The whole "just go elsewhere" idea doesn't really work in a total monopoly like Microsoft has on desktop OSes for some use cases.

There is not, and has never been an alternative to windows for all use cases. Most notably: a gaming rig (One of few remaining use cases for stationary home PCs these days, so perhaps the most relevant for the idea of the Microsoft monopoly on the desktop). If you want to reply that Linux is a perfectly usable OS for a gaming rig these days then please reconsider. It's just not.

I actually don't understand how Microsoft reasons around these things. There is zero way that these news links actually "pay for themselves" in income vs customer alienation. There must be something else to it.

>If you want to reply that Linux is a perfectly usable OS for a gaming rig these days then please reconsider. It's just not.

Could you please elaborate? It was impression that SteamOS (based on Arch with KDE Plasma) does cover all bases - what's missing?

By "usable" I mean "is equivalent to" in terms of performance, availability. I should have used a better term than "usable" I suppose. It's usable with some caveats if you are willing to miss some titles, miss some performance and so on. It's not usable as a complete replacement for windows if you don't accept missing any titles, any performance.

Windows itself has issues with titles that don't work, or leave performance on the table. Granted these are older titles long out of the spotlight but by your metric Windows 11 can't be a complete replacement for Windows 98 or XP.

Yes, the interesting segment imo is "online multiplayer AAA, released in the last 5 years".

Because when people buy gaming rigs with $1-$2k graphics cards, those are the titles they are likely to want to play. Anything simpler, older, indie, you can basically work around by other means (virtualization, emulation. Or the community or company, or driver vendor has caught up and "fixed" the problem, see e.g. Apex Legends).

> If you want to reply that Linux is a perfectly usable OS for a gaming rig these days then please reconsider. It's just not.

The fact that Valve recently released a gaming handheld that runs Linux, and is wildly successful, should be a hint on the status of gaming on Linux

I love my steam deck, but the subset of games it can play is exactly that - a subset of games that work fine on Windows.

About 3/4 of my library is marked with “no” on their compatibility chart, and from some experimentation, they’re largely not wrong.

> About 3/4 of my library is marked with “no” on their compatibility chart

It's unlikely as they haven't checked that many games, I suspect most of your games are still "unknown" (but are very likely to just work in practice).

Anyway you're very unlucky with your library, in my case most of the games work out of the box regardless of the rating, and most of the games marked "unsupported" can be played by changing the proton version or using protontricks.

Did you check ProtonDB for full stats about your library?

> most of the games marked "unsupported" can be played by changing the proton version or using protontricks.

I'd call that "unusable" if you need to tweak it. It's possible for power users like me or you, but if it requires some knowledge of computers, or being able to google an error message or visit a forum to look for solutions, it's way beyond usable for most people.

I'd say using any tweaking at all would for most people fall under "nope". It's only enthusiasts that can do that.

My point remains: only enthusiasts who are ready (and able) to tweak even small settings - particularly e.g. visit a forum or google the occasional error would this work for.

Let's measure it this way: how frustrating would an average non-power user find the desktop Linux gaming experience today? I'd argue that while it's a lot less frustrating to them than it was a few years ago, but it's still not so frustrating when put next to the windows start menu ads frustration.

Sure there are still cases where you can't switch, but the gap is ever closing and is already very very narrow. Proton covers most games, and WINE covers most windows software, and plenty of big software has native versions for multiple OSes.

I think if more people tried Rather than just assuming they would probably be pleasantly surprised.

I think its' perfectly fine in many games. In others there is a performance penalty of several percent, a slower fix rate for OS specific bugs, or graphics drivers lagging several weeks or even months behind the Windows release specific for the game.

That seems to be very much the exception. In many other cases Linux gives significantly better performance and less issues.

Linux is very much a viable gaming platform these days, and Windows only has a minimal advantage in that area.

It's a lot better than it used to be, but it's still far from great. Especially with anything non-steam or anything that uses one of the newer Anticheats (which are basically rootkits).

Here's the top of the list of 2022 most sold PC games (US chart):

#1 Most sold 2022 (CoD MW2): Nope https://www.protondb.com/app/1938090

#2 Most sold 2022 (Elden ring): Sort of (Steam deck apparently great, Desktop less than pefect) https://www.protondb.com/app/1245620

#3 Most sold 2022 (Madden NFL 23): Barely. No online play and worse perf https://www.protondb.com/app/1760250

And so on and so forth. But if we give a little more time it could be better. So look at 2021 most sold PC games instead

#1 Most sold 2021 (Apex Legends): Yes. Fixed in 2022 with official anticheat support 3 years after release. https://www.protondb.com/app/1172470

#2 Most sold 2021 (BF 2042): Nope https://www.protondb.com/app/1517290

#3 Most sold 2021 (CS:GO): Works (Although some of the user reports look really painful). https://www.protondb.com/app/730

Looking at protondb the number of titles that get a "Platinum" rating meaning they work out great of the box without tweaking, is extremely low. (proton/steamdeck isn't the only way of running Linux games of course).

Right, but that's a very very tiny handful of titles. It's not surprising that the biggest AAA title games might have issues or DRM nonsense, but that's a small handful of games.

I disagree it's 'far from great', I'd say it's only slightly short of Windows support. There's a reason Steam thought it made sense to use it as a base after all.

As for CSGO I have better performance under Linux than I do on Windows, and many other users support the same.

By number of copies sold or hours played even just those six are a huge chunk of "PC gaming". Including say the top 15 of the last 3 years, you can pretty much call all the rest of PC gaming a long tail roundoff error in terms of copies sold or hours played. It doen't really matter if for these 45 titles there are 4500 titles that work perfectly on Linux.

Depends how you look at it. If 95% of games play fine on Linux, and if a significant percentage of those play better on Linux than they do on Windows, then it's clearly not as far behind as you are trying to argue it is.

I think all it comes down to is: how bad is bad? To me, if 9/10 work equally well and 1/10 doesn't work at all, then that's way worse than unacceptable. I.e. not even close to acceptable.

Others might shrug and say "hey 9/10 that's great, and if 3 of those run even better then I love it!"

Yup. I'm in the latter group I suppose, since I don't really want to deal with any title that has intrusive DRM or anti-cheat as it is. I do security research and they don't tend to like some of the stuff I have on my system as it is.

I do gaming livestreams from a Linux setup. Out of the last dozen of games that I played, most worked perfectly right out the box. One had a minor texture glitch on the start screen (though not in-game), one had rather bad (though playable) performance. The only issue that I've seen across multiple games is that they seem to get confused when screens are on different resolutions, but I can usually fix that by flipping between windowed and fullscreen.

So yeah, it's not all sunshine and butterflies, but "extremely low number of games that work out of the box" is not true in my experience.

(Important side-note: I don't play online multiplayer stuff, so the whole anti-cheat software topic does not apply to me.)

Yeah and I consider "PC gaming" to basically be "AAA multiplayer gaming" so you can see there are different niches here.

Protondb is not great way to get a summary across many titles. It's effectively closer to a bug tracker. If some people have an issue, you'll see it on protondb - it may not be a real issue or may be due to some weird old config though.

Few people think to visit it and report that a specific game works great for them.

I've never had any issues with CS:GO. It's native to Linux. Also, I get better performance in CS:GO on Linux than Windows.

Proton was not the experience I wanted on a steam deck. I had to dig way down into comments on proton.db to find the configs that would stop games from crashing or what not. It was getting to the point where I needed notes with links to configs and Reddit comments to get certain games working.

I sold my steam deck because I don’t have the time to play switch, desktop, and steam deck. Proton configs were one of the reasons I chose to sell the deck instead of the switch or desktop.

The proton configs worked and I was surprised they made a big difference. They made unplayable games playable. I’m just not trying to debug pleasure activities.

okay, this doesnt sound good. Now lets remember back to the era of incompatible rootkits where windows gamers were reinstalling windows weekly because they wanted to play different incompatible games. Of course some bought multiple harddrives and had several installations concurrent.

Which is worse? :)

> Now lets remember back to the era of incompatible rootkits where windows gamers were reinstalling windows weekly because they wanted to play different incompatible games.

I am guessing that there have been real issues with incompatible root kits, but there has never been an ‘era’ where it was a common thing for the average gamer to reinstall windows weekly because of incompatible rootkits.

The only thing close to that I can think of is places where poorly maintained rootkits were required for banking, could not be easily uninstalled and caused havoc. That’s a hellscape for sure but not quite the same thing.

there was

When? What release of Windows, and what games? I’ve been PC gaming and consuming video game media since before Win 3.1 at a level where it wouldn’t be under the radar if it was an ‘era’ where this was the regular thing to do. Are you absolutely sure this is unrelated to banking rootkits in certain countries/regions?

Probably the problem that persists in the modern day, because it remains relevant.

The other thing people could do is stop buying software that only works on Windows.

Usually, home users do not NEED whatever software only works on Windows. Usually, the example is some AAA game. No one needs a game; it's a luxury. So if some stupid game is "forcing" you to stay on Windows, that's your own fault and I have zero sympathy.

Welp someone better call up Gabe and tell him to stop selling the Steam Deck, apparently Linux can't be used to play games. Poor guy must've missed the memo.

I never said linux can't be used to play games.

MS365 from Linux is at times painful but not undoable, for example sharing ppts from teams is nice. In the browser it's anyway easier to have multiple teams windows open.

For everything development related, Windows just that thing that runs WSL2, and dropping the WS makes it better.

That describes my work experience right now... Mostly just slack, browser, vs code, and code/docker/etc is in WSL.

Though if I had to deal with the consumer windows garbage from win11 again at work, I'd start advocating for a full switch (I know at least 1/3 of devs would be with this, and it's a .Net/Azure shop mostly).

> for some use cases

let me guess, Photoshop and Autodesk?

For pro use. Then AAA multiplayer online gaming for home use.

Nah. Plenty of gamers and linux users disagree.

Anticheat makes a lot of multi-player games not work on Linux.

Can't play Rust on a steam deck.

It IS a perfectly usable OS for a gaming rig. Try a Steam Deck if you haven't. Most games work, granted if you love some multiplayer game with kernel level anti-cheat it won't work. But at this point it feels like 90-95% compatible. I've run into I think one game I've tried out of probably 50-100 that I couldn't get to work just by launching or either bumping the Proton/Wine version.

> It IS a perfectly usable OS for a gaming rig. Try a Steam Deck if you haven't.

I remember when Loki was porting a small handful of games to Linux and clueless Linux Desktop evangelists back then claimed the same thing: "look, it is a perfectly useable gaming platform!".

Look, Linux has made a ton of progress as a viable gaming platform lately, largely due to the Wine and Proton projects[0], but there are still large holes in what it has reasonable support for. For me personally, VR is a shitshow on Linux, even with Valve's own offerings.

[0] Because the actual Linux Desktop community could never get their shit together enough to actually be a platform, we ended up just porting Windows's own platform.

Its a matter of perspective and what kinds of games you are interested in. Even with the relatively few games from Loki / Id / etc. you still had more than enough games to fill your time. So in that sense it was a perfectly viable gaming platform. Of course if you want to play whatever is popular then the story is different - but even there, Proton does improve things quite a bit.

Everything is a matter of perspective though so this is a pretty meaningless statement. And telling someone who stays with Windows because of gaming that 5 games is "more than enough games to fill your time" is one of the big problems with the Linux Desktop community: You seek to change the user's use case rather than make the OS better at the one they actually have.

I think this is mostly the same argument as "It's perfectly usable on the desktop" of previous decades. It's basically "yeah you will need some tweaking, but it's worth it for the benefit of being free/libre/open/hackable/..."

The opposite is basically "Yeah you pay for an OS that shows ads in your face and that you hate, but on the other hand you don't need to occasionally google error messages for that latest game you bought or worry that the anticheat doesn't work" Sadly you can't have both. But my point is if you absolutely must play all AAA online PC multiplayer games perfectly, then you must also use windows. I guess the contentious part is, is that the definition of "usable" to me it is, but clearly not to everyone.

No it's very very different. 15 years ago when I first tried gaming on Linux it was crap. A literal handful of titles worked. Most would not launch or they would be a slideshow after considerable futzing with Wine.

10 years ago things improved a bit when Valve started bringing Linux ports to Steam but still most games didn't work and needed effort in Wine to launch. Now you literally click one check box in Steam and install the game and it just works most of the time. If it doesn't work you can often use ProtonUp Qt to get the latest Proton build and that often solves it. It's about as much effort as updating a GPU driver on Windows. For non-Steam games Lutris and Heroic are pretty similar.

I'm not just talking indie games either, big AAA stuff like Marvel's Spider-man work well. Online kernel anti-cheat games are really a pretty tiny list. Obviously there's some popular, high profile stuff on there but a lot of good recent stuff that does work.

I think it's a matter of perspective, which mostly depends on your attitude to AAA online multiplayer. Those represent a huge % of copies sold and hours played for PC gaming (They are certainly the majority of titles on the most sold lists). Many of those titles also have windows-only anti-cheats (Valve obviously being a driving force for Linux here).

So if you look at "N titles of M work well" then the Linux glass is half full. If you look at "X hours of Y of the total played hours of recent popular AAA games are played on games or modes that work poorly on linux" then it's still half empty.

Out of curiosity I took the top most played games on Steam of 2022 as given here: https://store.steampowered.com/sale/BestOf2022?tab=3

Unfortunately it's not by hours but peak concurrent players. It's also pretty similar to the top grossing list. I checked each games Steam Deck rating and if it was verified or playable (usually means it needs text entry with a keyboard or doesn't support controllers) marked it as "works" (with the exception of TW: Warhammer III which is listed as not working because the performance isn't good on Steam Deck but it's a native linux title). If it was unsupported and the reason was given I marked as so, if it was some other reason I checked ProtonDB and noted the rating. I assumed if Valve marked it not supported it doesn't work regardless of ProtonDB rating (except again TW:Warhammer III). Out of the 90 titles there 21 are marked unsupported mainly because of anti-cheat or 23%, when weighted by player base that rises to 26%. So arguably it's 3/4 full. ;)

Of course if you demand every title MUST work and no alternatives will ever suffice I doubt you'll ever be satisfied. Anti cheat also gets rarer as you move away from big online games.

Here's the full list:

Over 240,000 Peak players:

Goose Goose Duck - works Ark Survival Evolved - works Elden Ring - Works Dota 2 - Works COD MWII (2022) - Doesn't work, anticheat PUBG Battlegrounds - Doesn't work, anticheat Yu-gi-oh Master Duel - Works Apex Legends - Works Lost Ark - Doesn't work, anticheat CS GO - Works Destiny II - Doesn't work, anticheat Dyling Light 2 - Works

Over 130,000 peak players:

Cyberpunk 2077 - Works New World - Works Monster Hunter Rise - Works Total War Warhammer III - Works WB Multiversus - Works V Rising - Works Path of Exile - Works Team Fortress II - Works Naraka: Bladepoint - Works Rust - Doesn't work, anticheat GTA 5 - Works Wallpaper Engine - Doesn't work? (is it really a game though?)

Over 75,000 Peak players: Raft The final chaper - Works Vampire Survivors - Works The Sims 4 - Works Rainbow Six Siege - Doesn't work, anticheat War Thunder - Works Fifa 23 - Doesn't work, anticheat Left 4 Dead 2 - Works Unturned - Works Witcher III - works The Forest - works Civ 6 - Works Valheim - Works Fifa 22 - works Football Manager 2023 - Works Dead by Daylight - Doesn't work, anticheat Dread Hunger - Maybe works? ProtonDB says Gold Warframe - works Terraria - works Football Manager 2022 - works NFS Heat - Works Warhammer Darktide - Maybe works? ProtonDB says Gold Warhammer Vermintide - doesn't work, anticheat Lego Star Wars Skywalker Saga - Works

Over 40,000 peak players Skyrim - Works Euro Truck Simulator 2 - Works Fall Guys - Doesn't work, anticheat Don't Starve Together - works God of War - Works Gundam Evolution - Doesn't work, anticheat Cycle Frontier - Doesn't work? ProtonDB gold Stray - Works Deep Rock Galactic - Works Stellaris - Works The Scroll of Taiwu - Works Mirror 2 Project X - Doesn't work?, ProtonDB silver Conan Exiles - Doesn't work, anticheat NBA 2K22 - Works Farming Sim 22 - works Marvel's Spiderman - Works Battlefield 1 - works Battlefield V - works Risk of Rain 2 - works Crusader Kings III - works No man's sky - works Final Fantasy XIV - works Red Dead Redemption II - works Warm Snow - works Mount and Blade II Bannerlord - works World of Tanks Blitz - Works Payday 2 - works Hearts of Iron IV - works Super People 2 - doesn't work, anticheat Stardew Valley - works 7 days to die - works phasmophobia - works VR chat - doesn't work? ProtonDB gold Undecember - works garry's mod - works Halo Infinite - works Stumble Guys - works Day Z - doesn't work? ProtonDB gold Mir4 - doesn't work? ProtonDB borked Project Zomboid - Works Cult of the Lamb - works Victoria 3 - Works Rimworld - works

I'd strongly argue that for most people "90-95% compatible" means "not compatible" if it doesn't run the one AAA game they care about, and "could get it to work by messing with versions of other software" is incompatible with the words "perfectly usable".

If it doesn't work out of the box and requires fiddling, then it's at most "barely usable", it doesn't even meet the standard for "decently usable" much less "perfectly usable".

90-95% sounds like a good stat, but I just checked and it doesn't support at all the main game I play for most of my gaming time. So it's very incompatible from my point of view.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1938090/Call_of_Duty_Mode...

Looking back over the previous call of duty titles, it doesn't seem to support any of them. Missing giant and popular gaming franchises like this is why I would not even be comfortable calling it 90-95% compatible.

I also checked BF 2042 which I play probably 2nd most often, same, not compatible.

And 3rd most played for me, Rainbow Sig Siege, also not compatible.

These are not exactly small games or small gaming franchises and so basically steam deck or Linux doesn't support basically any of the games I play.

Just wanted to give my perspective.

so playstation isnt a perfectly good gaming console because it doesnt run all games including those that only come for xbox?

no, linux is not "perfectly usable" for every single task imaginable, but you know what? neither is windows, or osx, or ios, or android.

People are used to all the bullshit windows forces them to do, and since they consider that the default, thats just how life is for them, and nothing they can do can change that. Ask them to use linux? they will have all sorts of things they need before "its ready", but all the shit they put up with on windows does not get to go in same category, because they already accepted that thats just life.

> so playstation isnt a perfectly good gaming console because it doesnt run all games including those that only come for xbox?

There are games made for xbox. On Linux, the story is sadly that you are basically trying to mostly bend games made for windows to work on Linux. It's not the same to the xbox vs playstation situation.

No, but if they want to play God of War or Uncharted, they get a Playstation, even if they may really dislike some aspects of the Playstation and would prefer an Xbox.

Some people (myself included among them) have hardware or use software that is either Windows-only or works much better on Windows - even if we really dislike some aspects of Windows.

Doesn't mean we won't complain about the things we dislike and call out for them to be changed/improved.

> People are used to all the bullshit windows forces them to do, and since they consider that the default, thats just how life is for them, and nothing they can do can change that. Ask them to use linux? they will have all sorts of things they need before "its ready", but all the shit they put up with on windows does not get to go in same category, because they already accepted that thats just life.

This × 1,000. Everyone has a tendency to do this, but I think it's especially prevalent for choices that we make essentially 'by default'. They no longer register as tradeoffs, and are naturalized and universalized as 'facts of life'.

> Most notably: a gaming rig

You know that feeling when you move from Windows to Mac, and suddenly realize that there is a paradigm of personal computing that doesn't involve multi-gigabyte updates to the operating system every other week? Maybe you don't, but it exists. There is a similar experience when moving to Playstation (or Xbox) for gaming, and suddenly noticing how much time you were spending in keeping video, mouse, and keyboard drivers up to date, and fiddling with all the settings that ultimately make little difference in how games actually play. I know, I know. "Mouse and keyboard." "Framerate." "Mods." I don't care. Moving to a console has been liberating. Since the advent of getting everything running at 60 FPS on the current-gen models, there's really nothing holding it back. Also, as an outstanding bonus: no cheaters in online games!

I really, really wish I wasn't so terrible at using a console controller for FPS games. I would love to play COD and all the others on PS or Xbox, but I'm awful. It would be so much better.

I'm not going to lie; it took a long time to readjust, but I have, and I don't even think about it any more. The key is that everyone else is using the same thing, so it works out. I've worked my way up to maxing out the sensitivity in Battlefield 1, and I can usually place in the top 25%. To be fair, it takes a long time to really dial in your snap 180's with a mouse too. The no cheating thing helped me get over the hump. I was pretty tired of ALWAYS having at least one hacker in PC Battlefield.

If you play on a reasonable server then hackers should be a non-issue. Any reasonable server is one you can return to every day and where you know there is a sane admin on, 100% of the time. That obviously all went out the window when they trashed community servers in BF (and some multiplayer games don't have stable servers to this day - which means I'll probably never play them).

Quite a lot of recent console FPS games just let you plug in a USB mouse/keyboard and you get matched with PC players (or other console users who use the same input method) instead.

CoD has supported this since their 2019 release, for example.

"... and suddenly noticing how much time you were spending in keeping video, mouse, and keyboard drivers up to date..."

Honestly - has this ever been a problem on Windows ? After the initial setup, I am done. I occasionally update the Video Drivers - but thats once in 6 months. Only if you change the keyboard, mouse hardware, would you need to run through the driver update process again and that too - only if Windows did not auto-detect and install the driver.

Source: experience in maintaining a dozen family windows installs on PC/laptops.

I hear this a lot with this generation and I think its misguided. If you really want to support, or not support something, you will find a way to make it happen.

Complaining or justifying why you have to do something that doesn't give you choice is a victim's way of thinking.

If you want the world to continue to become less free, keep blaming the world for your choices.

Your choices, good or bad, determine the world that we all live in together. It's up to each individual to make right choices for this world to change.

Not sure which generation you refer to, I'm pushing 50... I really don't want to use what games I play to make a statement about where I want computing or computers to go. I'd happily use Linux if it solved my problem better than a proprietary system. But I'm sure not going to use Linux because the other system is proprietary.

I don't know if that justifies using software that restrict peoples freedom.

I mean I make proprietary software for a living (as do, I assume, a huge fraction of people commenting on HN). For a lot of use cases I prefer proprietary to open. I have zero moral questions about using my iPhone or Windows desktop and I consider anyone who tries to use open software as a moral imperative do be fooling themselves and wasting their time.

With that out of the way I think it's completely irrelevant for the original discussion. Game developers are going to make games for the biggest platforms. So if you want to play the most titles, you choose the bigger platform.

Yes, so long as people keep using windows, the games will keep coming to windows . But I'm not going to waste my time crusading against that in order to maybe see Linux be a more viable gaming platform in two decades. Life is just to short. I'm not enjoying Linux on the desktop much to begin with, so in my case the game issue isn't really the deciding factor. For a lot of gamers it probably is, though.

> Yes, it is. The job of a proprietary OS is whatever that company says it is.

That's just semantics. The job of an OS is to be an OS, not to be an advertisement delivery mechanism. At least primarily. Just like a car is primarily for driving, not sampling random smells, even if a carmaker makes a car that can do that.

We are the customers. Of COURSE its appropriate to give feedback on what parts of the product we like/don't like.

The assertion that, because they put ads in, that it is the business-optimal thing to do is weird.