5 ms·

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 har

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.
badsectoracula 5y ago
I disagree, in my experience with the recent improvements to Wine, drivers, etc, if you have a bit of Linux knowledge you can get games work just as fine in Windows - with the possible exception of games that use anticheat malware (because frankly, software that relies on kernel-level hacks, etc is basically malware). Though personally i stick with SP games anyway. Also... > Like Linus says in that video, when I have time to play video games, I really don't want to pull out a debugger ...Linus is most likely blind to all the issues he may have to get games to work under Windows because he's used to them. I've been playing games on Windows for decades and it was never a plug-and-play experience (...or it was, if you consider the original PnP experience back in the 90s :-P). If games worked perfectly under Windows you wouldn't have sites like pcgamingwiki. Hell, i remember buying Tomb Raider 2013 back when it was new and having to trace through its registry calls on Windows to get it to work properly because its launcher was broken on my PC at the time. Incidentally that was supposed to be my relaxation time when i went home after work. (of course i do not expect Linus -or most people- to do the same, they'd most likely just drop it for some other game and wait for a fix - but i had just bought the game and i wanted to play it right then) In my experience it is rare to have a PC game on Windows play right away without any issues. If anything when it comes to slightly older games on Windows i had to use wrappers like DXVK to get games working properly due to the broken AMD Windows drivers. At the past i might have written here that if you want a problem-free experience stick with consoles, but judging from videos i see from channels like DigitalFoundry, it seems consoles have a ton of issues nowadays too (it isn't common but i found it amusing that some people seem to jailbreak their Switches to make games work better :-P). And these come with their own issues anyway, personally i wouldn't touch any locked down DRM riddled system anyway.
wildrhythms 5y ago
Have you tried Steam's Proton compatibility layer yet? I was surprised to find many (not all) games in my library running with near 1:1 performance and stability to Windows.

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.

badsectoracula 5y ago

I disagree, in my experience with the recent improvements to Wine, drivers, etc, if you have a bit of Linux knowledge you can get games work just as fine in Windows - with the possible exception of games that use anticheat malware (because frankly, software that relies on kernel-level hacks, etc is basically malware). Though personally i stick with SP games anyway. Also... > Like Linus says in that video, when I have time to play video games, I really don't want to pull out a debugger ...Linus is most likely blind to all the issues he may have to get games to work under Windows because he's used to them. I've been playing games on Windows for decades and it was never a plug-and-play experience (...or it was, if you consider the original PnP experience back in the 90s :-P). If games worked perfectly under Windows you wouldn't have sites like pcgamingwiki. Hell, i remember buying Tomb Raider 2013 back when it was new and having to trace through its registry calls on Windows to get it to work properly because its launcher was broken on my PC at the time. Incidentally that was supposed to be my relaxation time when i went home after work. (of course i do not expect Linus -or most people- to do the same, they'd most likely just drop it for some other game and wait for a fix - but i had just bought the game and i wanted to play it right then) In my experience it is rare to have a PC game on Windows play right away without any issues. If anything when it comes to slightly older games on Windows i had to use wrappers like DXVK to get games working properly due to the broken AMD Windows drivers. At the past i might have written here that if you want a problem-free experience stick with consoles, but judging from videos i see from channels like DigitalFoundry, it seems consoles have a ton of issues nowadays too (it isn't common but i found it amusing that some people seem to jailbreak their Switches to make games work better :-P). And these come with their own issues anyway, personally i wouldn't touch any locked down DRM riddled system anyway.

wildrhythms 5y ago

Have you tried Steam's Proton compatibility layer yet? I was surprised to find many (not all) games in my library running with near 1:1 performance and stability to Windows.