11% month on month expansion is fucking crazy. You can see from the data it’s mostly Windows 10 users deciding to upgrade to Linux…and even OSX.
I’m in those stats when I switched to Mint!
How is your idle VRAM (video RAM) holding? For some reason i have 1GB usage in Mint with Cinnamon without anything running, while on windows i have 400MB (although i have optimised them a lot).
I’m not sure. I’m a photographer and comic. I switched to mint cause it’s easy, I’m not much of a computer person.
Did you find mint easy? I am a bit of a computer person, and I’ve been struggling a bit with it
Effortless. My only issue with it was installing Plank Reloaded.
I’ve been struggling quite a bit switching file managers. Nothing is fully satisfactory
dired-modeis as good as ever
400MB??? What do you have running? I never use more than 100 unless I open a game or something.
Well, screen is running at 4k, so i think its normal.
Ah, yeah that changes things a bit.
Would love more support for MacOS but I’m also fine turning my windows 10 rig into a Linux machine. Need recommendations on a gaming distro! AMD TR 1950 w/GTX 1080TI
Bazzite is the go-to gaming distro. It’s basically Steam OS.
I’m personally a fan of Mint (old, stable) or Fedora Plasma (cutting edge), as both feel very familiar coming from Windows. I went with Mint personally.
This is my use case as well. Not that macOS gaming is terrible, it’s just not as good as a dedicated Linux system because of the easier proton translation on Linux than the tinkering required on macOS.
If all you do is game, outside of a few key games (Destiny 2, uhh,couple others) the experience on Linux is better for many folks.
The success of Steam Deck has helped a lot. Prior to that Linux ports tended to be very perfunctory and they weren’t tested or supported very well. I guess that now there are actual Linux gamers (via Steam Deck), that support has improved. That said, I think outside of Steam Deck and SteamOS, your experience of gaming is going to be extremely dependent on your GPU, driver support and a number of other factors. Things are far more likely to work well on Windows than they would for Linux.
I could drill down into the work that went into DXVK before Proton came about, enabling the Steam Deck, but that’s a boring history lesson. I will concede that newer bleeding edge hardware is far more likely to be plug and play on Windows, but one of the leading reasons I transitioned was Windows removing support for the audio chipset on the motherboard for my Ryzen 1600. Every time I rebooted, I’d have to unpack a zip file and reinstall the audio drivers, it was maddening.
In my experience (so, totally anecdotal), my hardware is stable longer on Linux than Windows.
My experience with Linux with Nvidia drivers was basically - hey execute this “.run” file and you get drivers. Okay that worked but then if the kernel updated, the drivers broke and had to be reinstalled. And if the dist upgraded to a new version then the drivers broke completely. And NVidia gave up providing drivers at all for their older GPUs and I was stuck with Noveau which is better than nothing but useless for gaming.
Conversely, some dists are supported by graphics manufacturers with proper packages but there is always that gap where the driver dependencies and the kernel dependencies are out of sync. Or the graphics driver only works on the last couple of dists and support disappears after that. Or you upgrade the dist and then discover there are no drivers for it yet.
I know it rankles some purists, but really there should be an long term, versioned ABI for graphics drivers on Linux. There is sort-of is one with Gallium3D but it’s still not supported properly by all vendors.
I just took an old Optiplex with a GTX1650 and got it going with Ubuntu 24.04 and my experience was mostly okay but I saw a number of issues which could confound a newbie. Firstly, I had to go to the command like to run the ubuntu-drivers auto install because the card wasn’t set up properly. If I hadn’t then games wouldn’t run properly. But then I was able to install Steam and get some games going. Acceleration looked okay and I tested games which were running under Windows emulation and natively with some success - however there was a long delay launching some games, like it was having to transpile shaders or something. Still, when they worked they seemed to work well.
The most egregious issue I had is that Ubuntu defaults to an X11 desktop and the desktop is slightly off but the games work well. If I change to a Wayland desktop, then the desktop is buttery smooth but the games are very choppy. I suspect that’s the driver for this old card just doesn’t work properly with the window manager for some reason in that mode, that the wm is not giving the game a proper surface to render in or is somehow interfering with performance.
For flat games this is true, there is still work to be done for the VR side of things, even that has advanced by leaps and bounds in just the last 2 or 3 years
Yeah that’s the biggest reason I haven’t pulled the trigger on a VR set.
The pace of hardware for the last few years has been crazy rapid with almost zero thought given to non-windows OS’s. The people working on reverse engineering drivers for headsets get one operable just in time for it to be out of date.
check out https://lvra.gitlab.io/ for information on linux VR
lol no
I never had a single issue so far. Actually, performamce is better on Linux every single time for me. I finally got rid of Windows since I have zero use for it. The only problem could be games with anti cheats.
I’m always surprised when I hear people claiming they work in IT and find Linux to be complicated. I just installed Fedora on two of my friends’ machines. Both are cluless about computers and they are doing perfectly fine. Now for basic tasks including gaming, a granny could use it without much issues if any.
When was the last time you tried Linux? If it has been a while, you might be surprised how it has changed recently. Proton made everything so much easier.
I’m not a technical person by the way; just a normal dude who uses Linux now.
The things that keeps me coming back to Windows in my gaming rig is mostly VR, which I haven’t been able to get working on Bazzite.
Though I steam my games with Apollo/Moonlight to Mac’s and handhelds, so I rarely need to look at Windows at all.
I have VR running in Kubuntu using the sigh “official” nvidia drivers for my 4070ti super. Many of the games work from (I have over 100 in my library) ok to real good. It is just some of my peripherals have no drivers or software to configure them. I am no expert, but I might be able to assist you in your vr on nix issue, feel free to dm
Thanks, kind stranger, and I might take you up on that, in the days ahead.
I get that it won’t be turnkey like in Windows and that I’ll probably need a Windows partition (or a dedicated system) for some time longer.
Just so we are clear, you are able to play Steam PCVR games and use the SteamVR environments on your Kubuntu system?
Added monkey wrench, I just use ‘Virtual Desktop’ for streaming 100% of my PCVR content to a Quest 3 wirelessly. I assume handling the controllers and telemetry is all software for Steam and not needing obscure system calls or api’s that will have driver complications?
'Cause in hella ignorant. Lol.
I get that it won’t be turnkey like in Windows
actually, for my vive, the setup was EASIER than on windows as steam does all the heavy lifting and I didn’t need to install the vive software, and didn’t have to pair my controllers, room setup is simple same as windows.
Just so we are clear, you are able to play Steam PCVR games and use the SteamVR environments
I only do pcvr, and the steam overlay works for LOOKING at your desktop (sadly can’t interact with desktop through steam, it just closes, but there is an easy to install app that is kind of like Desktop+ that gives desktop control with a double press of a button on your controller) or using the steam launcher. I stopped using their environments (I had the basic and some Dr Who ones, some star wars ones like the cantina and millennium falcon) on my older pc cause the environment was adversely affecting performance(don’t think it was shutting off completely, I now simply use the empty space on the round grid with mountains in the distance and bring up my steam menu from the controller.
I just use ‘Virtual Desktop’ for streaming 100% of my PCVR content to a Quest 3 wirelessly
I never used VD and the people I know that do are only on windows.
I assume handling the controllers and telemetry is all software for Steam and not needing obscure system calls or api’s that will have driver complications?
I wish I had an answer for this one. Can quest use the steam backend like vive/index? if so should be good. I know vive and valve worked together on the software so are compatible that way. Like I said above wrt controllers they just worked with no pairing, both my index controllers and vive wands (I did a quick test for someone who was having issues with vive wands “stuck on the floor while in their hand”
Just make sure you use the steam installer from the steam site, not the flat pack or snap or whatever, they don’t have the correct screen lease thing (whatever it is called) and I used Kubuntu simply because when I started my journey KDE was the preferred DE, I personally prefer Gnome but VR dammit, and wayland was the better choice for VR x11 maybe better now for VR but wayland is the future from what I read.
Thanks for sharing all of this and I’ll have to take it for another spin.
Quest is a whole SOC, a beefy Snapdragon computer that has its own environment, and needs software to link it with the desktop housing SteamVR.
I’ll have to try Steam’s maybe platform and see if I can forego Virtual Desktop. Or at least dual boot
Yeah, that is fair. I personally don’t know much about VR so I wound’t know.
I admit it might be a a bit more complicated when it comes to make VR or things like a racing wheel work without having to dig around.
I had to move back to windows on my son’s computer because of VR… But we now have the quest 3 and most things I want to run just work on that now anyway. It’s for the kids really, it’s gives me a headache
But year vr on Linux doesn’t really work from what I can tell.
It’s often easier for those that have few technical skills to learn new things. Simple because they need to unlearn so little. Experts have to put forth much greater effort to forget the “I have always done it this way” an “Why doesn’t this respond exactly the same way I’m used to.”
It takes far more effort to unlearn years of skills and replace them with new ones.
lol anyone who works in IT and finds Linux too complicated should not work in IT. Then again, most people who work in IT should not. It’s complex, but all you need to do is learn. People who can’t learn more all the time don’t belong in a field where things change and improve all the time.
I got started with tech starting from when I was like 7 yo in 1980 and ended up in IT since it was a passion of mine and I have an affinity for it. Working as a professional, I saw - DAILY - morons in the field who were bungling every other task they had. They didn’t think the right way, they didn’t understand it, they didn’t love it, and screwed up every other thing they did. DAILY I saw this from techs whose work I was called in to fix after the fact.
I recently got a new work laptop with Windows 11. It’s just different enough from Windows 10 that it pisses me off to try to find the stuff I need. I end up hunting and grumbling and searching the web for answers to simple things.
If you’re going to do that anyway, just try Linux. It’s free and easy, and it doesn’t steal all your private data, sell it, and use that money to corrupt your government to steal your rights and give them to corporations.
It’s probably because I’m using an NVIDIA card but I switched an SSD to arch Linux because that’s the only thing I could get to actually run a game and not a black or grey screen. Once I finally got steam and heroic launching games I will say only about 60% of the games I’ve tried work but that’s because I’m trying to keep up with some newer games and play Jedi Survivor, The Last of Us part 1 and the Mass effect Legendary Edition and half the time it won’t boot or has HDR issues or something. But all my indie or smaller games that are verified I’m surely installing and only playing them there.
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Dude, you need to chill. Why not take a break and unclench you jaw and fists for a while?
This conversation doesn’t deserve this level of blood pressure.
A decade ago you tried Linux and it was hard, try again or butt out. Windows has become even more of a privacy violating, data snorting, market manipulating whore in that time and it will not stop.
I’ll bet they roll out subscription based drivers before you make a legitimate atempt.
lol ya
except not, not at all
Saying that there is a gaming focused linux distro is like saying there’s a cliff-climbing focused dolphin.
I’m sure the delusional believe in it, but actual reality says otherwise.
Yeah see, based on your other comments on this post, I don’t feel obliged to take anything you say about Linux seriously
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Name checks out
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Maybe depends on what distro you are using. There are ones dedicated for gaming.
Well I tried redhat ubuntu gentoo fedora knoppix mint arch MEPIS and even fucking slackware because apparently i am a masochist
And you will say ‘Oh but those are old distros, now they’re much betterer!’
Nope the weeks of frustration aren’t worth revisiting. You really don’t understand how much PTSD I got from the linux forums
Get a techie to set gaming distros for you. My brother installed Bazzite for me and troubleshoots. Speaking of which, Bazzite is meant to be for average users who are less literate on computers. I have rarely had issues on Bazzite unlike with other distros. Indeed, newer distros are better.
I understand. Linux can be daunting for us average Joes. Plenty of information i see on the internet are either outdated, or simply doesn’t work.
Bazzite feels so close to feature complete, but there are still corners I stub my toes on.
I have to care about whatever Wayland is, because RustDesk on Bazzite fights me (it’s my backup for remoting to fix a machine when moonlight or Steam Link is misbehaving), and I miss Steam PCVR hosting, but both of those are edge cases for most folks and I can forego on most systems.
Meanwhile, the lean, light, singularly focused environment is great and I really do like not having to bother with Windows. I never want Edge to barge in on my day again. I will never subscribe to OneDrive. I don’t want an AI companion modem Bonzai Buddy to “help” me remember anything, and memorize my SSN or Birthday along the way.
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I doubt the quality of your work.
Still, Bazzite is pretty much one of the best Gaming distros out there. All drivers are included with the installation (you select which Hardware you have before downloading) and the OS itself is immutable, so you don’t have to worry about damaging the OS in any way. The only downside is that it exclusively uses Flatpaks, which does have a few problems regarding interoperability between programs (e.g. Firefox doesn’t allow KeePassXC to interact with the KeePass add-on). However, I would recommend Flatpaks either way, since it adds better security and reliability, since you don’t have to worry about an update breaking programs.
However, if you don’t need that interoperability, I’d say there is little reason not to use it if you want to play games. And when a game doesn’t work, protondb usually gives enough hints to how to fix these issues. Generally, I had less issues with games on there compared to other distros (e.g. OpenSUSE).
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And yet, here we are. What are you even doing, responding to everyone on this group, if you just want to do work and just want to use Windows?
How is this informative, edifying or fun for you?
I’ve been running Bazzite OS on my living room big screen gaming PC since May. It’s a really slick fedora-based distro that installs out of the box with Steam, proton, and graphics drivers ready-to-launch for gaming. It was really easy to use, and my games worked perfectly.
My high school age son got a new AMD proc/mb for his birthday, and I was surprised when he said he wanted to try dual booting Bazzite and Windows when we set it up. 2 weeks later, and he decided to kill the Windows boot and just use Bazzite full time. He has no linux experience and just figures it out.
Windows 11 is shit and Linux alternatives are prettier, easier to use, don’t shove AI down your throat, and don’t steal your data for profit. The time has come.
Linux really is in a good place I’ve been on it for some months now. It feels like win 7, it doesn’t get in your way, it does what you want it to do when you want it to. And if you fuck something up its because you fucked it up… go fix it…
“Fixing it” has been a lot easier to do lately as well. Most distros set up a rollback feature of some kind these days.
I don’t remember what i did… but i completely fucked my system up… linux wouldnt start at all…
I tried looking online for help and i basically needed a flash drive with linux to “fix” the issue…
I didn’t have that, i lost it or whatever…
I took a shot with asking chat gpt and for all its hate… it was somehow able to explain some weird boot loader thing I’ve never heard of and i punched in some commands into the command line, and everything was fixed…
Im not sure the point of the story, but don’t go changing system level shit when your trying to fix your graphics card from crashing while playing no mans sky… i did fix the issue though changing the desktop from cinnamon to xde or something…
But its like a memory bug or something that hopefully gets fixed for amd at some point
Your son is a badass.
Good on your son! Glad he sees the light. Windows is shittier and shittier all the time. I migrated away from it years ago. It’s absolute poison now.
I’m too old to tinker anymore. Bazzite has been a blessing. Rock solid.
I can’t wait for nvidia to fix the last few graphical glitches in steam big picture and game scope.
I have windows 11 and bazzite as dual boot. I haven’t moved over full time yet though. Mainly due to VR support and sailing…
Valve put together a good product this time compared to the first steam machines push. Most games work without fuss and it’s priced well. They didn’t start the handheld PC market but they sort of Apple’ed it by taking something other companies had been doing and streamlined it enough to get mainstream copycats, Lenovo/Asus/etc. Plus SteamOS/bug picture looks a lot better today than 10 years ago. So proven market/platform that can again try to undercut Windows machines in price because Linux is free and leverages the work of open source developers
Microsoft Recall and Steam Deck and Proton are why.
It would be so hilarious to see historians refer to the market shift as “The Great Microsoft Recall” as like a literal recall in addition to the name of the feature.
I’ve been using Arch for a little over a year, and it’s been fun. I’ve learned so much more about computers and Linux itself. I highly recommend trying out Linux and you can do it here: https://distrosea.com/ - It’s a website where you can try out different Linux distros in your web browser.
I tried setting up Windows 10 in a virtual machine recently and damn, what a miserable experience that was. “Please wait. We’re getting things ready . . . please wait . . . We’re getting things ready. Hey, you want Cortana? Tough shiat, we’re installing it anyway. Do you need an Office App? Well we’re going to install Live365, whether you like it or not. Also, we really want your email address. You don’t have a choice. Just give us your damn email address. And your phone number, too.”
Installing Linux: 15 minutes later: “You’re done. Enjoy.”
Haiku, 30 seconds later… Your all set
It’s not so much about users switching, it’s more about the ones that will stick with it. And that we can’t know for a few years yet.
Lemmy Linux copium is one of the strongest in the world.
As people already stated in the comments, this may not be a permanent change for some (they find out something like destiny 2 refuses to work on Linux without bans, some other tools needed for certain use cases are not there yet or windows only), but I think is super important people understand there are alternatives, and not only windows or Mac. Hopefully gives more people awareness that something else is out there. And would be really cool if we had more of the user base that is on the verge to throwing away the machine because of windows 11 restrictions and instead, gives machines a second chance.
All we can do is guide them. Personally, I guide them to treasure I cannot have, since I’m damn near obligated to run and deeply understand Microsoft Windows because I work for IT support.
All of my work tools are Windows centric.
I do use windows for work as well, but if people want adoption, it starts at home. I do see a need for Linux distros in general will have to make even a bigger shift for the user needs instead of whatever agenda people like to imply (I think open source is a good goal, but if I introduce Linux to someone, I will not for certain preach endlessly about this).
We need more adoption, but I also see some camps will decide to further distance themselves from these groups of users.
Yeah, by a whole permille I bet.
Common Windows L
Anyone know if CP2077 runs better on Linux than Windows?
By much? With HDR?
Sorry for the drive by comment, but this is like the one game my 3090 can’t quite handle to my satisfaction. I’ve thoroughly disabled the thing from rendering in Linux and don’t want to undo all that… But if I could get like another 10% over Windows, that would be incredible. Even 5% would be awesome.
this is like the one game my 3090 can’t quite handle to my satisfaction
Nvidia and Linux don’t have the best history. Their driver are not open source, so Valve developers have no means to improve performance and fix bugs on a driver level.
Success stories of Linux gaming are usually about Radeon and Arc GPUs whose drivers are fully open source.
This is what I was afraid of, and reflects my experience in the past, unfortunately. I am intimately familiar with Nvidia’s drivers and my random Linux black screens…
I would have gotten a 7900 TBH, but prices were terrible at the time.
I don’t run any hardware with an NVidia GPU on Linux any longer, so I don’t have recent first hand experience but I do follow Linux news and every year or so it’s announced that Nvidia is working on the last feature that’s holding back perfection on Linux. NVidia drivers don’t support implicit sync but now that the Linux graphics layer supports explicit sync, the NVidia drivers make the “Final Steps Towards Ultimate Desktop Experience”. Same BS every year. Nvidia is always lagging behind on Linux.
I’ll consider using NVidia with Linux, should NVidia ever enter upstream kernel and Mesa development the same way AMD and Intel do.
I am intimately familiar with Nvidia’s drivers and my random Linux black screens…
Same here. At one point I was very versed in reinstalling the entire Linux graphics stack because the NVidia driver’s kernel module decided that it is no longer compatible with the lastest kernel update.
I’ll consider using NVidia with Linux
Screw Nvidia.
I’d be on AMD if they weren’t price gouging just as bad (or worse), or on Intel if they offered 24GB+ cards for less than a car.
With path tracing it runs significantly worse than it does on Windows. Without it, it runs roughly the same. RTX 4060 Ti.
Awesome, thanks!
I think there’s huge variability, but as a gross overgeneralization AMD gpus run Cyberpunk 2077 a bit faster on Linux than Windows, and nVidia gpus run it a bit slower on Linux than on Windows.
If you’ve got a spare usb hard drive you could always install Linux there for a test drive though. You might be able to find a setup that gets you the extra performance you’re looking for.
I already dual boot CachyOS! In fact I spent a lot of time tweaking schedulers, power, undervolting the GPU and such for compute performance, but I think it’s well tuned for gaming too.
It’s just annoying because I beat the GPU into submission with tons of settings (as Nvidia is funny with Wayland), so its display out is totally disabled. It’s a lot to undo.
See, that makes it sound to me like you could probably come up with a setup that would do what you want, but that doing so would probably mean making it worse at some of the other things you currently use it for.
Which is where using an external drive for a third installation might be easier. Or at least easier to dispose of if you get sick of the project. But I am perhaps unusually lazy in that regard.
You raise an excellent point.
TBH I am both lazy, and a bit paranoid/afraid of dealing with Nvidia rendering issues (even if using my IGP for desktop work), but it would probably be fine and I’m… just being lazy and paranoid.
I don’t think it would make it worse for compute work.
An external 3rd partition does sound appealing, though one quirk is that CP2077 does really like SSDs. I have a slow external SSD, but it still might muddy an A/B test.
If you have a desktop, these work great for swapping SSDs out. Get a pair and swap them out whenever you need/want to. You just need a spare x4 (or larger) PCI-e slot, which is pretty common to have. (Technically they work fine with a x1 slot, but then you are slowing the SSD down.)
I’ve got an ITX mini PC with both nvme and the graphics slot filled, heh.
I put KDE plasma on my elderly Mom’s surface laptop. She uses it mostly for organising photos, and she’s loving it. She complained that windows always “messes with her settings”. If she gets it, you can too.
Anyone have good experiences with the NVIDIA 50 series on Linux? I’ve tried a bunch different flavors over the years and I’m fairly distro agnostic as long as it doesn’t get too esoteric.
Also weird question does anyone know if Single Player Tarkov with Project Fika works on Linux? I think it should
My gaming distro of choice is Garuda. As long as I keep everything up to date, everything just works.
But it’s also an Arch based distro so everything is bleeding edge, which poses risks of it’s own. I’ve not had it bite me yet, but the risk is there.
