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this post was submitted on 09 Mar 2024
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Why I am still hesitant to make the leap. Not just do I mostly use my PC for gaming but I have a tendency to jump into a new game for like 3 weeks and then off to the next like the horrid ADHD having fuck that I am. I don't want to possibly have to work to make a game work each and every time. I know its gotten a lot better about that but still. Convivence has me trapped yo.
I was in the same boat. But Valve seriously made it easy to install and play games on Steam. If you have a spare drive, give it a shot.
Things I had to do were to turn on proton in the steam settings and installing vulkan drivers for my AMD card.
I honestly might with my next build this summer.
In a desktop (which is what you want for gaming anyways) why not? Easy enough to slot in a new drive and dual boot from there, no need to muck about with partitions like with a single-drive laptop.
If it doesn't work out, oh well, go back to Windows. But maybe Linux is finally there, and you'll find you don't need to go back
Oh it's you again, Mr. Edible Friend...
A couple days ago I posted a comment on the negatives on Linux, but honestly, if you play normal games on Steam, like not some weird obscure Atari 2600 emulators, you can try Linux fearlessly.
99% of games work on Linux, I personally have played many Steam and non-Steam games, such as Cyberpunk 2077, War Thunder, world of tanks, rimworld, factorio, Overwatch etc. All ran flawlessly for me, and I even have an NVIDIA GPU, which is supposedly very bad on Linux!
I was surprised by this.
Admittedly, I haven't played many video games in the past few years but I was a little disappointed when the list of Steam games for Linux was quite short.
Then I read about Proton. The first Windows-only game I tried worked great so I'm happy.
I play older games on a 1060 so I don't have a good sense of what the performance is compared to playing directly on Windows though.
as long as it's not a competitive multiplayer, it's more likely than not that it'll work out of the box.
Check ProtonDB. The overwhelming majority of games work just fine on Linux with Steam's Proton. I encounter a game that genuinely will not work on Linux only like once or twice a year.
How is graphics card stuff with them, all okay in terms of drivers? I assume VR might be an issue?
Graphics drivers are fine. No idea about VR since I don't use it personally.
I haven't tried my VR on Linux because the general consensus of people who have say it's bad. It's impressive how far Linux has come in terms of gaming in such a short time. Proton is incredible.
That being said, niche things like VR, or running multiple monitors with different high refresh rates and freesync simultaneously are still rocky.
The biggest issue in see however is multiplayer competitive gaming. There's no easy path to that in sight due to aggressive anti-cheat software.
As such Linux is currently relegated to mostly single player games that don't do anything crazy. That's honestly good enough for a lot of people, but misses the mark with a lot of gamers.
Not really an issue anymore with most Wayland compositors (KDE and wlroots, soon to be fixed with Gnome). That's mainly an X11 specific problem.
You're attacking this from the wrong angle. Tinkering every few weeks with something new on linux can keep your ADHD occupied ;-)
As someone with ADHD this is exactly what happened to me when I switched to Linux. Continues to keep me occupied 3 months later
As an intermedia Linux user prior to making the jump 2 years ago, if you mainly game on Steam you're fine. Wine and Proton are mature developed now that most games 'just work'. Almost all the problems I've run into for gaming on Linux have come from trying to do something outside steam (although Blizzard and Activision games seem to be pretty low effort).
Once you get outside that, it's hit or miss (sometimes good hits. Sometimes bad misses).
What you'll have to say goodbye to is alphas, betas, and release weekends. They CAN function (I did all 3 Diablo 4 beta weekends last year with no issues at all), and there's plenty of early access stuff on steam that works fine even though the developers didn't care about Linux one bit. But usually if you're reporting issues on opening weekend for a new game, they're more concerned with making their game launch work for the 95%+ of users instead of the 5%. If you want stuff to 'just work' and don't want to spend your weekend tinkering with waiting for hot fixes or patches, you'll probably not want to make the switch. Or will want to change your mentality about which games you play and when.
That being said, the experience is constantly getting better. So in a year or two it may be a different story.
I run Pop!_Os. Steam with Proton is a gamechanger. Yet to find a game that doesn't just work with zero configuration.
Only thing I've found to really not work is head tracking. That's pretty niche though and I'm expecting someone to figure that out eventually. Almost every game ran no problem.
https://github.com/opentrack/opentrack Used this years ago in Elite without issues.
Yep open track works but not the freetrack protocol which communicates with various games through it.
Might not be called freetrack. Was a month since I used it, and honestly I don't pay much attention to the names of stuff. But either way it isn't supported on Linux.
I fucked around with OpenTrack for days but came to no solution other than reverting to windows.
edit: yes, it's freetrack. When freetrack works I'm instantly leaving.
Like VR you mean? lol my next build is when I want to finally get into VR and try all the games I haven't been able to play yet :(
No, not VR. Headtracking. The head is tracked with something like a webcam to move the camera.
Wouldn't you look away from the screen?
You calibrate it so that a small head movement translates to a large camera movement.
Yo what how long has this been a thing?!
Check out OpenTrack!
Ohhh cool!! Thanks :)
That sounds better than the silly example I had in my head.
oooh spiffy.
Anecdotally; I am running Manjaro, with a valve index, and other than a few need-to-disconnect-and-reconnect my HMD, it's been solid and painless.
There has been a LOT of progress since the SteamDeck launched. The only real barrier now is multiplayer games that run anticheat. And even some of those have been figured out.
Try dual booting so you can test if it just works or if the friction involved is acceptable.
Actually with ADHD it's nice. Making something work under Wine (following the instructions from winehq.org) is a bit similar to a game itself
EDIT: Oh, there's another such comment.
If you have a spare drive, install Pop_OS! on it. Don't let people let you think that everything is a piece of cake. It can be a little frustrating. A lot of guides jump to "the rest of the fucking owl" or are made on older versions of software. Steam does make it easy but most games are not a matter of simply hitting install because they do not have a native Linux version. You have to right-click on the game, go to Manage, and then set compatibility to Proton (generally although some games need other settings added which you can often find in protondb.com). Is it worth? I like it. There are some basic things that can be annoying like my fingerprint reader not working even though fprintd supports it but I'm too lazy to make a bug report.
Try dual boot. Ideally install both OSs on separate drives and do windows first. Best of luck!
I just dual boot Ubuntu and Windows 11 on my laptop. W11 for gaming, Ubuntu for everything else.
That's basically why I stopped gaming. Have saved so much money from not filling up my Steam library with games I'll never finish. lol
I think you should try it yourself, see if you like it. Who knows, perhaps it's not actually as troublesome as you think. You can always reinstall windows again anytime you want.
I also have ADHD and concerns that my 40p game library would be an issue
I'll report back on this comment when I find a game that doesn't just work with Proton, cuz I haven't tried one yet that didn't (admittedly I haven't tried a kernel level anti cheat game)
Even FFXIV, an MMO, works and installed reshade with no issue
Literally the only issue I had installing Linux Mint was my sound card refusing to output sound even though the OS could see it. Every other jack worked, just not my sound card. Fixed it by plugging my phones into a different DAC lol, and the other jacks were fine anyway so it was NBD to begin with
No worries. Grab one of these going to a landfill and try it out - its all free!
Take the plunge, you won't die.
The best bloodstain in dark souls
People still have sound issues with gaming on Linux.
It's tremendously better, but it's not guaranteed.
Even in this very thread people are to make certain gaming features work in Linux.
That speaks volumes.