Steam data reveals PC gamers shifting from Windows to Linux
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Yeah, “linuxism”, that must be it… That or it’s possible that the OS and distributions have evolved while you were not looking.
Linux dominates on servers because of that yes. Also because of its licensing costs, being open source, stable, secure (please don’t try to tell me Windows is more secure, please please please), better performance and lesser response time. Because a Debian stable will never break with simple security updates. I am also quite curious about getting a source for that claim that Windows Server is coming back.
Finally, do tell me where I mentioned MacOS. Unless you think that MacOS and Linux are the same? That wouldn’t surprise me considering your apparent knowledge (or lack of) about Linux. FYI MacOS is based on a BSD kernel.
The big benefit of linux servers for most businesses is that they tend to be configure-once systems, where you set it up, verify it works then no further maintenance is needed beyond applying updates in line with your update schedule and downtime windows. Sure there will every once in a while be something that changes but far less than you see with Windows Server where some registry values stopped working with a recent windows update without warning so now you have to track down new registry values to recreate the behavior. That and tracking down why Windows decided to ignore all of your settings and reboot this time (and how to stop it again)
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Microsoft Recall and Steam Deck and Proton are why.
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Are there really people playing VR stuff regularly? I only know 2 people in my circles that bought equipment for it, and both of them got sick of it after a couple weeks.
I don’t know, what I’ve tried was fun for about 10 minutes, but that’s about all I could take before the headache starts.
on a vr headset for everyday for the past 3 days. Each day around 4 to 5 hours
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Technically they can extract more now, it’s just a really really small amount.
We have made more than we put in to the reaction, but that’s a far cry from making more energy than we put into the reactor, or extracting any of that energy at all.
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We have made more than we put in to the reaction, but that’s a far cry from making more energy than we put into the reactor, or extracting any of that energy at all.
Oh, that makes sense.
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Honestly, I kinda suspect the tariffs are speeding this up. I recently upgraded my desktop due to the suspicion that prices are gonna go bonkers shortly and since I was basically rebuilding it anyway, I went ahead and switched my last windows PC to Linux. Been a lot smoother than I had suspected, highly recommended.
I actually watched the prices increase by about 10-20% while ordering computers from work. This was through Dell so clear as mud normally for any given computer but the value of my invoices jumped by a clear 10-20% after the tarrifs started biting back in April
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Just tried gaming on Linux because I forgot my Ally and was stuck on my laptop. Sorry, guys, it still sucks. It’s getting better, though. Perhaps in another 10 years.
uh oh you said something against Linux on Lemmy
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Very true, if I find a DE that works with Embrilliance this weekend, I could use my Ventoy stick and see if she vibes with it. Good call!
Ventoy even supports persistence! It’s a bit poorly documented but you download the 1-2GB persistence volume, configure ventoy to include that feature and which ISOs to associate with which persistent volumes and you’re off to the races
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I don’t remember what i did… but i completely fucked my system up… linux wouldnt start at all…
I tried looking online for help and i basically needed a flash drive with linux to “fix” the issue…
I didn’t have that, i lost it or whatever…
I took a shot with asking chat gpt and for all its hate… it was somehow able to explain some weird boot loader thing I’ve never heard of and i punched in some commands into the command line, and everything was fixed…
Im not sure the point of the story, but don’t go changing system level shit when your trying to fix your graphics card from crashing while playing no mans sky… i did fix the issue though changing the desktop from cinnamon to xde or something…
But its like a memory bug or something that hopefully gets fixed for amd at some point
If the game was crashing to desktop, it was probably not a graphics card thing, but that you were running out of ram and the system was just automatically killing the program when that happened. That’s a system stability thing, it prioritizing the needs of the system and desktop over a program so as to prevent the whole system from crashing.
The easiest solution to that is to increase the “swap” size (IE a bit of storage that gets set aside to act as back up memory). That is a system level thing, but it’s not really a big deal to change.
If you were getting to the command line, Linux was running, although, if it was just the command line then it may have been an issue with the desktop or window manager not starting. And if it was an issue with the desktop or window manager, then I could see changing some boot loader settings fixing that. Like, making sure the boot loader automatically starts the desktop when the computer boots. not sure how you got from messing with graphics card to the system only booting in command line, but, shit happens. I’ve broken my system in weirder ways while pulling at the guts.
By switching from cinnamon to XFCE desktop you may have solved the issue with the game crashing simply because you had more memory available, as XFCE is a much lighterweight desktop.
If the games was slowly slowing to a crawl before freezing up completely but not outright crashing to desktop, that could have been an issue of running out of video ram for the the GPU, I’ve had that happen with helldiver’s 2. I don’t remember exactly what I did to fix that, something with the launch options that affected the graphics settings or capped the frame rate I think. Not sure how changing between desktops could have fixed that though.
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Ventoy even supports persistence! It’s a bit poorly documented but you download the 1-2GB persistence volume, configure ventoy to include that feature and which ISOs to associate with which persistent volumes and you’re off to the races
Nice! That’s good to know for other things!
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I tried setting up Windows 10 in a virtual machine recently and damn, what a miserable experience that was. “Please wait. We’re getting things ready . . . please wait . . . We’re getting things ready. Hey, you want Cortana? Tough shiat, we’re installing it anyway. Do you need an Office App? Well we’re going to install Live365, whether you like it or not. Also, we really want your email address. You don’t have a choice. Just give us your damn email address. And your phone number, too.”
Installing Linux: 15 minutes later: “You’re done. Enjoy.”
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Historically I’ve used lutris but more recently I’ve been observing more broken scripts than not. But Lutris is extremely handy for mapping to a pile of game data that I might grab from Itch for example. I also havent been gaming as much lately so maybe I’m just hitting some weird games and that’s all.
I’ve heard good things about Heroic Launcher which apparently is actually sponsored by GOG, but I’ve yet to try it on my Linux machine
Gonna check out Heroic. Thanks for the tip
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People care a lot about macOS because you can charge users $15 for a GUI wrapper around a terminal command and they will pay and even recommend your app. I’m not even joking, there are a thousand examples of apps like this. If your app actually does anything, you can charge $30 and they will pay.
Now on Linux you could release the cure for cancer for $0.99 and you’d get screamed at. And I say that as a Linux user. Which means you need significantly higher numbers than macOS to achieve the same revenue, which also means the companies developing the commercial software that holds back adoption of Linux will take a long while before starting to care.
Isn’t it the same on Windows tbh?
The knowledgeable users on MacOS install Homebrew (or nix if being a hipster) and get most of their cool tools for that.
With Windows, the default assumption is that the user has less money than a MacOS user so all the useless shit on Microsoft Store is cheaper than MacOS, but it’s still money for software that shouldn’t be paid.
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I tried setting up Windows 10 in a virtual machine recently and damn, what a miserable experience that was. “Please wait. We’re getting things ready . . . please wait . . . We’re getting things ready. Hey, you want Cortana? Tough shiat, we’re installing it anyway. Do you need an Office App? Well we’re going to install Live365, whether you like it or not. Also, we really want your email address. You don’t have a choice. Just give us your damn email address. And your phone number, too.”
Installing Linux: 15 minutes later: “You’re done. Enjoy.”
No to suggest that anyone should install Windows, but if you install Rufus then you can make the Window ISO skip most of the bullshit questions and TPM requirements before you write your flash drive.
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If the game was crashing to desktop, it was probably not a graphics card thing, but that you were running out of ram and the system was just automatically killing the program when that happened. That’s a system stability thing, it prioritizing the needs of the system and desktop over a program so as to prevent the whole system from crashing.
The easiest solution to that is to increase the “swap” size (IE a bit of storage that gets set aside to act as back up memory). That is a system level thing, but it’s not really a big deal to change.
If you were getting to the command line, Linux was running, although, if it was just the command line then it may have been an issue with the desktop or window manager not starting. And if it was an issue with the desktop or window manager, then I could see changing some boot loader settings fixing that. Like, making sure the boot loader automatically starts the desktop when the computer boots. not sure how you got from messing with graphics card to the system only booting in command line, but, shit happens. I’ve broken my system in weirder ways while pulling at the guts.
By switching from cinnamon to XFCE desktop you may have solved the issue with the game crashing simply because you had more memory available, as XFCE is a much lighterweight desktop.
If the games was slowly slowing to a crawl before freezing up completely but not outright crashing to desktop, that could have been an issue of running out of video ram for the the GPU, I’ve had that happen with helldiver’s 2. I don’t remember exactly what I did to fix that, something with the launch options that affected the graphics settings or capped the frame rate I think. Not sure how changing between desktops could have fixed that though.
Yeah xfce is what i switched to, which was easier than i expected it to be.
No it was crashing to the login screen… randomly and frequently while playing games … I was trying to update stuff and make tweaks i messed something up and the system didn’t even recognize it had an operating system…
I looked it up… it was the grub menu that i was finally able to get to load which helped me put things back to normal…
It helped taking out my old 2 sticks of 8gb ram in my configuration with my teo 16 gb sticks which worked fine when i was using windows… none of the issues happened on windows so i was really trying to figure it out… i mean i did figure it out… but yeah…
It really did not help that i was running at 120 on an ultra wide at 5120 x 1440 or whatever the resolution is… i also tried to run it at 240 but that was a horrible idea and the start of my issues…
But yeah, its been a while so…
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Just tried gaming on Linux because I forgot my Ally and was stuck on my laptop. Sorry, guys, it still sucks. It’s getting better, though. Perhaps in another 10 years.
Could you be more specific? I’ve had very few issues gaming on Linux and haven’t felt like I’ve been missing anything. Mind you, I do skip games with kernel anti-cheat, but that’s the only real broad category of games I know have issues.
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Switched to linux (popos - so far so good) this month because fuck microsoft. yeah, some things aren’t perfect or require extra steps (modding, usually) but fuck microsoft. Fuck their AI shit, fuck their “recall” spyware, fuck their CEO that babbles about AI while laying off thousands of workers.
With Pop!_OS you should be in for a good huge update in about 2026 or so. They normally released every half year with Ubuntu, but they haven’t done a new release since the 22.04 LTS (Long Term Support) version because they’re working on their own desktop environment and it’s taking up most of the developer resources.
So hopefully in 2026 they’ll release 26.04 with the new COSMIC DE to replace 22.04 with Gnome (with their customizations, also called ‘COSMIC’ so it gets confusing lol). I think technically they’re working on a 24.04, but at this rate I think Ubuntu 26.04 will be out around the same time or even before COSMIC is fully ready.
So there’s a decent chance you’ll get a whole lot of improvements at once, which is cool
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I do a lot more than that, so, hard pass.
I mean, yes, but I also do dev coding work, run AI models, produce audio and video content from my machine. But years ago I adopted a ‘No BS’ software approach and rid myself of software that was deliberately getting in my way so transitioning to a fully *Nix workflow wasn’t an issue for me.
If anyone working with aggressively anticonsumer software right now tried to switch, it’s a nightmare.
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For flat games this is true, there is still work to be done for the VR side of things, even that has advanced by leaps and bounds in just the last 2 or 3 years
Yeah that’s the biggest reason I haven’t pulled the trigger on a VR set.
The pace of hardware for the last few years has been crazy rapid with almost zero thought given to non-windows OS’s. The people working on reverse engineering drivers for headsets get one operable just in time for it to be out of date.
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Could you be more specific? I’ve had very few issues gaming on Linux and haven’t felt like I’ve been missing anything. Mind you, I do skip games with kernel anti-cheat, but that’s the only real broad category of games I know have issues.
This specific time, I couldn’t synchronize my save files for GOG games. Something that is completely transparent on Windows.
