My boss got a windows laptop (11). She was having trouble logging in. Our IT guys solution was moving it to windows 10.
MS owns gaming but they can’t seem to get out of their own way in making a respectful OS without ads, forced online accounts and telemetry. It’s kinda embarrassing in the corporate world when people open edge to the default edge home page..
I have a steam deck but my Linux laptop games well.
There's urgency to stop using Windows 7 though. Qt has already dropped it, and Chrome (used in a lot of 3rd party programs like Steam will be dropping it in less than half a year).
(And Windows 8+ is not acceptable, 11 is just even worse than 10.)
Tough I personally stopped dual booting with Windows due to their updates policy.
Sometimes I would not boot into it for months and then unskippable (or I forgot to skips them) updates would ruin that one hour of gaming I might have available...
I have a Windows VM on my main machine that I pass a GPU to for playing games. The idea was I'd just snapshot the disk so if windows hosed me I could roll back. In practice I just play games in linux through proton or native though. The Windows install always needs updates so it is a chore when I actually want to use it.
As an aside, I cannot believe how it is impossible to script the base windows install to do updates through the command line on a strict schedule! I ended up having to install some 3rd party powershell package and I still have some annoying limitations around feature updates with it. This should be built in!
Do you just use virtual box for something like this?
I split my time between two places, and game infrequently which means my SFF gaming PC is often still in the box until I need it, at which point Windows updates can waste the time I had for gaming.
Would love a way to use my laptop to keep some Windows VM snapshot up to date. Windows has ruined more gaming sessions than it’s provided for me lately.
I've installed W11 on a used laptop I intend to sell extra cheap, using a ISO gen tool to ignore the stupid requirements and it seems to work well (for now).
Apart from multiplayer games with kernel anti cheat and some games unsupported by Proton, I see no reason to install Windows on my next gaming PC or any other PC of mine. I have a Steam Deck, a Linux laptop and a gaming PC with dual boot.
Feel like this is mostly Steam Deck usage but I would be pretty tempted to use a desktop build of SteamOS on a well supported device (like say, a Framework 16 one day)
I remember a while ago Valve said eventually a base OS that resembles how Steam Deck OS is gonna be officially released, do you know if there are news about this?
For the time being HoloISO seems like a nice alternative, are there any caveats or problems? Are you using an AMD GPU like the Readme says is more likely to work without issues?
One thing to keep in mind is that Intel GPU support on Linux is still missing some things for VKD3D to work properly so DirectX 12 games tend to just not work.
Not surprising: the vast majority of major games are windows only, and then use steam deck/wine to work anywhere else.
You can do similar with some games on Mac but it’s done through the windows client which is what I assume is being measured - couple that with the comparative difficulty of setting wine+steam up and you have negligible mac usage.
Which difficulties are involved in selecting a Proton version from a dropdown and clicking install?
I only boot windows to play VR. Gaming on linux is easy* compared to the early days. Nobody messes around manually with wine instances anymore, dude; wine/protontricks is a thing. (98% of the time at least).
[*] Easy for the games that run on Proton, which according to ProtonDB is ~70% of the titles on steam (those with silver+ rating).
Edit: I should mention, I swore off AAA gaming years ago, so that likely contributes to my satisfaction with linux gaming. Really, though, nothing of value was lost to me.
> Which difficulties are involved in selecting a Proton version from a dropdown and clicking install?
That it doesn't exist on macOS?
The point I was making is that the overwhelming number of games on steam are windows only games, the valve semi-supports on linux via proton, which they do not offer on macOS. The net result is anyone jumping through hoops on macOS to use steam+wine is recorded as a windows user, even if there were even remotely meaningful number of such users.
Hence linux steam users matching macOS steam users is an obviously plausible outcome.
Hoping to see more movement on Mac compatibility in the future, but even with the recent game porting tools, I won't be holding my breath. It's sad, these laptops seem like they'd be decent for casual gaming (One of my main computers is a MBP. I use all the OSes.)
It’s almost like modern Mac users can’t play games well on their Arm based hardware…but hey let the Linux guys have another scintillating victory……Yotld!
ARM isn't the issue. They run in the x86 emulator fine. I can't tell they aren't native. The problem is virtually no games support MacOS. ARM or x86. Anything that does seems to run really well.
I can play minecraft at 120hz for hours and hours on battery and it's a great experience.
Yes. They also pissed off almost every developer by cutting off their legacy revenue stream. No one is going back to update an old 32-bit game to 64-bit. Apple burned a lot of bridges in the gaming community with that move, and other boneheaded stuff like their refusal to support Vulkan.
Because they would sell more games in the end. I guess this is exactly what will happen: A Steam Runtime for 32bit x86 games bundeled with FexEmu for M1 and a 32 bit x86 runtime for macOS in general.
I don't think so. The whole move to steamos started with the windows store and valves worry that a future windows wouldn't support third party games, or would somehow make them worse compared to windows store games. It turns out msft made a mess of their initiative but that was valves worry.
I don't think galve trusts apple to do anything different at all - apple maintains much more stringent control of their os and what software can be run on it, and also asks for platform fees.
Valve wants none of that. Apple will develop their own game support and it will be for an apple gaming platform that they'll take 30% for.
Let's also hope that outside of Macs Risc-V is going to be adopted soon, because neither Intel nor Ryzen (and Arm is even worse??) are acceptable options.
On Steam Deck? Valve does make Windows drivers available for Steam Deck hardware, for those who are hardcore enough to install Windows on it, and those willing to accept the trade-offs and downsides of doing it.
Valve ships windows drivers for the steam deck but does not currently support dual booting. Some people have published guides on line for how to accomplish this unsupported
If Valve has a polished SteamOS distribution for general hardware by the time Windows 10 goes EOL that would be very, very awesome. It would need to be as good of an experience regardless of your video card choice, but I'd for sure opt to install it over Windows 11 in that case.
It's not perfect but it's pretty good and I only use my desktop as a small media server and for games anyway.
I chose nvidia when I made the switch to linux probably 8 years ago. At the time AMD had not yet started their open source driver efforts. I haven't had any major complaints besides updates once giving a black screen. During most of that time AMD drivers were making a lot of changes that I didn't want to deal with. I believe they are a good choice now but they certainly did not seem to be then.
As far as steam, I've been using it happily on mint the entire time. It has had a big picture mode for some time. I'm a little baffled by people who seem to be waiting for a steamOS general release to make the switch.
I've been using Steam longer than HoloISO and I also used Nvidia 15+ years ago but I much prefer the updated interface, and Valve have no time to code around Nvidia's bullshit so the there are hard crashes.
I switched to AMD after the RX480 and haven't looked back. That was 8 years ago, so there hasn't been a good reason to use NVIDIA for a long time.
It's fine if you want to use Mint, but it doesn't make Nvidia a good person here.
The article is using Steam adoption numbers as gateway into Linux game market overall, so it is only appropriate that proper game market numbers are mentioned.
> "if SteamOS usage from SteamDeck count as Linux Desktop"
SteamOS basically is a Linux Desktop. Steam Deck is just a hand-held form-factor PC with built-in Steam Controller, and SteamOS is basically just Valve's custom Arch Linux with KDE Plasma desktop and Steam "Big Picture" mode as "desktop" environments.
> "then so should Apple mobile devices."
No, they shouldn't, because Apple mobile devices don't run Linux, nor Steam.
Apple Arcade is nostalgic in the sense that the entire catalog of games is short enough that you can iterate it. (Note: still zero games that start with a V) The games aren't bad, but everything is the list has a better version elsewhere. Couple of examples:
- Oceanhorn 2's gameplay is strictly inferior to Zelda (because of BotW's popularity, there are more fun options even over TTK)
- I found Oregon Trail patently offensive. It's one thing to be a remake that worse than the original. Lots of games have that problem. It's another when your nostalgia-bait headliner actively drives people away.
Apple's success outside of Arcade (Apple is the largest "gaming" company in terms of money made) appears to be a side-effect of them owning the plaform.
I mean, the market it targets makes sense. If you're worried aobut your kids paying hundreds on any app store game (which is pretty much all of them these days), Apple Arcade gives a cheap subscription for decent quality games with not IAP's. But they are still mobile games, so they aren't trying to compete for Game of the Year. The audience doesn't need that anyway.
This might be hardware-specific, but I cannot actually run games on Windows anymore. My machine hard resets every 10 minutes of I do -- some sort of an overheat problem perhaps.
On Linux everything's just fine. With the added bonus of 90% less cruft from the OS.
What's your hardware? I have the same problem that seems to come and go between driver versions. I have a AMD RX 6600XT. I've tried aggressively underclocking it, like you thinking it's some kind of thermal protection, but the issue resurfaces. And the Windows Event Viewer isn't helpful for debugging it. :/ Dual booting into Ubuntu and running the same games through Proton has no issues.
Asus Zephyrus G14 AMD from 2022. Some people suggested to me that this implies that Windows is able to actually the hardware, but that seems like a bullshit excuse to me. Especially when I'm seeing similar FPS on both sides. And it's not like the fans aren't running on Windows, they sure are.
Uninstall Armory Crate and use G-Helper, use it's update tab to make sure you have all platform/driver updates, and to confirm you have the GPU preferences, and CPU+GPU fan curves set as you'd expect (or can reset them to factory defaults). I suspect you'll have a better time.
Even if you, the reader, are not having issues and have an ASUS gaming laptop, check out G-Helper. It's a huge QoL upgrade. (It's one of those tools that causes people to write the n+1th "I normally hate third party tools but G-helper is actually amazing" etc posts).
Thank you for the ideas. I won't need them anymore since Linux is now strictly better than Windows for me. But perhaps that info will be useful for someone else.
Awesome! I'm basically there too. Honestly I mostly keep Windows just to be able to stay on top of firmware updates (fwupdmgr can't take over the world fast enough!).
For Linux ASUS Gamers, y'all likely already know, but supergfxctl, asusd/asusctl/rog-control-center are your friends!
Once they release the same steam OS that's on the steam deck for the PC, I'm going and not looking back.
Windows has turned into a horrendous flurry of advertisements, internet-based searching you can't turn off, and all kinds of default opt-in telemetry and privacy violations. Microsoft is not to be trusted.
I've been a happy Microsoft user for quite a few years because their untrustworthiness was mostly focused on other companies, and they generally had good products. But lately they have started ruining their OS in the name of short-term profits. Now it affects me and I'd like to divest away from them.
Well aside its inherent self-selecting nature, we've see multiple huge swings from China, exploding the margin for error to eclipse half-point swings like this.
I'd love to see a proper census done, or per-region drill-downs. It's too heartbreaking to see headlines like this and next month they're wiped out by internet cafes in China doing a reboot.
> The Steam Survey results for July 2023 were just published and it points to a large and unexpected jump in the Linux gaming marketshare.
> When looking at the Steam Linux breakdown, the SteamOS Holo that powers the Steam Deck is now accounting for around 42% of all Linux gamers on Steam.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 157 ms ] threadMS owns gaming but they can’t seem to get out of their own way in making a respectful OS without ads, forced online accounts and telemetry. It’s kinda embarrassing in the corporate world when people open edge to the default edge home page..
I have a steam deck but my Linux laptop games well.
(And Windows 8+ is not acceptable, 11 is just even worse than 10.)
my windows never gets updated because any update could break gaming.
my linux gets updated daily, when something breaks it’s easy to rollback and pin.
Tough I personally stopped dual booting with Windows due to their updates policy.
Sometimes I would not boot into it for months and then unskippable (or I forgot to skips them) updates would ruin that one hour of gaming I might have available...
As an aside, I cannot believe how it is impossible to script the base windows install to do updates through the command line on a strict schedule! I ended up having to install some 3rd party powershell package and I still have some annoying limitations around feature updates with it. This should be built in!
I split my time between two places, and game infrequently which means my SFF gaming PC is often still in the box until I need it, at which point Windows updates can waste the time I had for gaming.
Would love a way to use my laptop to keep some Windows VM snapshot up to date. Windows has ruined more gaming sessions than it’s provided for me lately.
Apart from multiplayer games with kernel anti cheat and some games unsupported by Proton, I see no reason to install Windows on my next gaming PC or any other PC of mine. I have a Steam Deck, a Linux laptop and a gaming PC with dual boot.
For the time being HoloISO seems like a nice alternative, are there any caveats or problems? Are you using an AMD GPU like the Readme says is more likely to work without issues?
You can do similar with some games on Mac but it’s done through the windows client which is what I assume is being measured - couple that with the comparative difficulty of setting wine+steam up and you have negligible mac usage.
Which difficulties are involved in selecting a Proton version from a dropdown and clicking install?
I only boot windows to play VR. Gaming on linux is easy* compared to the early days. Nobody messes around manually with wine instances anymore, dude; wine/protontricks is a thing. (98% of the time at least).
[*] Easy for the games that run on Proton, which according to ProtonDB is ~70% of the titles on steam (those with silver+ rating).
Edit: I should mention, I swore off AAA gaming years ago, so that likely contributes to my satisfaction with linux gaming. Really, though, nothing of value was lost to me.
That it doesn't exist on macOS?
The point I was making is that the overwhelming number of games on steam are windows only games, the valve semi-supports on linux via proton, which they do not offer on macOS. The net result is anyone jumping through hoops on macOS to use steam+wine is recorded as a windows user, even if there were even remotely meaningful number of such users.
Hence linux steam users matching macOS steam users is an obviously plausible outcome.
Hoping to see more movement on Mac compatibility in the future, but even with the recent game porting tools, I won't be holding my breath. It's sad, these laptops seem like they'd be decent for casual gaming (One of my main computers is a MBP. I use all the OSes.)
I can play minecraft at 120hz for hours and hours on battery and it's a great experience.
- Game used to be Mac playable, but isn't because of 32-bit
- Game doesn't have a Mac version at all
Valve's work on the Steam Deck shows they could fix both problems but why should they do free work for the world's richest corporation?
I don't think galve trusts apple to do anything different at all - apple maintains much more stringent control of their os and what software can be run on it, and also asks for platform fees.
Valve wants none of that. Apple will develop their own game support and it will be for an apple gaming platform that they'll take 30% for.
adobe sells some 3d software for linux via steam.
somewhat related, wickedengine runs great on linux too, even though the primary developer only runs windows.
linux gaming is here!
It's not perfect but it's pretty good and I only use my desktop as a small media server and for games anyway.
Despite them releasing a "open source" driver, Nvidia not actually working properly still seems to be the number one complaint that I see on Linux.
I chose nvidia when I made the switch to linux probably 8 years ago. At the time AMD had not yet started their open source driver efforts. I haven't had any major complaints besides updates once giving a black screen. During most of that time AMD drivers were making a lot of changes that I didn't want to deal with. I believe they are a good choice now but they certainly did not seem to be then.
As far as steam, I've been using it happily on mint the entire time. It has had a big picture mode for some time. I'm a little baffled by people who seem to be waiting for a steamOS general release to make the switch.
I switched to AMD after the RX480 and haven't looked back. That was 8 years ago, so there hasn't been a good reason to use NVIDIA for a long time.
It's fine if you want to use Mint, but it doesn't make Nvidia a good person here.
Additionally, if we are comparing the Linux gamer ecosystem to Apple, then also the Apple ecosystem should be taken into account.
SteamOS basically is a Linux Desktop. Steam Deck is just a hand-held form-factor PC with built-in Steam Controller, and SteamOS is basically just Valve's custom Arch Linux with KDE Plasma desktop and Steam "Big Picture" mode as "desktop" environments.
> "then so should Apple mobile devices."
No, they shouldn't, because Apple mobile devices don't run Linux, nor Steam.
Meanwhile, Valve has to emulate Windows and DirectX to make SteamDeck usable for its target market.
- Oceanhorn 2's gameplay is strictly inferior to Zelda (because of BotW's popularity, there are more fun options even over TTK)
- I found Oregon Trail patently offensive. It's one thing to be a remake that worse than the original. Lots of games have that problem. It's another when your nostalgia-bait headliner actively drives people away.
Apple's success outside of Arcade (Apple is the largest "gaming" company in terms of money made) appears to be a side-effect of them owning the plaform.
On Linux everything's just fine. With the added bonus of 90% less cruft from the OS.
Even if you, the reader, are not having issues and have an ASUS gaming laptop, check out G-Helper. It's a huge QoL upgrade. (It's one of those tools that causes people to write the n+1th "I normally hate third party tools but G-helper is actually amazing" etc posts).
For Linux ASUS Gamers, y'all likely already know, but supergfxctl, asusd/asusctl/rog-control-center are your friends!
Windows has turned into a horrendous flurry of advertisements, internet-based searching you can't turn off, and all kinds of default opt-in telemetry and privacy violations. Microsoft is not to be trusted.
Has this not been a truism for at least a couple of decades now?
Well aside its inherent self-selecting nature, we've see multiple huge swings from China, exploding the margin for error to eclipse half-point swings like this.
I'd love to see a proper census done, or per-region drill-downs. It's too heartbreaking to see headlines like this and next month they're wiped out by internet cafes in China doing a reboot.
> When looking at the Steam Linux breakdown, the SteamOS Holo that powers the Steam Deck is now accounting for around 42% of all Linux gamers on Steam.
Doesn't seem unexpected at all?