Counter: it's the publisher's fault, not Linux. As you said, the hardware is perfectly capable, and the OS is capable, publishers just refuse to allow it without installing kernel level malware.

It's EA's fault that you're required to install a damn rootkit to play a game. It's not the fault of Linux for refusing to allow this. Microsoft shouldn't allow it either, and they will likely shut it down before too much longer.

EA wants to intentionally compromise your computer. Linux says they can't do that. EA doesn't want you to play on Linux.

Competitive online gaming is the least strong part of the steam deck. But on the flip side it’s way better for local multi player. You can pack it in your bag with some controllers and plug it in to a friends TV easily.

I just refuse to buy games that rely on kernel-level anti-cheat to work.

Bought GTA IV only to find out the Rockstar Launcher got broken on Linux about a month before I purchased it. Downloaded all twenty gigs of the game, can’t use a penny’s worth due to the broken Rockstar Launcher.

I wonder how League of Legends (LoL) manages, given it didn't rely on kernel-level anti-cheat when I was playing. Granted, you'd have to report one or two players per week; but that was quite a rare thing and mostly it was obvious levelling bots. Clearly they manage without root kit-level hacks.

I love the idea of my Steam Deck, but most steam games just aren't make for tiny 720 screens. I'm an old man now, I can't read tiny fonts.

Also, the face buttons are just to far to the right. My thumb will begin aching after 15 mins or so. Other controllers are far more comfortable.

To be honest. I like my Playdate more than my Steam Deck.

Valve wont's give anti-cheat tools root access, and Microsoft will, but after the CrowdStrike fiasco, there's rumors that Microsoft will limit root access to monitoring tools, so anti-cheat engines on Windows might lose their advantage.

> The limitations of anti cheat on Linux might be insurmountable

Why is it insurmountable? It's not like it's impossible for the companies that produce anti-cheat solutions to get them running on Linux.

I hear you, but at the same time, you can't deny the amount of improvements the Linux ecosystem has seen due to Valve's involvement: tons of AMD-related improvements in the kernel, tons of mesa/radeon improvements, massive improvements in KDE, improvements to Arch etc. Not to mention lots of other contributors riding the wave and contributing things like drivers for gamepads and other bits, making power user tools like LACT/OCCT etc.

Linux hardware compatibility has never been as good, and I suspect a lot of it is due to so many gamers trying Linux on a myriad of systems and submitting bug reports. I've also seen some folks in some communities go from complete Linux noobs to actually making FOSS software. We've also seen some very innovative distros being born as a result of all this hype (Bazzite, the uBlue family, CachyOS etc). So you can't deny the massive impact Valve has had on the overall ecosystem, and personally I think that's a good thing - even if Proton doesn't exactly sit well with FOSS ideals.

They've sold ~8 million units. Well past the technical argument and the devs who can't be told, that's 8 million Windows licenses they haven't bought. I thin they've more than paid off the salaries of the few people they've hired to make Proton a reality.

Not sure I see your comparison to Netbooks; they failed because ultra-cheap laptops are inherently bad. You cut that many corners, you lose quality. They lost out to tablets, better phones, and Chromebooks, each doing something a netbook did but better. Steam Decks are a format that will persist.

DRM is optional on Steam. The dev can opt to not include it, and the default Steam DRM is trivially bypassed anyway.

Valve barely does any gatekeeping that isn't caused by outside pressure, i.e. Visa and Mastercard in the latest instance, which they're atleast trying to fight back against, from what I can tell.

No they are not. You can install the Epic store and others right on a Steam deck and use it. You can start any binary you wish, direct from the steam launcher. You can use the steam deck as a full-on desktop if you wished.

If Gabe Newell gets hit by a bus, what happens when his estate sells majority control to pay the inheritance and estate taxes?

With federal taxes of 40% over $15 million, there's no way his estate maintains majority control, no matter Gabe's good intentions. After that, we can look forward to Microsoft Steam. Or, if the FTC is annoyed, Amazon Steam.

I think that is a nice start, but I don't want sales of "Xbox" devices growing so Microsoft throws more weight behind them.

This is changing. Valve is actively working with hardware manufacturers to get SteamOS on a number of systems other than the Steam Deck. You can buy a Lenovo Legion Go S with SteamOS today[1], and Valve will be supporting SteamOS on the Asus ROG Ally in the future[2], whether Asus partners with them or not.

[1]https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/p/handheld/legion-go-s/len106g0...

[2]https://www.theverge.com/2024/8/13/24219469/valve-steamos-as...

I don't run SteamOS but I run Bazzite on my desktop, the main advantage of running these immutable gaming distros is to have a fuss-free gaming experience - my PC boots straight to Steam, and I never ever have to worry about OS updates or other maintenance tasks. Basically I get to enjoy a console-like gaming experience.

I work as a sysadmin during the day, fixing PCs and stuff, and I really don't want to continue doing that after I get home - I just want to pick up my controller, put my feet up and get straight to gaming without having to worry about updates and other PC annoyances.

The best part is, if on the rate ocassion an update breaks something,I can easily boot straight to the previous image from the boot menu, without needing to run any commands or do anything special post-boot. And with Bazzite (and other uBlue distros), I can go back upto 90 days worth of images (3 previous local images + older images pulled from the cloud). I can also pin a known "good" image so it'll always be available in the boot menu. Essentially I get a rock solid unbreakable system, which is great because after a hard day's work, I really don't have the patience to deal with any PC issues at home.

There's very good steam integration, a controller first UI, it's very performant, sleep works better, fantastic performance monitoring and settings.

I love it, but there's probably not a whole bunch of reason to run it on things in other form factors.

SteamOS is very different from Arch. There’s almost too much to list here. But it uses an image based read only OS, a fully custom wayland desktop environment/compositor, does not have pakman, software is distributed either through steam or flatpak, OS image updates have their own mechanism. And a whole lot of preinstalled drivers and software for things like controller support which typically don’t come out of the box on Linux distros.

The whole OS is made for controllers, no need for a mouse/kb for anything.

> derived from Windows Core

if you polish a turd, it's still a turd.

I've heard that too. And also Xbox had 2 different DirectX APIs, one more customised to the console, and one that's the standard Windows DirectX which is not as performant. From what I've heard most devs used the latter as it made porting the PC version of the game easier, and sales on Xbox would be tiny compared to PlayStation (1/3rd the install base, sales even less than that due to Xbox users not buying games and just using gamepass) there was less incentive to optimise.

The Xbox died the moment they announced it would require a constant connection to the Kinect, and internet in order to function. Even after backtracking from that, it never recovered. There’s also just a lack of reason for it to exist anymore. The PlayStation fills the need for a high power console, Nintendo offers something portable and gimmicky, what would Xbox even offer here?

These days most consoles run fairly standard hardware and games are programmed to be generic and published on every console.

It can get funny sometimes. There a game from 1999 that I had troubles running in Wine on Linux all the way back in 2005, and wrote a patch for it:

https://aow.heavengames.com/cgi-bin/forums/display.cgi?actio...

And then the same error message started showing up on Win10. Thankfully the same patch still works...

Not to mention for the different games that need different environments/configurations/libraries it's much easier to manage a bunch of profiles than a bunch of windows installations/VMs.

also the fact that it doesn’t have an internal battery

OP explained that. The original was stable after 6 months of patches. The Xbox Ally should in theory have that stability baked in. Everyone deserves a second chance. Not so much a third.

I've been using Linux since the late 1990s.

Gaming has improved by leaps and bounds in the last few years, but non-gaming desktop use has been solid for ages. What little annoyances and bugs and issues kept you going back to Windows?

I found Windows 10 was the first bearable Windows, that I could use without wanting to go back to Linux all the time. Not great, but bearable.

I still used Windows for gaming throughout the whole time. (Until about a year ago, when I accidentally nuked my Windows installation, and then never bothered to set it up again..)

Depending on the job I had at the time, I also used Windows at work.

> As for all the linux a-holes out there, please STFU, I don't wanna hear "winblows sux" or "this distro is better", it's why I didn't specify what specific distro I use. That toxic fanboyism is what keeps people away from seeing it as a viable usable OS.

I've mostly heard that until perhaps about 10 years ago. I'm sure these people are still out there, but it seems to be much less common these days.

I use Arch Linux for what it's worth, but almost any distro can install almost any program (and they all run the same kernels), so it mostly comes down to what package manager and configuration system you want to use, and whether you like the defaults that come with your distribution.

I'm still having some trouble with screen tearing in some games on Linux, alas. I suspect these problems have been ironed out for the more mainstream window manager setups (like whatever you get in Ubuntu by default, instead of me using XMonad), but so far I couldn't be bothered to fix it, yet.

I don't expect that atrocious garbage to ever get a solution on Linux. Normal games should focus on server side anti-cheats or anything that doesn't need to put stuff in the kernel.

Which is great for Linux gaming, since it removes the need to use Windows.

Windows games worked on Linux for years with different levels of success, the difference is that now they work much much better and at times better than on Windows itself :)

As for the enterprise part of OP's comment, Bazzite is a community-contributed OCI container (similar to a Docker container) running on top of a Fedora bootc spin with GNOME or KDE. It is trivial for a company to add their own RUN instructions to the OCI Containerfile.

Here's a working one that I prepared earlier that installs 1Password on Bazzite GNOME and Bluefin:

https://github.com/lkdm/Phoenix

Bazzite does include the Steam frontend but that's a proprietary system, it's not something that the Linux/FLOSS community came up with. The KDE folks are starting to look into remote-control focused "10-foot" media center interfaces (see the Plasma Bigscreen project) that are also somewhat applicable to gamepad control (though these handheld devices generally come with touchscreens too, and this creates additional affordances) but that's a bit of a too little and too late situation. We need far more than that to make this novel class of devices usable for genuine production uses.

How do you install non-Steam games (e.g. from GOG)? Last I tried that still required dropping to desktop mode and using mouse/keyboard.

The general performance loss with the DX12 -> Vulkan translation on Linux especially with Nvidia hardware recently had the cause identified and will hopefully get solved in the near future. It has to do with descriptors and how Nvidia handles it is the general gist of it. A new Vulkan extension will be developed that more closely resembles how DX12 does things as I understand it, and then Nvidia and others can use that to hopefully solve this once and for all.

Here[1] is the full presentation and the slides[2] from it.

[1] https://video.tuwien.ac.at/events/xdc/v/OlwauRVEIGa

[2] https://indico.freedesktop.org/event/10/contributions/402/at...

You’re comparing a game running on a compatibility layer, running on Linux to a game running directly on Windows. Not quite what the parent comment was stating.

That's expected. Always use AMD for Linux gaming.

There is some WIP to address it for Nvidia, but it requires new Vulkan features.

See: https://indico.freedesktop.org/event/10/contributions/402/at...