I am immediately skeptical of the 90% claim. There are a lot of Windows games, going back decades! Not even 90% of those work on Windows, let alone Linux!
Actually, once you go far enough into the past, Linux has better support for legacy Windows software than modern Windows does. The claim might be true if they’re counting a lot of shovelware.
That’s great and all but the two things that hold me back from going 100% Linux are kernel-level anticheat, and lack of graphics card acceleration in virtual environments. Once we have those I’ll be happy.
Visual Basic added to Libre Office would be really nice too, but I get that it’s not particularly feasible.
Not having Malware Anti-Cheat support is a good thing. Hopefully it will continue this way until people realize that it’s not worth giving shitty companies like EA access to your online banking passwords just to pretend to shoot 11-year-olds in the head.
A bit sceptical of this number. Most popular games have some form of anti cheat which the game not run on Linux. Some other games sometimes have weird bugs that do not occur on windows. - source: I am on Linux 😩
When you are talking about “popular” games, you mean service games that are often some kind of multiplayer games. Each of them binds a lot of players and is big and popular, indeed. But these are only a few compared to the amount of games that have been released in the past decade. Let alone released games from 2024 that are listed on imdb.com are 1551 Imdb.com
So yes, I can imagine 90% is right since the most games are no service games and do not require some shitty kernel level anti cheat.
For bugs: I have no idea since I only use linux for non-gaming tasks.
The only ones that wouldn’t work are probably the ones with kernel level anti cheat. Maybe if I would be much younger, I might have had different opinion, but, as of today, I believe that all these games that wont run on Linux due to anti-cheat are cancer anyway.
In my experience AAA games from around 2000s and early 2010s often have problems running in Linux, especially if they have DRM.
In some cases a pirated version will run just fine whilst the official one won’t.
Kernel level anti-cheat is what’s probably going to keep me on Windows for a while. I get those games aren’t for everyone, but I like them well enough, and that’s what my friend group plays. Warzone, DMZ, and going to try RedSec tomorrow. Kind of a shame. Otherwise I’d love to make the jump. As it is I’ll probably see about dual booting when I get my next PC in a year or two.
You can run them alternative ways usually. Fortnite works with mouse and keyboard through gamepass, although gamepass is a shit deal just for fortnite.
I know a lot of people dual boot or use a virtual machine with windows on it too.
Fortnite works with mouse and keyboard through gamepass
Only local streaming from an Xbox. Streaming from their website requires a controller and I’ve never been able to get a controller to work with a browser on Linux. Well, on Bazzite at least.
trying to force AI into windows 11 isnt helping MS.
I can not understand why they made that decision.
The end user is seen as nothing but an exploitable resource. If a few thousand nerds don’t like it, they don’t give a shit. Until the general public wakes up to the shitfuckery, nothing will change. Just ask your mom, what she thinks about Microsoft’s data collection.
Because it allows them to collect and process more data, which can be used or sold, increasing their profits.
To be fair it’s not just Microsoft doing that. I was looking at gym equipment the other day and some idiots were trying to sell a fucking home gym with AI. Everyone wants to sell it, nobody wants to buy it.
They think line won’t go up if they don’t shove it down every user’s throat. They’ve put most of their eggs in that basket.
2026 will be the year of the Linux desktop!
Every year
The time is near
The thing is I swapped, whenever I start using something and I dont want it to become popular because everything somehow gets ruined when it gets popular, it ends up getting popular. Im usually a late “early” adopter.
Basically if I stopped being put off by it and felt I wanted to switch, I think it may be viable for many more ppl in a year or two, or already, I swapped like almost a year ago, I typically don’t like stuff til it feels intuitive, instantly good.
There are still lots of reasons that stop people from jumping 100% into Linux. Gaming is less and less one of them.
True, but network effects are important to that.
There were huge numbers of people that wouldn’t move to Linux because it didn’t support all of their games. Now it does, and lots of people are moving.
There are lots of people that won’t move to Linux because they have a random bit of hardware that’s not supported, or a highly-specific bit of software they need to do their job that only runs on Windows. The manufacturers wouldn’t support Linux because not enough people used it. Ah, but now we have all the gamers, so there are quite a lot of people using it.
Each domino that falls encourages the rest. Steam Linux users are more than 3x Steam macOS users, and we’re not that far from overtaking it for general desktop usage. In some regions, that’s already the case, and while the Windows 10 exodus can move to Linux easily, they’d need to buy new hardware fo use the Mac operating system. Not many companies would question providing Apple support; once Linux has a comparable share, it would be foolish to leave that out of consideration as well.
The problem is that he biggest networked games, I.e. those with the most players online, won’t work on linux. Until fortnite or apex legends or LoL allow linux machines, people will be stuck on windows so they can still play with their friends. The same thing happens with most of the sports games except those players are almost entirely on console, and they are locked in there.
Some shitty games will hold out, but as long as the majority works better under Linux, I’m fine with it.
I’m trying to get into Linux atm. Working at the kinks and work flow. I will dual boot for the exception that I really want to play that doesn’t run on Linux.
Be careful, windows can fuck up some dual boot setups and make the Linux side worse
Strangely enough, “Windows always fucking up my dual boot setup” is what caused me to drop Windows for good about a decade ago. And Linux gaming has come on absolutely leaps and bounds since then.
I don’t have much of a choice. I don’t have another system to work on and I’m not ready for Linux to be daily driver yet. I’ve installed on a separate SSD.
Edit: Sorry, I just saw and remembered what I wrote originally lol nevermind… I will keep that in mind going forward. Thanks.
If you are able to i think ensuring they’re installed on different drivers alleviates most issues
In my opinion this the unique milestone linux has to achive to be declared as a total winner vs windows, in the near future I would like to see non tech industries using linux instead of microsoft spyware.
There’s a chance it will happen outside the USA.
Deciding to send to the landfill every PC sold after 2018 is a decision that they saw analyzing only numbers from big American corporations. “Anyway they lease the computers and have a refresh every 3-5 years”
But the rest of the world?
Here in Italy I still see people on Windows 7
When I traveled in southeast Asia I saw people using windows XP
Or Brazil, where the import taxes make a windows 11 compatible PC ultra expensive
Regular people and small businesses , especially outside the USA won’t simply buy a new PC just because Microsoft and Intel needed the line to go up.
If we could get just one of the big tech suites to support it, I think that would help to finally break the dam and get some serious migration.
Mechanical/civil engineering software, music production, and digital art. Those are the big ones.
FYI: That’s more Windows games than run in Windows!
WTF? Why? Because a lot of older games don’t run in newer versions of Windows than when they were made! They still run great in Linux though 👍
There is like a good chunk of an entire decade’s worth of games that can’t be played on PC legitimately due to either expired licenses for music (e.g. EA Trax) or lack of support for older, disc-based DRM (SecuROM etc.).
That’s before factoring older titles that no longer work due to arbitrary changes to DirectX and the Windows kernel, which break backwards compatibility.
Huh wonder whether shadows of destiny pc port works on proton.
One of the most frequently suggested beginner distros is Linux mint. It’s great, it’s stable, it’s what I use and while it’s not exactly cutting edge, or necessary the prettiest distro, it’s great for beginners and will feel pretty familiar coming from windows.
Pop_os! And bazzite are more “gaming focused” if that’s more your style, but I’ve never had an issue gaming with Linux mint.
Ultimately, it doesn’t really matter terribly much. Pick one, install it to a new drive and try it out. If you don’t like it, pick another one.
I’ve converted all my gaming to linux including vr and couldn’t be happier! Even hardware works flawlessly these days with the exception of VR at times. I’m still struggling to get No Man’s Sky to work on my quest 3 and linux VR and thats really the only thing I’m missing but it seems close to working just needs more fiddling.
Highly recommend Bazzite for people looking for a linux gaming distribution. It’s immutable which can complicate some things but it’s mostly plug and play and impossible to ruin due to immutable nature.
I’ve installed Bazzite myself. What do you mean by immutable? I ran into an issue trying to install VPN the other night. Something about the fs being read only. I’m still yet to look into it.
That’s what immutable means in this case. You can’t modify outside of your user directory, at least not directly, on immutable distros. The files outside of your
~home path are read-only. You can override that a few different ways, however. If your VPN has a flatpak, that’s the easiest way to get it up and running. If you don’t care about more space (minimal, if you only do it for your VPN) being used, you may be able to follow your VPN’s fedora instructions, replacingdnfwithrpm-ostree. That will likely allow you to install as you can in other distros.Feel free to ask any questions if you have any, I’m happy to help.
Thanks mate. I’m very new to Linux and still have the 101’s to learn. I’m going to see if I can find a CLI cheat sheet somewhere to memorise 😜 Oh and it was a run file that I downloaded for the VPN.
Cachy does everything bazzite does but better less complicated and more friendly to new users coming from windows.
Immutable distros just add endless headache for new users and are a pain in the ass to look things up for if you don’t explicitly understand what your os is.
Immutable distros just add endless headache for new users
I disagree here. Sure it makes copy/paste computing a bit harder but it also prevents newbies from working themselves into a dysfunctional operating system which happens way more often than you’d think. People open a port or set some system variable for one thing and never set it back breaking everything else. With immutable system new users are forced into sustainable, reversible and transparent solutions.
The issue is that immutable linux is still pretty new so some mutable solutions aren’t adapted in immutable ways yet but if you’re just gaming you should never be on that side of the bleeding edge anyway.
I use cachy on my laptop but I wouldn’t call friendly an arch based distro that during setup asks the user “which of those 19 desktop environment do you want? Choose wisely only one”
It doesn’t even have a gui to install new software (at least, I am not an expert, I chose hyprland and it didn’t install that, and when I manually installed KDE Discover and the GNOME software manager, they only show and install flatpak apps - but because I’m not an expert I might have messed something up)
Just made the switch, surprised how smooth the transition went so far.
Ooooh, what distro did you go with?
I went full AMD and Fedora. Couldn’t be happier. All games I’ve tested work. It’s been a while since I’ve had a gaming pc so I don’t have a reference point, but everything is as smooth as I’d want to. Some games may need a library or so as stated in protonDB but, I’m so impressed. Now I have desktop running KDE, steam deck has KDE too and my laptop also with fedora.
For real, full AMD on Fedora is incredibly stable and smooth.
Can confirm the viable gaming. Some need fairly annoying workarounds that require some regular fiddling to adjust (looking at you EA/Origin with your silly launcher), but in the end it’s definitely playable.
