Discussions and news about gaming on the GNU/Linux family of operating systems (including the Steam Deck). Potentially a $HOME away from home for disgruntled /r/linux_gaming denizens of the redditarian demesne.
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FYI Prism Launcher is a Minecraft launcher ( !prismlauncher@lemmy.world )
*Data is based on 1908 publicly shared crash logs because no telemetry is collected
It is most commonly installed with Flatpak.
The most common graphics kernel driver is amdgpu
I was so happy when I discovered Prism because I did not want to install multiple layers of garbage to get Curse modpacks working like I had to on Windows. I still have friends with Overwolf running in the background!
I'm not sure if I remember this right, but I think there was also a while where it was integrated into the Twitch desktop client
EDIT: Yeah, you needed the Twitch client (with Twitch account) to be able to download modpacks
Oh yeah! Fuck that noise too!
If I installed it on a Linux machine and had mods, can someone on a console join and have the mods work?
Spouse plays on console, and it would make it more likely I'd like to play if I could add some kind of mods
Java edition (the one Prism and most other launchers run) and Bedrock edition (the one on consoles) are incompatible with each other unfortunately. Also Bedrock doesn't support modding afaik
It's the best Minecraft launcher right now so it doesn't surprise me that much. Anyone playing Minecraft on Linux (Windows too) should use it
I just swapped to it last week, from curseforge. omg it's so much better
next swap is to Linux, but I'm really taking my time with that, because I am lazy
Make sure your essential programs can join you on the switch, if not then make sure you're comfortable with the alternatives the Linux ecosystem has to offer. Take your time, and I'd recommend mint.
Don't let us peer pressure you, take your time.
It will be fun as long as your curiosity passes the lazy. Speaking from personal experience lol.
Do you play any kernel level anti cheat games or absolutely must have desktop Office? If not, just pull the trigger. It's so worth it.
no, on my personal computer, it's purely laziness that has kept me from switching this past year. I don't do much on my own pc lately beyond game, and not much variety lately. I just haven't gotten around to cleaning up all my data and shit, which in my mind is step number one to sorting out my computers and network setup going forward. I have a bunch of shit to do and just want to tackle it when I have time to do it all, not currently in a 'tech' phase of hobbies lol. but soon enough, it is winter after all, with less time outside.
if you're going for a gaming distro, do yourself a favor and go with bazzite!
it's kind of the unofficial SteamOS for desktop and has a general philosophy of "it just works", comes preloaded with basically all relevant gaming communities!
prism is in the app store, bazaar, and literally just a click to install ;)
so bazzite 'full' or whatever doesn't work on my old af laptop, so I went with xubuntu. seems to be working fine. that was easy
the problem now is getting my designated server PC running the server, and I seem to be having difficulties getting that going on Debian, as none of the guides I've seen so far actually explain what is happening or are for a different setup. mostly it's just a lack of knowledge thing on my part, but I have a few hours to give it tomorrow to try and sort it out
good luck!
If this isn't just an artifact of the way data was collected, I suspect it's not because Linux users are more likely to install alternative launchers, but because they're much less tolerant of non-FOSS software in general.
Anecdotally, most Windows users I know use a custom launcher, but they use proprietary ones like CurseForge or Feather (both of which show advertisements; something no self-respecting Linux user would accept, but which has been normalized in Windows).
What’s prism launcher?
An open source Minecraft launcher with the ability to manage multiple instances, accounts and mods. Focused on user freedom and free redistributability.
It's based on crash logs so you're assuming all OPs have the same rate of crashes, which is probably false.
Do you mean OS'?
I use it on windows. Literally can't get the java version to run on windows without it (and I actually own the game)
Many people on windows don't know about it tho. PrismLauncher is vastly superior to the dogshit launcher mojang provides. I'm pretty sure there would be more windows users if it was more known.
Haha, I just installed prism (via flatpak) to set it up and see what my Linux performance was like compared to my prior Windows performance a couple days ago.
Don't strongly recall my Windows performance, but pretty sure Linux was doing better, frametimes seemed more consistent for the same result. Also, man, Prism is still the best, such a great way to manage a lightly modded Minecraft instance, with just a few handpicked mods, shaders, and resource packs.
Prism and Modrinth have been a godsend! It is so easy to manage mods and updating
What if it crashes way more often in Linux?
Or what if it crashes way more often on Windows? Also, can you disable sharing of the crash logs? Are Windows users or Linux users more likely to share the logs? We don't have enough data, this graph could be skewed either way. Though it's probably mostly accurate.
The crash log sharing is opt in, as far as I recall
It is
It's anecdotal , but I heard that Linux bug reports are actually a problem for some game developers. When 1% of your customer base submits 10-20% of your bug reports, middle managers get upset. Apparently several games have had Linux support dropped because of this.
While Linux often has more bugs in games (and so more reports), Linux users have also been conditioned to report bugs better. It helps a lot in FOSS etc.
Yeah, I've also heard that Linux users report more bugs, but including bugs that are not Linux specific. So they are helpful to the Windows users in a way.
I just wanted to add to what you said by sharing this bit of information, because I do find it very interesting to see. I hope I don’t come off as argumentative, because that’s not my intent.
I recall this post on Reddit from an indie game developer of the game “ΔV: Rings of Saturn”. They said how 38% of the bug reports for their game came from Linux users, despite only making up 5.8% of the purchases for the game.
It does make it seem like the Linux version of their game was buggier, but of the some 400 bug reports they got, only three were specific to the Linux build. In this case, getting more bug reports from Linux users did not indicate the game was buggier on Linux.
I will not say this is the case for all cross-OS games because this is just one example, but it seems that Linux users are more inclined to provide bug reports than Windows users are, and that doesn’t necessarily mean Linux versions of software are buggier. In some (maybe even many, I don’t know) cases, the Linux version certainly is buggier or performs worse due to developers spending less time on it or other reasons I’m not aware of, but it’s not always the case. The higher volume of bug reports from Linux users may give the perception that the Linux version is buggier.
And, as the developer mentioned, those bugs exist whether or not they’re aware of them. I’d argue that the decision by some developers to remove Linux versions because of the higher volume of bug reports is short-sighted because many of those bugs are not going to be OS-dependent, and now there are fewer reports of them.
You've basically summed up what I was trying to say better than I did. To Linux users, bug reports are a good thing. They help fix things. To middle management, bug reports are a bad thing, they hurt their bonuses.
One group needs to change, and Linux users are impressively stubborn.
Anecdotal of course, but I use it regularly and it has never crashed. I'm using EndeavourOS.
I use this on Windows and honestly it blew my mind how amazing it is compared to the regular launcher. Like it’s one of those things that I have to tell everybody about because it’s that great.
People willing to play expert modpacks are also people who are willing to tinker with Arch Linux.
Seriously though, there's so many parallels between modded Minecraft and Linux: they're foss, they have a billion packages with a billion dependencies, weird bugs pop up and you work around them, and of course, the skill set to automate things in a game like that (or factorio, satisfactory, etc) lend themselves to using console commands and scripts and such.
That said, it's also just easier to play Minecraft on Linux with a launcher, haha.
Been off MC since m$ ruined it. Only luanti and voxelibre now. Im having fun again!
Its not a 100% perfect copy, but it works flawlessly, and servers are dead simple to setup. And everything is totally customizable.
I refuse to pay m$ or use an account from them. They already ripped me off twice for the game (because I never moved it from mojang because i wasnt gaming when that transition happened, and they will not give it back), so screw em.
(Psst, there’s a fork of prismlauncher called freesmlauncher which bypasses the need to pay micros*ft to play Minecraft) you can’t join servers that have their online-mode set to true, which is 99.9999% of public servers, but if you host your own, you can disable it and let anyone join
Fuck MS but I will say once you own the game you don’t have to give them money. I bought it on Java from Mojang years ago and didn’t play during the changeover but was able to move it to an MS account and not pay again.
Now with Prism launcher it’s incredible and I’ll never go back to the bloated launcher.
It's available in the software catalog with a click of the button in Linux. Also, it makes running mods simple.
Well, PolyMC (PrismLauncher antecessor) was forked from MultiMC after its dev had a big disagreement over how it was packaged in Linux Distros, so I suppose it makes sense the primary audience is Linux
I am surprised that amd is at the top, but the nvidea arbitrary restrictions and tax are quite high.
Let’s keep passing those Linux numbers up!
Side note: why is there a presumably third party “Minecraft launcher”, doesn’t the app just open? What does this do?
minecraft has a vanilla launcher too, because the game started out as a java applet so you need a shitton of flags to actually get the game to run normally. also there's no way to login to an account in the actual game.
anyway, prism is a mod-loading launcher. it integrates with curseforge and modrinth to allow you to install, build and distribute mods and modpacks.
Is there a variant that allows users not to have to pay Microsoft for minecraft?
No but there might be a json file to drop in your dot files that covers you
Wow, I thought it was the opposite! That the majority of users are on Linux.
Or maybe it is the case, because the stats have a very limited dataset.
i have seen people dualboot linux just because minecraft runs so much better compared to windows