With how user-hostile Windows has become lately I've been happy to see gaming on Linux go from how esoteric it used to be to the more commonplace scenario that it now is. While it's obviously a small fraction compared to Windows (as noted in the article, 0.5-2% seems accurate), those that tried playing modern games on Linux a decade ago would be pleasantly surprised to see how much more feasible it is today; it's come a long way.
Valve and Steam have played an important role in this, but we've also seen significant improvements in wine, applications like Lutris, and all-around steady improvements in hardware support and drivers, as well as a much larger and more accessible community and body of knowledge.
While there's still quite a few games that seem near-impossible to play from linux, I think a lot of people that decided against trying this many years ago would find things much better off than where they left off, especially for someone that is willing to put in just a little bit of time to fix potential issues (but of course, we must admit that sometimes one can be unlucky and spend hours trying to fix some specific issues, even if that is much more rare than it used to be). Although I don't play much, I'm happy to not have to dual boot Windows just to run a few select applications and I hope that things look even better this decade with the amount of interest we've seen in FOSS, user privacy and security, and so on, all increasing.
Valve's been amazing. Without their (ongoing, even after SteamOS pretty much flopped!) support, I don't know if I could've survived on Linux. xP
What's surprising is how many games are native through Steam. It tends to be the types of games I think most Linux nerds (like me) would stereotypically tend to prefer, too (Factorio, Europa Universalis 4, Kerbal Space Program, Cities: Skylines, most roguelikes). That said, I think a varied gaming diet is important. For non-native (especially AAA) games, https://www.protondb.com/ is very handy. Even games that can't run seem to get more runnable over time. Not long ago (a year or two?), Fallout 4 would run hilariously badly -- tons of graphical assets would be missing, and it was unplayable. Today, it runs "okay" (a subset of the sounds don't work unless you use a Proton flag in Steam, and the mouse is pretty sluggish).
I've seen it theorized that SteamOS was less a flop and more a shot across Microsoft's bow that had the intentional effect. It briefly seemed like a war was brewing over the Windows Store or the Steam Store being the main outlet for PC game purchases, particularly games developed by MS studios. Seems that all but disappeared when the Steam Machine came out.
SteamOS has nothing to do with the Windows Store failing. That was tied to WinRT and Windows Phone. SteamOS and the few Steam Machine designs announced were underwhelming junk that had no market.
But you could be absolutely right that it was intended as a signal to Microsoft. Maybe Valve just got lucky and didn't have to follow through seriously.
It's more like an insurance policy than a serious attempt at building a platform. However, should it come to it, a lot of the problems with desktop Linux really come from a lack of money and direction - Valve have the liquidity, and games are enough of a selling point to justify only supporting one or two distros.
I'll second the "Valve's been amazing" comment. The majority of games I play are native, and all but a few of the rest work fine under Proton. Compared to when I started using Linux on the desktop a decade ago, the gaming situation is night and day.
Regarding Fallout 4, though, I played through it using Proton a while ago. As far as I can tell, the mouse thing is just an issue with the game - I found multiple sets of instructions to fix it that assumed you were using Windows.
At least Factorio is Linux native (and maybe even works better, for instance it has autosave without pausing support, and the headless server is AFAIK Linux-only…) without Steam :
The only issue is multiplayer, which has regressed with the recently added better compatibility with Steam multiplayer :
the big standalone servers work just fine, but you won't be able to connect to most random people's games, because most of them are going to use Steam, will assume that you are using it too, and will not have configured port forwarding in their routers for other non-Steam using players to be able to join them :
As proven by Netbooks, ChromeOS, Android and maker consoles.
Anything Linux based that goes mainstream has very little to do with regular GNU/Linux, or is based on customized distributions, tainted with OEM specific drivers and kernels that never get updated.
I'm very enthusiastic about keeping systems up to date, but I've had Windows unexpectedly reboot in order to push an update. This part isn't new, but updates require a reboot almost monthly. Compared to Linux and macOS that's obnoxious--especially combined with coercing those reboots to happen.
I've found the "news" and ads added to Windows very user hostile. As with telemetry. Any attempts to disable them soon get backed out via an update. Similarly with Edge harassing you to "try it again" "are you sure you don't want to change your default browser?"
I don't necessarily mean the last week or month, but more so the last many years. There's definitely too much to list at this point, but in short, Windows has significantly ramped up their user-hostile surveillance and privacy-invasive functions, pushes many features that no one wants such as excessive advertising and tracking, constantly forces what Microsoft wants onto the user (e.g. constantly 'asking' users to use Microsoft Edge, Onedrive, many others), has many annoying patterns such as forcing updates+reboots excessively often, and in my opinion also has terrible UI/UX. Some of these points are a little subjective, but I think that the general pattern of changes over the last decade has been very clear.
Literally all changes past win8 have been user-hostile.
(Depending on your thoughts on what windows version constitutes as good you move this line back to win7/XP, I personally felt win8 was at least usable and did not show freaking ads in my start menu.)
I don't want to be that guy, but the misuse of "literally" in this particular case is just inflammatory. I get the impression you must not have paid close enough attention Windows changelogs to credibly make that statement. I'm a desktop Linux person, but there are _literally_ hundreds of examples of changes to Windows that aren't user-hostile.
I was also pleasantly surprised by how well VR works on Linux and how much work had been put in to make even the Proton experience seamless. I now have over 1500 hours in VR exclusively on Linux.
Boneworks certainly takes the cake as my absolute VR title. It beats even Alyx in terms of gameplay alone. Playtime-wise I spent most hours in Elite Dangerous - flying in an HMD adds so much to the game that its hard to put in words how immersed I feel.
i'm waiting to try Alyx, cause i think the outlay for the hardware alone will be quite large.
any insight into how compatible Valve's Index will be with non-valve games? i don't really wanna drop $2k-$3k to play a single title and have the VR hardware work poorly with other games or become obsolete in 2 months; the pace of state-of-the-art in VR was so rapid, that i didn't want to spend money on anything until some bug-free plateau was reached.
The Index controllers can do everything other controllers can do + extra stuff. If you play a game that doesn't have finger tracking, that just means you don't get finger tracking. But the controllers themselves work just fine.
There are some games that might not have a good set of bindings for the index controllers by default (something might be bound to "squeeze the grip" when it should be bound to the trigger, for example), but you just open the settings menu (inside VR), click "custom bindings", and then pick the most upvoted community made set of bindings and it just works. Takes a few seconds.
I bought and index and have been driving it with a 2700x and 1060 6gb. Alyx was hands down one of, if not the best gaming experience I’ve ever had. I think the index controllers really take the experience to another level. Being able to pick up things by grabbing them is awesome. The headphones on the index are amazing too, and really help with immersion.
Support with other games is pretty good. I bought a bunch of games during the summer sale, and haven’t found anything unplayable for me. Not all games have full finger tracking, and not all games have the ability to pick things up like you can in Alyx. Some older games have been updated for Alyx style controls, but many control exactly how they did with the Vive.
I tried VR in Linux first, then tried on windows. Windows has better feature support and performance hands down. If you have a better GPU, you might be fine, but the advantages to booting into windows was worth it to me.
Index will work with anything. And vice versa, any headset can play Alyx well. If you're not up for spending all the money, you can mix and match SteamVR controllers/headsets (e.g. old school Vive with the fancier Knuckles Controllers).
Pretty much every game worth playing is also available on steam or via some other method. If you REALLY want the Oculus stuff there's always Revive. https://github.com/LibreVR/Revive
Hmmm, for me, with steamvr and a htc vive on linux, there is about a half second delay on tracking which quickly gives me nausea. The issue does not happen on windows.
Sad to see the focus being on gaming. Installing any modern game on windows is a nightmare. You install one root kit after another. All running as administrator and installing things left and right, with each studio having their own identity tracking running forever in the background.
The benefit of VR will be when it is decoupled entirely from games. Just like we got window manager composers when we finally stoped looking at openGL as a game technology.
OpenVR/OpenXR are already decoupled from games. You can target both Oculus and SteamVR with these APIs and pretty much do whatever you want. I think the only reason games dominate the medium is because of the hardware. It's very difficult to do productivity in VR, but comparatively easy to put a player into a simulated world to have fun.
The point is that you can create a full FOSS runtime (+ drivers) for VR that will be compatible with most software out of the box. I think there was a project called OSVR that tried to do this, but I'm not sure how that's going.
You could probably bring a lot of this work into the kernel if VR becomes popular enough.
I've found that Valve is pretty good when it comes to respecting their users. SteamVR software isn't even DRM'd and can run without Steam.
> The point is that you can create a full FOSS runtime (+ drivers) for VR that will be compatible with most software out of the box. I think there was a project called OSVR that tried to do this, but I'm not sure how that's going.
The point is that it have zero real-world hardware support.
Yeah you can buy playstation controllers and hack them, but that is not realistic. (to quote the state of the art on the links you posted)
Would write graphical interface code if a color monitor and a mouse required the end user to solder stuff and compile kernel drivers? While every game already had those two things but tied down to the facebook app? ..that's how insane VR is today (and for the foreseeable future)
> So, a few early adopters of the technology started developing an alternative implementation of [Valve's] OpenVR called “Open Source Virtual Reality (OSVR) which even had open-source hardware projects. Sadly, its development stalled and even today its main site is offline.
Ah, I didn't know that SteamVR could run without Steam. Can Alyx (once installed) ?
Still, this leaves the issue is that being theoretically Steam-free isn't enough, as the experience with AOSP/Google Play Store has shown.
Valve might be 'pretty good' with their own users, but still the result of Steam's dominance is that it's getting harder and harder to get mods and play multiplayer outside of Steam.
The worst of which are Valve's own Custom Executable Generation, and Denuvo, which is third-party but (last time I checked) Steam doesn't warn you about as being a 3rd-party DRM.
To be honest though, the Valve Custom Executable DRM is pretty easy to bypass. There are automated tools that make it pretty much trivial. I won't link them because it's technically illegal in the US.
Denuvo is the most difficult one, yes. It's technically not DRM, but anti-tampering software that wraps around another DRM, that said it is really the worst.
Yeah, Steam's DRM implementation is ancient and well known to be compromised. They never really push it, but publishers demand it to "feel" safe. The biggest hook is that many people prefer games on Steam due to the added benefits.
except that VR nobody can use for anything other than game.
your GPU and integrated GPU run somewhat slower on opensource OS and drivers. Heck you can compute on them on cloud providers. Anything VR can only run if you install a game studio disguised tracker and social network apps in VR headset driver's clothing, in windows only.
Even the other comment misleading saying "you already can" is only a convoluted step to provide content that will be run in the above game-restricted setting.
> Consider that we Linux users are a tiny slice of the desktop market. Let us be optimistic and say that we are 2% of desktop users (although in Steam it fluctuates around 0.86%). VR users in Steam are around 1.9% according to the latest hardware surveys, and those are gamers, they are not representative of the desktop users, but nevertheless let’s suppose that 2% of desktop users have some kind of VR device. If the proportions hold, Linux VR users would be 2 percent of 2 percent, or 0.04% of PC users, or 4 people in 10,000, and scattered all around the world. That tiny market would not even be a consideration for any sane investor.
This math assumes that being a VR enthusiast and an (even occasional) Linux user are independent. On the opposite, I would guess that there's a lot of overlap between the two ! (Also with things like being a gadget-loving 'geek', still owning a desktop PC, &c.)
P.S.: "Scattered around the world" is not an issue for software, and maybe even not for hardware, as the overwhelming majority of the users able to afford desktop 6DoF VR are going to be either in North America or Europe.
Great article (disclosure: from my colleague at Boiling Steam)! Definitely learned a lot as a newbie to VR on Linux. I'm still new to VR but not Linux gaming, and have been having a blast. I really appreciate it especially in the winter (great and fun workouts while playing games) and when other activities are limited due to the tragedy that is the US coronovirus response. The sense of space is what really gets me, never have I felt so transported somewhere else. This is in contrast to things like 3D movies where stuff pops out at you, while this gives depth and openness as you step into huge rooms, landscapes, whatever.
I also wrote [0] about just getting the Valve Index and playing on Linux with my aging but still capable desktop (poor 970 was still going strong but VR is really pushing it).
I would be interested in developping (research) software based on VR under Linux, any recommendation for devices that work well? are there any Open frameworks?
I read these reports with a mixture of jealousy and frustration; my Valve Index + 3900XT + Radeon Vega 56 (sigh) works splendidly under Windows 10, but despite everything I've tried, it Just Doesn't Work for me when I boot the same setup to Ubuntu 21.04 (note, Steam and non-VR Steam games work great).
When I try to launch it, I get a "Only one instance of the game can be running at one time." pop-up and a "StreamVR has detected your headset running as a monitor. For best results, please switch to Direct Display Mode." Clicking "nable Disrect Display Mo" (sic) restarts SteamVR to a big window of grey binoculars. At no point is anything displayed in the headset.
Thanks, I had already tried everything in there, but since posting I saw people suggesting unplugging the HDM and plugging it into another DP port. That actually worked, but the end result was very buggy and flaky, unusable in practice. I'll try again in 2022 when GPUs might be back in stock.
I don't know about others, but the main reason why I moved to Linux is to get away from the spyware, DRM, closed source Windows which has reached for me the breaking point with Windows 8/10.
So I'm not really interested to play games on Linux, if it's only to be forced to, yet again, use closed source, potentially DRM and spyware-riddled software.
Even Valve got worse in this aspect, as, unlike for their earlier games, you seem to be forced to run Steam just to run Alyx.
(Also I'm pissed that I now can't seem to be able to install Oculus Rift CV1's software on Windows 7 any more despite it having been sold as compatible with it for several years (and with Linux support having been promised in the still not materialized future !). Yes, I know, Facebook, but this was before the Cambridge Analytica scandal, though I still should have known better.)
Sure, OpenXR : Monado and Arcan sound promising, but will they attract video game developers ?
Vulkan seemed extremely promising too, but without Xbox support, it currently seems to go the way of OS/2, with no game developers directly targeting it (without even bothering with DirectX), and it being mostly used as a compatibility layer in the Steam/Proton stack.
Valve and Steam have played an important role in this, but we've also seen significant improvements in wine, applications like Lutris, and all-around steady improvements in hardware support and drivers, as well as a much larger and more accessible community and body of knowledge.
While there's still quite a few games that seem near-impossible to play from linux, I think a lot of people that decided against trying this many years ago would find things much better off than where they left off, especially for someone that is willing to put in just a little bit of time to fix potential issues (but of course, we must admit that sometimes one can be unlucky and spend hours trying to fix some specific issues, even if that is much more rare than it used to be). Although I don't play much, I'm happy to not have to dual boot Windows just to run a few select applications and I hope that things look even better this decade with the amount of interest we've seen in FOSS, user privacy and security, and so on, all increasing.