not sure I understand how the anti-cheat measures are furthering those.
  - camjohnson26 5y ago
    I wonder if more low tech solutions could work. What if you added random short screen blackouts or unexpected lags and see if perfect input still comes through. Anything that a human would react to but a bot won’t.
    - johncolanduoni 5y ago
      If your shooter intentionally drops frames or adds network or input lag, nobody is going to want to play it. This is the genre that generates most of the consumer demand for > 60 Hz refresh rate monitors.
  - drdaeman 5y ago
bob1029 5y ago
The client can just lie about its state. The only solution that is deterministic would be to move all rendering server-side. You could guarantee a fair match as long as participants are within some reasonable distance to the server. Note that this has other massive benefits if you can build for it natively...
dspillett 5y ago
Not sure why you are being downvoted for not understanding and asking a question to fix that, as the matter is relevant to the post you replied to... Essentially anti-cheat code needs that level of access to detect/circumvent cheat enabling code that has that level of access - it is a protracted arms race. There is money and kudos to be made through gaming, so people will cheat by any means necessary. You can't remotely prove the entire state of the client unless you entirely control the client, and no current OS can offer the level of sandboxing required to offer that assurance. If you can't 100% trust the state of the client then no transport level encryption and such will fix that - you are just guaranteeing the faked data is transported safely at that point. Of course that level of control being required for single player games is much more dubious, so there is a grain of truth in the more tin-foil-hat sounding theories about identity tracking & such on the part of the publishers.
creshal 5y ago
"Thanks" to competitive gaming involving real money incentives these days, cheats have reached the level of custom PCIe cards directly accessing kernel memory via DMA. So a kernel rootkit is the bare minimum to try and detect these attacks, preventing them isn't even on the table any more. In the distant future, you might be able to bypass it with hardware-authenticated homomorphic encryption, but that's still way off.
oliwarner 5y ago
Doesn't require it. Anticheat for multilayer could all be done server-side, by peers (started by vote), on demand or by peers on demand; all by just checking the player could do what their client claimed to do. It's just event logging and replay. But checking drivers and secure connections is easier.
- majormajor 5y ago
  How does checking if the client claimed to do something possible answer questions about if the player had the skill to actually do what they could have possibly done?
  - oliwarner 5y ago
    Because many cheaters do things which are impossible. This is low hanging fruit that we're told we need a ring0 driver to have access to EVERYTHING. Stupid things like tracking other players through walls. Still common because it's so damned easy. You play back their events and you see the cheater always knows where to go, where to hide. There are also exploits. These can all be unit tested away. But there are cheats like kickback compensation, hitbox tracking. You can apply statistical models and find unlikely consistency but it's hard to say for certain.
- bob1029 5y ago
  Event logging is irrelevant if you have incorporated certain optimizations into your game. For instance, many forms of netcode necessitate revealing slightly more information to players than you otherwise would want to. The world coordinates of player footstep sounds is almost certainly some information flowing across the network. All you would need to do is intercept this information on the network and view it on an entirely decoupled system in a 3d coordinate space - potentially one synchronized to your player character using similar snooping tactics. Valve has done a pretty good job at making this harder with asymmetric encryption, but its still something the client can ultimately decode or otherwise you wouldn't hear shit during a multiplayer match. Trying to lock down/validate the actual gamer's PC is a fool's errand. Just go back to first principles in information theory to see what a joke this is. If a certain fact made its way to a player's computer (or simply their home network), you should assume that they know it in the most adversarial way possible and model for that outcome. Obfuscation is just playing yourself in the long run.

samvher 5y ago

Interesting - is performance comparable to Windows or is there a significant hit?

Kim_Bruning 5y ago
It depends on the game, but of the ones I've tried so far, most are fairly comparable! Separately; GOG.com has a large selection of games that run Linux native; though not necessarily the most popular ones.
- creshal 5y ago
  It also depends on your kernel, the FUTEX_WAIT_MULTIPLE patch solves a specific Wine/Proton bottleneck that native software doesn't care about¹, but delivers a significant performance improvement if compiled in. ¹: https://lwn.net/Articles/811696/ https://lwn.net/Articles/811696/

Tenoke 5y ago

Even for single player games it's never certain everything will work and with multi-player there's too many that don't. At any rate, I barely game and it's still super disappointing when the random thing I want to play turns out to not quite work.

creshal 5y ago
> Even for single player games it's never certain everything will work 100% compatibility isn't guaranteed for Windows either, you can always get screwed by random driver bugs. For that, you need a console.

the_cramer 5y ago

Is there any collector site that states what titles are Linux compatible and what are not? I'd like switching and gaming is keeping me from it. Browsing to all developer studios websites for my favourite 50 steam titles is a bit tedious... in other words... I'm lazy.

b0afc375b5 5y ago
Perhaps protondb fits your needs? https://www.protondb.com/ https://www.protondb.com/
- Kim_Bruning 5y ago
  With steam+proton you can almost just buy whatever; but it does help to check the db before you pay. For those who are not (always) on steam there's also the original wine: https://appdb.winehq.org/ https://appdb.winehq.org/
  - alpaca128 5y ago
    > With steam+proton you can almost just buy whatever Unless you don't have a magically compatible hardware setup. On my laptop like half my Steam library won't start, only shows a black screen or crashes instantly. Not even all official Linux releases reliably work. The last time I tried Ubuntu I couldn't even install Steam out of the box. Yes, Steam+Proton has improved the situation immensely. It's still a different kind of experience than on Windows, though. I just went the console route. Not perfect, but I like that it basically guarantees the hardware will be compatible with new games for 5+ years. The slightly better visuals aren't worth it to me, most games look good enough nowadays (or rather, the best-looking games tend to not be the most enjoyable ones on average).
    - Kim_Bruning 5y ago
      Hilariously, NixOS actually gets steam set up perfectly every time, all the time. Of course this presupposes you got NixOS set up at all in the first place. And I'm not ENTIRELY sure I'd recommend it for your daily driver. But a friend of mine talked me into it all; and despite the warts at times it just seems like it's the least worst distro (to praise it with faint damns)

lawik 5y ago

I did say I use Windows for gaming, I don't think I said I couldn't switch but you have the right idea. I haven't tried Linux gaming in some time (ages). At a base level I don't mind having Windows for certain things, such as gaming and using Win or Mac for some media workloads. If they could just stop with the egregious overstepping I'd be pretty okay with using Win for gaming, accounting and a few other things. I'll likely have Win around for the foreseeable future, not just me in the household :) I appreciate the update on Linux gaming though, haven't really looked in a long time.

spondyl 5y ago
As someone who stuck with Windows begrudingly for game support (but was comfortable with Linux), Valve's Proton is basically black magic. I ended up running pop_OS! (Ubuntu) as my main OS for a solid year or so before selling my desktop. The fact you can play GTA V at 60 FPS like it's nothing is pretty mind blowing. Even more surprising was the ability to play Final Fantasy 14. Primarily because I expect anything with a custom launcher to be dead on arrival with Linux. If you find Windows frustrating, I highly recommend trying out pop_OS! just since everything Just Worked out of the box, even VR
creshal 5y ago
It's still a bit rough around the edges, as the best compatibility is found in community Proton forks you need to install manually, plus the need for out-of-tree drivers and non-standard bluetooth module config flags to get game controllers to work reliably. (OTOH, you're stuck with a similar driver mess if you want a DualShock or JoyCon on Windows, so w/e) But it's gotten a lot better than it used to be.
- notemaker 5y ago
  > (OTOH, you're stuck with a similar driver mess if you want a DualShock or JoyCon on Windows, so w/e) Recently bought a PS5 controller and while not supported natively on either Linux/Windows, Steam does pick it up without any configuration (on both OS:es). It's really leveled up my PC gaming experience: I get the same feeling as playing on console with the freedom of PC.

ff86033e-9382 5y ago

I no longer evangelize for Linux. The hardware support is good enough that it just works, and has been for a decade. In that period I've seen the desktop become worse and worse in the name of 'accessibility'. Since I can't get the people in RedHat to stop making the desktop worse my next best alternative is to make Linux toxic enough that there is no financial incentive for them to continue and simply leave. Anyone non-technical who ask about windows alternatives I merely tell them that Linux is too hard and they should stick to Windows. Gate keeping is a virtue that we need to practice more of.

kaba0 5y ago
What accessibility? It has never had much support. Linux is terrible at that.

ginko 5y ago

I'm not much of a gamer these days, but aren't consoles pretty good these days? I guess it depends on what kind of games you like, but afaik the difference in available content for PC vs console is a lot smaller than it used to be.

creshal 5y ago
Smaller, yes, relatively speaking. But in absolute terms, the gap is still vast, and not exactly closing. (If anything, widening, as we keep getting more and more reliable emulators on PC that give access to hundreds of older console exclusive titles.) Plus, individual consoles are still randomly cockblocked by exclusive contracts, so you'd need 3 consoles to get all possible content, vs. a multiple accounts on one machine for all the various PC game shops.
- majewsky 5y ago
  > all possible content The path to happiness for me has been realizing that I don't have time to consume all possible content anyway, especially right now (cf. "Peak Content"). So I just pick one platform every few years and choose from the games available on the platform. Over the years, I've gone from PC to PS2 to Wii to PC and right now, I'm gaming on a Switch (plus Minecraft on the PC that I already have). And if there were ever a PS5 or XSX exclusive that I'm interested in, I can always watch a let's-play first and see if I'm still interested later. (Which has not even happened to me so far because I don't actively seek out news for games that are not on the platform I own.)
- Ashanmaril 5y ago
  You won't get all content on PC though because not every game gets ported there. I think a lot of people are pretty happy with a PC + Switch combo, since there's straight up no hope of Nintendo porting their games to PC in any time soon. And a Switch is relatively inexpensive (especially if you go for the Lite model) Sony also has a lot of exclusives on their systems (Bloodborne, Spider-Man, Uncharted, Last of Us, God of War, etc)
rhn_mk1 5y ago
Consoles aren't any better than Windows in terms of control. They are fully controlled by the respective manufacturer, and if you're not getting permission dialogues, it's because you agreed to them when you first started the console. (Disclosure: I don't actually know if modern consoles spam permission dialogues or ads.)

swiley 5y ago

Windows is literally just uber for malware at this point.

pjmlp 5y ago

Gaming is great as long as GNU/Linux keeps pretending to be Windows. I rather have the original deal without additional layers.

blooalien 5y ago
As you apparently already know WINE/Proton is just for games that are not available in native Linux versions. My own Steam library is packed with games (thousands of them with many thousands more available for purchase at any given time), and very few of those require the use of Proton, but it sure is nice to have available, since it adds the ability to play games which would otherwise bit-rot there in my library.
- pjmlp 5y ago
  Windows and game consoles raise a couple of thousands more and pay to see the cards, if we are playing quantities game. If on the other hand we are playing the quality card, or what everyone else is actually paying for, then down Proton it goes. Isn't ironic that while most Android games are NDK based, so basically ISO C, ISO C++, OpenGL, OpenSL, Vulkan, they don't get ported to GNU/Linux? Or Stadia ones for that matter (regardless of its possible future).
  - chaps 5y ago
    All fair points, but honestly? I fully expect comparability layers to be at least somewhat flawed and I adjust the way I do things accordingly. Game doesn't work 100%? Whatever, I have other games to play. At the end of the day, I don't want to reboot just to play a game. I personally don't see the need to be a comparability purist here.

alexgmcm 5y ago

Also many developers are creating native Linux versions - Paradox Games Studio comes to mind where their Grand Strategy games are available native on Linux. Rimworld and Factorio as well. Nowadays I'm very unlikely to buy a game that doesn't have a native Linux version.

II2II 5y ago

It's also worth noting that Steam brings in some of the tactics of the untrustworthy world of commercial software. By requiring the installation of Steam to install games purchased through Steam, they are forcing the installation of a marketing tool. While Steam may be mostly benevolent at present and they have made enormous contributions to Linux for gamers, it doesn't change the fact that they are using their position to sell people more games when they go to launch a game. It also doesn't diminish the possibility that Steam could integrate user-hostile features at any time. (Remember, there was a time when Google was considered benevolent.)

Fire-Dragon-DoL 5y ago
Unfortunately steam also limits library usage to one person at a time. For those with hundreds of games, this is very limiting nowdays if you have a family. I switched to GoG whenever possible.
- shoemakersteve 5y ago
  Steam actually has a family share feature, and while you "can't" play games if your library is being used by someone else, you can just go into offline mode to bypass that. So if you want to play single-player games, that works pretty well.
  - Fire-Dragon-DoL 5y ago
    I'm aware and that's a bug, not a feature. If you are online and go Offline with the explicit button (instead of unplug the cable) and actually keep the cable connected (not sure if LAN or internet at this point) and start a second Steam client and use the library (not sure if online or offline for the second one), the offline one will not be able to use the library because already in use. The workaround is, indeed, pull the cable or firewall steam, go offline, plug the cable. So the concern becomes "what if the protection becomes stronger".
  - swiley 5y ago
    I used to live somewhere with terrible internet. Offline mode seems to work about 10% of the time and your better off pretending it doesn't exist.

tuismuggler 5y ago

Linux gaming is fantastic. I couldn't play dragon age origins on my windows 10 PC. Was a nightmare just to get it to launch and then it would just crash all the time. Tried it on my Linux machine and bam it worked no sweat. I should add the hardware was different so I can't rule out the game not working on rtx20 series or 9-10 gen i7. Couldn't believe it. (I also got it running on windows 7 before I decided to try my mint is).