this post was submitted on 08 Jan 2025
316 points (97.3% liked)
PC Gaming
9233 readers
231 users here now
For PC gaming news and discussion. PCGamingWiki
Rules:
- Be Respectful.
- No Spam or Porn.
- No Advertising.
- No Memes.
- No Tech Support.
- No questions about buying/building computers.
- No game suggestions, friend requests, surveys, or begging.
- No Let's Plays, streams, highlight reels/montages, random videos or shorts.
- No off-topic posts/comments, within reason.
- Use the original source, no clickbait titles, no duplicates. (Submissions should be from the original source if possible, unless from paywalled or non-english sources. If the title is clickbait or lacks context you may lightly edit the title.)
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I'm dreaming but that would be amazing. That would make this the year of the Linux desktop. C'mon GabeN, make it happen!
Things which are holding this back
What we know so far, SteamOS won't be a general purpose OS, so it might not support every random piece of h/w.
We might not have the year of the Linux Desktop, but we can expect 2025-2026 to be the year of the Linux handheld.
SRC: Linux fanboy for the last decade
Choice paralysis is a surprisingly big issue. I'm waiting for the parts for my new gaming PC build to arrive, and the amount of time I've spent choosing a distro has been asinine.
But I did make the choice to leave both the NVIDIA and Windows eco systems on my desktop after seeing most my games run fine on the steam deck ( along with disliking windows 11, and NVIDIA ending gamestream support)
Distro doesn’t really matter too much. Just don’t get some obscure distro that no one has heard of before.
Plus it’s pretty common for newbies to jump around to test out different distros anyway.
Most of the time, the differences you will see are just desktop environment.
After you have used Linux for some time, then you will understand the major differences between the distros other than the way they look.
If you have any questions about Linux feel free to send me a DM. I’m always happy to help.
You are aware of the differences (or lack thereof) because you have spent some time. But think from a newbie perspective. They think there are 1000s of completely different OSs.
"Does OpenOffice work on Ubuntu? On Kubuntu? On Arch?"
We somehow have to stop spreading this message.
Surprisingly for a choice that I realize doesn't really matter, it still ends up burning alot of time researching.
Intially looked at Bazzite, which seemed great other than I wasn't a fan of it immutability, I've had to remove the read-only property from my steam deck a few times.
Then I looked at CatchyOS/Arch, decided to avoid that as I know I'm too lazy to read notes every update, and while I don't mind tinkering and fixing stuff.. I want it to be on my schedule lol.
Avoiding Debian, my server currently runs it, but I remember it giving me headaches installing older JREs on it to run modded minecraft servers.
So I'm going to try OpenSuse, not for any real valid reason other than the last time I tried Linux as my daily driver ( 2004/2005) it was the first distro that worked smoothly without any driver headaches.
Fwiw, Bazzite handles its 'immutability' vastly different.
That’s great. I looked into that one before, but never used it for some reason. I forget why, but it was nothing major.
I use CachyOs and it’s been a joy. If you want Debian but gaming optimized check out PikaOS. If you want Bazzite without immutability checkout Nobara.
As the saying goes, you have to use arch or you have a small penis
Hey! Some of us manage both.
Nvidia works flawlessly in my system, didn't have to tweak anything.
Let me tell you about my Nvidia experience.
I use an old Nvidia card and I'm using the proprietary drivers. My distro maintainer said they are switching over to the open source version (only supported for 20xx series and above). They said it will cause an issue. I updated my distro like usual. And boom! Can't boot anymore.
Since I'm more or less tech savvy, I could fix it but it took me few hours of my life to find the solution. I saw on reddit many people were having the same issue. If I constantly checked their Discord before every update, I could have avoided it but it's impossible for a layman.
A mainstream person won't be able to search & diagnose the problem. They will just think it's a Linux problem and give up. This is why it's impossible for Nvidia users to peacefully live with Linux. I know they are going to release a proper driver for Wayland but I am pretty sure that will take another 2-3 years. But till then, my stance remains the same.
There are a few things in your anecdote that are particular to your case and which should be solvable by an installer that focuses on gpu detection; those are the things that valve will focus on.
I'm sure it's solvable but I call these example "death by a 1000 papercuts". I don't want absolute newbies to face these issues which will make them give up Linux forever.
I am not saying that Linux can't be mainstream. I'm saying Nvidia is one of the blockades for Linux becoming mainstream. I have bazzite on my Rog Ally and it's a fantastic experience, way better than windows, but it's because of AMD.
If AMD can get an equal footing in the GPU landscape (unlikely in the next 5 years), maybe things can change. I just hope Nvidia comes to their senses and properly support Wayland.
Mine works fine, I knew nothing about linux and all I did was disable secureboot and copy paste some commands into the terminal. Now games that used to crash in windows don't and games that didn't run run. And yes spent tons of time scouting forums, going through dumb windows control panels and messing around in regedit to troubleshoot it without a solution.
Right, so since you had that experience, everyone else must also have it?
Previous commenter cited Nvidia support as a problem, I gave my singular experience of it not being a problem.
Not sure what you are on about.
Why did you feel compelled to give your anecdote, if not to undermine the idea that Nvidia support is not good?
I would argue that year of the Linux handheld has been since the deck dropped. There's been nothing that's anywhere near the solid experience of a Steam Deck. Every competitor is releasing with windows, and all I ever hear from the people I know who bought one of those is that they like it....now that they're running Bazzite. The ones that aren't releasing with windows are doing android, and while I get a whole bunch of gaming from my various android devices, until I can play pc games unported they aren't competing in the same space.
That would be a massive headache because you'd have to make it work on any hardware. And if you bork your users' PCs you're in for a really bad time. It would be much better to come up with a new Steam machine.
i mean… any hardware is kinda just a matter of time imo
linux already works with more hardware than windows does, and often more reliably - not some of the complex stuff required for gaming of course, but again… matter of time. it’s not important until it’s important and then it really kicks off
Big old citation needed there
the point is that the architecture and development style of linux provides for a very robust and reliable platform to develop hardware for
gaming is a VERY new thing on linux, so it’s not at all surprising that support is in its infancy… but you look at things that linux has been doing basically since the internet has existed: servers, and hardware support is unmatched
… and there’s way more server hardware than there are most other categories of hardware
Most of the world computer hardware is running linux already. Linux is the most popular os by far since all the servers run it. Desktop linux is very new and has gone far in a short time. With more users being lured in (and the windows exodus might be able to lure in the vital tech people) more problems will get solved.
Does anybody remember Wubi? It was Linux that was installed on Windows just like a regular program. Gave you an option to choose Linux on boot. It didn't make any partitions, and if you didn't want it anymore? Then you'd go to Windows and uninstall like any other program. It had a few limitations but was an interesting concept.
Yeah, I remember Wubi! That was 20-ish years ago now. It kind of got made irrelevant by VM's I guess. I wonder if it's still around.
VMs are still slow unless you're talking linux on linux with KVM
Wubi was great because you got native speed to test Linux with, which was probably better than Windows for at least most versions of Windows.
There's WSL now in Windows 11 - a built-in, pretty performant instance of Linux. The recent versions run a proper Linux kernel I believe (the older ones were more of a compatibility layer over Windows APIs). I'm not sure what the limitations of WSL are. But there is already some kind of Linux in Windows. I use it for the odd utility and to avoid having to learn PowerShell.
There is. Wubi was more about giving 14 year old me the confidence to try out an entirely different os.
Of course! It's what got me started!
I love it as a concept, and frankly a dual boot installer (create partitions) that worked from Windows would be pretty useful I think. USB/disk installs add complexity that just hurt the chances.
Are you sure you don't want to create a microsoft ID? Microsoft believes that you should only trust them with all of your data and credentials. They promise they won't hand over your information to the government unless the government serves them a subpoena or has an agreement to access the data that is lawful or they detect something they have been asked to report.
"It erased pictures of my nana, Im going to sue Gabe Newell!" Windows users 🙄🙄
(I am that user)
You forgot the endless pages of trick questions you have to periodically step through to get into Windows. One wrong move and you owe Microsoft money every month.
If Linux had better nvidia support I would swap in a heart beat.
AMD's RT performance is getting quite close to Nvidia. Each generation gets them closer and closer.
CUDA will always be proprietary but there's a ton of resources being put against alternative solutions.
I have been running OpenSUSE with nVidia for 7 years. No issues here.
Using Pop for almost 2 years on nvidia laptop and pc, no problem, whats the issue?
...Ok no problem is a lie, but it wasn't GPU related problems..
I had issues with my specific hardware combo of i9 14900k and 4090 and multi display issues that windows doesn’t seem to have. Though that could just be my ignorance.
Amd cpu and 4070ti super here without issues. I suspect intel being the usual dumpster fire.
Depending on the issue it may be fixed now that Wayland is better supported on Nvidia.
X.org always had issues running multiple displays with different refresh rate for example.
But don't know your exact problem of course. May be something different. I think there will be some big leaps made with nkv (the new open source drivers for Nvidia cards), but it gonna take some time.
You can always try something like pop_os on a live usb. They have the Nvidia drivers installed and use Wayland I think.
I had an issue with 2 4k screens through my dock, but that was apparently my docks fault.
I am happy going cold turkey to fedora. Windows is the less user friendly and functional experience considering i didn't even need to scour the internet for my weird audio device or graphics tablet drivers. Also steam uses multible times more ram than the os and my phone messages are on the screen and clipboard gets shared.