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Wild how less than 24h ago we were told to assume Linux was finally a hardened contender for gaming OS. The facts are the facts, and they're yet again trending

by 1970-01-01 10mo ago

Wild how less than 24h ago we were told to assume Linux was finally a hardened contender for gaming OS. The facts are the facts, and they're yet again trending opposite of journalism's opinions. The users have chosen Windows. Again. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46457770 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46457770

oreally 10mo ago
Keep widening the context. Last thing we need is a developer with rent on their minds, influenced by internet comments, developing on linux and being ignorant of the realities there.
Bjartr 10mo ago
These are not contradictory statements. Linux can be a contender and not currently be in the lead.
- 1970-01-01 10mo ago
  Using this definition means Firefox is a contender in the browser wars, an independent will be a contender in the next Presidential election, and a hydrogen fuel cell vehicle is a contender for your next car. Can we just leave out this contender nonsense and replace it with exotic choice?
jamespo 10mo ago
No, that was a single journalist's article on how Linux is working for him gaming-wise.
loganc2342 10mo ago
The author of the PC Gamer article acknowledged that the install base for Linux among gamers was dwarfed by the install base for Windows. All they were arguing is that Linux is the better platform for gaming, not that it’s more popular.
Sweepi 10mo ago
ah yes - "we were told" and "journalism's opinions"
Joel_Mckay 10mo ago
Slop content is still slop... especially when saying things people want to hear. Fact is most modern Linux Kernels >6.8.x don't support the legacy nvidia driver 470. Thus, on modern OS distros a lot of legacy video cards and laptops running Linux >6.18.x just isn't practical without a GPU upgrade. The situation will probably get worse in the next few years as perpetual permutation kernel culture hits unmaintainable EOL hardware driver Blobs. Most dual boot a Windows 10/11 ssd, as it still sort of works. YMMV =3
- formerly_proven 10mo ago
  470 is for GTX 700 series and older - these are ~13 year old GPUs.
  - Joel_Mckay 10mo ago
    note 580 is now also EOL, and a rack of hardware video encoders is less demanding than gaming. =3
    - formerly_proven 10mo ago
      No, 580 is the new legacy driver branch, it's still supported for a couple years. Just not optimized for new titles iirc. I'm not sure what the state of the open-source drivers is for the really old nvidia GPUs, but for Pascal and such it's pretty decent. No video hwaccel though. However, for hardware encoding, NVENC has improved a lot over the generations. So the old chunkers are probably beat on every metric by e.g. a T400 card. Or Intel Arc (business model: "Quick sync for AMD").
      - Joel_Mckay 10mo ago
        I have yet to see a fully working nouveau based system, as most people are just looking to blacklist the mod given the collateral problems. Depends on the hardware codecs use case, as some legacy cards are valuable to people that own legacy workflows. Without CUDA + hardware-encoders a GPU is just a paperweight regardless of age for some use-cases. =3
chrsw 10mo ago
Users are using Windows, not choosing it.
realusername 10mo ago
It's clear that on the long term trends, Linux is rising. From 1.2% in 2022 from 3.2% now. It just didn't rise in December. From the chart, it looks that Windows took some small share to some older OSX in December and Linux stayed mostly the same.

oreally 10mo ago

Keep widening the context. Last thing we need is a developer with rent on their minds, influenced by internet comments, developing on linux and being ignorant of the realities there.

Bjartr 10mo ago

These are not contradictory statements. Linux can be a contender and not currently be in the lead.

1970-01-01 10mo ago
Using this definition means Firefox is a contender in the browser wars, an independent will be a contender in the next Presidential election, and a hydrogen fuel cell vehicle is a contender for your next car. Can we just leave out this contender nonsense and replace it with exotic choice?

jamespo 10mo ago

No, that was a single journalist's article on how Linux is working for him gaming-wise.

loganc2342 10mo ago

The author of the PC Gamer article acknowledged that the install base for Linux among gamers was dwarfed by the install base for Windows. All they were arguing is that Linux is the better platform for gaming, not that it’s more popular.

Sweepi 10mo ago

ah yes - "we were told" and "journalism's opinions"

Joel_Mckay 10mo ago

Slop content is still slop... especially when saying things people want to hear. Fact is most modern Linux Kernels >6.8.x don't support the legacy nvidia driver 470. Thus, on modern OS distros a lot of legacy video cards and laptops running Linux >6.18.x just isn't practical without a GPU upgrade. The situation will probably get worse in the next few years as perpetual permutation kernel culture hits unmaintainable EOL hardware driver Blobs. Most dual boot a Windows 10/11 ssd, as it still sort of works. YMMV =3

formerly_proven 10mo ago
470 is for GTX 700 series and older - these are ~13 year old GPUs.
- Joel_Mckay 10mo ago
  note 580 is now also EOL, and a rack of hardware video encoders is less demanding than gaming. =3
  - formerly_proven 10mo ago
    No, 580 is the new legacy driver branch, it's still supported for a couple years. Just not optimized for new titles iirc. I'm not sure what the state of the open-source drivers is for the really old nvidia GPUs, but for Pascal and such it's pretty decent. No video hwaccel though. However, for hardware encoding, NVENC has improved a lot over the generations. So the old chunkers are probably beat on every metric by e.g. a T400 card. Or Intel Arc (business model: "Quick sync for AMD").
    - Joel_Mckay 10mo ago
      I have yet to see a fully working nouveau based system, as most people are just looking to blacklist the mod given the collateral problems. Depends on the hardware codecs use case, as some legacy cards are valuable to people that own legacy workflows. Without CUDA + hardware-encoders a GPU is just a paperweight regardless of age for some use-cases. =3

chrsw 10mo ago

Users are using Windows, not choosing it.

realusername 10mo ago

It's clear that on the long term trends, Linux is rising. From 1.2% in 2022 from 3.2% now. It just didn't rise in December. From the chart, it looks that Windows took some small share to some older OSX in December and Linux stayed mostly the same.