Even gamers nexus’ Steve today said that they’re about to start doing Linux games performance testing soon. It’s happening, y’all, the year of the Linux desktop is upon us. ᕕ(ᐛ)ᕗ
Edit: just wanted to clarify that Steve from GN didn’t precisely say they’re starting to test soon, he said they will start WHEN the steam OS releases and is adopted. Sorry about that.
Every game I bought on Steam under Windows runs great on Steam in Linux Mint. The few games I didn’t buy on Steam (Deus Ex, Giants: Citizen Kabuto) run great on Wine, using the default settings.
Adopting Proton was the smartest thing Valve ever did. They’re going to get about 90% of gamers migrating from Windows to Linux, who don’t want to fiddle with configuration settings.
the biggest wall imo is still getting companies with anticheat games on board.
Or getting players & friends to stop playing those types of games when there are so many compatible games to choose from.
It will be the opposite. Even Microsoft hates kernel-level anti-cheat.
Let’s be honest here, they only care because when someone inevitably fucks up, people will think the fault is with windows.
It kind of is Windows’ fault for letting them fuck about in kernel space though, right?
“Cant have those TenCent CCP botnets sniffing the same customers WE’RE sniffing! Get outta here!”
–M$, prolly lol
I wonder why they dont like people fucking around with the kernel
I’m sure it starts with C and ends with “Strike”.
Oohh, counter strike.
Uhhhh, sure, I guess.
That will be more likely as more people start using SteamOS.
If SteamOS can get enough users, then not supporting it will start to hurt the game developers profits.They’ll come around when the userbase increases. We live in a capitalist world, and these fuckers will always follow the money. They have zero principles, they just want the money.
IMO, no one should be playing games with kernel level anticheat. There is no way I would let any big gaming company have that level of control over my PC. It’s a security nightmare.
If gamers were buying in their best interest nintendo would be bankrupt, there is what gamers should do and there is the real world. The sad reality is that only the low end gamers care about vanguard and they aren’t paying the bills in riot
I wouldn’t say it has anything to do with the financial affluence of the gamer, but I agree with you that the vast vast majority of gamers simply do not care. Like with a lot of things, that same majority would be better off if they did.
After that huge “Salt Typhoon” hack against major telecoms, you’d think people would take “security nightmare” a little more seriously!
Truth is though, your average Valorant/League/Whatever player probably isn’t even aware of it running when they smash through ok -> ok -> agree -> yep -> accept -> accept -> ok -> play.
Any kernel-level anything connected to major corporate servers should be scary and taboo, but except for the alarm-raisers who know what they’re talking about, most people don’t even understand the implications.
I’m glad Steam is at least marking a big “This game requires kernel level anti cheat” on store pages now. It looks ugly, possibly scary, so maybe that’ll raise some awareness and make developers not want to go with it.
sadly theres a line between shouldn’t and how the market responds to it. Regardless of the fact, it is a hurdle, and the reason why not all of the top games on the concurrent player list on steam is playable on SteamOS, whether one likes it or not.
I wonder if Valve will eventually offer their own system of checks similar to Google Play Integrity? I don’t think I’d care for it since it’s an invasion of personal choice on a device that you own, but for people who want to play competitive games with cheating problems, running a partition with integrity checking seems a fair trade.
Yeah you can do most of that server side but they don’t want to pay for it. Why pay when your players let you coop their machine for free or even better yet pay you for the privilege. Also player run dedicated servers would fix all of this. Don’t like the cheaters movement servers. Own the server ban them. We had this working just fine in the 90s.
I would imagine it wasn’t that large scale back then. I wasn’t in the 90s so I wouldn’t know. But some games with player servers are filled with extremely triggering names and env, if you know what I mean. I’d rather prefer the current matchmaking.
The tick was to find your sever. With Quake 2 and Team Fortress Classic. You would find a server that meshed with the community that fit you and you would go to that server. You got to know the players that would come back over and over. It was a micro community in the larger community of the game. You became a regular sometimes were even giving mod rights very much like a lemmy community. Yeah there were asshats just like there is on here but you just don’t engage with them.
Hell back when quake 2 was in heat.net we would just hang out and chat in the lobby. When playing mechwarrior 2 they had clan websites and we would battle other clans in brackets. I started in that clan by just random showing up in that lobby and someone was nice and taught me how to account for lag when targeting other mechs.
It takes a little more work to find or create your community but once you do it’s so much better than the company directed dull experience. Stuff like surf servers in counterstrike or bombing run basketball servers in unreal tournament would not exist without player controlled dedicated servers.
Also scale didn’t mater since it was decentralized like lemmy is. The company didn’t have that much control of what players did with their severs. That’s what this is what this is all about control. They want to make sure you see what they want you to see to buy that cosmetic to feel fomo. To play how they want you to play. So emergent gameplay almost never happens anymore.
If it’s an immutable system, it should be easier to ensure system integrity IMO.
It’s true that a big slice of gamers play games with anti-cheat solutions that don’t work on linux. That said most of those aren’t even on steam, which is the biggest pc game marketplace, so I’m not sure it’s that big of a dealbreaker for that many people.
you don’t have to onsider off platform titles on its own. just take proton DBs list and sort by playercount and youll have your handful of misses on some of the top currently played titles. that already filters the non steam games already, and it still has its small handful of titles not on board yet.
It does often feel like as soon as a significant hurdle is overcome, the industry just makes another one.
Hopefully SteamOS/Steam on Linux gets enough traction to force publishers to reconsider.
And with every step it’s getting better. 10 years ago almost no games were natively supported and you needed to fuck around a lot to start anything with wine and most didn’t work anyway. Nowadays everything just works, and the only category of games that doesn’t is that slop with kernel level anticheat.
The improvement was monumental.
The reason why I can’t try Marvel Rivals with friends.
Fuck kernel-level software from commercial companies, though!
? rivals works fine on my machine on Nobara. it has a Linux compatible anti-cheat.
Hm? It wasn’t very click-and-play on Bazzite before, and areweanticheatyet.com listed it as broken.
I see it’s updated to Running (though not Supported)
I’ll have to try this weekend, it seemed fun!
protonDB is my go-to and most people on there seem to be having a pretty smooth experience with it! it is fun!
I’d rather kick them off the boat.
i have faith this will be resolved eventually/they will have to admit kernel anticheat isn’t even meaningfully more effective and give up on it. anyway loads of people don’t play multiplayer AAA so it’s a no brainer already for them. as the mass of people migrating continues to grow devs/publishers hopefully will have to catch up. 2% of the steam hardware survey is linux now, it could be 5% within the decade. that’s my optimistic outlook, i know i shouldn’t underestimate how out of touch the epic games suits etc. are though
I never really gamed on PC except for Command and Conquer Red Alert and Age of Empires 2. I still got a Steam Deck and it replaced my PC and not just for gaming.
The only bastion left is anticheat. Everything else are just (bad) old habits fueled by marketing.
…and VR. VR is already finicky on its own, gaming on Linux can be finicky in different ways, and the issues multiply if you have two things like that.
I work in VR, I play in VR, including Windows games, all on Linux. No specific problem for me on that front.
How do you work ‘in’ vr?
Tends to depend on the headset you own, some work perfectly. Also, Valve is very likely releasing a headset based on SteamOS, which should help.
Anti-cheat systems already have to make changes, since Microsoft have plans to significantly restrict kernel mode access after the major Crowdstrike issues earlier in the year. Kernel mode code is very invasive, difficult to get correct, and can result in major security holes or stability issues if not written correctly.
A bug in userland code may crash that one app. A bug in kernel mode code can (and often does) cause bluescreens, that people blame Microsoft for. I’m sure they’re tired of being blamed for buggy code written by other companies.
Running the anti cheat code in userland will (in theory) make it easier to run on other OSes too.
Thanks Steve
Just in time for Windows 10 to lose support in October 2025 and for me to never switch to Windows 11 because it sucks and I hate it
Every so often they’ll release an update that breaks everything, or they’ll patch something and the processor improvements will be bigger than intel or amd get out of a generation, showing how gimped it was to begin with.
A Linux distro with a great OOTB experience for gamers would go a long way.
- Steam pre-installed
- trustworthy Flatpak packages for popular gamer apps like Discord (not uploaded by some nameless rando)
- TeamSpeak for curmudgeons like me and my friends
- desktop environment tailored to Windows users
- auto-install and configure graphics drivers for AMD and Nvidia
- configurable automatic updates and system backup
- choice between Chromium, Firefox, etc. for default browser during setup
- included in Steam Deck compatibility testing
As I understand it, there have been issues with distributing Nvidia drivers in a Linux distro. Some do do it, but it’s kind of a legal grey area due to potential conflicts with the license of the Linux kernel.
I don’t really understand it fully, but it’s been an issue for a while. Apparently it’s less of an issue now because Nvidia partially open sourced its drivers. AMD’s GPU drivers apparently don’t have these issues.
Wonder what the situation with intel’s new GPUs and its drivers is.
Nvidia is working on opensousing and openlicensing their drivers, it’s going to be good, but nobody knows when
I’ve been using Nobara and its been awesome. I wanted a fairly standard desktop with a gaming focus and it fit the bill. It even managed to automatically get the power saving sorted for my laptop which has a nvidia GPU. Great distro.
I was so impressed with Garuda that I adopted it for my primary workstation OS even though I’m using the “gaming edition”.
take a look at bazzite perhaps?
Don’t forget real, well-tested HDR and VR support on all GPUs out of the box.
We are slightly behind on the HDR issue. I hope to see it resolved by end of 2025.
You’re just shy from describing Bazzite
It’s got:
- Steam pre-installed
- trustworthy (?) Flatpak packages for just about everything, even encourages it
- desktop environment tailored to Windows users (KDE, really)
- auto-install and configure graphics drivers for AMD (Mesa) and Nvidia
configurableautomatic updates and system backup (although I think you still have to click the notification for flatpak updates)- choice between anything for default anything during setup
- included in Steam Deck compatibility testing (actually in not sure but they do offer Steam Deck builds)
I’d also add automatic configuration for multiple monitors, perhaps as much as 3 or as much as tmmy laptop’s GPU allows for.
I’ve been doing some research and it seems like arandr has the best GUI for doing this.
Luckily for you this already exists, and it’s effectively SteamOS:
You can even put this on a Steam Deck as a drop-in replacement.
Bazzite is fantastic and it’s what I’m running on my gaming laptop, but I’ve always wondered why you would want to put it on a Steam Deck? Is it for the people who use it as a laptop replacement?
Beca*se I’m tired of using an ancient version of KDE Plasma?
Bazzite has more features when compared to SteamOS. Some examples
- Waydroid - support for android games
- Easy install of lots and lots of applications and tools (DeckyLoader/EmuDeck)
- More recent kernels
- Easy system config scripts using ujust
This is just the tip of the iceberg.
Some of them are targeted to new users but most of them are for gaming enthusiasts. If you are a newbie, stick to SteamOS which is still great. This would be my recommendation.
People who want to run a lot of different emulators, for example. You can play all your Steam Deck games and all your other console’s games, from a single device with a great Big Picture mode.
Bazzite also includes Waydroid, which means you can use all your Android apps.
I know that it’s possible to do some (perhaps all?) of that on a stock deck by doing all the setup yourself, but Bazzite handles it OOTB.
Bazzite
In my case it’s a sign I might should try out PC gaming again. I’ve been console exclusively for like 15 years now because so few games used to work. But with Steamdeck’s popularity we might actually start seeing more than 10% of games getting native ports 🤞
At this point we don’t even need native ports. Developers can just make a windows version and we can play it with proton
Having more developers natively release for Linux implies removing influence from Windows and making more people realize it is a viable option for daily computer use.
It’s not just about gaming at this point, it’s about changing an entire paradigm and erode monopolies.
Can you imagine a Linux “monopoly” on personal computers? The dumb discussions about using Arch, Fedora, Debian or Suse? It would only be hot air escaping mouths because under the hood every development on one side is feeding improvement into the entire ecosystem.
I just did that. I have a dual boot laptop where Windows was used exclusively for games, and instead of upgrading that I built myself a PC with an AMD GPU (Nvidia, fuck you!).
So far I haven’t run into any problem that I couldn’t easily solve, and the only games that won’t run are those demanding I install an anti cheat system, but I’m fine not playing those.
Very nice! I wish I could use an AMD GPU, but sadly machine learning keeps me on the CUDA platform. Gotta make a living. That said, recent NVIDIA drivers got better on Linux. I can finally use Wayland problem free now. Games on proton also work just fine.
However, this only works well on Arch, BTW. Really wish I could just use Debian. I’m a computer scientist, but I also get tired of an avalanche of software updates every couple of days; I don’t need all the latest and greatest software. My German internet commection also means I wait up to half an hour sometimes.
Funny enough, I’m on Arch by choice. I was using it before but it makes sense as having the latest packages is good for gaming on it. Luckily I’ve just been upgraded to a FTTH connection so I’m good on that front.
I had to go back to Xorg though because Wayland was doing some weird shit.
Windows is actually fedware these days.
(Fedware that also scams and aggrevates the feds themselves) if you post here you owe it to yourself to dump that hot garbage as soon as you can.The issue for me that had me buy a Windows 11 laptop was it was the cheapest I could find. Though I have since then given it away and replaced it with a Steam Deck as my only computer.
Going back to the earliest versions of Microsoft’s on-disk encryption it was backdoored by the feds. They’ve always been the AT&T of OS vendors per US government cooperation
I thought this had already happened?
I remember seeing ads on Steam for SteamOS years ago—wasn’t there a point at which you could download and run it on your own computer? What happened?
If I recall correctly, this has never happened the way it’s happening now. It was a matter of “hey, you can fork it on GitHub and make your own iso thing”, hence why there was a “holoiso” or something like that that (I keep forgetting the name) where people used if they wanted to install steamOS on a device. This one is straight supported by valve. Like “hey, here is our official steam OS that we use on our steam deck. Use it and we will support you”.
My understanding is the big change here is that they’re specifically making it available to other handheld manufacturers, which is huge, because windows handhelds have not been great because of how much the bloat of Windows steals performance and battery life. They’re making steps to make SteamOS (I.e. Linux in general) the default OS for handhelds and non-console dedicated gaming machines in general.
If it works, it will put tremendous pressure on publishers to support linux, which is great.
A close friend of mine hates Linux with a passion. He always sends me meme about how terrible Linux is. He has the ROG Ally, he texted me the other day to tell me he had to put Bazzite OS on it because it was dogshit on windows. He loves it now. Lmao.
Oh, how the turn tables…
Iirc the original steamOS was Debian based and you really had to be an experienced Linux user to use and enjoy it.
With the new steamOS (arch based?) it’s a much more streamlined experience and opens up the user base because of it
Old steam os was an Ubuntu derived OS. Ubuntu has issues relating to the organization that runs it. New steam os is basically a coat of paint on top of Arch which is community based. The old os is deprecated.
The version on steam deck is fantastic, but they have been polishing it for desktop use for a while now. I can’t wait to have it available.
Ah, ok—was it also immutable like the new one is?
I believe so, but I never used it and didn’t read too much on it at the time. It was designed for the steam machine concept they were trying to push at the time. So it would be weird if it wasn’t.
I think modern steamos is based on a different distro then it was then. Also proton is good enough now to justify switching for a lot of people
Yeah, choosing Arch as the base of something that’s supposed to be newbie-friendly and stable is wild, but it seems to have been working so far.
From what I recall, it wasn’t something you could easily use like a normal distro, and that version was based on Debian (so stable but outdated software). It only worked on some hardware, and you had to do a full system wipe.
More likely, this is them officially partnering with handheld or gaming laptop makers, using their latest Arch-based distro and allowing them to use Valve/Steam branding as a selling point.
I would love them to partner with like micorcenter and have systems that are completely supported like an apple store.
Only 1 downvote? woah.
Bill Gates? Where is he?
let’s goooo
Really nice. Been waiting for this. I’ve used linux for two decades but kept gaming pc separate last years as I’ve became lazy. Now I’ll likely decommision that one and just rdp into my work windows machine if needed.
Thanks gaben
People might not realize this, but your comment is a huge deal. People like you who keep a separate PC are normally very hard to convince that gaming on Linux is a viable alternative. So the fact that you’re saying that, is a big deal. Right on.
