(My) Second Year of the Linux Desktop (For Gaming)
32 points by ciferkey
32 points by ciferkey
Linux for games works mostly fine for me. It's just the big problem now are the big multiplayer titles with butt probe kernel-level anti-cheat. Unfortunately, I find Fortnite fun with friends. I'm not sure what the end game there may be - perhaps vendor-provided kernels (Valve's?) with the necessary modules.
What I would really like is some way to opt out of the malware on particular servers where you're just playing with your friends. You can enforce not cheating as a social issue, when you do it on a regular human scale, just like you can playing cards around a table.
In my experience, 100% of games work flawlessly on Linux, because whenever I hear about a new game, I first check whether it works well on Linux and if not, I simply mentally block that the game exists.
I've also been gaming on my NixOS desktop for about 2 years. My experience is that everything works (I don't play online games so anti-cheat doesn't ever bother me). Some things require a bit of tinkering and you can usually find a solution on PCGamingWiki (if the issue is not specific to Linux) or ProtonDB.
Most of the issues I run into are related to path casing and resolution/fullscreen.
I think Wayland (Niri in particular) handles fullscreen issues better than Windows: the compositor has full control over the window placement and size so I don't ever run into situations where the game has an issue and refuses to give control back to the desktop or doesn't work when I switch to another window, which happened often on Windows.
Path casing on the other hand is usually solved with symlinks. I just had to debug some games (Higurashi Kai) that handled this improperly but all it took was some strace -e file to figure it out.
I really enjoyed this post; I have a similar one in the works. It's fun to see someone took such a similar journey, right down to the same first distribution, 20 years ago, Ubuntu 5.10. Breezy Badger, was it?
Thank you for sharing
Yes same one! I remembered all the bits and pieces over the years, but things really feel different when you sit down and line it all up. Shoot me a message when you finish your own post. I'd love to read.
About 4 years of linux gaming for me. I hope things stay working as well as they have, I do not have any reason to use windows anymore and I'm really happy with my computers now.
Also,
Install the game on Linux and try to play.
In my experience this pretty much always just works. I very rarely stumble upon issues, and often when I do, they are same issues as when playing on windows. For example UI scaling issues with older games, but that's where https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/ comes to rescue.
Recently been having problems getting Bluetooth Xbox One controllers to register with steam on Linux. Even hardwired doesn't work. Nothing can see it even with the drivers. Idk if it's a nixos issue but it's still not perfectly smooth sailing with gaming on Linux.
I don't think there will ever be a true Year of the Linux Desktop.
Concur. But I suspect this will be mostly because of the "desktop" dying. Maybe if Microsoft/Apple drop the ball so much because there is no money to be made, the small portion of people who use desktops will flock to Linux, but I doubt this will happen. But I see people increasingly deciding that phones/tablets cover their computing needs.
On the other hand, for me it's been the year of the Linux desktop since 2002 for personal stuff, and since 2011 for work. Yes, I have adapted my habits to what Linux allows (e.g. gamed mostly on consoles in the PS2-PS4 ages. Although in 2012 I started getting HumbleBundles, which by that age, picked a lot of games that had Linux ports).
I don't expect a lot of people will choose to allocate their preciously limited amount of energies to the cause of Linux on the desktop- and that is fine. (Maybe I should allocate my energies to something else too! I still give business to many companies I dislike because it's "easy".) We just need to try what we can to make it easier and easier.