No.
Considering a majority of people use Nvidia on their desktops, they’ll be forced to jump through hoops with stuff as minor as setting their desktop session to X instead of Wayland (which is absolutely not ready) to installing a custom vaapi package to get hardware accelerated video playback in Firefox. With games and Nvidia say goodbye to a chunk of DX12 performance Then you have the majority of laptop users that have intel HD graphics laptops, ones made in the past 10 years will be fine for low end stuff, but they will take a hit because i915 shits itself with DX12 games and the new xe driver that handles it better is very new and only available on iGPUs made in the last 3 years or so? It is really only good if you have an AMD GPU which has absolutely pitiful market share, with the Steam Deck probably being the most popular AMD PC device people own.
Gamers on Linux have minimal setup overhead.*
*as long as you stick with Steam. Anything else means going to Lutris, Heroic Games Launcher, etc which is far more hit or miss.
Added the missing qualifier to one of the articles bullet points for them.
In my experience running non-steam games through steam with proton is the best way to play those games too. The only time I’ve ever had to use lutris was when I had to install some DLC for a GOG application on the same prefix as the game because it had a separate exe installer for that DLC. I haven’t been able to figure out a way to do that through steam. But once I got that done I just ran the game through steam and it worked perfectly. The heroic games launcher gets suggested a lot too but I literally have never been able to get it to work for a single game.
Why is the penguin holding it like that??
Have you tried to play with one without thumbs?
maybe its ai slop
This illustration is triggering me
At this point Linux and Windows are more like Xbox and PlayStation back in the the 2000’s, except Linux has a compatibility layer to allow it to run a lot of Windows games.
Yes
What about flipping the question. Making modern games available on more platforms?
An article similar to this is posted by itsfoss every week.
Not yet, in order to be ready for mainstream gaming, the gaming experience has to be smooth (As in easy to install, Mod & patch)
It’s smoother than Windows gaming was when I started Windows gaming (win 95).
For reference, to play Warcraft 1 multiplayer you joined a chatroom on Battle.net and the chat channel gave everyone a
terminalMS-DOS command that you had to copy/paste into the terminal. If anybody had any network more complicated than computer -> modem then it would fail. If anyone failed to connect your game would crash. I was gaming like this at around 10 years old.Obviously, comparing 2025 Linux to '90s Windows isn’t exactly fair… but gamers are not incapable of dealing with complexity.
Sure, don’t tell your 8 year old cousin to swap from Windows to Linux. But if you’re a smart high school student then you can learn. Like anything, it’ll take some getting used to and you’ll have to deal with frustrations but knowing how to use Linux and, probably more importantly, how to research and solve problems is well worth the effort.
Oh yeah. I remember watching my older brother try to set up that kind of connection. I was never allowed under threat of capital punishment to touch anything of course. Good times.
Doesn’t actually matter with the way Windows performs, these days.
No.
This is the same horse-shit conversation that’s been going on since like 96.
Want to prove somebody is a tech fraud? Listen to them rec *nix for anything but what it’s good at.
This is specific to gaming, which it does great at. I’ve been running Ubuntu since late 2023 with no issues.
I’ve been gaming soley on linux since 2020 or 2021.
Yeah, its definitely ready now, most straggler games are basically massively overproduced and massively MTX exploitative team based shooters using kernel level anti cheat that are designed for children with mom’s credit card.
So what you are saying is “no, linux doesn’t let you play the games you want to play, especially the extremely popular ones”.
You can play most of the games you want to play, with the main caveats being VR and anti-cheat. If it’s SP and on a regular screen, it’ll probably work.
The majority of problems Linux has with gaming are intentional decisions on the part of the studios at this point.
I keep what I think is a pretty healthy gaming diet, which tends to steer me away from the megacorporate shit and into smaller studios and indies, and games just tend to run.
Even AAA games are fine, as long as they don’t have intrusive anticheat. If you’re after SP, non-VR gaming, Linux is ready today. If you want VR, you need to be more flexible with headsets. If you want MP, you need to be really flexible since devs intentionally block Linux for whatever reason.
Meh. Most games, I’d say. Couldn’t get Cyberpunk 2077 to run on Mint.
--launcher-skipshould fix it, according to ProtonDB.I looked on protondb of course. The issue isn’t the launcher, it does boot into the menu and freezes once I load a game.
Ok, then it’s probably some kind of system resource setting or something. I had an issue with Hogwarts Legacy freezing after an hour or two, and it was fixed by this setting change. Maybe that or a similar tweak is all you need. Or maybe just a GPU driver update.
I haven’t tried that game, but I will say most of the games I’ve tried work fine without any tweaks.
I love that you tried to help though. Thanks anyway.
I’m happy to. If you ever want to give it another try, there are tons of there willing to help as well.
I don’t think you need to be super flexible with Multiplayer as long as they aren’t competitive games. Here’s some multiplayer games I’ve played flawlessly in the last 12 months: Baldur’s Gate III, Webfishing, Deep Rock Galactic, Atlyss and Stardew Valley. It really depends on the genre I think.
I’d say the peripheral situation could be better too, such as sim racing gear. Logitech support is solid and looks decent with Fanatec at least, but there’s a lot of options out there that are unlikely to have good Linux support.
I tested out Monado recently with the Reverb G2 and it’s coming along nicely. It’s definitely not ready yet, but hopefully it will be within a few years.
I can install and play pretty much any single player game I want, even new releases, and I am confident I will be able to play it with no significant/noticable issue… and on the offchance there is one, it will most assuredly be fixed within a couple days with a proton update… and honestly its been like 2 years since that last happened to me.
The only time I even have to think about installing a game, and thus have to check protondb, is when I want to install an MMO or Multiplayer game…and a shocking amount of those work, too. Just not all of them, because of invasive anticheat.
Not until they implement 3D Settings page in the Nvidia control panel, and improve upon HDR support. Do those two things, and I will finally stop having to dual boot.
Edit: And yes anticheat needs to be sorted as well, as others have pointed out.
I would say mainstream should become this: game has client-side kernel level anti-cheat? Goes right into trash bin
Hell, I do not need any kernel-level third-party hacks to literally spend money on the Internet, and some company wants system-level access to my computer when I want to just have fun and do pew-pew? Lol, good luck with that
That’s nvidia’s proprietary software, only nvidia can add stuff to it.
As for anti-cheat, kernel level anti cheat is not going to happen on Linux, nor should it (or continue being used in Windows)
Yes, we know, but it’s still part of “Linux being ready for mainstream gaming”. If the average person (the mainstream) has to worry about stuff like that, then it isn’t ready for the mainstream.
Well I doubt the mainstream actually tweaks 3D settings in nVidia control panel. Anti cheat making some online games not work is a bigger issue but still not worth it.
Ahh, my apologies. I thought you were referring to the Nvidia drivers being proprietary in general, not just the lack of 3D settings in the control panel. I totally agree that those settings are not needed by mainstream users.
Or switch to an AMD GPU.
AMD can’t compete in the high end GPU market, but their CPUs kick ass. I play in 4K 144Hz with Ray Tracing. Find me an AMD GPU that can handle that, and I will glady sell the 4090.
Sorry I’m not a fan of having a company create both the problem and the solution and then forcing the industry to go asking with it.
You are like th 0.01% of gamers dude. 4K ray tracing is borderline luxury category.
In 30+ years of PC gaming, I’ve never had anything beyond a xx70 (midrange) GPU, so when I saw that the 4090 was actually considerably more powerful than the next card down (unlike the xx90tis and GTX Titans of the past), I decided to splurge for once in my life.
I promise you I’m not rich. I just had some extra life insurance money to spend.
Sorry, I did not mean to attack you personally. Te high-end GPU market is clearly NVidia territory and in my opinion so few people are using theses cards with Linux, the issues related with them might not get as much attention as the more mainstream stuff. No suprised AMD not even trying to compete with these cards and want to stay in mid-high range.
Thank you. But yes it gets tiring constantly getting berated for still using Windows. I’m aware that I’m a minority, but it is frustrating that Lemmy users love to attack me for using the OS that has the features I need as my primary platform. Believe me; I’d love to move to Arch full-time, but it’s just not capable enough yet for the high end.
I’ll probably still be using the same hardware 5 years from now, so I have my fingers crossed that Linux will eventually have better support for Nvidia GPUs and HDR displays by then.
the best card of the previous generation was probably the 4080 or the 7900xt. the performance per dollar is just not there for the top end. i bought an xtx for productive work and it benches very close to the 4090 in most things, only losing out in rt and xformers, but it also benches only a few percent better than the cheaper options. i just wanted the ram.
And fix issues with anticheat.
