This is interesting for a couple of reasons. One is that this is about as much market share as Mac ever had at its peak, and almost twice as much as it has currently. Another is that, if you click the link for the site’s Steam Linux Data Tracker, you can see that English-only Linux market share (a crude way of filtering out the ebbs and flows of Chinese players on largely-identical hardware and operating systems) is more than 6%, up from under 2% just 5 years ago. A lot of people are unhappy with Windows in general, and especially 11, and Windows 10 is about to force the issue in just a few months as it loses official support. I have a friend whose computer is still in decent shape for gaming but with TPM settings that don’t meet the minimum spec for Windows 11; at some point, he’ll lose compatibility and have to throw out an otherwise perfectly functional machine, so it’s good that some other OS is shaping up to be a good enough option for many people.
This has been an upward trend since slightly before the release of the Steam Deck, as you can see on the graphs, and I’ve come across YouTube videos from both James Lee Animations and PewDiePie about how they got to be so sick of Windows (and Adobe) they both switched to Linux with middle fingers raised at their old workflows. Folks like them making videos like that can have real effects on the market. Linux has been my daily driver for gaming for about 8 years now, and it’s matured so much in that time that I’ve hardly booted to my Windows partition for any reason. It’s not perfect, but if I’m choosing between the quirks that Linux has by accident and the deficiencies that are in Windows on purpose, I’ll take LInux every time, and it seems like more people are coming to that same conclusion.
No doubt the biggest remaining frontier is live service gaming with kernel level anti-cheat, but if Linux becomes a larger user base, as it’s doing right now, the developers making those games will have to solve that problem to reach that addressable market, and everybody wins.
I switched to linux because fuck microsoft. So far it’s been fine. A minor issue with crackling in the audio in one game, and I can’t figure out how to disable the “drag a window to the edge and it wants to tile it” thing (popos with the default gnome desktop environment). But those are minor things- my windows install I couldn’t get the bluetooth to connect to one device, and a bunch of other little annoyances were inescapable.
If you have an issue with the way gnome works by default, then you are using it wrong and you should feel ashamed for that.
- the Gnome dev team
For anyone in the future, I figured out how to turn off the edge tiling thing (which is what it’s called when a window touches the edge and it wants to resize it)
gsettings set org.gnome.mutter edge-tiling falseper https://askubuntu.com/questions/1107089/how-to-disable-auto-resizing-of-windows-when-moved-to-the-topYeah GNOME exposes a bunch of settings for advanced users and extensions, you can look through them with dconf editor. PopOS isn’t the best distribution for GNOME though as it’s stuck on GNOME 42 so you’re missing out on 3 years of updates.
I have that crackling thing sometimes too, but only on desktop and not on Steam Deck, so the issue lies in something that’s different between those two things. On my desktop, my usual use case is to have a bunch of programs open at any given time and put it to sleep at the end of the night rather than close everything and power off. While low spec games like Skullgirls are fine, if I boot up a higher spec game like Kingdom Come: Deliverance II after waking my computer from sleep, I’ll get the crackling. If I just rebooted, the crackling is gone. I don’t understand the problem, but at least I have a workaround, and it’s better than Microsoft determining when I should reboot my computer. It’s my computer. I decide that.
Yeah I don’t get it when just playing music or watching video. It’s mostly been when playing Guild Wars 2 in scenes with a lot of players. I wonder if there’s something like “when the CPU is in high demand, the audio gets less priority” happening. I saw some posts about a cpu “niceness” value but I’m not familiar enough to fuss with it, and it’s not a big deal right now.
I did fuss with it according to the directions in forums, and it didn’t change anything, but I also barely understood what I was doing.
Gamemode, that I mentioned in another message, among other things changes the niceness value.
Try searching internet for something like: Linux proton crackling
Are you using gamemode, and have you added your user to the gamemode group? Crackling is likely caused by buffer underrun. Many reasons why that might happen, but one is that if the game isn’t given high enough privileges, the machine can’t fill the buffer quickly enough. Gamemode should solve that. Check your distro’s guide how to set it up. If that doesn’t work, Pipewire/PulseAudio might have been configured to use too short buffer.
I don’t think I know what gamemode is. Is it https://github.com/FeralInteractive/gamemode ?
I’ll do some searching for crackling next time I’m at the desktop
That’s the thing. It’s most likely in your distro’s package manager, unless you are using CachyOS, which uses different app for the same thing. Remember to add your user to the gamemode group or it won’t do much for you.
Are those instructions current? I don’t see it on the readme on the git project, and installing it from Kubuntu’s package manager didn’t create a gamemode group (it also doesn’t come with a manual page).
You can just create the gamemode group and then add your user to it.
Use
gamemoded -tto test that it’s configured and working correctly. The configuration file should probably be /etc/gamemode.ini. Andgamemoded -stells if gamemode is currently active. Steam doesn’t support gamemode, so you have to addgamemoderun %command%to every game’s launch options.Would that same command also work through Heroic, or do they handle that kind of thing differently? Sorry, sometimes things are so abstracted from us that we don’t have to think about what it’s doing under the hood.
Heroic Launcher should have a setting for gamemode.
I think Windows is kicking anti cheat out of their kernel (thanks, crowd strike) so it may become a non issue.
What I had heard was that they were looking for other hooks into the operating system that weren’t as deep, not that they were removing the deeper hooks.
That is still kicking it out of the kernel. For all functional purposes anyways.
The short of it to what I understand is they want to provide an official standardized way for anti virus and anti cheats and other software that would normally live in the kernel to do what it needs to.
Basically making everything live in user space unless it’s made by microsoft. It should result in basically there being an entire layer between the kernel and the user and their software.
Which is perfect for Linux. If it lives in userspace, it can be made compatible.
If anticheats would work properly on Linux I would probably ditch Windows forever. Alas.
EasyAntiCheat and BattleEye work on Linux thanks to Valve’s efforts. Unfortunately many devs explicitly deny Linux or only allow the Steam Deck.
To be clear:
The anticheat software CAN work on Linux about as well as it does on Windows. Most of the more invasive syscalls don’t exist but said tools are also backing away from those on the Windows side as diminishing returns and fear of pulling a Crowdstrike. Alternative calls are used and most of the major anti-cheat solutions actually already do that and already support Wine/Proton in ways that most game devs never will.
The issue is that the devs (so their publishers) actively disable support for that. They have EAC et al check if it is running in Proton and quit if it is. There are reasons for that (much smaller testing surface) but it is also hard to believe that companies like EA actively updating all their old Battlefields to block Proton isn’t intentional and political.
Err, and then you have stuff like DBZ Xenoverse 2 which just will never have their EAC updated because it is more effort than adding a few new skins to go with the latest movie.
There are also rumors that Microsoft will remove third-party apps like antivirus apps and anticheats from Windows kernel. If that happens, it will pretty much solve the anticheat problem for Linux as well.
Yes. That is the aforementioned “pulling a Crowdstrike”
But, as I said, stuff like EA actively going through basically every Battiefield since 3 and actively disabling Proton “support” indicates a political aspect to things. And there will still be the same testing surface issues that make live games hesitant to support “Valve and some company say this is fine” for games that make more money than many small nations.
Just avoid the games that use them. Games and the software they install should NEVER EVER run kernel-level. Also the games that use those ac’s are bad anyways.
If you must play those games, passthrough your GPU and hide the fact that the VM is a VM.
Just avoid the games that use them.
Agreed. I have no desire to give EA root access to my system, full access to everything I do on it … just to play a game.
I’m amazed Microsoft even allows such on their platform, given how large of a vulnerability it creates; as CrowdStrike demonstrated.
Well…microsoft was allowing kernel-level apps (in general). Now they’re shooing every app from the kernel.
Good: ACs won’t run as root anymore :D
Bad: It includes AVs (anti-viruses) D:
Of course, it’s rolling out slowly.
passthrough your GPU and hide the fact that the VM is a VM.
Careful with that, I’ve heard of folks getting banned because it can still look fishy.
Idc if it looks fishy because i’m discouraging this anyways.
There’s definitely some selection bias for me that made it easy to not even be interested in buying the types of games that won’t work on Linux, and that made my switch easier. I hope the solution that we eventually arrive at isn’t, “Here’s a custom kernel compatible with our anti-cheat,” but instead, “Here’s a way to play our game without kernel level anti-cheat.”
The only way to do that is to use Linux anyway, ditch Windows, and give them the middle finger until they make their game available. No amount of asking politely or screaming obnoxiously will make them care if people just continue using Windows because they feel like they “have to” play this game and keep paying them money, because all they care about is money. Only when they can clearly see their position is losing them money (3% is probably not clear enough for many of them but time will tell) are they going to change their behavior. There’s nothing else that motivates them more than seeing money slipping through their fingers.
Depending on white knights like Valve and CDPR to ride to our rescue is good but they can’t do this on their own either, and in fact they’ve already done very close to as much as they reasonably can. They need our help, we consumers are the ones who are statistically not doing our part. We need to recognize that we have the bulk of the agency here and we need to start to use it.
We have to choose what matters more to us, the future of playing video games on our own terms or letting the developer dictate how much we need to spend and what rights we need to give up to able to play a popular video game right now. We’re not talking about something we need to live. This is a choice we can make. Will enough people choose the future instead of immediate gratification? I don’t know, available evidence doesn’t paint a particularly reassuring picture, but I never am willing to give up on hope.
A little dramatic, but yes, I’m already not playing those games.
Is “Stop Killing Games” also dramatic? Maybe we need to be dramatic to accomplish actual change. Thanks for the backhanded compliment though, I guess.
I wonder what the percent market share is that desktop Linux needs in order to be enough for devs to implement a Linux-friendly anti-cheat
I don’t think it’s particularly controversial these days to say that Linux gaming is way ahead of Mac gaming, so I’m not sure that part is suprising, beyond the notion that in other metrics the OS split for those is more like 15% to 5%.
I mean, the Mac side was celebrating this month that Cyberpunk finally runs natively on it, and it is borderline unplayable on most of the hardware out there, gets comparable to what? A 5060? on the very top end.
I read in that two missed opportunities: One, Mac gaming should get so much better. Two, somebody on the Linux side should really start taking non-gaming compatibility seriously.
The Mac thing is two-fold. Apple moved to new architecture before it was primed and ready for gaming, and Valve has been slow to adapt Steam to it. Apple’s solution, which will not work, because Valve tried the same thing a decade ago, is to juice the market by funding ports. Apple’s putting far more money into it, because it’s such small potatoes on their balance sheet, but the result will be much the same. This isn’t a situation where getting a few heavy hitters will solve their library problem and get everyone else to fall in line. The problem is Apple and its platform are hostile to getting this sort of game on it.
It’s genuinely more complicated than that, honestly. Apple did a great job of pretending these ARM devices were on par with desktop PC hardware when they… kind of aren’t, in absolute terms. I wonder how much of an incentive they have to keep doing this if the result is their top of the line five grand devices start to look like mid-range PCs and the bullshit way their naming conventions are designed starts getting exposed by widespread FPS counts on tentpole game releases. I genuinely don’t think Apple wants to have that conversation.
So if anything it seems weird to me that they are focusing on this. Honestly, getting triple-A releases ported to phones and tablets seems like a much safer bet. I guess it’s just hard to leave the laptop and desktop users entirely out of the loop for no good reason, but they have a lot of experience doing just that, so who knows.
It seems pretty obvious that unifying the software is the next step for them after unifying a lot of the hardware. what that means for gaming on their devices is anybody’s guess.
And of course I don’t particularly care because… I mean, macs.
The newer macs are also relatively in a state of flux with apple figuring out what works and what they want to invest in. Brew didn’t work well for a good year after the M1 made its debut. I remember trying to get things working and it was a nightmare. It’s still somewhat difficult to program for. And game devs often will do whatever it takes to release a game…which can include some strange code that only works on a blue moon or s very specific.net version.
It’s getting better each year or so but I can’t blame valve wanting to just skip all the ballony untl it’s in a better place.
You’re not wrong, but I don’t know if it should be a Valve thing anyway. For one thing, I am not comfortable with Valve owning all of PC gaming in the first place.
But from their perspective, it’s one thing to own compatibility in a system they don’t pay anything for and effectively can own and another to go do work for a bigger fish. If Apple wants big PC games to run on their hardware Apple can make it happen, presumably. I mean, Meta is keeping the VR market afloat single-handedly, and there’s a chance you could actually make money with this stuff on Mac.
I do think it makes more sense for them to do that if and when all their hardware is running the same OS, or at least the same software. They don’t seem to have made up their mind on whether that should be a thing, even though it’s very clear it should be a thing.
Agreed, I dont think its a good idea to have ANY company own near 100% of the market with PC gaming. Can you imagine the DRM and copyright protections shenanigans you could pull if you were the only effective player? Valve is mostly benevolent…but theres always a chance it goes downhill with just one asshole.
I dont claim to be in the video game industry only a dev. And macs can be easy or VERY hard to develop under depending on the underlining tools. If they dont have them…you basically have to build them from scratch (like Expo/mobile development, brew custom mac specific libraries, gnu tools that use a language not supported, etc… etc… ). If they have the libraries already installed, and is supported by apple, it becomes a breeze and, best yet, they are better than windows at less breaking changes. Not security mind, but breaking program changes. Or at least it seems like it last 10 years or so.
The M1 Arch was a departure but not from their own tooling, just everyone elses. That from what I understand a lot of games stopped working right when the M1-3 became a thing in steam. But again someone else can correct me if im wrong. I saw the effects from a friend trying to get steam working on a newer macbook pro but I am again not an expert when it comes to the gaming industry.
An interesting fact: English-language adoption of Linux on Steam is over 2x the overall, all-language adoption. This mostly cuts out Chinese (25% of users), Russian (8% of users), and Spanish (5% of users). Seems America and Europe is adopting at record pace while China isn’t.
I wonder what it’d look like with English+German only.
It always bugs me that china has higher windows usage than the rest of the world.
By the way, is it really around 6% for english-speaking users? That’s huge!
Looks like Linux adoption has been skyrocketing since early this year in English speaking areas.
I am figuring on switching once Arch Desktop SteamOS is officially released. I want Linux’s privacy, without technical irritations and official support from an 800-lb gorilla.
The avalanche will only grow
IS IT THE YEAR!?
IT’S FINALLY THE YEAR!
Tux shall rule all desktops.
all hail tux
THE PENGUIN’S REIGN CANNOT BE STOPPED
The moment Marvel Rivals is functional on Linux, is the moment I leave Windows forever.
…cue someone telling me it’s already been done
Seems like you are in luck https://www.protondb.com/app/2767030
HELL YEAH
TOO COOL FOR SCHOOL
Amazing!
