Gaming on Linux:

Linux doesn't have many games..
Why? Because the market share is small.. But why is that? Because Linux doesn't have many games. FUCK

The Linux community has never wanted market share on desktop, wallowed in smugness and was happy to keep average users out. That a good market share would have meant proper hardware support and games has proven too complicated a connection for large parts of the Linux community to grasp.

No, it's because since time immemorial games could monopolize resources on win and perform better. Linux had full multitasking.

Gog and steam both have linux stuff

Havent we solved that with the proton compability layer? At least to break the vicous cycle?

https://www.protondb.com/

I can confirm that Proton works pretty well and combined with a number of games going native Linux, it's actually pretty good right now.

This has been discussed over and over again. Lets get real, linux in general was completely garbage on desktop until 5-6 years ago. Its main purpose is to host servers, then completely different projects handled design part.

Linux in desktop is still immature, no matter how you look at it. Desktop is nothing without decent desktop environment and UI/UX.

Either give it much more time to be way more stable, or wait for a company to release a single, probably not open source and stable OS running linux with decent support.

@illegaldisease Still immature?! I'm sorry but I've worked with at least 5 very stable desktop environments so could you define immature?

@illegaldisease im back linuxxx on this. Immature no alot of desktop ui stuff is ripped right out of linux and put on windows and macosx if anyone is immature its the thiefs.

@RememberMe yeah! Proton works really well! Time to fire up my steam machine again! :)

@skprog its still absolutly unusable for any non technical user. As soon as you have to open a command prompt people flock back to their macs and pcs.

@EdoPhoenix All respect but bullshit.
Source: parents + sister + friends (all a-technical as fuck) who successfully halve ran Linux for the past 8 years.

You don't HAVE to use the CLI!

@EdoPhoenix KDE Neon, Cinnamon, Unity, Gnome and more like those all make it very use friendly!

Yes, I'm a server engineer myself so I always have shit tons of terminals open but boy do I love eye candy and a stable desktop; migrated to KDE Plasma a year ago and still not looking back.

@EdoPhoenix there are distros such as Mint which don't require you to know what a terminal is. You can easily have an experience close to Windows or Mac.

@linuxxx darn it, I got ninja'd :P

@Frederikam @EdoPhoenix Fun fact is that my sister booted into windows recently (I setup dual boot for her when she got her laptop (Ubuntu and windows)) for the first time in ages and she had a really fucking hard time to work with it xD

Well, if you build it, they will come. Go out, make a kick-ass Linux game, and then people will be able to say, "hey, if you get Linux you can play Mass of Duty: Judgement Day" or whatever

And this is why proton is a step in the correct direction. first remove the "i can't use linux for games" argument (at least in parts), then native support will come.

The main reason linux has no game support... is that most game studios can not support the ever occuring API breakage.

If u want to get information about this, see at one possible solution made by collabora:

https://git.collabora.com/cgit/...

And no. The gaming studios are not the bad guys. There are no Bad Guys here.

Windows e.g. still has 254 char path restriction... And a lot of the flaws of windows like this one date back to DOS and good old 16 bit... For the sake of compatibility.

As for all Linux problems, the answer is pretty simple: code it yourself! Complete freedom. That's the whole point!

Want a 3D shooter? There's plenty of game enginers for that. Well, not really, but you can code your own engine!

Want a car? Just get the latest Debian, melt some rubber for wheels, weld a chassis and build an engine. Linux has it all! Yee!

Market share is small .. on desktop. Where Linux runs well, but due to Microsoft's grasp on hardware vendors, it's their OS that gets preinstalled. And what user would change operating systems from something that "already just works"?

@Fast-Nop The Linux community has got everything but the desktop market. Preinstalls rather than smugness is the reason for that. But you are right in that many Linux users would rather not see the general public use an operating system that - unlike Windows or MacOS - requires you to think twice before executing something, because the system will happily kill itself when asked to (rm -rf /*). There are no failsafes, and I don't think that users can deal with that anymore. It's an industrial operating system that requires a proper operator.

That said, Linux distributions have evolved significantly. In Ubuntu or Manjaro for example, nothing requires an average user to ever leave the comfort of a GUI. As for market share for hardware development, don't you think that the majority of internet servers, embedded systems (like routers etc), smartphones, and whathaveyou are sufficient? The only issues with hardware that I've faced so far in Linux is GPU hybrids, some wireless cards and printers. For all of which there are excellent manpages that are the result of one time work for many to see, rather than one-on-one real-time support which apparently the average n00b on Facebook seems to expect. The desire to not do things twice or more is smugness nowadays?

@illegaldisease immature design-wise? 5-6 years ago that was definitely the case, and in many distributions' stock desktops still is. But there are customization options out there, and there are many distribution maintainers that have caught on to it. Manjaro for example now has a nice flat icon theme, and if memory serves me right, Mint does have a modern design too. Things can change a lot in a couple of years!

As for me, I'm running the Paper icon pack and theme here.

@linuxxx Yes. I am talking about stability, nothing else. Hardware support and overall experience is way ahead of windows/macos. Installation of stuff is 10x easier on Linux in general.

But since the UI part lacks stability, not to mention ease of access for absolute end users, i dont think it is completely stable.

Don't get me wrong. Just like you, this year is my 7th year on Linux ( mostly used KDE ), so i experienced its evolution fisthand. We keep using it despite of constant xorg crashes, weird bugs and lack of hybrid graphics support out of the box, because we love fixing problems. Absolute end users just want it to work immediately.

Whenever i encouraged absolute end users to use it ( some of them are software engineers, but i still consider them as the same as "only surfs on internet" people ),

The second thing they did was to uninstall their Ubuntu. Their reasoning mostly contained crashes and lack of graphic cards support. Nobody mentioned "confusing UX, bad design". They actually liked it, but left anyways. This is what i mean by stability.

@Condor I totally agree with you, but non-technical people ( absolute end users ) don't.

They dont want to have anything bucustom. They will just consume what you give them, while we literally build our desktop at terminal.

By the way, MATE looks very similar to KDE, i like it. Colors are too dim but looks cool. Could give it a try sometime :)

@illegaldisease very true, considering that stock experiences are also at the root of what made Linux not take off on the desktop. Distribution maintainers should really take the stock design more seriously.

Mate is a spin of Gnome2, so yeah in terms of UX it's similar to Xfce and KDE etc. Much easier on RAM and GPU though, something which on this legacy business laptop is quite a premium (but its keyboard is.. gorgeous. It's one of those real desktop keyboards, jammed into a laptop design :D). And on my previous laptop with 8GB RAM I rarely exceeded 2GB anyway, often leaving plenty of room for a nice tmpfs for blazing fast storage :3 so it's not like I really need much in this configuration anyway.

@illegaldisease I guess that's bad experience from your side as I haven't had any UI instability issues yet (many systems, many distro's and many graphics cards).

Just got the Visiontek Radeon 7750 working flawlessly with my system on 4 simultaneous monitors (upgrading to 6 soon, just waiting for additional hardware), KDE Neon.

Not sure how relevant the idea of not many games run on linux anymore, at least when using steam there are around 5,400 (I made sure to only tick games and not dc lol) games that have linux support.

It might be one big company but at least they are trying their best to get compatibility for linux (and shifting away from windows in the process) and I think with this other companiea might follow since if they don't they'll lose competition.

@Condor rm -rf /* requires sudo on quite some distros these days.

But Linux GUIs tend to suck because they are all too often just CLI wrappers that map CLI options on graphical elements and came as afterthought. This development process is downright wrong.

Manpages for wireless cards and printers? How about just working?

Oh and the package manager where you either need a new OS with ever new bugs and workarounds every two years, or you get that continuously with rolling release, or you sit on LTS with also outdated applications.

Embedded market share? That's devices where the end user never comes into direct contact with Linux and that don't contribute anything to desktop or gaming. Plus the main advantage of Linux for embedded is just "no royalties", so it's cheap if you need pretty big embedded hardware anyway.

@Fast-Nop Quite some distro's?! It literally deletes the entire system including the root folder, so yes, root very much required ;P

@linuxxx lol yeah totally right! I mixed that up with "rm -rf *.*" which used to boil down to the same. Can't remember where I've seen that, and of course I didn't want to run exhaustive tests, but some distros catch that before the damage happens.