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This reminds me of the recent Linus Tech Tips series on gaming on Linux[1]. Their conclusion is that although many games work out of the box (although usually n

This reminds me of the recent Linus Tech Tips series on gaming on Linux[1]. Their conclusion is that although many games work out of the box (although usually not at launch), Linux is not ready for mainstream gamers. Not many people would have the expertise or the interest to troubleshoot the problem as OP did. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rlg4K16ujFw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rlg4K16ujFw

spijdar 5y ago
It definitely isn't. I've been a huge linux nerd since my preteens in the late 2000s, I jumped on to squeeze more performance out of the thoroughly mediocre hardware I had access to. I wanted to program, and I found Visual Studio to be incomprehensibly dense and confusing, while Linux tools were so much simpler, with GCC, GEdit, makefiles and the like being more to my liking. I fell deep into the rabbit hole, learned emacs, then vim (it was more responsive on my intel atom-powered netbook), became a "shell guru", eventually went to college at 16 and started doing cybersecurity work/pentesting professionally. I've even made a tiny contribution to the Linux kernel, which I'm pretty proud of. All this anecdata to say, I consider myself pretty okay at using Linux, I "prefer" Linux, but I don't use Linux for gaming. Not unless it makes sense. I play Minecraft on Linux, and FOSS games that were developed on Linux. There's a POWER9 desktop on my desk that runs Linux, and all my professional and hobby work goes there. I love it. But any commercial games? They go on my old college-days Intel desktop, running Win10. I can do the work to get games running on Linux, but why bother? Like Linus says in that video, when I have time to play video games, I really don't want to pull out a debugger and strace and crap to do more $DAYJOB work. Not to say I never do that for fun. I do. I've done some work with https://github.com/ptitSeb/box86 https://github.com/ptitSeb/box86, and that involves a similar process. But I just frankly don't find doing it to your average Steam game to be very fun. Sometimes the muse strikes, usually it doesn't. And for your average Linux user, much less your average computer user overall, you can forget about it. IMO, unless you have a strong ideological reason to only use FOSS OSes (and all the power to you!), the reason you use Linux is because it's a vastly superior tool for certain problems. Playing your average commercial game is not one of them.
- CorrectHorseBat 5y ago
  It's not, but it really has come a far way and I'm extremely impressed. I'm kind of the other way around, I've never been more than a very casual gamer and I'm simply not interested in keeping a separate Windows pc or dual boot install for games. If I can't get it working on Linux I'm not bothering with it. Right now I can play any game I want to play with very minimal tinkering (that probably says more about me than the state of Wine/Proton, but still).
  - spijdar 5y ago
    Linux has absolutely come very far, don't get me wrong! I'm also mostly a casual gamer, and only have my "dedicated gaming PC" because it's 7 year old hardware I've replaced with a dedicated "workstation" I bought after getting a job and saving some money. On all my other hardware, I just run Linux, and I pretty much do the same as you -- most of my games work fine on Linux, a surprising number natively! Linus brought this up in his video as well, that if you don't really care which games you play, you'll be fine. The problem is there are a few games I like playing or like to play with my local friend circle that just don't work well on Linux. The problems are really stupid, too, and often not the fault of Linux per se. Garbage like Elder Scrolls Online still relying on a TLS cert signed by a CA that's been almost universally revoked, so the launcher will silently hang on linux. Bypassing this relies on either adding the (revoked for security reasons) CAs to your system's trust chain, or man-in-the-middleing the game process to force the updates regardless of the cert problems. It's not like I really care that much about this specific game, but it's nice to play every now and again with friends. Maybe my long rambly point is, if you primarily use Linux for other reasons and occasionally play games with it, it's awesome. But if you're the average "PC gamer" whose computer is primarily for gaming, Linux will probably disappoint you.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - Schnitz 5y ago
      Where does this sentiment come from that Linux has come very far when it comes to gaming? When Doom 3 released in 2004 I had to use a hex editor to hand patch the executable to get sound working. Luckily someone did what OP did and posted the instructions on a forum. I've used Linux/Unix for 20+ years but I wouldn't recommend it for gaming unless you enjoy debugging Linux software and want to do more of it. Frankly, you can learn a ton by doing so, it's not a waste of time, but priorities and frustration tolerances change as people get older. Then the demographic that no longer wants to debug their games tends to also be the cohort that has more money and is more willing to spend for a better experience, which means more money is being allocated to the platforms they are on as opposed to Linux.
xfer 5y ago
> Not many people would have the expertise or the interest to troubleshoot the problem as OP did Not many people have the expertise to do this on windows either(i would expect even fewer). Bear in mind that the developer sells this game as supported on Linux. The main reason is developers understandably don't care for bugs encountered by 2% users, which makes it a completely different discussion.
INTPenis 5y ago
Then again I play Papers Please through Steam and have no problems, so maybe they're using the 32 bit version. I agree that Linux use in general requires troubleshooting skill. We shouldn't assume there will never be any issues worth troubleshooting and recommend Linux to novices as a Microsoft killer. We should instead assume problems will happen and therefore a robust restore process is much more valuable to a novice Linux user. This is why I believe in btrfs that Fedora uses. Imagine having the powerful restore options many Windows computers ship with. Just press a key, go into a menu, select a point in time recovery, restore. But that said, what I really wanted to say was that I play exclusively on Linux now thanks to Proton and it's amazing. I can play big titles like Witcher 3, RDR2 and more, but I mostly play smaller titles like Oxygen not included, Rimworld and Ostriv.

spijdar 5y ago

It definitely isn't. I've been a huge linux nerd since my preteens in the late 2000s, I jumped on to squeeze more performance out of the thoroughly mediocre hardware I had access to. I wanted to program, and I found Visual Studio to be incomprehensibly dense and confusing, while Linux tools were so much simpler, with GCC, GEdit, makefiles and the like being more to my liking. I fell deep into the rabbit hole, learned emacs, then vim (it was more responsive on my intel atom-powered netbook), became a "shell guru", eventually went to college at 16 and started doing cybersecurity work/pentesting professionally. I've even made a tiny contribution to the Linux kernel, which I'm pretty proud of. All this anecdata to say, I consider myself pretty okay at using Linux, I "prefer" Linux, but I don't use Linux for gaming. Not unless it makes sense. I play Minecraft on Linux, and FOSS games that were developed on Linux. There's a POWER9 desktop on my desk that runs Linux, and all my professional and hobby work goes there. I love it. But any commercial games? They go on my old college-days Intel desktop, running Win10. I can do the work to get games running on Linux, but why bother? Like Linus says in that video, when I have time to play video games, I really don't want to pull out a debugger and strace and crap to do more $DAYJOB work. Not to say I never do that for fun. I do. I've done some work with https://github.com/ptitSeb/box86 https://github.com/ptitSeb/box86, and that involves a similar process. But I just frankly don't find doing it to your average Steam game to be very fun. Sometimes the muse strikes, usually it doesn't. And for your average Linux user, much less your average computer user overall, you can forget about it. IMO, unless you have a strong ideological reason to only use FOSS OSes (and all the power to you!), the reason you use Linux is because it's a vastly superior tool for certain problems. Playing your average commercial game is not one of them.

CorrectHorseBat 5y ago
It's not, but it really has come a far way and I'm extremely impressed. I'm kind of the other way around, I've never been more than a very casual gamer and I'm simply not interested in keeping a separate Windows pc or dual boot install for games. If I can't get it working on Linux I'm not bothering with it. Right now I can play any game I want to play with very minimal tinkering (that probably says more about me than the state of Wine/Proton, but still).
- spijdar 5y ago
  Linux has absolutely come very far, don't get me wrong! I'm also mostly a casual gamer, and only have my "dedicated gaming PC" because it's 7 year old hardware I've replaced with a dedicated "workstation" I bought after getting a job and saving some money. On all my other hardware, I just run Linux, and I pretty much do the same as you -- most of my games work fine on Linux, a surprising number natively! Linus brought this up in his video as well, that if you don't really care which games you play, you'll be fine. The problem is there are a few games I like playing or like to play with my local friend circle that just don't work well on Linux. The problems are really stupid, too, and often not the fault of Linux per se. Garbage like Elder Scrolls Online still relying on a TLS cert signed by a CA that's been almost universally revoked, so the launcher will silently hang on linux. Bypassing this relies on either adding the (revoked for security reasons) CAs to your system's trust chain, or man-in-the-middleing the game process to force the updates regardless of the cert problems. It's not like I really care that much about this specific game, but it's nice to play every now and again with friends. Maybe my long rambly point is, if you primarily use Linux for other reasons and occasionally play games with it, it's awesome. But if you're the average "PC gamer" whose computer is primarily for gaming, Linux will probably disappoint you.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - Schnitz 5y ago
    Where does this sentiment come from that Linux has come very far when it comes to gaming? When Doom 3 released in 2004 I had to use a hex editor to hand patch the executable to get sound working. Luckily someone did what OP did and posted the instructions on a forum. I've used Linux/Unix for 20+ years but I wouldn't recommend it for gaming unless you enjoy debugging Linux software and want to do more of it. Frankly, you can learn a ton by doing so, it's not a waste of time, but priorities and frustration tolerances change as people get older. Then the demographic that no longer wants to debug their games tends to also be the cohort that has more money and is more willing to spend for a better experience, which means more money is being allocated to the platforms they are on as opposed to Linux.

xfer 5y ago

> Not many people would have the expertise or the interest to troubleshoot the problem as OP did Not many people have the expertise to do this on windows either(i would expect even fewer). Bear in mind that the developer sells this game as supported on Linux. The main reason is developers understandably don't care for bugs encountered by 2% users, which makes it a completely different discussion.

INTPenis 5y ago

Then again I play Papers Please through Steam and have no problems, so maybe they're using the 32 bit version. I agree that Linux use in general requires troubleshooting skill. We shouldn't assume there will never be any issues worth troubleshooting and recommend Linux to novices as a Microsoft killer. We should instead assume problems will happen and therefore a robust restore process is much more valuable to a novice Linux user. This is why I believe in btrfs that Fedora uses. Imagine having the powerful restore options many Windows computers ship with. Just press a key, go into a menu, select a point in time recovery, restore. But that said, what I really wanted to say was that I play exclusively on Linux now thanks to Proton and it's amazing. I can play big titles like Witcher 3, RDR2 and more, but I mostly play smaller titles like Oxygen not included, Rimworld and Ostriv.