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It's a pretty huge advantage! That being said, I run a "nightmare stack" of sorts on my main Linux gaming PC: Alder Lake CPU, Nvidia GPU. NixOS on root and Ste
by smoldesu 3y ago
It's a pretty huge advantage!
That being said, I run a "nightmare stack" of sorts on my main Linux gaming PC: Alder Lake CPU, Nvidia GPU. NixOS on root and Steam installed natively. For a while, it was Unsupported Driver city - Population: Me.
...that being said, games have "just worked" for as long as I have Vulkan drivers installed. Steam might complain about software acceleration, but Cyberpunk runs with DLSS and Raytracing like a charm. The underlying stack is incredible, and I think it proves that you can make Linux a reliable delivery platform if you put in the work.
That's just my experience, but look at the rest of the industry: Apple publishing Game Porting Toolkit based on DXVK code, Raspberry Pi GPUs playing Fallout: New Vegas, RISC-V getting Box86 support, the list goes on. Hardware diversity is great right now, the Steam Deck just pulls a lot of that technology to center-stage.
- PaulHoule 3y agoRight, and there are a huge number of devices on the market that will compete with the Steam Deck/Nintendo Switch form factor, the portable game console drought that started with the end of the PS Vita is no more. (I still want to see a monile shooter that bests Killzone Mercenary.)
- 1MachineElf 3y agoI'll echo a positive experience using Steam on NixOS. Almost makes me wish my Steam Deck was running it too.
- pxc 3y agoI haven't done much PC gaming lately, but I ran NixOS on the living room gaming and emulation PC for years, and it likewise worked well for me. It's probably not a use case people think of when they think of NixOS, but it's popular with users and contributors nonetheless, and thus also fairly well-supported. It's also generally a nice way to cope with proprietary NVIDIA drivers (although the new open-source ones are already available in Nixpkgs as well!).