This is a great use-case for a live Linux environment. Throw one onto a drive and see if it works well, and if not, just restart and go back to what you have.

But, like you said, not a big deal either way.

How do you know if someone owns a Steam Deck? Don’t worry, they’ll tell you.

So anyway, a couple years ago I bought a Steam Deck. And since I bought it, virtually all of my gaming is on the Deck. Prior to that, virtually all of my game time was on a Windows PC. So, for me personally, there’s been a big shift towards Linux for gaming.

The other big change that’s coming for a lot of people I know: end of Windows 10 support. Honestly, the majority of people I know who still have a traditional Windows PC are using machines that can’t be upgraded to Windows 11. These computers are perfectly functional and do everything the users need them to do, and they have no inclination to go out and buy a new computer just because. Especially in this economy. Additionally, there are quite a few people with computers that are capable of running Windows 11, but they have no desire to upgrade to a worse experience and an experience that is randomly different in a myriad different ways for no good reason. Both groups are ripe for the picking in terms of a switch to Linux. No, the year of the Linux desktop is not here, but the conditions for such a change are building. And this Steam data may present a picture of the larger trend. Who knows?

It was written in the scrolls. The day prophezised for hundreds of years: the year of the linux desktop.

I wonder how dual boots show up in these stats

With path tracing it runs significantly worse than it does on Windows. Without it, it runs roughly the same. RTX 4060 Ti.

What? I have a 2060 and shit runs fine.

Of course. There’s always the ones for whom everything runs fine. These are the ones who aren’t affected by bugs in power management caused by Nvidia drivers because they use desktop PCs and not laptops. These are the ones who still used X11 five years after the rest of the Linux world moved to Wayland and when Nvidia drivers got good enough for Wayland, it’s always “see, how much Nvidia’s drivers have improved a lot since the 2010s!!”

Nvidia is lagging years behind on adopting newer technologies in the Linux graphics stack.

Edit: These days it’s “HDR can cause game-breaking graphical artifacts”.

I ran a dual boot back in college to dabble with Linux a bit but gaming support back then was literally nonexistent. The Deck and Proton really reinvigorated that drive nearly a decade later.

This past winter I started a huge degoogling push and trying to replace big tech platforms in general, and I’d also recently quit the only the game I regularly played that didn’t run on Linux due to anticheat bullshit, so I said fuck it and set up a CachyOS dual boot and I haven’t looked back since.

The dual boot is just there in case I ever need it for some odds or ends, or in case I break Cachy, but so far I’ve booted windows maybe 4 times since January.

Nvidia seems to be the biggest hurdle for most people. The simplest solution I’ve found has been universal Blue, Bazzite (specifically the Nvidia images). You don’t have to think twice about Nvidia as everything is preconfigured for you out of the gate, forever, in perpetuity.

I’m not aware of the x3d issues you speak of.

I didn’t say there are never any issues I said it’s fine. The idea that “success stories” are only amd is silly. 90/100 times unless you’re using bleeding edge hardware or pathologically fussy you just hit play and stuff works. 9 out of the remaining 10 times you tweak a proton version or wine setting, the other time it’s a driver bug.

People often repeat that Nvidia is a nightmare to get working and that you need to install some sort of pre-packaged distro that configures Nvidia for you but… that hasn’t been true for years?

Get any distro you want, from Fedora to Arch, install nvidia-open, reboot… that’s it? Maybe install extra packages for 32 bit support, video decoding and CUDA if you want, optionally. Not different from installing Nvidia drivers on Windows at all, except you’re not running a .exe, but that’s true for any package.

OSes are sticky as hell. People don’t like switching.

Every time they buy a new device they have to switch back to linux, because that device with very few exceptions ships with MS.

I’m not sure. I’m a photographer and comic. I switched to mint cause it’s easy, I’m not much of a computer person.

I am not sure, as I’ve actually only played it under Linux. I have a laptop with an RTX 3070. It’s able to handle the raytraced low setting at 1080p, but I just run High instead so that the fan isn’t as loud. And in my opinion that even looks pretty good. I might try start it under windows and run its benchmark because I’m curious now! I’ll update here if I remember to do this test.

Did you find mint easy? I am a bit of a computer person, and I’ve been struggling a bit with it

Effortless. My only issue with it was installing Plank Reloaded.

What’s the best Linux distro to play games? Im currently on Ubuntu 22.04 and won’t leave it as my main but I have a AMD TR 1950 with a GTX 1080 TI will to play some final fantasy.

11% month on month expansion is fucking crazy. You can see from the data it’s mostly Windows 10 users deciding to upgrade to Linux…and even OSX.

All the major desktop distros play games about as well as one another, assuming you set them up correctly.

Choose a distro based on other criteria, like the release cadence and admin tools that you find most comfortable. If you don’t have any particular needs or preferences, I guess you could save 10 minutes by choosing a distro that installs Nvidia drivers by default, but it’s not going to run games appreciably better than the others.