I am and always was a casual gamer, I like playing puzzles, strategy and builder games, sometimes I play with friends some 7 days to die or AoE2. I am on Linux Mint for more than a year now and was surprised how easy gaming was. From time to time I had problems with weird DirectX error messages, but all in all everything just worked.
My setup:
- AMD Ryzen 5 3600
- GeForce GTX 1660 Super
- 32 GB DDR4 RAM
So last week my girlfriend worked on my computer (we are not living together), she wrote some bills for customers and did some table stuff in calc. When I asked her at the end of the day how it was to work on Linux, she shrugged and said “Oh I didn’t notice” lol (using Cinnamon as DE btw).
Today she bought Until Dawn the remake on Steam while she is here and because she really wanted to play she downloaded it to my PC. She just started to play and everything was great. I wondered again if I should say something like “you see how great you can game in Linux”, but then it came to my mind - she doesn’t care and she didn’t even question it! The Linux Desktop got so mature, that non-tech people just don’t notice!
I think the biggest “problem” with Linux adoption is that it does not come preinstalled on computers, and this kind of proves my point I guess.
Yeah that’s all, I just wanted to share this with you guys.
P.S.: There were some bugs btw. but it turned out they have nothing to do with the OS.
I have friends who says “I still run Windows because I don’t want to do any tinkering,” but don’t realize they’d do less tinkering if they switched haha. It’s not 2015 anymore.
“Windows doesn’t require any tinkering, just run this to make a local account, decline 100 requests to use OneDrive and Office 365, get these debloaters, uninstall all these things, and make sure you always tell Windows to not restart your computer while you’re using it every time it updates. And when it does update, you’ll need to run the debloaters again.”
And if some obscure error code shows up, the first five points in the knowledge base are powershell commands.
I mean, you don’t really have to do these stuff. I doubt the comment’s author’s friend cares about debloating and privacy.
Yes, in the same way that you don’t typically need to tinker with Linux
In the end they’re not so different, except Windows intentionally does anti-consumer things that make people want to tinker.
No joke my linux laptop hardest part was the initial install. Steam made gaming seemless. No ms account login, no asking for ai, no drivers. Just install and boom im playing my games. Its so nice.
Literally, my Linux Mint came with the drivers for the wifi, meanwhile Windows always needed me to put them there…
I put Windows on my laptop last year-ish, same exact one with Linux on it now. Took around 2.5x slower to start it up. Win 11 at the time. Fresh off a new image.
Linux takes less than 10 sec. And thats without any optimization and a “heavy” distro like PopOS.
Mint is a good option too :)
I prefer Mint Cinnamon because it’s the closest I have to my long time experience with Windows. It feels closer to it, more intuitive even if vastly different.
There’s what Die4Ever said, but there’s also Windows 11 incompatibility with games that otherwise just work with Proton. Around when I got my Steam Deck, I also had a Windows PC that was, to my initial surprise, way more of a hassle for games, so I pretty quickly switched to Linux Mint, and later Fedora.
I used Ubuntu way back when on secondary PCs mostly for fun, but Linux has only outpaced Windows imo in the past five years.
Absolutely this. I was spending 2-3 hours a week making my Win11 box stable.
Once a month I had to redo all the sound drivers, as with each reboot sound would get quieter and quieter until I was running a lottery of which program wouldn’t be affected any given day and suddenly have it’s volume loud enough to shake the house.
I upgraded CPU/MB after the MB failed, MS cancelled my Win11 licence. I realized I still was spending stupid amounts of time keeping things working, and I am very against all the AI being shoved into every Windows book and cranny.
The first week of ditching Win11, I was tinkering everything because New Shiny, but now things were working I’m not even sure I’ve spent 3 hours in the last two months tinkering.
I mean, if you have Windows like DE’s it’s really not THAT hard for a Windows user to use Linux. The issue is when you have Gnome and others installed.
But yes I agree with you. I definitely think we’ve come a long way from having to use the terminal for everything.
Compared to when I started with Linux 21 years ago, we are absolutely spoiled with games that work well today.
Gaming on Linux wasn’t really that much worse back then. This is just reaction to Proton propaganda. Proton didn’t even fix the frame timing issues that caused rhythm games to be near unplayable or racing games with time trials to be unbeatable (imagine spending hours on an impossible to beat track). -Wine devs fixed that so very recently that many probably aren’t even on that fix yet!
And Microsoft is constantly coming out with newer technologies that Linux will never keep up with or come out with on their own from ‘volunteers’.
If you want to play modern games, there’s no reason to not use Windows. There are reasons to not use Linux.
Man do I feel that PS, I think the worst part of gaming on Linux (which is massive credit to how well it works) is not knowing whether a bug is just… the game, or is somehow Linux/Proton/Drivers. I hate not knowing if it’s worth stopping to look into a fix or not.
When our 7 days to die server is not working or we get some bug we are always joking in my friends group that it “must be a Linux issue” lol. We have checked so often and it always was a problem that had nothing to do with it. To be honest my Windows friends apps have problems with bugs and glitches in their games because the game studios often release their games in a poor state.
The “doesn’t come preinstalled” part is still huge, combined with the “doesn’t have first-party device manufacturer support”.
If you buy a PC with Windows preinstalled, that doesn’t only mean that you don’t have to install Windows, but also the whole set of hardware in there will work just fine under Windows. They don’t put a fingerprint reader in there that doesn’t have a Windows driver, or a GPU with bad Windows driver support.
And yes, most hardware natively works pretty well under Windows, but the manufacturer taking care that they only select components that work fine under Windows is a big part of why there isn’t a hardware lottery under Windows.
I suggested a friend to try out Bazzite (KDE desktop). He told me it felt like he was playing on a console because everything works from the get go. He didn’t have to tweak or install anything.
I almost broached the topic with my mother (60s) the other day about moving to Linux. She’s got a computer that sucks, and my other brother got windows 11 on there so it’s exceptionally slow. I was helping her with some documents and printing and whatnot so I started asking a couple of the questions you would ask, like what she uses the pc for. She uses this tax software and “needs” it installed (as opposed to the browser version) so I didn’t continue down that road but I’m pretty sure it’d blow her mind how much better this thing would run with mint. And other than that tax software, it’d be nearly identical for her, open a browser and go to the thing.
I got my mom (about the same age as your mom) setup on Linux for her new laptop about a year ago. She’s been using it fine, and was even excited to tell me how she figures stuff out without me.
Honestly, I’ve had to do less work on her machines since I switched her over. Package management makes it easy for my mom to add or remove apps.
I’m old and thus my relationship is old enough to drink. As we met they were using an utterly virus riddled Windows XP install. I suggested alternative and that Debian install has survived a couple decades. Sure, I’ll do anything major like hardware changes but mostly it has just been easy living. For most people working browser, some sort of office package and an image editor is plenty. Linux has been ready for that for a long time.
Glad to see the “working as intended” responses. Linux as a computer for people to use and Linux as a hobby can sometimes be at odds. It’s not a problem at all if someone’s able to use a Linux computer without noticing.
Nice it’s always great to hear the work millions of people put into the Linux ecosystem is paying off.
This is the kind of story we should forward to Linus Torvalds, the Linux mailing sublists and other volunteers so they see how their work gets recognized ^^
Excellent. That means it’s working as intended.
The best user interface is one that you don’t even notice. The seamless layer between you and your tool (or game in this instance).
My partner is the same way roughly. Biggest issue she’s had was her drawing tablet pen not working. Turned out she was using the wrong pen for that tablet, the correct pen worked flawlessly. An hour of my life troubleshooting I can’t get back haha.
There have been a few games that have had issues, and the updates aren’t the most intuitive on Kubuntu, but she did manage the last update just fine on her own without me even being home, so that’s good.
My biggest issue with games is that they still don’t just work™, all the time, and they need to be seemless for people like that.
You download a game on a couple devices it doesn’t work on one, or you need to tune the configuration, or even when it does start there are sometimes graphical issues (unrelated to GPU capability, like not all layers rendering), or ghost input (one game I have circles round and round like the R joystick was glued right even with just a mouse and keyboard), or modern games designed to work only with a mouse when the developer could have easily supported keyboard and controller.
A couple of years ago, I might have still checked protondb for Linux compatibility before making a purchase, but it seems a waste of time now. Everything that I’ve bought through Steam, or bought on GoG / claimed for free on Epic through Heroic has Just Worked, and has done for years. I think it got better when the Steam Deck was released; put a lot of visibility on Linux compatibility.
If you aren’t in to AAA, and even then only the competitive multiplayer with intrusive anticheat, then Linux is all you need.
I can barely get anything to run on Mint, but it probably has more to do with the fact my desktop is 14 years old and I refuse to put any money into upgrading it.
Idk, my partner has an RTX 1650 but the PC runs Mint, is a Dell Optiplex 990 with stock mid-2011 mobo, Intel i5-2400 CPU and 20GB DDR3-1333 RAM (8+8+2+2). It runs really well, considering.
Yeah, 14 years might do it. Does your GPU have Vulkan support?
If not, yeahhhh, that’ll make basically anything not run
A slightly newer but still cheap GPU might work wonders. RX 580s are pretty cheap ($60 last we looked?) and if you can afford that, it’ll get you Vulkan support.
– Frost
