Steam on Linux Use Skyrocketed Above 5% in March
phoronix.com781 points by hkmaxpro 4 days ago
781 points by hkmaxpro 4 days ago
I've probably said this a bunch of times already, but based on my past experience, any analysis built on month-to-month changes in the Steam Hardware Survey should be taken with a very large grain of salt, if not considered outright useless for any serious conclusions.
The clue is already in the article itself. The author notes that "part of the jump at least appears to be explained by Valve correcting again the Steam China numbers." If you actually think about what that implies, it raises more questions than answers. A 31.85% monthly drop is obviously not organic, so yes, it makes sense to call it a "correction." But then why was the previous month's data so far off in the first place? Is there something fundamentally flawed in the survey methodology, like sampling bias, non-uniform distribution, regional skew, or something else?
And if this kind of correction happens this month, what's stopping it from happening in previous months? The reality is: it does happen all the time. You can usually spot at least one clearly unrealistic data point in almost every release.
At that point, it's hard to argue there's any real value in trying to analyze these results in a rigorous way.
The explanation I've heard is simply: Chinese New Years happened, which means a lot more Chinese gamers are online in February during the week long national holiday.
It happened in last year's March stats too: https://web.archive.org/web/20250404061527/https://store.ste... -25%
How does a Jan/Feb holiday affect this year’s March number (that was reported in early April)?
I’m not talking about the Feb number that is reported in March.
The number being discussed is not March alone, but the percent change. So March's number relative to February's number.
A holiday that warps numbers in February will no longer be warping things in March.
Of the publicly available sources I think CloudFlares Radar is one of the better ones. Silver linings of having such wide dragnet on the internet. It puts Linux market share at 3-4%, with some regional variance
https://radar.cloudflare.com/explorer?dataSet=http&groupBy=o...
Fun tidbits, Finland is at ~10% (!), and Germany at 6.3%.
This was probably a lot more true in the past but Linux users tend to be more privacy conscious and do things like spoof their user agent, so this is almost certainly an undercount. You basically used to have to do this to browse the web before Firefox became one of the dominant browsers.
I don't know anyone who goes through the trouble to spoof their user agent and I know plenty Linux users.
Unfortunately I have to use some government websites which refuse to work when my user agent contains "Linux x86_64". So I just always spoof it.
This is the reality - most people won't spoof until they figure out it's the way to make a specific site work; and then they'll likely spoof for everything.
I'd also like to add that we forget that we're doing it, or at least I do. Once you set something up like that, there's never any reason to get rid of it; nobody is positively discriminating towards Linux.
I love when a ruleset (firewall, for example) has a "comments" field because I inevitably forget why I added something and then Chesterton's fence means I leave it forever, lest I spend hours a year later wondering why something broke.
Every time I try to change my user agent with a FF extension I get hit with brutal cloudflare captcha loops. How are you changing your user agent in a way that this is not a problem?
The archwiki Firefox privacy guide comes to mind, which mentions UA spoofing:
Actual reason: SBC retro handheld consoles now run Linux and people are using them to play steam indie games. The China holiday had some blow out pricing.
Non primary devices more likely to run Linux. Primary still windows.
Tons of people did and do this to get higher resolution on a certain streaming site.
Privacy minded Linux users probably also know, spoofing your user agent is likely to increase fingerprint entropy and actually decreases privacy. It may have been true in the past, but I don't think anyone even recommends it anymore.
There's still plenty of web sites that check the OS and if it's not Mac OS, Windows, or Andoid it's no service for you. Faking your UA is not always about privacy, it's about defeating stupidity.
You should only do this on websites that actually require it otherwise you're almost certainly going to cause more problems than you'll solve.
Messing with the UA header is going to get you flagged by every bot detection tool because when you change your header from "Firefox on Linux" to "Chrome on Windows" your fingerprints don't add up anymore and you look exactly like a poorly written bot. You're likely going to see more captchas, you might get blocked or rate limited more often, and get placed under increased scrutiny, orders held for verification, silently filtered or shadow banned, etc.
Browser yes, but OS? Rarely, I have issues with Firefox, but never had Chromium not working, too.
It any case, it would be silly to assume services measuring OS popularity would put up such limitations. And more likely than not, people are changing their UA as a work-around on a case-by-case basis than make it a default, since that's gonna cause trouble.
In the last decade, the only time, I actually had to touch the UA is when breaking ToS with curl :D
The only websites that really do this anymore are ones that are delivering native code for those platforms or those that require DRM that only work on those platforms.
Even when that is the case (what is a minority of the time), just because I'm using Linux, it doesn't mean that I don't want to download some Windows software.
But well, I haven't had to spoof my browser's UA for a few years. If some site refuses it, I'll just move on. (Including some that started doing it after I brought thousands of dollars worth of stuff from them.)
I'm sure there are some, but having used Linux for 32 years, it's been at least 20 years since I needed to do that.
Actually that sounds like exactly the sort of nuanced reality that “privacy-conscious Linux users” aren’t that likely to know at all.
The EFF's "Panopticlick" paper was published in 2010 [1], together with Firefox/Tor research that knowledge became mainstream. Therefore privacy guides don't recommend it. The Arch wiki linked above has this warning in bright red:
> "Changing the user agent without changing to a corresponding platform will make your browser nearly unique."
Sorry, I am not sure, if arguing about nuanced reality is the battleground, where I see you thriving.
[1] https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/ (browser test since 2014)
If you spoof user agent, you will get more captchas because it won't match their other fingerprinting.
You also get more captchas because you are on Linux, I see the Cloudflare one on my computer everytime.
Used to be worse. Something happened in the last year and I'm seeing way way less random captchas for regular use from a residential IP. In '22-'24 it used to be extremely common, now it's an event when it happens. Also went from mint to plain ubuntu so that might have something to do with it?
It's a good thing too, because when I see the Cloudflare captcha I try it once and if that doesn't work then I just close the tab and add it to the list of non-functioning websites.
Cloudflare captcha = infinite loop of captchas (if it doesn't work on the first try). You can give up the moment that happens, because you will never get to the website itself.
Overall agreed. I think a more interesting look at this is the tracker which GamingOnLinux keeps (not yet updated with the new numbers as of writing), where they also have one graph that shows usage among only English speaking users. Overall it is trending upwards, and English Linux Steam users are approaching 9%.
Yes, this is the key. You can account for anomalies such as Lunar New year, do rolling averages and other statistical modelling to show trends.
Saying that one source of data should be discarded because it contains nuance is.. a take.
The key word in the article is "again"
'Valve correcting again the Steam China numbers.'
This seemingly is a common problem with the Steam Hardware Report, with Chinese users being erroneously represented. It constantly gets fixed, although takes a bit. It could be the hardware surveys are sent out at a different time compared to the rest of the world, then combined in the following month.
This is proven by "Ended 2025 at around a 3.5% marketshare, dipped a bit in January, and fell to 2.23% in February."
The other aspect I find interesting is the February spike in win10 usage, presumably from Chinese users. Where will they migrate to over the coming years as support goes away. They seem to be both resisting win11 and resisting linux perhaps as either it's not suitable for the games (online?) they play or not great for Chinese users, or perhaps along with the nvidia spike because of getting more out of those GPUs on windows.
It's because of the Chinese user influx during their holiday season. Valve is not correcting anything they are just showing the data. As usual, Phoronix is misinterpreting what they're looking at.
It's about oversampling. Due how the survey is sent, a massive influx of machines coming online all at once will be more likely to trigger the survey. They know the general composition of their users, so they need the survey to be around the ballpark of that.
They are still only reporting the data they see. They are not correcting or manipulating the data like phoronix implies in their article.
unpopular opinion: this can be explained by the social and monetary economics of the gaming ecosystem as a whole.
- Microsoft has worked tirelessly to make the windows compute experience an evermore intrusive and soul crushing experience for the average gamer. artificially outmoded hardware at a time of GPU scarcity means consumers cant comply with redmonds increasingly arbitrary hardware edicts even if they wanted to. at the same time, linux has become ever easier to install and use as an alternative. there is likely an inflection point for a lot of gamers that are just looking to access their library.
- console gaming has become hideously overpriced. madatory tie-ins with playstation network, high costs for all consoles, and the potential for the console stocks to simply not be available at time of release make for a frictional and frustrating experience. Microslop is embracing the same playstation style enshittification that routinely brings sony to its knees. neither juggernaut seems genuinely interested in the end user with the exception of Nintendo, whos quality control issues and pricing as well with switch hardware make it a nonstarter for anyone but the most diehard zelda fan.
- steam + linux offers a largely seamless experience for the casual gamer. steam sales are fun and engaging. the community is generally well rounded. gabe newell is generally well respected by gamers and visibly interested in gaming and the community. Valve has contributed significantly to Linux since their push to obliterate the Windows store and shows no sign of retreat anytime soon. Steam + Linux is free and works with your existing hardware in a time of high prices, inflation, and scarcity in the western world.
This time it's different.
Linux was already stable enough 10 years ago as daily driver, i used Arch.
everything worked just fine, i remember only having issue with graphic drivers and glitches
I never really wanted anything more from it but when i moved to Mac, i saw how it prevents me from opening apps i downloaded from trusted site and every now and then i need to set xattr to open the files, and go through bunch of lockdowns.
Now freecad has improved so much, with all AI coding and all opensource will improve DRASTICALLY and very fast.
using AI which stole everyone's code to develop OpenSource is morally right thing to do vs using it at private companies. It will attract more devs.
> any analysis built on month-to-month changes […] should be taken with a very large grain of salt
Agreed.
January and February are school vacations in South America. The whole month. Kids have a lot more free hours to tinker and play video games. That might not be the cause of the spike in this particular case, but there's probably dozens of similar random facts that can affect statistics on any month in unexpected ways.
Agree the numbers are not set in stone, but there is absolutely no denying that the Linux userbase has increased.
Proton's updates is a game changer, Windows 11's absolutely garbage buggy slop is frustrating more and more people. OS' like CachyOS and Bazzite etc making the transition far more approachable than ever.
The future is bright.
I filled out the survey yesterday and it didn't notice my dGPU. No way to correct the entries as well.
Even if it wasn't for corrections, one has to look at the longer trends and not just single months.
Loads of people switch to Linux but I do wonder how many are still there a year later? I say this as someone that been a Linux daily runner since about 2010.
> Even if it wasn't for corrections > Loads of people
This is all fine (and might even be true) but not having to fill in the gaps with anecdotal data and wishful thinking is precisely what good statistics are for. Bad statistics, on the other hand, make for a bad conversation starter because everyone is confused and it gets worse from there.
> Loads of people switch to Linux but I do wonder how many are still there a year later?
Everyone who bought a gaming PC last year, only to be told it has to be scrapped now because Windows 11 doesn't like the colour of the power cable.
Really happy to see this kind of analysis on HN. The news you want to hear the most must also be looked at critically, and as much as I love Linux gaming we want to be sober in our expectations.
I mean you make good points and all, but on the other hand I really want this to be the year of the Linux desktop, so I'm gonna go with the other interpretation anyway!
Well, if it's any indication, my sister, who is very much not a tech person, randomly asked me to help her install Linux Mint a month ago, and has been using it successfully since without needing to ask for help once (at least not from me, I suspect ChatGPT is getting a workout).
That felt like an indicator to me. I only switched to Linux a year or two ago and haven't mentioned it to her once, so she got the idea from somewhere else, and had enough impetus from whatever she disliked about Windows to actually go through with the change. If I was in marketing at Microsoft I'd be shitting myself over that, assuming Windows even still fits into their long term plans somehow. It's one thing for 100,000 techies to preach Linux across the web, but if random normies start using it without fanfare, that's real change.
There's a tipping point and we may be getting close. A few of my friends' kids & nephews have recently switched. Now that Valve seems to have solved the gaming compatibility issue, what Windows only software is left for teenagers to use that OS?
Also, regardless of what you think of LLMs, it makes tech support for Linux a whole lot more accessible to the average person. There is going to be less of an expectation now that you need to have a Linux guru on speed dial for the occasional weird edge case situation.
> but if random normies start using it without fanfare
From the normies I know, they only vaguely know what chatgpt is and sure don't use it.
to give you a single data point, I've finally committed to linux on my desktop machine at home (I posted in another comment on this thread regarding my sim setup, thats another issue), but on the desktop machine, I installed steam, proton, downloaded a few games from my library, and they just worked on install, no stuffing around at all, no searching the web for fixes to get it going. It's probably been 6 years since I tried it, and last time I tried pretty much every game needed _something_) to be done to get it working. The level of technical knowledge required to get it going now is minimal, so maybe 2026 is the year of linux
the one caveat was, ubuntu 24.04 LTS still didn't recognise my xbox wireless controller out of the box, and I needed to get xone and compile it and install the driver, a minor inconvenience, but something that would be beyond one of my daughtrs or wife. I've since moved back to debian though but already armed with that knowledge so it wasn't any kind of surprise.
next step will be to migrate my work machine, but that one is more difficult because the primary dev is in Delphi, so it'll probably be a case of linux on the hardware, and virtualbox running a win10 VM to do compilations, the other parts of the job are basically all o/s independent python dev, so no problem there.. although I will miss toad for oracle.
There is value in the gaming specific distros since they already include all the stuff like controller drivers. I installed Bazzite on my desktop which I have plugged in to the TV and it's been every bit as seamless as the steamdeck. It boots up direct in to steam big picture mode and I can do everything with my xbox controller.
Bazzite is an immutible os which is absolutely the future of linux. Your install will never break on updates since rather than a normal update migration process, it simply boots the next version of the OS image, which if it doesn't work will just revert back to the old image where you can wait for the bug to be fixed to update again.
One of the straight-up benefits of TV gaming that Bazzite (and presumably any KDE environment, but it's been a bit since I used another) has over Windows is that you can label your Bluetooth devices. I have blue controller, pink controller, white controller, damaged white controller. 90% of my gaming is local multiplayer games and I switch between an actual PS5 and PC, so this is super useful.
Can't do it in Windows 11 for some reason. No option to label them in the new settings app and the option to label them in the old control panel does not work. They all got saved as "Dualsense Controller" and you just had to guess which one you were reconnecting.
I've been using an immutable Linux for the last year or so, and it's gone quite well, but not without pain points.
There's a lot of stuff that I do which does not have a flatpak or package baked in. To get around this, I've been using distrobox to run these things in Ubuntu containers. So I will do "distrobox enter sdr" to have a terminal open up in that environment. You can export applications so that they show up in the applications list. It really takes some experience to shift your mindset, but it was worth it for me.
I agree that development sometimes takes extra steps, but honestly setting up dev environments almost always takes too many steps anyway lol. Overall it's worth it for the stability.
> I needed to get xone and compile it and install the driver, a minor inconvenience,
Call me nitpicky, but this is why Linux desktop is not ready yet. If anything, I'm a firm believer that SteamOS will be Linux Desktop
I agree, but I'm sure Bazzite/CachySteamOS all have support for them on boot.
Bazzite KDE picked up my 8BitDo controller immediately, with no prior configuration. I didn't even have to manually pair the Bluetooth. I was very impressed.
> CachySteamOS
Where can I find more information on that? I use CachyOS but never heard of that. Googling didn't find a single result (surprisingly, not even your comment)
Yeah I think for the not-so-tech-savvy gamer, there are better distros than Ubuntu. Ubuntu(and Debian) tend to lag behind the cutting edge a bit too. For such users I'd probably recommend fedora (or one of it's variants) or just straight up steamOS
As a Fedora user, I would actually recommend Ubuntu for gamers new to Linux, just because companies that offer Linux builds tend to only support Ubuntu. It's a bit more work comparatively to get to smooth sailing on Fedora. I think that work is worth it, of course, but new users might beg to differ.
I tried cachy, but I decided I hate the kde plasma environment, I should have chosen some other window manager but wanted to try the recommended one
there is also something to be said, negatively, for the number of distros now, cambrian explosion since the good old days of slack, deb, redhat, suse lol
I honestly believe one of the main, highly supported Distros like:
Debian, Arch, Fedora, Gentoo, Ubuntu, Nix, etc are all better choices than Catchy, Manjaro, Bazzite or whatever else niche distro exists.
I commonly find myself running into weird issues that I would of never run into otherwise. Bazzite for example by default, opens Steam on boot. This caused my games drives to not be mapped in Steam. (I assume Steam somehow booted before my drives were properly mapped) I helped my friend for hours troubleshooting his fstab config, rebooting, etc, but then realized it was just a default that he never set.
He quit Linux because of this (and some other minor gripes) and I don't think the gaming distros do much to properly help.
Doesn't Cachy support all of the DEs? Use it to try them all. (I don't know how CachyOS handles it; EndeavourOS lets you pick the DE on login.
yeah, on install you select a window manager, I didn't bother trying any others, just opted to go to Debian instead
It has been achieved with WSL on Windows, and Virtualisation Framework on macOS.
Other than that, I am still waiting for when I can buy a Dell, Asus, HP laptop on Media Markt or FNAC, with GNU/Linux pre-installed having 100% of the hardware being supported.
a lot of people don't even have a computer and do everything on their phone. Given androids market share, one could argue Linux is already present on most desk tops and therefore has already won.
A few weeks ago, I installed linux (Nobara, if you're curious) on my PC and hooked it up to the living room TV to use as a gaming console. I have absolutely no regret. I did it initially because apparently playing games on a shared screen is better for my kid. But I was pleasantly surprised by how smoothly Windows only games run on Linux. The whole experience has been great, and I don't think I'll ever go back. I have an nvidia gpu as well, which apparently does not work very well on Linux. For me, on Nobara, it's been working flawlessly.
The most annoying thing I encountered was the Switch controller support being rather poor. Every button press was somehow interpreted as two different buttons at the same time and I had to figure out which commands to run on Terminal to stop it from happening. Even then, the bluetooth connection on my PC was so bad that I had to stay within 3 feet lest the controller disconnects. I don't really think this is a Linux issue per se, but I recommend people buy a couple of 8bitdo controllers on Amazon which come with USB dongles if they want to go this route.
I will miss games that I can only play with mouse and keyboard, but I think there are enough games out there with controller support that this is not going to be an issue.
The "Nvidia on Linux compatibility" issues are something I wonder if I have side-stepped somehow either by lucky choice of GPUs, or lucky choice of Linux distros.
Was/is this a distro thing, or an actual issue?
Every Nvidia I've used [1] has worked perfectly, from the change for Xfree86 to Xorg, through the Compiz desktop wobbly window craze, to the introduction of GPGPU APIs like CUDA/OpenCL and recently Vulkan.
I do recall once helping a friend setup a Debian and a Ubuntu machine with Nvidia (which I never used before) and it took some figuring-out of how to install non-free drivers, so maybe my choices of Gentoo and Arch (not being as conservative towards non-free licenses as Debian/Ubuntu) always made it a non-issue?
[1] 6800 Ultra, 7800 GTX , 7900 GTX, 8800 GTX, GTX 280, GTX 480, GTX 680, GTX 760 Ti, RTX 2080, RTX 4080... probably missed some.
I've also never had any trouble with NVIDIA on the desktop. I think most issues people have are on laptops, which have odd hybrid/dual GPU setups, and which exercise suspend/hibernate much more aggressively.
That's a good point that I hadn't considered. I've never had a laptop with Nvidia, I probably subconsciously avoided those dual GPU setups as they sounded hacky and I never really needed fast 3D on a laptop.
FWIW I have an Asus Zephyrus G14 and the dual graphics cards works pretty well in Linux in hybrid mode. It's pretty cool, certain things (games) run on the dedicated Nvidia GPU. Everything else runs on the built in AMD GPU.
I'm guessing it's because the laptops are popular enough that there's a dedicated group of people that make it work [0].
I'm still on X11, dunno what the story is like with Wayland though.
As far as I know dual graphics laptops are a pain no matter the OS and chips.
The one sample i know of first hand is an amd/nvidia laptop that never obeys the settings about which GPU to use. In Windows.
If you have sufficiently old Nvidia GPUs, eventually drivers and supporting software stops shipping with distros. I have a bunch of older laptops that support in Ubuntu existed for like 10 years ago, but drivers stopped being updated and Ubuntu dropped them from their repos.
We've had open source AMD drivers for... 20ish years now? Meanwhile Nvidia begrudgingly added drivers support in the last year or two. So maybe some recency bias.
> The "Nvidia on Linux compatibility" issues are something I wonder if I have side-stepped somehow either by lucky choice of GPUs, or lucky choice of Linux distros.
It could also be lucky consequence of what games you play and what else you do with your computer.
I was a long-time Nvidia user, and had plenty of problems with their drivers. They ranged from minor annoyances when switching between virtual consoles (which some people never do) to total system freezes when playing a particular game (which some people never play). It would have been be easy for someone else to never encounter these problems.
Since switching to AMD a couple years ago, I have been much happier.
nvidia x11 support has been pretty good for quite some time. It's nvidia wayland support that has been less than stellar. That has gotten better in the last year to year and a half now.
Now, I think it's no big issue so long as you are using a distro that supports up to date drivers. That should be about everyone now as I think even debian stable currently has decent drivers.
Does Nvidia need to support Wayland, or does Wayland need to support Nvidia? I.e., what is the support at the API boundary which is missing?
I'm not sure exactly what the API boundries are.
I know that Nvidia is integrated into the kernel and that wayland is talking to nvidia through the kernel. I also know that for accelerated rendering, wayland is talking directly to the nvidia drivers (bypassing the kernel? IDK).
But I also know that in the nvidia release notes, they've mentioned changes to improve support and functionality of wayland.
Same, no issues with any nVidia card going back two decades, several PC's and laptops, Linux and Windows.
It has more to do with how you're using the cards. I don't see you mention gaming at all, that's where the biggest performance penalty and lack of support is apparent.
I just migrated to linux (Bazzite) in March, I have a RTX 3080. The only issue I ran into was that video stream compression is not supported on linux so I can't run 1440p 165hz with HDR on because my monitor doesn't support HDMI 2.1. Either I need to turn off HDR or lower refresh rate to 120hz.
NVIDIA driver progress has been massive over the past year, I wouldn’t consider it much less stable/supported than AMD cards.
Definitely better now with their new "opensource" driver.
I still ran in a few snags:
- DKMS can break, e.g I had a kernel bump to 6.18 or 6.19 and the nvidia driver wasn't ready yet so the build failed. A mainline driver will always win this one.
- Suspend almost always works, but sometimes fails on lid close which is of course when you can't see it fail and my laptop battery dies unexpectedly. You'd say use hybrid sleep but that reliably always fails with the nvidia driver too. Both work flawlessly with Nouveau.
Since I don't need the extra perf on this laptop I just use Nouveau to drive the the dGPU + the AMD iGPU most of the time which is powerful enough for my non-desk needs.
Agree on both counts. I use debian unstable and is usually 50/50 on whether the machine will reboot on a working display after a kernel upgrade. Very easy to fix if you have a bit of knowledge, but certainly not ready for the general public.
I don't have a laptop with an nvidia card, but I often suspend the linux gaming machine on my living room, and sometimes it doesn't come back from sleep, while my steam deck never failed to.
dude, the whole Linus sticking his finger up at nvidia meme? Its still real in 2026. The opensource ABI whatever the fuck they call it is trash. I'm absolutely ready to purchase an AMD card next GPU I buy. I don't want to give nvidia anymore money, I'm done. It'll be AMD GPUs from now on no matter the performance diff, purely because they've got a better attitude to supporting non MS deployments.
There's too much TPM/SecureBoot/Enroll key hoops you have to jump through that a lot of distros just haven't bothered with.
If I'm being completely real, I'd be running FreeBSD 15. I just could not get a working nvidia driver going in 15 and get a working X installation. Supposedly 15.1 fixes it, we'll see in June. I've always preferred the BSD design, fs layout, etc, and I would love to have a FreeBSD desktop with a wine 11 install that actually plays games.. the dream!
Nah, nvidia drivers on Linux 2026 is hands down just as easy as AMD. I’ve had no more issues than running an AMD card and everything works flawlessly. They’re 100% right at the absolutely generational improvement in nvidia drivers since they’ve released the open drivers. Linus himself straight up said anyone trying to say this stuff in current year is being super disingenuous twisting his words from ages ago and that he considers nvidia a fantastic partner nowadays. And frankly, anyone unironically trying to use X in 2026 deserves the pain, it’s been officially deprecated for a while now and they maintainers were ultra clear that the only reason to use it now is for compatibility reasons and that you should expect issues if you do. Wayland is so far ahead of X now that anyone still trying to use X is being purposefully obstinate.
> the bluetooth connection on my PC was so bad that I had to stay within 3 feet lest the controller disconnects
Did you remember to screw in the antennas to the motherboard?
> on my PC and hooked it up to the living room TV to use as a gaming console.
This is the way.
I did the same with an ITX AMD APU system. Thankfully well before the AI crunch. Running Debian because I just want it to work. Best keyboard for this setup is the Logitech Wireless Touch K400. Audio is through an older Sony receiver driving two of the floor standing Magnepan mid size speakers with a 10" sealed sub fed by a USB DAC. Mainly for music listening so no surround. The only thing I am missing is a nice wireless game pad.
I have a low power FreeBSD server running a 20TB raid z5 which serves all my media. I don't use any software contraptions like media centers or databases. I just mount file system and open a playlist in media player like god intended. Steam just works, though I haven't really gamed on this other than testing - that is what my desktop beast is for. I had issues with Hulu or whatever streaming thing in Fire Fox but had no trouble with any of them in Chrome. I know you don't get 4k but I don't care.
edit: > I will miss games that I can only play with mouse and keyboard
When I first setup the PC I had a full wireless KB & mouse, installed Half Life lost coast and played the demo using a TV table as a stand in front of the couch. NOT ideal but would work better with a proper adjustable TV table/tray thing. My friend has one and used it to work from home on his big ass 80+ inch TV.
I use an 8bitdo controller and they work very good in linux, I use the dongle instead of the bluetooh connection
I have an 8bitdo Pro 2 and it's... kinda okay? 90% of the time it works great, but if I don't have an application running which looks for a controller then the controller gets disconnected and reconnected every 10 seconds or so.
If you haven't tried it, the Steam controller does a pretty good job of playing mouse&keyboard games. The original is probably hard to find now, but allegedly they'll release a new one later this year.
Keyboard & mouse user here. To lessen the pain, I moved to gyro-based gaming. I think 8bitdo has those. I specifically use the Switch joycons. I recommend you just get yourself a good BT dongle.
8Bitdo does have a gyro controller, I have the Ultimate 2. It does have some requirement to configure the gyro though, you have to boot it in `dinput` mode by holding down a button.
I have included a link from my notes, I have not actually tested it much beyond seeing that the gyro does work in steams "configure controller" thing, never got around to correctly mapping any game.
Me too. My weapon of choice is the Dualsense. Lots of great things about it in addition to gyro controls: as of late last year you can pair 4 devices with it. I have one Dualsense and roam between PS5, Bazzite desktop and Steam Deck seamlessly.
How do you use the gyro sensors to play? I looked into it before but couldn’t wrap my mind around how we’re supposed to do that.
If you're asking how it's setup/configured, then Valve ships "Steam Input" that can do a lot of things and one of them is translating gyro data to mouse events.
Some games support gyro directly, but even then AFAIK people prefer Steam Input due to how configurable it is.
More like, how does gyro help you play some games?
Another method for gyro aim is flick stick, using the right stick to control the direction of your aim (on the left/right axis) and gyro for fine tuning and also up/down axis.
https://youtu.be/CiSS5OsNCNU from the creator explains it (and older gyro controls).
With controller sticks you control the 3D camera only indirectly -- by telling the rotation velocity (in very limited range) and for how long to apply it.
With gyro you have 1:1 proportional camera position input, like with mice.
It's more or less about possibility of developing muscle memory. With (linear) gyro/mice you could sharply snap camera to a point you see on screen without much overshoot. You could turn 180 degrees in split second with eyes closed (actually with gyro people often use flick stick for such big rotations, turning instantly -- but that's besides the point)
With controller stick? Well you could try to time that 180 turn takes 1.5 seconds of holding at full deflection -- good luck developing a feeling for all the speeds inbetween zero and full deflection.
I have found that you have to keep it centered in order to keep it from moving/registering input, so it worked very similarly to an analog stick to me. Am I mistaken?
I guess I just need to try it some more.
If controller isn't being rotated in the moment, then camera should be stationary regardless of controller orientation, yea.
I guess you've used some strange gyro to stick emulation (never heard of such thing, but sounds like it).
what surprised me is how Proton works under the hood... no emulation at all!
wine translates win API -> Linux. Then DXVK converts DirectX calls into Vulkan in real time, and VKD3D-Proton for DX 12. so it always native Vulkan.. no wonder performance is even better than in windows!
this laid it out it for me visually - https://vectree.io/c/how-proton-runs-windows-games-on-linux-...
> no wonder performance is even better than in windows!
Every "benchmark" I've seen from someone claiming a game performs better on Linux via Proton than on Windows was written by someone that doesn't know anything about running benchmarks or how statistics work.
You can get dongles for pretty much any controller you like.. Switch Pro, Wii U, Xbox etc. It's generally more stable than using bluetooth on a controller that supports it, especially if you position the dongle to have clear sight to your couch.
> I did it initially because apparently playing games on a shared screen is better for my kid.
Explain please?
I read online that playing games on a shared screen is better because it establishes gaming as a group/social activity.
Thanks. Believable - when my kid is glued to a tablet with another kid and they're talking about what they're seeing or doing, it makes me feel much better than when she's doind the same by herself...
When Windows 11 was force-installed on my main game development desktop, I was skeptical, but kept using it. I was annoyed at having to turn off all the tracking and noise (like news articles)
When it updated and started shoving AI down my throat, with no easy way to turn it off and suddenly lots of data I don't consent to sharing getting used, 11 became the last Windows OS I'll ever use.
Whenever the next version comes out, Im moving fully to *buntu.
My main laptop already uses it and Steam on Linux has been fantastic. Any bugs or issues Ive experience have been due to my very unusual setup (like an eGPU over Thunderbolt)
On my wife's laptop, I've uninstalled MS AI 3 times. I'm just about to lose my mind. I'd have already wiped the machine and moved it to mint but the data in her one drive, bookmarks, etc, I'm sure migrating her over won't be a totally seamless experience. I also have not tested battlenet under linux wine in a long time, and I expect some level of anti-cheat to give me hell there.
On all of my machines bar one, windows is completely gone. I have a simrig, currently running win10, but the hardware there, simucube base, simucube pedals, require some drivers I don't believe exist under linux, and/or don't work properly, and then there is iracing with it's easy anti cheat usage, from my understanding I'm screwed there as well. So it'll live on Windows 10 until the day iRacing stops supporting windows 10, or start supporting linux.
after having written that, I wonder if the simucube tools will just work under linux anyways, the UI is all written in QT, maybe simucube has/is developing linux drivers, given they're finland based :) .. I'll need to test it out
Simucube uses the hid-pidff driver which is built into the kernel. For setting up the base using the SC2 software there is a guide available[0]. I’m not an SC owner myself but there are a few people on the SimRacingOnLinux[1] discord who seem to have everything working nicely.
0: https://granitedevices.com/wiki/Using_Simucube_wheel_base_in...
You can install programs under Steam that are not distributed through Steam.
You can install battlenet under Steam and use all the proton magic to make it work. Starcraft 2 and diablo 2 both work very well (those are the only two I've tried). At least for SC2, anti-cheat did not cause any issues if it's even there at all.
Seriously the only thing stopping me from putting linux on my wife's laptop is the fact that she uses a cricut, which has software that doesn't work well on linux.
Also, I really dislike cricut as a company. Such a scammy business model.
Sadly, the original Assetto Corsa is also borked on Linux (AC Evo and AC Rally, on the other hand, run great).
AC works fine just requires a little extra setup, either use this script[0] or use the latest GE-Proton (with a fresh prefix), I recently updated protonfixes to fix a CM/CSP issue. The latter is better as newer Proton has some definite performance improvements.
That’s excellent, thanks for the heads up! By chance, RPS covered the Mulholland Drive mod recently and I’m keen to try it on Bazzite.
I would definitely prefer to go the GE-Proton route. To clarify, what do you mean by “fresh”? Just the most recent release or something more specific?
Fresh should mean creating a new prefix. For example, Proton-GE enabled wow64 in Wine by default, but it requires recreating the prefix to use it. Should be easy enough with Protontricks or even Winetricks.
Yes very much this. It is possible to modify an existing prefix but there are quite a few things to do, it's easier to back up savegames and game config files and then create it anew.
Thank you very much to both of you. Got it running flawlessly with CM on Steam Deck OLED at 90fps using GE-Proton10.34 and LSFG-VK for frame-gen. This one goes straight to the top (alongside DR2.0 and AC Rally) as favourite gaming on the go.
In my (admittedly limited) experience, it does run, even with quite comparable performance, but getting a wheel to interact with the game has been a bit challenging. But this could be resolved with a custom driver for my specific hardware. Using the community standard mod manager seems to resolve the UI jank by completely bypassing it.
What is your specific wheel hardware? It should simply be a case of binding the wheel axis in Content Manager’s controller options.
Hop on either matrix or discord listed at https://simracingonlinux.com and one of us will be happy to help you work through the issue.
yeah, I've heard this too.. and I'd rather my rig just works rather than try and stuff around making it work under linux + I know iracing is cooked anyway, and I've spent enough money on the rig to just want it to work, and not get stuffed over by some anti-cheat, maybe soon
picture of my rig https://www.arcturus.com.au/rig.jpg
That matches my experience almost exactly. I was hanging onto Windows almost entirely due to cutting edge graphics and my Nvidia card on my desktop that I'd built.
Windows 10 was already pretty bad, but it felt fast and stable. I think they started putting content in the start menu, and I think I did regedit stuff I can no longer remember to get rid of it.
Windows 11 they made us upgrade with a gun to the back of our heads, they made it feel sluggish, they hid settings in such a way that you're expected to use Search to find the setting (although Apple has that issue too), and somehow the Search wants to include the whole Internet instead of what's local.
But the AI agentic force-feeding was the last straw. What am I, at work?
And then HN insisted Linux gaming was ready and they were right! Someone wrote to me in a comment, "join us, brother" and I'm glad I did, it's brought joy back to using my machine and playing around again.
They already crossed your line with 11, and you're still using it despite Win10 or Ubuntu also being an option. Are you really going to switch when 12 comes out, or is something holding you back?
I will warn you, Ubuntu is basically dead now.
Canonical announced that they are no longer using Debian as a base, but the unvetted packages compiled and uploaded by random people on Snap.
Please switch to Linux, but find a distro that actually wants you as a user.
> Canonical announced that they are no longer using Debian as a base, but the unvetted packages compiled and uploaded by random people on Snap.
Citation very much needed for this claim.
As somebody who has been around linux almost for as long as it exists, i must say that is a very strong statement.
In real life: systemd IS useful, Wayland is becoming (has become?) the default, ubuntu is the most popular desktop distro family.
In my experience, Snap is frustrating to use, buggy and is opinionated in ways I don't like.
It's also a weird choice for servers running Ubuntu. I recall some CLI utilities being moved to Snap and you can't install them with apt anymore.
Ubuntu on servers has always been "a choice", Debian is definitely the preferable of the two. Even on desktops, I'd sooner suggest Debian or Mint than Ubuntu. Ubuntu is a dead distro coasting on a reputation 15(+) years out of date.
(And it used to be that Ubuntu was still a defensible choice for maximizing the chance of getting help online, but LLMs have effectively neutralized this advantage.)
Mint still uses Xorg, so it's outdated. I tried it recently, it wasn't working with my iGPU+dGPU (nothing exotic, just a regular PC), and all the other distros already went to Wayland so nobody was talking about this online. I feel bad for anyone who gets convinced to switch from Windows to Mint, being told it's the easy one. The fix was to just install Ubuntu.
Maybe Xorg is inherently better than Wayland, but that doesn't matter, the ship has sailed and the community evidently doesn't have time to properly support both.
I genuinely don't think Xorg is a deal breaker for newbs and I would characterize dual-GPU as at least slightly exotic, maybe because I've never owned such a computer, but that's a fair enough point. Personally I think the polish of Cinnamon makes it the best recommendation for somebody new, and I know a whole lot of people start with that and have a sufficiently good experience that they stick with linux (while maybe moving on to other distros.)
It's not exactly dual GPU, just the Intel CPU has integrated graphics as usual. I'm not surprised if you don't have that, but it has to be the most common desktop setup, and quite common on high-end laptops. Was giving black screen after wake. Probably a solution exists somewhere, but even if I found it, the fact that this was broken out of the box and didn't have a clear fix was already reason enough not to trust it.
The GUI layout of Cinnamon vs KDE vs w/e seems like the main thing people argue about, but it doesn't matter compared to this. Anyone who even knows what an OS is enough to go install Linux will figure out how to use whatever GUI you give them, provided it works. The bar needs to be at making sure stuff isn't straight up broken.
To be honest I haven't owned a dGPU in almost 20 years, but I've been lead to understand that most users with them use them all the time and ignore their iGPU, unless they're laptop users, in which case they might have to use Nvidia's proprietary drivers from what I understand; the installation of which is something Mint makes straight forward for novices, or so I've been lead to understand. Maybe I'm wrong about some of that.
I definitely agree that KDE vs Cinnamon probably doesn't matter. But I'm afraid I don't think particularly highly of any KDE-first distro; it's great from, for example, OpenSUSE, but that's not a distro I'd recommend to new users for other reasons.
The problem I've got with Ubuntu is they keep doing weird shit like submitting desktop searches to Amazon or putting ads in the motd. They're an erratic organization and I think it's a mistake to send new users in their direction. Mint may not be perfect, but I think it's broadly inoffensive and mild, a good distro to leave a good first impression on a new user fumbling through the process themself.
