8 ms·

I think its interesting that mainstream PC gaming press is now talking about Linux. We have the benchmark Youtube channels doing some benchmarks of it as well a

I think its interesting that mainstream PC gaming press is now talking about Linux. We have the benchmark Youtube channels doing some benchmarks of it as well and plenty of reports of "it just works", which is pretty promising at least for the games that aren't intentionally excluded by DRM. For me its still controllers and equipment incompatibility due to my VR headset and sim wheel/pedals setup, I use Linux everywhere else in my router and home servers. I just hope that Nvidia notices that there does appear to be a swing happening and improves their driver situation.

ErroneousBosh 9mo ago
Gaming now works better on Linux than it does on Windows. This must be upsetting for Microsoft, but it was their game to lose.
- voidfunc 9mo ago
  I dont get the feeling they care. Microsoft is so lost under Satya at this point. Totally blinded by Azure and AI and stock price growth. At some point they're going to realize all the ground they've lost and it's going to be a real problem. They're repeating a lot of the same mistakes that cost them the browser and mobile market.
  - gerdesj 9mo ago
    "Totally blinded by Azure and AI and stock price growth." Stock price growth is their core business because that is how large firms operate. MS used to embrace games etc because the whole point was all PCs should run Windows. Now the plan is to get you onto a subscription to their cloud. The PC bit is largely immaterial in that model. Enterprises get the rather horrible Intune bollocks to play with but the goal is to lock everyone into subs.
    - tombert 9mo ago
      It's pretty much every American business now isn't it? Do any big corporations actually make money anymore? I thought all of them more or less have operated under Ponzinomics ever since Jack Welch showed that that worked in the short term.
  - dontlaugh 9mo ago
    They don’t care, they’re defunding Xbox and even the Windows team is hollowed out.
    - k12sosse 9mo ago
      When the rumour was Windows 10 will be the last windows! I don't think people thought it would because of win11 would be so unbearable it would finally drive users to Linux.. but here we are. RIP.
    - isnckwndkwmx 9mo ago
      [dead]
  - diabllicseagull 9mo ago
    Yeah. MS must have been so hurt about losing to the iPhone, they really jumped the gun on AI as if to avoid a similar mistake. It's Satya's major play and I think they are already paying for that decision. xbox is hollowed out so that AI can be funded, while the pc/console hybrid project is doomed to fail because "windows everywhere" doesn't work if windows is crap. indeed, they might be left with just the cloud business in the end.
    - isnckwndkwmx 9mo ago
      And the funniest thing is: not having a mobile platform anymore will be the death knell for all of their AI efforts. I’m not really into this AI shenanigans, but it seems to me that if you want people to use /your/ bot, you gotta give it to people in the most seamless and efficient way possible, and that does not translate well to a desktop OS. I don’t think they would have dethroned iOS or even Android had they stayed their ground, but they probably would’ve had a stronger base to build upon for their Copilot nonsense. Those that used Windows Phone used it because they loved it, Copilot could’ve garnered some good rep from those already sold on Microsoft’s platform; instead, they’re trying to shove it down people’s throats even though very few people actually use Windows because they actively like it, most use it because it’s the “default” OS and they do not (and care not to) know any better.
    - com2kid 9mo ago
      First they jumped the gun on tablets, listening to the tech media that was saying tablets were going to replace computers. That resulted in Windows 8. More recently they've freaked out about ads, app stores, and SaSS revenue, which has resulted in lots of dark patterns in the OS.
  - casey2 9mo ago
    If people were buying new PCs every year like they used to I'd be worth it. Turns out there isn't as much value having a "captive market" on a PC unless it's locked down.
- spockz 9mo ago
  Gaming works fine with exception of things like BF6 that require kernel level anti cheat. The one thing I haven’t been able to get working reliably is steam remote play with the Linux machine as host. Most games work fine, others will only capture black screens.
  - jetbalsa 9mo ago
    if you are running KDE you can whitelist Steam for remote desktop work, this is because of wayland.
    - spockz 9mo ago
      I get to see the Steam Big Picture albeit very laggy. Also the games I tried such as Transport Fever 2 and Valheim are streamed and visible but still noticeably laggy. Only some games such as Arc Raiders yield a black image.
- jetbalsa 9mo ago
  This still has a "sometimes" on it, there are more then a few games that need magic proton flags to run well, nothing you can't go look up on protondb, but lots of games you would want to play with friends might have some nasty anti-cheat on it that just won't let you play it at all.
  - ErroneousBosh 9mo ago
    Exactly. Battlefield 6 for example does not work at all in Proton. This is a far better user experience for Battlefield players than in Windows. Have you ever actually attempted to play that half-assed buggy piece of shit?
- threethirtytwo 9mo ago
  The irony is that gaming on linux got better but the instigator was not the OSS community. All of it was funded by closed source software competing with other close source software. The OSS community by itself did not have the conviction to climb over this bulwark.
  - nine_k 9mo ago
    But when Steam started to develop Proton, WINE was 90% there! Valve only had to provide the remaining 90%. The strength of Linux and Free software in general is not in that it's completely built by unpaid labor. It's built by a lot of paid, full-time labor. But the results are shared with everyone. The strength of Free software is that it fosters and enforces cooperation of all interested parties, and provides a guarantee that defection is an unprofitable move. This is one of the reasons you see Linux everywhere, and *BSD, rarely.
    - eru 9mo ago
      > This is one of the reasons you see Linux everywhere, and *BSD, rarely. I doubt it's a large reason. I'd put more weight on eg Linus being a great project lead and he happens to work on Linux. And a lot of other historical contingencies.
      - nine_k 9mo ago
        BSD does a few things right, hence it's used by Netflix (who share back some of their work), userland of macOS (because Apple don't like GPL, I assume), PS4 and PS5 (IDK if anything seeps back upstream from there).
        eru 9mo ago
        There's also plenty of software available on Linux and other operating systems that uses the BSD license.
  - Spivak 9mo ago
    Money and resources suddenly materialized once someone realized that there was profit in it is pretty much the expected way this goes. OpenTofu happened not because of some OSS force of will but because a group of companies needed it to exist for their business. This flow is basically the bread and butter for the OSS community and the only way high effort projects get done.
- tombert 9mo ago
  Proton has gotten so good now that I don't even bother checking compatibility before buying games. Granted, I don't play online games, so that might change things, but for years I used to have to make a concession that "yeah Windows is better for games...", but in the last couple years that simply has not been true. Games seem to run better on Linux than Windows, and I don't have to deal with a bunch of Microsoft advertising bullshit. Hell, even the Microsoft Xbox One controllers work perfectly fine with xpad and the SteamOS/tenfoot interface recognizes it as an Xbox pad immediately, and this is with the official Microsoft Xbox dongle. At this point, the only valid excuses to stay on Windows, in my opinion, are online games and Microsoft Office. I don't use Office since I've been on Unixey things so long that I've more or less just gotten used to its options, but I've been wholly unable to convince my parents to change. I love my parents, but sometimes I want to kick their ass, because they can be a bit stuck in their ways; I am the one who is expected to fix their computer every time Windows decides to brick their computer, and they act like it's weird for me to ask them to install Linux. If I'm the one who has to perform unpaid maintenance on this I don't think it's weird for me to try and get them to use an operating system that has diagnostic tools that actually work. As far as I can tell, the diagnostic and repair tools in Windows have never worked for any human in history, and they certainly have never worked for me. I don't see why anyone puts up with it when macOS and Linux have had tools that actually work for a very long time.
  - theshackleford 9mo ago
    > At this point, the only valid excuses to stay on Windows, in my opinion I didn’t see a performance increase moving to Linux for the vast majority of titles tested. Certainly not enough to outweigh the fact that I want EVERY game to work out of the box, and to never have to think if it will or won’t. And not all of my games did, and a not insignificant number needed serious tweaking to get working right. I troubleshoot Linux issues all day long, I’ve zero interest in ever having to do it in my recreation time. That’s a good enough reason for me to keep my windows box around. I use Linux and OSX for everything that isn’t games, but windows functions just fine for me as a dumb console and I don’t seem to suffer any of these extreme and constant issues HN users seem to have with it from either a performance or reliability standpoint.
- pjmlp 9mo ago
  As long as Valve depends on the Windows ecosystem for content, they are quite safe. Game studios will keep buying Windows and Visual Studio licenses, target DirectX, and let Valve do whatever they need for game content.
- HumblyTossed 9mo ago
  They asked AI and it told them they needed to focus more on AI instead.
necessary 9mo ago
This is a big reason I’m excited for Steam Frame - high quality VR on the Linux desktop.
- pjerem 9mo ago
  AND high quality Linux desktop on the VR :)
desireco42 9mo ago
My VR glasses work on Omarchy, to my surprise, I plugged them and they work. I have XReal, older model.
- MSFT_Edging 9mo ago
  Aren't the XReals just displays in the glasses? If they work with other devices, it's no surprise linux can just use a display standard.
  - desireco42 9mo ago
    But they work out of the box, which is my point. You can use a device that can be inbetween which places screen into fixed space in front of you for example. While it is cool, it is kind of a hassle to have this device inbetween. I just plug them directly and they work.
fooker 9mo ago
The last remaining roadblock is kernel level anti-cheat frameworks. Pretty horrible technology, and unfortunately a good majority of the gaming industry by revenue relies on it.
- deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
- hparadiz 9mo ago
  The Linux kernel has eBPF now so if they wanted to start spying on everything you do they can just do it.
  - hackyhacky 9mo ago
    > The Linux kernel has eBPF now so if they wanted to start spying on everything you do they can just do it. Sure, except that anyone can just compile a Linux kernel that doesn't allow that. Anti-cheat systems on Windows work because Windows is hard(er) to tamper with.
    - tapoxi 9mo ago
      The interesting solution here is secure boot, only allow users to play from a set of trusted kernels.
      - monerozcash 9mo ago
        Yep, a plenty of prior art on how to implement the necessary attestations. Valve could totally ship their boxes with support for anticheat kernel-attestation. Is it possible to do this in a relatively hardware-agnostic, but reliable manner? Probably not.
      - fooker 9mo ago
        You can switch out the kernel in the running Linux desktop.
      - znpy 9mo ago
hinkley 9mo ago
When that steam deck clone came out and games played better on SteamOS than on Windows on the exact same hardware, it woke a bunch of people up. Microsoft scrambled to bring the startup time and footprint down but shots had already been fired. You don’t want a vendor you have to publically shame to get them to do the right thing. And that’s MS if any single sentence has ever described them without using curse words.
- Trasmatta 9mo ago
  I've got the Legion Go S with Steam OS, and that shit is great. It's stable, my games run well, the OS is pretty much entirely in the background, but I can still access it fully if I need to. Love it.
arwineap 9mo ago
I'm surprised to hear you are having trouble with wheels / pedals, we should be there already! https://github.com/JacKeTUs/linux-steering-wheels https://github.com/JacKeTUs/linux-steering-wheels Hopefully vr headset support will get better
- Fr0styMatt88 9mo ago
  Funnily enough the most annoying things on my system at the moment is RGB and keyboard/mouse customisation. I haven’t found a tool that can access all the extra settings of my Logitech mouse, not my Logitech speakers. OpenRGB is amazing but I’m stuck on a version that constantly crashes; this should be fixed in the recent versions but nixpkgs doesn’t seem to have it (last I checked). On the other hand I did manage to get SteamVR somewhat working with ALVR on the Quest 3, but performance wasn’t great or consistent at all from what I remember (RTX 3070, Wayland KDE).
  - starky 9mo ago
    I was annoyed recently because I replaced my GPU and I had to boot into Windows for the first time in months and install drivers just to turn off the RGB on the card because OpenRGB wouldn't find it.
  - rounce 9mo ago
    Have you tried running the windows RGB utility via Wine with HIDRAW enabled for the device? Alternatively, given you’re running NixOS you can just override the `src` of the derivation with a newer version. This is part of the point of running NixOS: making small modifications to packages in the fly.
    - Fr0styMatt88 9mo ago
      Good idea about HIDRAW — I’ll have to look into that, thanks! I did try overriding the src for OpenRGB but as I’m on unstable, something else in the dependency chain must have broken as the post-install patches weren’t applying IIRC. Wasn’t urgent but I’ll likely get back to it at some point.
dijit 9mo ago
I’ll keep repeating it: the more people vote with their wallet, the more game companies will deploy Linux - including the anticheat. EAC has the support for Linux, you just have to enable it as a developer. I know this, I worked on games that used this. EAC was used on Stadia (which was a debian box) for the division, because the server had to detect that EAC was actually running on the client. I feel like I bring this up all the time here but people don’t believe me for some reason.
- deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
- ThatPlayer 9mo ago
  > EAC has the support for Linux This does not mean it supports the full feature set as from EAC on Windows. As an analogy, it's like saying Microsoft Excel supports iPad. It's true, but without VBA support, there's not going to be many serious attempts to port more complicated spreadsheets to iPad.
bilekas 9mo ago
> I just hope that Nvidia notices that there does appear to be a swing happening and improves their driver situation. I firmly believe that Nvidia doesn't want the general public to ever have better hardware than what is current as people could just run their own local models and take away from the ridiculous money they're making from data centers. In step they're now renting their gaming GPUs to players with their GeForce now package. The market share for Nvidia of gamers is a rounding error now against ai datacenter orders. I won't hold my breath about them revisiting their established drivers for Linux.
- kouteiheika 9mo ago
  > I firmly believe that Nvidia doesn't want the general public to ever have better hardware than what is current as people could just run their own local models and take away from the ridiculous money they're making from data centers. You're underestimating them. They don't even want rich professional users to own hardware that could compete with their datacenter cash cow. Take RTX 6000 Pro, a $10k USD GPU. They say in their marketing materials that these have fifth-generation tensor cores. This is a lie, as you can't really use any 5th-gen specific features. Take a look at their PTX docs[1]. The RTX 6000 Pro is sm_120 in that table, while their datacenter GPUs are sm_100/sm110. See the 'tcgen05' instructions in the table? It's called 'tcgen05' because it stands for "Tensor Core GEN 05". And they're all unsupported on sm_120. [1] - https://docs.nvidia.com/cuda/parallel-thread-execution/#release-notes-a-spec-f-spec-ptx-feature-release-history https://docs.nvidia.com/cuda/parallel-thread-execution/#rele...
fxtentacle 9mo ago
The Quest 3 works offline with ALVR streaming over a private (non-Internet connected) WiFi network. Together with my 3090 I get 8k @ 120fps with 20ms latency over a WiFi6e dongle. I had to manually install the dkms for the dongle on PopOs, but apart from that it just works. ALVR starts SteamVR and then I use Steam to start the game. Proton seems to use Vulcan for rendering.
- gloomyday 9mo ago
  Overall, I had a pretty bad experience with ALVR. I never managed to figure out the cause of stuttering on mine. I wished Meta would support Linux.
  - rounce 9mo ago
    Have you given WiVRn a try? I’ve heard good things.
scrollop 9mo ago
What might help is if AMD or Nvidia take the gamble and create decent drivers and advertise Linux compatibility, driving up sales, forcing their competitor to do the same.
- creesch 9mo ago
  AMD has very decent drivers on Linux which are even open source. It is one of the main reasons people recommend people go with AMD cards for Linux.
HumblyTossed 9mo ago
I thought it was just my bubble, but I guess you're right, it does appear Linux is being talked about more in the mainstream.
johnnyanmac 9mo ago
>which is pretty promising at least for the games that aren't intentionally excluded by DRM. Sadly, those exclusions are pretty big asks for the common folk. That's always what it comes down to. Some killer tool you need for whatever reason that either doesn't work on Linux, or is severely compromised. I'm very comfortable with Linux, but my work still requires Unreal Engine. And good luck getting that going in Linux. So I'm stuck with dual booting at the bare minimum.

ErroneousBosh 9mo ago

Gaming now works better on Linux than it does on Windows. This must be upsetting for Microsoft, but it was their game to lose.

voidfunc 9mo ago
I dont get the feeling they care. Microsoft is so lost under Satya at this point. Totally blinded by Azure and AI and stock price growth. At some point they're going to realize all the ground they've lost and it's going to be a real problem. They're repeating a lot of the same mistakes that cost them the browser and mobile market.
- gerdesj 9mo ago
  "Totally blinded by Azure and AI and stock price growth." Stock price growth is their core business because that is how large firms operate. MS used to embrace games etc because the whole point was all PCs should run Windows. Now the plan is to get you onto a subscription to their cloud. The PC bit is largely immaterial in that model. Enterprises get the rather horrible Intune bollocks to play with but the goal is to lock everyone into subs.
  - tombert 9mo ago
    It's pretty much every American business now isn't it? Do any big corporations actually make money anymore? I thought all of them more or less have operated under Ponzinomics ever since Jack Welch showed that that worked in the short term.
- dontlaugh 9mo ago
  They don’t care, they’re defunding Xbox and even the Windows team is hollowed out.
  - k12sosse 9mo ago
    When the rumour was Windows 10 will be the last windows! I don't think people thought it would because of win11 would be so unbearable it would finally drive users to Linux.. but here we are. RIP.
  - isnckwndkwmx 9mo ago
    [dead]
- diabllicseagull 9mo ago
  Yeah. MS must have been so hurt about losing to the iPhone, they really jumped the gun on AI as if to avoid a similar mistake. It's Satya's major play and I think they are already paying for that decision. xbox is hollowed out so that AI can be funded, while the pc/console hybrid project is doomed to fail because "windows everywhere" doesn't work if windows is crap. indeed, they might be left with just the cloud business in the end.
  - isnckwndkwmx 9mo ago
    And the funniest thing is: not having a mobile platform anymore will be the death knell for all of their AI efforts. I’m not really into this AI shenanigans, but it seems to me that if you want people to use /your/ bot, you gotta give it to people in the most seamless and efficient way possible, and that does not translate well to a desktop OS. I don’t think they would have dethroned iOS or even Android had they stayed their ground, but they probably would’ve had a stronger base to build upon for their Copilot nonsense. Those that used Windows Phone used it because they loved it, Copilot could’ve garnered some good rep from those already sold on Microsoft’s platform; instead, they’re trying to shove it down people’s throats even though very few people actually use Windows because they actively like it, most use it because it’s the “default” OS and they do not (and care not to) know any better.
  - com2kid 9mo ago
    First they jumped the gun on tablets, listening to the tech media that was saying tablets were going to replace computers. That resulted in Windows 8. More recently they've freaked out about ads, app stores, and SaSS revenue, which has resulted in lots of dark patterns in the OS.
- casey2 9mo ago
  If people were buying new PCs every year like they used to I'd be worth it. Turns out there isn't as much value having a "captive market" on a PC unless it's locked down.
spockz 9mo ago
Gaming works fine with exception of things like BF6 that require kernel level anti cheat. The one thing I haven’t been able to get working reliably is steam remote play with the Linux machine as host. Most games work fine, others will only capture black screens.
- jetbalsa 9mo ago
  if you are running KDE you can whitelist Steam for remote desktop work, this is because of wayland.
  - spockz 9mo ago
    I get to see the Steam Big Picture albeit very laggy. Also the games I tried such as Transport Fever 2 and Valheim are streamed and visible but still noticeably laggy. Only some games such as Arc Raiders yield a black image.
jetbalsa 9mo ago
This still has a "sometimes" on it, there are more then a few games that need magic proton flags to run well, nothing you can't go look up on protondb, but lots of games you would want to play with friends might have some nasty anti-cheat on it that just won't let you play it at all.
- ErroneousBosh 9mo ago
  Exactly. Battlefield 6 for example does not work at all in Proton. This is a far better user experience for Battlefield players than in Windows. Have you ever actually attempted to play that half-assed buggy piece of shit?
threethirtytwo 9mo ago
The irony is that gaming on linux got better but the instigator was not the OSS community. All of it was funded by closed source software competing with other close source software. The OSS community by itself did not have the conviction to climb over this bulwark.
- nine_k 9mo ago
  But when Steam started to develop Proton, WINE was 90% there! Valve only had to provide the remaining 90%. The strength of Linux and Free software in general is not in that it's completely built by unpaid labor. It's built by a lot of paid, full-time labor. But the results are shared with everyone. The strength of Free software is that it fosters and enforces cooperation of all interested parties, and provides a guarantee that defection is an unprofitable move. This is one of the reasons you see Linux everywhere, and *BSD, rarely.
  - eru 9mo ago
    > This is one of the reasons you see Linux everywhere, and *BSD, rarely. I doubt it's a large reason. I'd put more weight on eg Linus being a great project lead and he happens to work on Linux. And a lot of other historical contingencies.
    - nine_k 9mo ago
      BSD does a few things right, hence it's used by Netflix (who share back some of their work), userland of macOS (because Apple don't like GPL, I assume), PS4 and PS5 (IDK if anything seeps back upstream from there).
      - eru 9mo ago
        There's also plenty of software available on Linux and other operating systems that uses the BSD license.
- Spivak 9mo ago
  Money and resources suddenly materialized once someone realized that there was profit in it is pretty much the expected way this goes. OpenTofu happened not because of some OSS force of will but because a group of companies needed it to exist for their business. This flow is basically the bread and butter for the OSS community and the only way high effort projects get done.
tombert 9mo ago
Proton has gotten so good now that I don't even bother checking compatibility before buying games. Granted, I don't play online games, so that might change things, but for years I used to have to make a concession that "yeah Windows is better for games...", but in the last couple years that simply has not been true. Games seem to run better on Linux than Windows, and I don't have to deal with a bunch of Microsoft advertising bullshit. Hell, even the Microsoft Xbox One controllers work perfectly fine with xpad and the SteamOS/tenfoot interface recognizes it as an Xbox pad immediately, and this is with the official Microsoft Xbox dongle. At this point, the only valid excuses to stay on Windows, in my opinion, are online games and Microsoft Office. I don't use Office since I've been on Unixey things so long that I've more or less just gotten used to its options, but I've been wholly unable to convince my parents to change. I love my parents, but sometimes I want to kick their ass, because they can be a bit stuck in their ways; I am the one who is expected to fix their computer every time Windows decides to brick their computer, and they act like it's weird for me to ask them to install Linux. If I'm the one who has to perform unpaid maintenance on this I don't think it's weird for me to try and get them to use an operating system that has diagnostic tools that actually work. As far as I can tell, the diagnostic and repair tools in Windows have never worked for any human in history, and they certainly have never worked for me. I don't see why anyone puts up with it when macOS and Linux have had tools that actually work for a very long time.
- theshackleford 9mo ago
  > At this point, the only valid excuses to stay on Windows, in my opinion I didn’t see a performance increase moving to Linux for the vast majority of titles tested. Certainly not enough to outweigh the fact that I want EVERY game to work out of the box, and to never have to think if it will or won’t. And not all of my games did, and a not insignificant number needed serious tweaking to get working right. I troubleshoot Linux issues all day long, I’ve zero interest in ever having to do it in my recreation time. That’s a good enough reason for me to keep my windows box around. I use Linux and OSX for everything that isn’t games, but windows functions just fine for me as a dumb console and I don’t seem to suffer any of these extreme and constant issues HN users seem to have with it from either a performance or reliability standpoint.
pjmlp 9mo ago
As long as Valve depends on the Windows ecosystem for content, they are quite safe. Game studios will keep buying Windows and Visual Studio licenses, target DirectX, and let Valve do whatever they need for game content.
HumblyTossed 9mo ago
They asked AI and it told them they needed to focus more on AI instead.

necessary 9mo ago

This is a big reason I’m excited for Steam Frame - high quality VR on the Linux desktop.

pjerem 9mo ago
AND high quality Linux desktop on the VR :)

desireco42 9mo ago

My VR glasses work on Omarchy, to my surprise, I plugged them and they work. I have XReal, older model.

MSFT_Edging 9mo ago
Aren't the XReals just displays in the glasses? If they work with other devices, it's no surprise linux can just use a display standard.
- desireco42 9mo ago
  But they work out of the box, which is my point. You can use a device that can be inbetween which places screen into fixed space in front of you for example. While it is cool, it is kind of a hassle to have this device inbetween. I just plug them directly and they work.

fooker 9mo ago

The last remaining roadblock is kernel level anti-cheat frameworks. Pretty horrible technology, and unfortunately a good majority of the gaming industry by revenue relies on it.

deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]
hparadiz 9mo ago
The Linux kernel has eBPF now so if they wanted to start spying on everything you do they can just do it.
- hackyhacky 9mo ago
  > The Linux kernel has eBPF now so if they wanted to start spying on everything you do they can just do it. Sure, except that anyone can just compile a Linux kernel that doesn't allow that. Anti-cheat systems on Windows work because Windows is hard(er) to tamper with.
  - tapoxi 9mo ago
    The interesting solution here is secure boot, only allow users to play from a set of trusted kernels.
    - monerozcash 9mo ago
      Yep, a plenty of prior art on how to implement the necessary attestations. Valve could totally ship their boxes with support for anticheat kernel-attestation. Is it possible to do this in a relatively hardware-agnostic, but reliable manner? Probably not.
    - fooker 9mo ago
      You can switch out the kernel in the running Linux desktop.
    - znpy 9mo ago

hinkley 9mo ago

When that steam deck clone came out and games played better on SteamOS than on Windows on the exact same hardware, it woke a bunch of people up. Microsoft scrambled to bring the startup time and footprint down but shots had already been fired. You don’t want a vendor you have to publically shame to get them to do the right thing. And that’s MS if any single sentence has ever described them without using curse words.

Trasmatta 9mo ago
I've got the Legion Go S with Steam OS, and that shit is great. It's stable, my games run well, the OS is pretty much entirely in the background, but I can still access it fully if I need to. Love it.

arwineap 9mo ago

I'm surprised to hear you are having trouble with wheels / pedals, we should be there already! https://github.com/JacKeTUs/linux-steering-wheels https://github.com/JacKeTUs/linux-steering-wheels Hopefully vr headset support will get better

Fr0styMatt88 9mo ago
Funnily enough the most annoying things on my system at the moment is RGB and keyboard/mouse customisation. I haven’t found a tool that can access all the extra settings of my Logitech mouse, not my Logitech speakers. OpenRGB is amazing but I’m stuck on a version that constantly crashes; this should be fixed in the recent versions but nixpkgs doesn’t seem to have it (last I checked). On the other hand I did manage to get SteamVR somewhat working with ALVR on the Quest 3, but performance wasn’t great or consistent at all from what I remember (RTX 3070, Wayland KDE).
- starky 9mo ago
  I was annoyed recently because I replaced my GPU and I had to boot into Windows for the first time in months and install drivers just to turn off the RGB on the card because OpenRGB wouldn't find it.
- rounce 9mo ago
  Have you tried running the windows RGB utility via Wine with HIDRAW enabled for the device? Alternatively, given you’re running NixOS you can just override the `src` of the derivation with a newer version. This is part of the point of running NixOS: making small modifications to packages in the fly.
  - Fr0styMatt88 9mo ago
    Good idea about HIDRAW — I’ll have to look into that, thanks! I did try overriding the src for OpenRGB but as I’m on unstable, something else in the dependency chain must have broken as the post-install patches weren’t applying IIRC. Wasn’t urgent but I’ll likely get back to it at some point.

dijit 9mo ago

I’ll keep repeating it: the more people vote with their wallet, the more game companies will deploy Linux - including the anticheat. EAC has the support for Linux, you just have to enable it as a developer. I know this, I worked on games that used this. EAC was used on Stadia (which was a debian box) for the division, because the server had to detect that EAC was actually running on the client. I feel like I bring this up all the time here but people don’t believe me for some reason.

deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]
ThatPlayer 9mo ago
> EAC has the support for Linux This does not mean it supports the full feature set as from EAC on Windows. As an analogy, it's like saying Microsoft Excel supports iPad. It's true, but without VBA support, there's not going to be many serious attempts to port more complicated spreadsheets to iPad.

bilekas 9mo ago

> I just hope that Nvidia notices that there does appear to be a swing happening and improves their driver situation. I firmly believe that Nvidia doesn't want the general public to ever have better hardware than what is current as people could just run their own local models and take away from the ridiculous money they're making from data centers. In step they're now renting their gaming GPUs to players with their GeForce now package. The market share for Nvidia of gamers is a rounding error now against ai datacenter orders. I won't hold my breath about them revisiting their established drivers for Linux.

kouteiheika 9mo ago
> I firmly believe that Nvidia doesn't want the general public to ever have better hardware than what is current as people could just run their own local models and take away from the ridiculous money they're making from data centers. You're underestimating them. They don't even want rich professional users to own hardware that could compete with their datacenter cash cow. Take RTX 6000 Pro, a $10k USD GPU. They say in their marketing materials that these have fifth-generation tensor cores. This is a lie, as you can't really use any 5th-gen specific features. Take a look at their PTX docs[1]. The RTX 6000 Pro is sm_120 in that table, while their datacenter GPUs are sm_100/sm110. See the 'tcgen05' instructions in the table? It's called 'tcgen05' because it stands for "Tensor Core GEN 05". And they're all unsupported on sm_120. [1] - https://docs.nvidia.com/cuda/parallel-thread-execution/#release-notes-a-spec-f-spec-ptx-feature-release-history https://docs.nvidia.com/cuda/parallel-thread-execution/#rele...

fxtentacle 9mo ago

The Quest 3 works offline with ALVR streaming over a private (non-Internet connected) WiFi network. Together with my 3090 I get 8k @ 120fps with 20ms latency over a WiFi6e dongle. I had to manually install the dkms for the dongle on PopOs, but apart from that it just works. ALVR starts SteamVR and then I use Steam to start the game. Proton seems to use Vulcan for rendering.

gloomyday 9mo ago
Overall, I had a pretty bad experience with ALVR. I never managed to figure out the cause of stuttering on mine. I wished Meta would support Linux.
- rounce 9mo ago
  Have you given WiVRn a try? I’ve heard good things.

scrollop 9mo ago

What might help is if AMD or Nvidia take the gamble and create decent drivers and advertise Linux compatibility, driving up sales, forcing their competitor to do the same.

creesch 9mo ago
AMD has very decent drivers on Linux which are even open source. It is one of the main reasons people recommend people go with AMD cards for Linux.

HumblyTossed 9mo ago

I thought it was just my bubble, but I guess you're right, it does appear Linux is being talked about more in the mainstream.

johnnyanmac 9mo ago

>which is pretty promising at least for the games that aren't intentionally excluded by DRM. Sadly, those exclusions are pretty big asks for the common folk. That's always what it comes down to. Some killer tool you need for whatever reason that either doesn't work on Linux, or is severely compromised. I'm very comfortable with Linux, but my work still requires Unreal Engine. And good luck getting that going in Linux. So I'm stuck with dual booting at the bare minimum.