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

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

I do a lot more than that, so, hard pass.

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

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.

The success of Steam Deck has helped a lot. Prior to that Linux ports tended to be very perfunctory and they weren’t tested or supported very well. I guess that now there are actual Linux gamers (via Steam Deck), that support has improved. That said, I think outside of Steam Deck and SteamOS, your experience of gaming is going to be extremely dependent on your GPU, driver support and a number of other factors. Things are far more likely to work well on Windows than they would for Linux.

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.”

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.

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

Microsoft Recall and Steam Deck and Proton are why.

Okay, I finally installed a new SSD yesterday so I could dual boot and put CachyOS on it. Played a few games and it worked surprisingly well.

But it did take quite a bit more doing than installing Windows. The USB drive wouldn’t boot when made with Rufus and I don’t quite get how to manage the games installed in Proton (like where is their virtual drive?).

I plan on migrating more of my stuff onto Linux in the coming days and will see if it can’t replace Windows eventually for me.

I could drill down into the work that went into DXVK before Proton came about, enabling the Steam Deck, but that’s a boring history lesson. I will concede that newer bleeding edge hardware is far more likely to be plug and play on Windows, but one of the leading reasons I transitioned was Windows removing support for the audio chipset on the motherboard for my Ryzen 1600. Every time I rebooted, I’d have to unpack a zip file and reinstall the audio drivers, it was maddening.

In my experience (so, totally anecdotal), my hardware is stable longer on Linux than Windows.

I’ve had a lot of success using Ventoy for my USB drive writing needs. Every steam game has it’s own folder for it’s virtual windows directory. You want to look in /home/your_name/.steam/steamapps/compatdata The folders are all strings of numbers, each being the ID of the respective steam game. You can find the ID for any steam game just by going in it’s store page and looking at the URL. You don’t usually need to mess with this though, just browse the game files in your /steam/common folder.

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.

I could drill down into the work that went into DXVK before Proton came about, enabling the Steam Deck, but that’s a boring history lesson. I will concede that newer bleeding edge hardware is far more likely to be plug and play on Windows, but one of the leading reasons I transitioned was Windows removing support for the audio chipset on the motherboard for my Ryzen 1600. Every time I rebooted, I’d have to unpack a zip file and reinstall the audio drivers, it was maddening.

In my experience (so, totally anecdotal), my hardware is stable longer on Linux than Windows.