I hate DRM, I hate monopolies, I welcome competition, but if one builds a massive empire by just creating a bonafide good platform, single-handedly making open source desktop better, with good customer support and treating users with respect, they deserve the money honestly.
If one day I manage to build a billion dollar empire, my sole inspiration on how to conduct business is Gabe Newell. [1]
Which is exactly the thing Epic can't compete on. They can give away all the free games they want, but Steam and Valve have done much more than offering games on sale.
(I got a 13 year old account on Steam, more than 500 games bought, almost $10k spent on the platform. No Windows partition for the past 3 years)
---
1: I honestly couldn't name anybody else that has kept their company private, grown it to such heights and stayed true to their founding principles, without selling out to shareholders and advertisers for an easy buck.
Yeah, pretty much all my PC game purchases go to either Steam (for their work on Linux gaming) or GOG (for their DRM free stance). Luckily my financial position is such that it really doesn't matter what sale is on Epic or Uplay or Origin to change that.
I won't say that epic didn't delivered for the gamers. UE5 is honestly a technology marvel and bring so much values for players. I don't even talk about lumen/nanite but all the others tools made for developers to push the limits of what is doable in a game, at runtime.
With UE5.3 we even get more productivity tools, which means we can deliver faster or bigger.
Don't get me wrong, many features are experimental since 4.26 but getting them production ready is the game changer.
I like Steam too but at the end of the day I'll buy games wherever they are cheapest. I don't care about multiple platforms like apparently some people do, GOG Galaxy solves that problem cleanly by making all my games from every platform show up in one interface. I also don't use features like achievements so I don't really care beyond just being able to play the game.
>Which is exactly the thing Epic can't compete on.
I mean, with these criteria is Epic really that far behind? They made desktop a better experience for devs, have decent enough customer support, and they don't exactly shit talk their users like other parts of the industry. The only arguable part is good platform, but it depends on what you need out of the platform. Does a platform have to offer a way to play windows games on linux to be "good"?
>I honestly couldn't name anybody else that has kept their company private, grown it to such heights and stayed true to their founding principles, without selling out to shareholders and advertisers for an easy buck.
hard to find platforms like that, but there are certainly creators that stayed small and humble despite growing huge in influence and pull.
When they buy out any game exclusivity (so the games are only sold on Epic store on pc), they would make the game drop linux support even when the games previously can run on linux natively (e.g. rocket league, payday 2, etc). That's a huge negative in my book, enough to make me never consider using Epic store.
I was starting to diversify my store fronts before Valve came out with the Deck.
But the release of it and the message it sent (that they take this seriously), made me reverse course and now I always buy my games on Steam, even if it costs 10 euro more.
FWIW many game developers would genuinely rather you pirate the game than buy keys on the ‘grey market’ sites. If you’re not going to pay anyone who deserves it, you might as well just not pay anyone..
It's not the shady sites that resell free or international keys, etc. I specifically didn't link to those (they're easy to find, but of questionable ethicality and usability).
FWIW if the dev offers a Steam key on their own site, I'd just buy it that way. But otherwise if it's Steam or one of those authorized resellers, there's no reason to prefer Steam itself. GMG, Humble, Fanatical, etc. have great deals that let me try games I otherwise wouldn't bother with. If they turn out good, usually there's in app purchases and cosmetics I'm happy to support. IMHO this is a good form of price differentiation, letting the base game be widely available for people to buy but selling supporter packs and cosmetics for people who really like it.
>I just hate that so many games I want are exclusive to Epic.
I miss the days when PC games weren't tied to some online webstore but came on a CD and the only DRM was a CD-key, no always online, no proprietary web store, just physical media that you could share with your friends.
Sure, Steam and GoG are probably the best kind of on-line webstore so far, bur I still love my collection of .ISO games that I can mount and play whenever I want without depending on any invasive DRM, accounts or internet connection.
Valve have funded some good work on the underlying compatibility code, but their big contribution was really fixing a problem they themselves created. Lots of games expect to be able to call back to the Steam client for a license check, and this used to require running the Windows version of Steam which didn't work well (huge compatibility issues and it really didn't like being run at the same time as the Linux version). One of the big things enabling easy Linux gaming was a Valve-approved way to run Windows games under a compatibility layer and have them still connect to the same Linux client used to run native games.
> but their big contribution was really fixing a problem they themselves created.
I think it’s a little bit of a stretch to say it’s a problem they created - they were just a victim of their own success. They can’t force developers to write games in a particular platform, and making games work under Linux is no small task.
It was probably easier to stream games from a Windows machine, which was their first approach with Steam Link and Steam Machines. It kinda sorta worked, and what they saw was enough encouragement to go and build the Steam Deck. On top of that, CPUs/GPUs just weren’t good enough 10 years ago to do what Valve wanted to do.
So I think it’s a little unfair to say they “created” this problem.
Valve may have contributed to the issue initially, but can you blame them? There wasn't exactly an abundance of Linux Support before Valve came along either. Why would they support a Linux Steam client and the whole compatibility layer when the demand just didn't exist.
Valve becoming big enough to break into the hardware market (first Steam Machines and then the Steam Deck) was the first time they had any incentive to care about the OS layer. They could've made some deal w/ Microsoft but instead went the open-source route to the benefit of everyone. Kudos to Valve.
Sure I can. They decided ultimately to make an indirect dependence on Windows instead of encouraging devs to make good native linux ports. They more or less made the deal with Windows without having to get their hands dirty.
Are you saying, that it is actually a good experience to run Linux on the gaming laptop instead of Windows with Proton?
I already have Steam Deck, and love it. But if I want to play games in better resolution, I might boot my Windows Laptop. Have not tried Linux with Proton.
On Linux laptop I have a NVIDIA some kind of 3xxx series card.
> it is actually a good experience to run Linux on the gaming laptop instead of Windows
Not a laptop, but I am livestreaming games from a Linux desktop. In the roughly two years since I've started doing this on a regular basis, I have played 23 games on stream using Steam Proton. My experience matches what Steam Deck owners told me about compatibility. It's not been completely glitchless, but all the problems I ran into were minor graphics glitches. When I buy games, I check protondb.com in advance, and it's always either Platinum or Gold for me these days.
I will note though that all the games I played were either single-player or cooperative multi-player. With competitive multi-player, there is an entire can of worms because of anti-cheat software. Valve's own anti-cheat should be fine, but if the game developer is using a different anti-cheat, it usually relies on Windows kernel drivers or some other shenanigans that conflicts with Wine in a major way.
For me it is. Partly though that's because I boot windows so rarely that when I do I have to sit through a whole bunch of updates.
I prefer linux to windows generally so the ability to game without re-booting is a bonus on top of that. If I preferred being in windows I wouldn't run linux just for gaming.
I would disagree, as someone who have a Steam Deck and has a desktop connected to the TV for couch gaming it is amazing.
However most distros still install Grub, and (although not their fault) have a crusty UEFI boot sequence making that startup sequence worse than it needs to be.
Steam also haven't officially released SteamOS 3, so unless you are going to do a bit of modification, it won't quite be as slick.
On the other hand, even with all that it is vastly better than the Windows experience.
I found that Elden Ring ran better on Proton on Linux than on native Windows on the same device. Loaded faster and ran more smoothly. I do not know why.
There was a while around release for Elden Ring where Valve was able to rapidly deploy fixes that resulted in the Steam Deck running without stuttering issues that were effecting powerful Windows builds. https://www.techradar.com/news/steam-deck-plays-elden-ring-b...
I'd hope that those issues eventually got resolved on Windows too...
In the case of Elden Ring, not really, it was due to DXVK (whose developer is sponsored by Valve) having custom patches to workaround the weird DirectX streaming logic of the game that caused constant frame hiccups.
So, on day 3 or something of release, Linux was the best platform to play the newest AAA game.
The year of Linux gaming has been here for a while.
It usually has to do with a translation layer, converting DirectX to Vulkan (there are a few different ones, depending on the version of DirectX).
And yes, gaming on Linux has been infinitely smoother and gets leaps of improvements every year. We're at a point where unreleased games already play on Linux, and typically with better performance than naively on Windows.
Controllers, audio, etc, all play out of the box, perfectly, since years now
I switched to Ubuntu for my gaming PC over a year ago and from my Steam library of hundreds of games so far I only found maybe 1 or 2 that did not work on Linux, but worked on Windows. All the others work flawlessly*
* there is one caveat to that though - if you have a VR headset, then there are many people reporting performance issues on Linux with those headsets. And personally I also find VR performance subpar on Linux (although it still improved in the last year).
Gaming on a Linux laptop with AMD CPU and Nvidia GPU was pretty good for the 2 months I did it. Not great but definitely good. Biggest problem was with a AAA game on launch day. It actually worked decently, but had a crashing bug that was quickly fixed, and the performance was never as good as what it was once I switched back to Windows and ran that game. Another game had an issue with connecting to multiplayer games that I never resolved, but otherwise worked as well as Windows (for single player.) Everything else I played seemed basically the same as my experience in Windows.
The games I play like CSGO work very well*, you have a steamdeck so you know how game support especially with anti cheat is.
However, I've had many bugs.
Nvidia on linux is painful. Just linux things - I get a bar at the top of the game when starting sometimes and have to change my resolution back and forth to fix it, I've had to restart pipewire to get my audio to reappear, I've had to replace pulse with pipewire (mid game).
Linux is not smooth, ESPECIALLY with nvidia. If the games you play are well supported, use AMD graphics, and doesn't tinker with their system at all, on a very stable OS - maybe you could call it stable?
Also if you want smooth - for the love of god don't use a rolling distro. If you check the arch wiki you'll see various nvidia/steam/wine/proton issues occur every few weeks. Many completely break playing games for several days unless you downgrade packages.
tl;dr - I would not recommend linux as a desktop to anyone who doesn't mind having their nose in their terminal desperately trying to figure out why you have no audio while your friends grow tired waiting for you.
The steamdeck specifically is very well managed by valve and I'm incredibly impressed that they made it work so well.
I've had a better experience since I switched from arch to ubuntu. For example steam remote play works w/ my Apple TV upstairs. Under arch I couldn't ever get it to work.
I've had mixed experience with AMD vs Nvidia. I bought a 5700xt which was way less reliable than my old nvidia 980ti, which never once crashed under linux. I upgraded to a 6700xt last year and that's been smooth. I'd originally bought the AMD card hoping to run Wayland but am still on X11.
Let's assign blame to Nvidia, though. It's their drivers that are crap, it's their decision to keep their hardware so heavily NDA'd that others can't write good drivers for it.
I'm not going to excuse Nvidia - their driver is buggy and they're still missing DLSS3. Many of the problems I had were nvidia specific, especially anything touching wayland.
However my audio issues, or a bug where if you click the selection of applications when you alt+tab would lock gnome up and you'd have to kill the application from the terminal - those were not nvidia specific AFAIK.
I've also heard of non-smooth experiences from AMD hardware.
I don't think it's fair to recommend linux to anyone who would be scared off by the terminal.
I'm not at all saying it can't be relatively smooth sailing though, especially without a rolling os.
For me it is supported better on Linux than on Windows because my GPU (RX 5700 XT) does not actually have HW raytracing but Mesa has a software fallback for it :-P. If nothing else i was able to see what the fuss was all about[0][1][2].
Though, well, performance was a tiny bit lacking as you can see (i actually had to modify the Quake RTX code to let me use lower resolution scale than the official binary allowed :-P).
Varies from game to game. I know it works in Cyberpunk 2077 but you need to include some special launch parameters. Portal RTX just worked. RTX in Control doesn't work even with config changes.
I haven't booted into Windows since 2009, thanks to Wine. Proton certainly expands its compatibility and support though, and I'll support any company that supports Linux, and Valve is one of the best ones.
I love Steam, Valve and Proton, and what they've done for Linux gaming, but nothing will make me compromise on DRM. To me, ending DRM is just as important as supporting free operating systems, so unfortunately no amount of good will gives Valve a free pass in my eyes.
So I've started buying games from DRM-free platforms like GoG and adding them to Steam as non-Steam games. Same compatibility and no need to use an external tool to maintain Wine/Proton prefixes. With the boatloads of money Valve makes from Steam, they probably won't miss me too much.
Like many others here have said, Valve has won a loyal customer. The impact proton has over linux as desktop is unmeasurable. They did open source right, and they will likely benefit massively from it.
The only people that hate proton are the teams that port games to linux for a living. I personally am sad to see that icculus and flibitjibobo, to name just two, are out of work on this front.
I picked up a Steam Deck recently and aside from when I’ve booted into the desktop mode to set up some emulators you’d never know it was running games through a compatibility layer. Truly incredible work from Valve.
Technical impressiveness aside it’s a really nice device too—I like having something that feels mostly like a console in the “it just works” factor, but still allows me to do some fiddling if and when I want to.
One thing that I'd love to see is a Proton version for M1/M2 Apple Silicon... UTM is the only thing that runs x86 VMs and for whatever reason its QEMU guest tool drivers are all completely buggy and everything is dog slow (and of course, Windows refusing to load unsigned drivers on Win7 x64 makes trying out different drivers pretty much impossible).
Apple's Game Porting Toolkit (https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2023/10123/) is essentially Proton for macOS. However, they've bizarrely restricted its use to testing your own games, and don't offer it as a general Proton-like solution for playing Windows games on macOS. You can't ship a game that uses it.
Whisky [0] makes it easy to install the Windows Steam client on macOS. I've played a few games on it, mostly flawlessly. Performance is nowhere near native though. Hopefully this improves over time.
Yep, if Apple could get over their stubbornness and work with Valve on this it would be fantastic for customers of both companies.
Apple has done some work with their game porting toolkit to support certain flavors of DirectX games with a combo of Wine and Rosetta. But this isn’t officially pitched as tool for end users to run Windows games.
I mean, they made an entirely new architecture just to keep their vertical integration running. Stubborness is basically in the DNA of the company. They still have enough draw that they can get away with it, so I guess they were pulling off "Valves" before Valve got popular (minus the whole "open source" moniker of course. but then again, Valve didn't exactly care about FOSS per se; just a smart move for independence when you're not yet a billion dollar corportation).
> I mean, they made an entirely new architecture just to keep their vertical integration running.
No, they went for running with their own silicon because Intel couldn't be arsed to provide them with actually power-efficient, performant and new CPUs and they were locked in to AMD for GPUs (because that is something Apple doesn't like).
It speaks volumes about just how badly Intel (and AMD) were stuck in the past when Apple blew them to pieces with the M1 performance.
Why not switch to linux though? You know there's some real cool hardware available out there that looks and feels way better than a mac, and battery aside, can do a lot more, is upgradeable and not locked in. Just a thought.
This is hilariously biased. This is HN, you're not talking to people who don't know what Linux is. Hell, a huge portion of us are linux engineers of various sorts. You're also in a thread literally about a linux app.
Anyway. I would never, ever use Linux as a desktop environment over OSX after the experiences I've had with it over the last 20+ years. OSX GUI applications absolutely blow everything that Linux has out of the water. I don't care if we're talking KDE, i3, dwm, cinnamon. The worst part about OSX applications is they aren't cheap. Even small apps like Soundsource a https://rogueamoeba.com/soundsource/ are usually $30+ but they are fantastic.
The thought of using pipewire and all the configuration hell you have to do to it to make it like Soundsource is a complete turn off. OSX apps work. They integrate. They look great and there are a LOT of them that do pretty unique things that I haven't seen in Windows or Linux.
I work on Linux 8 hours a day from OSX and about 30% of my time is using Win11 on my gaming desktop.
Also, now that I'm on an m1 max there is no way in the world I'm going back to x86 as my productivity machine.
This reply is also biased, maybe we had some bad experience in the past, but the example you made, Pipewire, is one of the things I was stunned that worked out of the box. It is relatively recent but it is already installed by default on most modern distros, and no "configuration hell" required. Linux applications might not be as good-looking as most of Apple store ones, but most of them sure work.
I'm not saying that you should switch to Linux, you do you, and to be honest Linux is not that friendly anyway. But that is not reason to stone linux to death, the parent comment is not even that offensive for MacOS users, it just asks if switching to linux would be an option, as an thought
Of course it comes installed so you can listen to audio. That isn't what Soundsource does - you CAN make Pipewire work like soundsource, though. Of course my post is biased. I gave my opinion as someone who uses both vs someone who only uses linux and doesn't know osx. Any Linux user telling me that "Linux does more than OSX" is getting my biased reply.
Per app audio redirection, per app effects, per app volume control, system-wide effects, headphone equalizer, auto change inputs/outputs etc. I haven't worked with pipewire in a long time but I had to use another app with some complicated GUI of "wires" or pipes to get the same affect. I can't remember the name of it now.
edit: Wireplumber or Mixx/Raysession, I forget. It was a huge pain comparatively.
You sure you aren't thinking of pulseaudio? Pipewire really hasn't even been out "a long time", and does do everything you listed kinda shockingly (to me) easily.
To be fair, I was a fan of pulseaudio even in the early days: being able to set up my desktop, with its decent speakers as just another audio sink for my laptop with its horrible speakers was like magic to me back in the day.
My mac mini and macbook pro would attest that i do know osx and indeed i have been using it for 15 years in work environments. Right after i switched to these from linux, to which i switched from windows and freebsd. Now back to linux. It’s come a long way.
lol. SoundSource looks identical to `pavucontrol` which I've been using for close to a decade, without ever touching a single bit of configuration, ever, for PulseAudio or PipeWire.
Or a single line to install EasyEffects which adds effects in the mix, also with zero configuration.
I'm not exaggerating. Tell me something you think SoundSource can do, and I'll show you me doing the same thing with Pavucontrol or EasyEffects in my entirely stock setup.
But sure. You found a screenshot of the ultimate Pipewire power tool that allows you to do things I guarantee SoundSource doesn't, and ran with it.
>They look great and there are a LOT of them that do pretty unique things that I haven't seen in Windows or Linux.
I love those of you who think an OSX user wouldn't know linux/linux apps.
edit: Yeah, this does nothing that soundsource does. I wish some of you would actually read the features and stop posting these volume control apps. Not to mention Soundsource was just a quick example. I could name 50 more apps that don't have a Linux alternative or one that is of any quality.
Literally - "A simple volume control tool (mixer) for the PulseAudio sound server."
Show me the UI for telling a specific application to redirect its audio output to a specific device automatically.
Show me the UI where I plug in a specific device it switches a specific applications (not all) default automatically to the new device.
Show me it's headphone EQ.
Show me per-app headphone EQ.
Show me per app EQ settings.
Show me the built in 3D/spatial audio for headphones
Then show me the config file you had to edit to set all of this up. And show me how clean and attractive the UI doing all this is. Then show me it in Pipewire because I don't care about Pulseaudio anyway and would never use that in 2023 with my need for low latency due to my DAW/equipment.
Then, in Pipewire, show me how to all this without using Wireplumber or Mixx.
I didn't say you couldn't do things in XYZ. I said the configuration of doing so sucks compared to doing it in another app. Soundsource was just an example. I don't know why you care so much. I could've said Pixelmator (GIMP?) or 30 other apps.
PS: "For all the talk, it should be trivial for you to make me look foolish right now. Like, so easy, right?"
You're this heated up because I like an OSX app more than Linux options? You're acting like I personally care about "winning" this argument. Even if it has these features I still wouldn't use the app. Aesthetics and ease of use is important to my day to day machine. Win the "argument" all you want.
> You're this heated up because I like an OSX app more than Linux options? You're acting like I personally care about "winning" this argument. Even if it has these features I still wouldn't use the app. Aesthetics and ease of use is important to my day to day machine. Win the "argument" all you want.
I use osx myself and do not like desktop linux for multiple reasons. Though, the fanboys like you are exactly the reason I want to migrate just to not have anything in common with that group.
You're so edgy!! I almost got cut with that comment! 2edgy4me!
You want to change your OS and leave m1 processors because random people on the internet think that OSX has better applications than linux. Hilarious. Like we sit with you at the coffee shop with our lit up Apple logos embarrassing you or something.
lol You're 100% right. I don't enjoy fixing linux at all after work. I used to do the VFIO GPU gaming desktop w/ linux + windows passthrough but I finally got over it and just installed windows on my desktop.
> You know there's some real cool hardware available out there that looks and feels way better than a mac
This is obviously a personal opinion, but just isn't close to true for me. I stopped using apple laptops 3 years ago, and I've never found a non-apple device with a trackpad as good as the mac.
I like the asus proart studiobook. It has the option of a 3d display without glasses. Dial doesnt work though, but the specs are pretty decent and build quality is great. Battery life is shit unless you shutdown some cores and apply other scriptable settings. Keyboard feels better than any macbook i ever owned, better than the magic keyboard. Ram, hdds and wifi card are upgradeable and are of pretty good specs. Screen resolution is high, has a touchscreen, high refresh rate, usb, thunderbolt and hdmi ports, etc.
But you know taste is personal and there are plenty other options.
What's different about the mac layout? Looks fairly standard to me, even the labels seem the same, apart from the trivially remappable control/alt/command/meta/whatever keys...
Valve already had Wine on Linux to work with. Although we have Wine on Mac now, it is a subpar experience. Aside from that, Vulkan on MacOS never received official support from Apple
I would say Valve stand on the shoulder of giants with Wine and Vulkan, they just had tl connect the dots between the two.
If Apple itself would respect its gamer users it could spend sometime on these open projects, but knowing Apple, if they do anything it would be on a closed-source vendor lock-in style
I imagine nearly everyone who runs macOS uses the App Store. Some apps are only available on it, and even some that are also available elsewhere are more convenient to install and keep up-to-date via the store.
But compared to the iOS store it’s kind of a ghost town. Tons of popular software isn’t in it. It’s quite normal to just download software instead of even looking to see if it’s in there.
And if it is, App Store software must be fully and tightly sandboxed. Which prevents a lot of useful software from ever appearing in it.
Sorry. I think I misread the tone of your comment.
For a lot of things I’m happy for sandboxing. Why should random games or todo apps need more access? But the fact you can’t get good backup software like Backblaze is a problem. They need more options for levels of sandboxing, including possibly none (with heavy review).
They did care about Linux, which was an even smaller market that doesn't like to spend money and doesn't like closed source and DRM. Yet now everybody is singing their praises.
It stands to reason that Steam on Mac is bad in comparison because of Apple.
> It stands to reason that Steam on Mac is bad in comparison because of Apple.
How? It’s software like any other. There’s TONS of great software on the Mac made by 3rd parties. It can be nice. It can run fast. MS does it. Adobe does it. Indie developers do it. So why is it Apple’s fault?
The story tends that gets passed around is that no one at Valve (more or less) works in it.
I’m not talking about the games Steam sells. I’m talking about the Steam client.
If they rewrote it in Electron (instead of whatever custom thing it uses) they could do a terrible job and it would still be faster.
I’m not even asking for it to be “Mac like”, just act like showing a store page isn’t a Herculean effort.
I’ll credit both sides with the stubbornness. Apple had many years of poor integrated GPUs (arguably Intel’s fault) and even mediocre dedicated GPU options (due to a rift with NVidia).
Apple also fully dropped 32-bit support, breaking a lot of older games that had been ported to Mac on Steam.
Even Windows running on ARM has emulation for 32-bit x86 apps.
On Valve’s side they gave very little love to the Steam client on Mac and didn’t bother to update their own games (Half Life, Portal, Counterstrike, etc) to 64-bit to keep them working on Macs.
The biggest thing that has changed is now Apple ships much better GPU power even in its cheapest Macs. They still aren’t equivalent to dedicated gaming PCs but are plenty to run a huge library of casual and older games, if only there were a convenient and well-maintained path to running them.
Valve often does things because a person employed by Valve wanted to do that thing. And then that person moves on to other things. You don't need any grander explanation for "Valve ported the Steam launcher to OS X and now barely maintains it".
Because they "put customers first"? That seems to be the PR that people feel had them invest in Linux, but they forget it was more of a desperation move in a time where Windows may have been trying to strongarm 3rd party game stores out.
Very smart to leverage that failure of Steam Machine into a portable form factor. A bit ugly and clearly some cut corners, but the price saved on no Windows license speaks for itself.
Because at least CPU-wise, the M SoCs blast a lot of the x86/64 competition to pieces. GPU is another story, although unified memory is inherently better than the current situation on x86/64.
Blame Apple for not implementing Vulkan on their GPUs. If they had a fully compliant Vulkan driver I'm sure gaming on Mac would be at parity with Linux very quickly.
MoltenVK is explicitly not enough for vkd3d-proton. It lacks features that are now mandatory for acceptable performance. So lack of native Vulkan there is surely a deal breaker.
From reading about dev effort to support Mac with DXVK, there are certain things Metal/MoltenVK doesn't support directly. So current compatibility requires more hacking as well as the additional layer of translation to hurt performance.
Metal is fine, Vulkan support as well would be ideal.
That is only a thing on i(Pad)OS. There's nothing to my knowledge preventing anyone from running their own app store on macOS - Steam purchases work fine, the entire Adobe suite does, as do Macports and Homebrew.
But Apple has proved that they will enforce their walled garden if and when they feel like it. Any company building a thriving profitable ecosystem inside Apple's walled garden is at risk of the owner of the garden starting to tax them.
It's a little like licensing Enterprise software from Oracle. You know they'll be looking for reasons to you sue you. You may be able to avoid it, but you know it's in their style.
It’s been many years since I was current on the state of cross platform gaming.
Is it possible that proton could become the de facto target platform?
That is, if a developer builds to ensure that their game works correctly under proton, then will it also work correctly under windows? So by just ensuring it works under proton, which seems to be minimal effort, do they get access to the expanded market for “free”?
Do any of the consoles support proton, so that the only barrier to releasing a game are the legal agreements?
Targeting Windows and Proton is already the status quo if you want the green tick on Steam, and apparently tens of thousands of game developers do because Valve promote Deck-compatible games heavily and that audience is more likely to spend money.
You can build a "Steam box" console with any Linux distribution and Steam's Big Picture mode. Autologon and start Steam in Big Picture mode on startup. I have this on Debian on a NUC, and there's a distro ChimeraOS which offers a polished pre-installed A/B update experience too.
Support for Proton doesn't imply full support on Windows out of the box, although it should be easier to fix problems on Windows than the other way around.
The thing is, currently, having a game built for Windows directly produces a much more performant game on Windows. Wine still has some hiccups here and there.
UWP is dead, and a lot of the people who were pushing that weirdly locked in platform have been pushed out of the company.
All future stuff is moving to WinUI 3.x (which belongs to the same family of C# XAML UI libraries, and Visual Studio has a wizard to help you turn your UWP app into a real C# app) and the Microsoft Store is no longer locked to UWP apps only and WinUI 3.x is officially supported on other non-CLR langs (such as calling it from C++ or Rust) and WinUI 3.x is coming to non-Windows platforms (such as Linux).
Microsoft isn't going to transform all their own apps overnight (for simple apps, updating a UWP app to a C# WinUI 3.x app buys you nothing), but will happen over time as WinUI 3.x-only features are added to those apps.
Microsoft set themselves on this path starting uh, like 5 years ago? They publicly announced it about 3 years ago.
Well, it's Microsoft, so every 5 years they release a new API/framework and declare the old one dead/obsolete. But they usually maintain backwards compatibility to their credit, and I almost never credit Microsoft with anything.
whatever was before MFC (I remember using a Charles Petzold book in 1997) --> MFC --> dotNet (many versions) --> XAML/WPF --> UWP
Notice how WinUI 3.x is the first thing named publicly named WinUI, but its already at 3? UWP is 2.x, Metro/WinRT/WPF is 1.x. They're all part of the same family of XAML UIs.
The part that got hard killed, and backwards support was absolutely 100% murdered was the Silverlight stuff, which was a XAML predecessor (and RIA runtime to compete with Flash/Air) written entirely in C#. For performance reasons, the WinRT/WPF->UWP->WinUI 3 branch of the family is largely WinRT-dialect C++.
So no, Microsoft actually hasn't abandoned the tech, they abandoned the dumb idea that all apps need to work on the Windows Phone (which no longer exists) and must be released on the Microsoft Store (which now allows apps in other languages), and everything has to be written in C# (which, again, is no longer forced on programmers), and everything needs to be Windows-only (Project Reunion aka MAUI brings both CLR and non-CLR WinUI apps to Linux).
Also, I'm not sure why you're branching WinUI family off from .net, as WinUI is the UI toolkit for CLR apps.
Proton is a remarkable accomplishment; I never believed it would have worked as well as it does. It helps that newer games are increasingly based on a couple of engines (Unity in particular) but its support for older games is also impressive.
Proton is the basis of Chromebook's experimental Steam games support. It works pretty well, as well as Proton itself as far as I can tell.
That is my next goal right right after I master NixOS! The learning curve is steep for nix itself and I know vfio is no walk in the park. I want to make sure if I'm doing complicated stuff like that, I can at least roll things back to a clean state if they break.
I followed this path too; it all worked, but the magic vfio incantations can change kernel to kernel, so there was always a fair bit of maintenance involved. I'd use Proton for 95% of my games, so whenever I had to fall back to vfio/Windows for a game for a while, everything would've changed. NixOS made this manageable, but it was never pleasant.
Have fun with the project; I'd be curious to know if (like me) you end up (sadly!) continuing to dual-boot for Windows only games. VFIO seemed like the dream end goal, and maybe it's gotten better since 2021, but for me at least, it got in the way more often than not.
I have rigged up a non-VFIO VM that boots off the same Windows partition though, so that I can log into it and run Windows updates once in a while without needing to do a full reboot.
I'll let you know. My priorities as far as "difficult things i desperately need to do" include better note-taking (org mode/roam) and learning enough about AI to put it to use. VFIO is definitely a dream but with dual booting it's also at the bottom of my list.
I've been running solely on Linux since something like 2015. I was primarily on Linux from ~2006 or so, but did switch to Windows for a couple of years to play some Windows games. (this was before Proton really existed)
I'm probably less technically savvy than a lot of the HN crowd, and I just have not ever had a significant problem running linux. For sure, I've avoided some problems by being picky about what PCs I buy. But for the most part it's been pretty pain free. Running Linux full-time has been effortless and easy. And thanks to Valve, gaming on Linux gets better every year. I played Elden Ring on launch, and on launch, it actually played better than PC.
To the extent that HN types have trouble with Linux, I can only imagine it's because they're doing _more_ on their PC than me. ie, they have some software or project that just needs to run a certain way. For sure, Linux isn't always perfect for that.
Linux is great for both the non-techie layman and the computer wiz. Those that complain are the majority on people you frequent on HN which know enough shell commands to be dangerous but couldn't unfuck a broken fstab.
Which is fine, mind you, just pointing out that most people that are NOT in tech would find Linux very usable, if not more usable than Windows.
It’s definitely better than “gnu+linux”, but Android is currently the most secure and usable linux distro hands down, and in my opinion it is just very sad that it is so hard to even run an android app on linux.
It makes for a very boring discussion (and makes this a boring comment) to recall some random person who ranted in a way that didn't age well. If you're going to make that point, at least link to the thread to allow reading some interesting comments there instead.
If your memory is about [1], which is the first main topic on Proton, the criticism seems quite muted (and otherwise downvoted).
It was a safe prediction to make. Even SEGA couldn't do a console anymore, Linux was behind MacOS in games support, all app developer companies whined about Linux being unsupportable and no market. "The year of the Linux desktop"
was a recurring joke (still is with the GNOME / Unity churn, Wayland switchover, snaps breaking how GUI apps interact with a filesystem, and the usual perpetual churn for churn's sake making system support and OS upgrades a crapshoot).
I never particularly doubted Linux working for gaming, but I'm not sure if a compatibility layer to the actual dominant platform is really the long term win to celebrate here. Great for customers, but a ticking time bomb for the FOSS crowd (aside from Steam being proprietary ofc. More talking about the Microsoft dependency).
to be fair, CSGO was a failure for the first few years of its existence. so it's likely you're remembering it best from around 2016.
all I know is that I have the operation payback challenge coin, but no real memory of those maps. i do wish they'd bring back some of the operation maps... (santorini anyone?)
As it happens, I was an early adopter. I have my 10-year badge just from CSGO. I was SMFC in ~2013 (it was easy at that point in time, I get destroyed now).
The game has changed a lot. The original version of CSGO wasn't even made by Valve Software. But every map in the Active pool is either a totally new map, or is an old one that's been re-built from the ground up.
And I have a few skins and a bunch of cases left over from back then. They were worth $0.03 each back then. But the game has grown 500x so demand has increased while the cases actually reduce in supply over time...
Most of the pros stuck with 1.6 instead of moving to Source (and most existing tournaments stuck on 1.6 - although notably CGS went with CS:S). In Source the movement was clunky, the sound system was awful, and the shooting & spray felt bad. The overall physics was just very strange, it felt like you were walking in honey - although did get better (a long time later).
Almost a year before CSGO official launch there was a showmatch for it and it looked awful. A bunch of small things were improved by the launch, but it was not good at all (look back at 2012 CS:GO footage and you'll be shocked). Sound was inaccurate and inconsistent, molotovs and smokes were glitchy, wallbangs didn't work in a sane manner ... it was pretty atrocious. That said, 1.6 was basically ancient and Valve (who didn't develop the game) pushed for CS:GO to be used in competitions, so it was used. Over time it was increasingly improved and there was an influx of existing (1.6 & CS:S) pro players towards the end of 2012 and early 2013; and an explosion towards the end of 2013. CS:GO came out in August 2012, but only crossed over the 100k concurrent player mark (which is the all-time CS:Source record) in ~ December 2013.
Skin betting became rampant on CS:GO after the August 2013 Arms Deal update, with sites like CSGOLounge having absolutely huge overall parimutuel pots on basically ever game. This pushed up the popularity of the game - even a small local tournament could have 10k viewers if the game was listed on CSGOLounge [and the bigger matches had millions on the line].
Eventually, years later, CS:GO was improved to the point where it could stand alone without propping up by the skin gambling - and since then it's grown much further; but in reality both CSGO and CS:S had very similar and buggy first few years.
On the topic of GE, anyone try his custom Fedora distro, Nobara[1] and has any feedback on it?
Is it daily-drivable on a laptop without any issues, and stable long term without any breakages? Not just for gaming, but for daily entertainment and productivity task of those with one distro for everything?
I tried installing it a while back and found the default installer partitioning much more janky and messed up GRUB making my system unbootable, unlike other "Just Works™" distros like Ubuntu, EndevourOS or Mint where they worked flawless on multi-boot systems.
I'm not knocking it, I can imagine it's tough for a single developer to do all that and test everything, it would just be cool to know if it's gotten some polish now and how stable it is to daily drive.
>i see no reason to use it. making fedora do what it does is easy enough
Yes, people working in tech and with free time can do that, but many don't want to go down that rabbit hole anymore and fiddle with their OS to get it to where Nobara is, and would rather go for something that's already preconfigured out of the box for the best gaming experience where everything is already set and you can immediately start installing and playing games after installing the OS, similarly to Windows is. That's the whole point of these distros.
Then they should be using a simpler distro like mint because an install script doesn't change the fact that it's still Fedora which doesn't target new users.
I run winesapOS[0] which is based on SteamOS and was able to repurpose an old Toshiba notebook for my kids, running Freddy Fish* and other games. Windows 10 doesn't run smoothly (even though it came with Windows 10) and I'm not going to run anything older than that.
Steam also makes it very easy to switch between Proton versions. If version X doesn't work, perhaps version X-1 or X+1 does work, or even the experimental version.
* Yes, ScummVM is available for Linux but the Steam Linux distribution included an old ScummVM which wasn't able to load some libraries. Running the Windows version through an compatibility layer was easier than modifying shell files to run the latest ScummVM through flatpak.
Proton was the missing piece to Linux gaming/desktop. It’s also a vital part of steam deck. Maybe someday we’ll get a standard rendering pipeline :/ /s.
Just went and checked, out of my top 20 games only flight simulator and space engineers do not work. I had completely missed that proton has come so far...I think this means I can finally truly ditch windows on my game/virtualisation machine
I don't know how common it is, but the AI War developers posted recently about their new game & said Steam recommended they drop their Linux port, saying that just relying on Proton would be better performing & a better use of time.
I'm very curious how widespread this advice is. It's a little sad & ironic to me if Proton is now entrenching Windows as the only target platform. I'm hoping this wasn't blanket advice Valve is handing out but really something specific to the team.
>Steam recommended they drop their Linux port, saying that just relying on Proton would be better performing & a better use of time. I'm very curious how widespread this advice is. It's a little sad & ironic to me if Proton is now entrenching Windows as the only target platform.
Very. Win32 ABI is the most stable and rock solid compared to the messy moving target of the Linux world, so recommending it is not entrenching Windows, just very good advice to save time and resources to target a platform that's alredy known and stable, and since the target is fixed and well known, it makes it also very easy to emulate on their end for Linux.
As much as FOSS-Linux evangelists hate it, Win32 emulated on Linux is better for everyone, than tryin to port games natively on Linux, and makes the most business sense of you want the same games on Linux.
It will be interesting to see if the Win32 ABI survives as a standard into the future beyond the point that Windows itself will continue to run it in in the same sense that commodity PCs are still based on the IBM PC architecture even years after IBM itself stopped making PCs.
Is it still called win32 nowadays? Because that name has existed for a very long time now, and early win32 stuff doesn't even run on windows without sysWOW64 stuff. I'm sure some versioning more granular than windows version names exists, but the extent of my windows knowledge is occasionally reading newoldthing.
The other technical solution to this problem is flatpak (and the others in this space). They vendor the libs (including libc) so you avoid the linking issues.
In the gaming world where steam installs apps itself and you need the Windows version for commercial viability anyways, it does make sense to push them to win32.
Outside of gaming though, I don't really see this being the case. You random desktop apps are better off with flatpak and distros like Fedora are already moving everything that direction. Flathub also has the benefit of allowing devs to push to one repo and support multiple distros (again, like Steam).
That's bullshit, for game developers there shouldn't be any "messy moving target" outside of the Steam Linux Runtime[1], which is pretty much rock solid.
Valve and others have explained it already why in general terms that apply to all games on the native vs emulated situation, no need to go into the pedantic details of one specific game.
as a framework author and C++ coder, the code base structure is not "excessively concerned with minor details and rules or with displaying academic learning." -- certainly not for you in any case, by your own statement
No need to be snarky and flash your coding street cred to make yourself big and make me look dumb.
I'm not the smartest tool in the shed, but I was not trying to be snarky and undermine your superiority or downplay your question, I was just saying it doesn't matter as the end goal is to get Windows games playable on Linux, and for that Proton emulation is the way that makes sense financially and practically for both developers and gamers, so no need to dive into the codebases and compare them, just to prove a point that's moot from the get-go.
>Win32 ABI is the most stable and rock solid compared to the messy moving target of the Linux world,
Blatant lie bordering on disinformation.
The only reason it is a "stable ABI" is that every dev of every windows program bundles every library with their program. You could do the same thing on Linux and the stability "story" would be exactly the same, or in fact even better on Linux because Win32 isnt actually stable and the Linux system call ABI is.
And? All of the shared objects you bundle on Linux will eventually call system calls to do anything.
What does "no they don't" mean? People absolutely do bundle all their dependencies on Windows that aren't part of the stable platform guaranteed to be around forever.
On Linux the part of the stable platform guaranteed to be around forever the system call ABI.
I don't know what you are even trying to say at this point. Could you explain what you mean in more detail? I'll explain where I'm coming from.
If you bundle DLLs with your program then you have a stable ABI automatically, because it's constant: something you bundle will never change its ABI, because it won't change in any way, because it's bundled. It's constant. Windows developers bundle all their dependencies with their programs. The result is that they don't have issues with their programs not working because the libraries they depend on have changed since they released the program. They might as well be statically linked.
There is nothing Windows-specific about doing this. You can statically link libraries on Linux and you can dynamically link to libraries that you bundle with your program. There's nothing stopping you from doing exactly the same thing that people do on Windows, and it will be just as stable.
The difference between the platforms is that Windows people do this and Linux people don't, I think mostly because they don't properly understand what a platform is in the Linux world. "Linux" as a platform is the kernel, and nothing else. You can't rely on any userspace libraries existing, not even libc. Or you could target glibc+Linux. That's a different platform, where you can assume that libpthread.so, libm.so, libdl.so and libc.so all exist, and some others. But you can't assume GTK+ will exist. Or you can target a particular distribution at a particular version. Then you are reliant on the particular distribution's stability guarantees. You can't expect it to run elsewhere, but you get access to a much wider array of libraries that you can expect to exist (by making non-base libraries dependencies of your RPM).
In all cases, ABI stability (the ability to update dependencies without rebuilding) is a property of the platform you target. To rely on a stable ABI, everything you target needs to provide that ABI stability. If you target a distribution like RedHat Enterprise Linux, then you get 10 years of ABI stability guaranteed. If you target Arch Linux, you don't: as far I understand, every package that depends on a library is expected to be rebuilt when the library is updated, if necessary. If you target Linux itself, or glibc + Linux, then you get ABI stability forever, and they go to extremes to give you that. But in turn you need to bundle any dependencies yourself, by whatever means you like. That doesn't mean you can't update those bundled dependencies when you update the program, of course.
Proton leads to some bizarre behaviors though. My worst experience is on a surplus "mobile workstation" with Optimus graphics. It has a pretty robust Intel quad-core and one of their better iGPUs as well as an NVIDIA Quadro M5000M which has decent VRAM and should compare almost to a GTX 1650.
The packages pulled in by steam define a bunch of vulkan providers which then confuses steam. Many games won't even launch and you have to manually kill off a bunch of steam worker processes to even successfully shutdown and restart steam. You can't uninstall the package due to dependencies, so instead have to manually move/rename some files under /usr/share/vulkan/icd.d/ to only leave the one for NVIDIA.
Then, games launch but have very inconsistent performance. I don't know if this is because Optimus is competing with the game for PCIe bandwidth, or something else still going awry with the driver stack.
Arguably, WINE has always been the most stable ABI on Linux. Good luck just getting a 5-year-old binary of any desktop file manager running on a modern Linux installation.
I’m dead serious. Grab a copy of Nautilus or GNOME Files from Ubuntu 16.04; try running it on Ubuntu 22.04. It isn’t easy. Now imagine a game.
This is only because of the nature of dynamic linking. Have a statically linked executable and you should be fine. Not that it should be an issue to get old software to run you simply need to download the dependent lib versions.
Anyone who sais this i feel hasnt worked very much with software, not that you should need to thats up to the one distributing the executable
What you mean is: the only stable ABI in Linux is the Linux kernel’s itself.
Windows is the opposite: the only stable ABI is the dynamically linked user space ABI. So yes, it’s perfectly possible to have a stable dynamic ABI across a dynamically linked boundary.
That is completely irrelevant to the discussion. The point is that both systems have very stable ABIs. Windows has a somewhat higher-level stable ABI, but as a result it is a much wider surface to keep compatible, it breaks much more often, it requires a lot more hacks to keep it stable over time (program-specific hacks kept around for decades), etc.
This is the point of difference: the layer at which each is stable. NOT whether Linux is stable.
The nature of stability literally is the discussion; I replied to a post that blamed the lack of a Linux equivalent to Win32 on dynamic linking. That the stable ABI you get on Linux requires you to bundle literally every dependency you have as if distros don't exist... And then still have issues because the kernel ABIs for graphics are entirely GPU dependent...
The two approaches are definitively not the same (as you claim), and the significant shortcomings of Linux's approach are why Win32 is becoming the ABI devs target even on Linux.
>That the stable ABI you get on Linux requires you to bundle literally every dependency you have as if distros don't exist...
This is not true. If your target platform is a distribution then you can assume that distribution's guarantees hold true.
What you cannot do is target "GNU/Linux" broadly and assume every glibc-based system running on top of the Linux kernel has all the libraries you want to depend on.
Pick a platform and target it. That can be the kernel. That can be glibc+the kernel (hey look GNU/Linux really is useful terminology), that can be RHEL9 or it can be Debian xyz. But don't pick "Linux" then make assumptions about userspace.
Your example doesn't make sense. Linux distributions have always had this trade off: Binaries provided through the package manager work with the libraries that are provided by the same package manager. I have a bunch of older gog or Humble Bundle Linux releases of games that still work fine on my system because (Windows style) they carry around all of their libraries with them. Linking Xorg doesn't make sense and applications linked statically against libX11 will work perfectly fine even with Xwayland.
https://www.x.org/wiki/Releases/https://www.gtk.org/docs/installations/linux/
I mean it will probably not be painless and other applications u run might break* but xorg is relativly stable.
Liba are out there are free to get. Usually people are arguing that the conveniences isnt there not that its not possible.
* if u dont sandbox this a bit with custom lib paths
What I am disputing is how this comes off to a game developer; 5 years from now, heck, 2 years from now when their games require library surgery to keep running... that’s just an awful experience.
That is not what a developer would consider a stable ABI. They could look into Flatpak - but look at what’s trending on Hacker News today - a rant against Flatpak.
Win32 over Proton is the winner for them; all other proposed solutions are hilariously naive and optimistic to what game development requires. No game developer is ever going to individually package, and consistently repackage, their game for 20 distributions. That’s never going to happen.
Well u sure made an effort to exclaim how hard it would be. If a developer had an install guide with links to dependencies or mirrors to those dependencies it wouldnt be very hard as they should have internally for their dev/ testing. Do windows devs not track their dependencies? Relying only on Win32 ? Whos the naive one ?
my memory might be wrong but I had issues with native linux games that had level editor based on GTK and python, could not get them to run after 3 years since launch, I do not claim it is impossible just that I could not do it with some a few hours effort.
Do you want more games to be played on Linux or not? Because we've been trying the whole "please target native Linux" thing for awhile now and it simply isn't appealing enough to ever work.
“on Windows” is no longer a worthwhile phrase when it simply means “targeting a Linux/Windows shared compatibility ABI”.
There are more functioning games on Linux than I ever would have thought possible because of this (very difficult and certainly open source) work that’s been done by Wine, Proton, Valve and many many more. But of course, someone has to find a way to discourage all of that because it isn’t pure enough or whatever.
Seems a pretty obvious way to preserve value-add in the face of competing game services. GOG and so forth don't have Proton, so the simplest moat to build is to curtail native Linux development and protect Proton's status as the "default" approach to getting games running there.
Unfortunately, GOG seems to have mostly given up on Linux and often doesn't provide available Linux builds (I think there may have been one main employee who pushed for better Linux support who left years ago). There is at least one "Proton without Steam" build that I haven't tried:
Personally, I've been using Windows fully offline with GOG games, although I'd like to some day try putting together a Linux based offline game console (or maybe NetBSD based if Wine is sufficient).
Repeating this FUD meme over and over again does not make it true. Yes we get it. You read an upvoted HN comment once that said "Windows API is the stable Linux ABI now" and know you can get upvoted if you just repeat it. But it is simply false.
Game developers have stated that the support requests they get for Linux outweighs the revenue they get from supporting it. There are so many distros with different packages/dependencies, drivers, package managers etc. that it's very time consuming to keep up and not worth it.
I recall seeing similar with major caveats, though. The general "make linux support and they will come" crowd is clearly too big to be meaningful. That said, there was a story of someone that had a bug cut from a linux user that commented how it was one of their best support cases ever. User was engaged and willing/able to work with them in ways that few support cases are.
As such, this is a mixed bag. Actual users that cut support issues from random machines will be worth trying to engage with. General cries that you should support it with no payment in play should likely be ignored, though.
Steam has provided their own container runtime for quite some time, so the packaging and dpendendies are a lot of a problem if you only distribute on steam.
I still prefer they go with the proton approach though.
I mean that's what Apple has done with "Game Porting Kit" - valve has pushed "windows is the platform" to such an extent that no one even tries to write portable code for games and just targets directx.
GP isn't saying that Linux is faster than Windows; they are saying that a Windows app running under Proton under Linux is faster than a native Linux app running under Linux.
I highly recommend tweaking things like Proton versions (try GloriousEggroll for example). I've been playing OW and OW2 on Linux for years, had very few issues since the beginning and excellent framerates.
I have a notebook (Nvidia 10xx something gpu), 8th gen intel I think. It gets plenty warm playing games, but the games play fine on PopOS. The fact that they run is pretty great.
But I think of the steam deck which is basically a Linux PC. Its lowerer spec, low power, but it seems to run pretty well without terrible battery life.
Well this is a topical place to ask this tangent I suppose. My GPU is on the fritz and I'm looking to replace it. Has anyone gotten SteamVR working decently under Linux through Proton? If so, what GPU do you have? It's basically impossible to search for information on this, but I really want to develop for VR, and I'd like to not have to boot into Windows to do it
I'd love to go Linux full-time on my gaming machine, but for now VR (Beat Saber, primarily) is keeping me tethered to Windows. It's no fault of Valve's, though… the blame falls entirely on Facebook for insisting on their proprietary Oculus client, not supporting Linux with that client, and not doing anything to make that client work with Proton/WINE.
My best workstation runs Linux for work, so I've spent time getting 'odd' setups like Centos 7 to work before there were nice packages for it. Learned a bit trying to game on my good video card without booting to Windows. Fast forward to current, and I don't even bother with a Windows partition on it.
Today, Ubuntu sorts the drivers and steam setup just lovely. I've gifted out old workstations to extended family and they are pretty happy with what they can do from a gaming/browsing perspective. With Windows 11 not able to support these boxes, having something 'just work' gives these older boxes an extended life. Most have not needed to pick up a Windows license. Very much at that 'good enough' state.
Sometimes is just hard to believe, that you can open Steam, buy almost any game and play it right away without any issues or additional tinkering, on Linux.
It depends more on the game at hand - proton, the tech itself is absolutely amazing and can sometimes run windows apps faster than they would run on windows itself. But video drivers have glitches, strange use cases, etc, so certain games may require extensive tweaking, or even more rarely won’t work even with that.
Steam makes most of the configuration seamless, though.
I direct newbies to Kubuntu; I've never had anyone struggle with using it - modern KDE is an incredibly intuitive experience - and any tech support is easy as they're pretty much on stock Ubuntu.
Honestly I think a lot of newbie gripes about "Linux" are just gripes about Gnome, sometimes quite justified ones.
not a productive comment to call someone deluded without at least explaining why. The UX does seem like a significant hurdle to maintream adoption to me.
Does it really require an explanation? All you have to do is observe that literally everyone besides a few free software zealots use "non-free" operating systems. What company is developing consumer linux computers for retail sale? If someone even wanted to buy one they would have to really look. There are many unknowns about what programs will run on linux. Will a buyer encounter a situation where they are literally blocked from doing what they need to do because they are using a fringe operating system? There are a million services that have integrations into these operating systems that would go out the window with linux. And this doesn't even begin touch the entire ecosystem of enterprise device management. But yeah maybe it's the UX. Just a couple more polished features in GNOME and then Walmart will roll out an entire fleet of new linux computers for their financial department! And grandma will finally switch over to that sweet FOSS laptop! And genz will drop their nice macbook pros and get on a nice fedora laptop! Just one more UX release.
