Total marketshare was estimated at 1.5% for Linux gaming.
The survey comes direct from Valve's Steam Survey. Potential bias aside the Steamdeck alone is estimated at 40%. Arch and Ubuntu ~8% each.
Is there any other trustworthy metric of all "Linux Gamers" out there? I'm curious how much using the Steam Client effects or tilts results towards systems that easily run Steam. Self selection at it's finest. My logic side knows that with only a 1.5% rounding error to the total "PC" gaming isn't market significant. I should be happy with the trend.
I own a Steamdeck. But it's like how my friends use their Nintendo systems. As an extension of my PC windows I was already personal project time with SteamOS and SteamLink. Point is, I wouldn't consider myself in the 1.5% even though I game wherever.
I can get behind the "Android isn't Linux" argument when it comes to claims of how numerous Linux users there are via smartphones. The userspace is quite distinct from anything GNU-like.
But the Steamdeck uses very much a full-blown Arch-derived Linux distro. So I'm not sure it makes sense to categorize their users as anything other than "Linux gamers".
The fact that AMD landed on the Steamdeck vs. NVIDIA or Intel is noteworthy. Their continued investment in mainline Linux support has clearly paid off.
The Deck uses a special, low power (specifically targeting ~9W), graphics heavy AMD SoC. It was actually the first of a new laptop CPU line that AMD seemingly canceled:
AMD coincidentally had the right CPU at the right time. Intel and Nvidia had nothing comparable for Valve to use. In fact, the successor to the Deck chip is kinda an existential problem, as AMD's CPU-heavy laptop line (including the Z1) is less suitable.
> So I'm not sure it makes sense to categorize their users as anything other than "Linux gamers".
It depends on what you’re using this data for.
If you are a game developer deciding what platforms to support then Steamdeck is fully distinct from Linux, imho. Support Steamdeck, it’s likely worth it (depends on type of game)!
However supporting Steamdeck may not require a native Linux port. It turns out the best way to support Linux May infact be to simply use the Win32 API!
And even if you do support Steamdeck with a native Linux port it may not be worth your time to try and support Ubuntu and a billion flavors of Linux that are each broken in different ways.
Supporting Linux clients beyond Steamdeck is likely not worth it for most games.
Source: have shipped games with Linux support. Was extremely painful and not worth it.
> I can get behind the "Android isn't Linux" argument when it comes to claims of how numerous Linux users there are via smartphones. The userspace is quite distinct from anything GNU-like.
But why does having anything "GNU-like" determine whether or not something is Linux? Surely the fact that it is literally running Linux makes it Linux more than some related software (GNU) not being used.
While true, often people talk about the proportion of Linux gamers in the context of growing desktop Linux market share, "the year of the Linux desktop," etc. Since Android and desktop Linux programs are largely incompatible, mobile games on ARM64 don't matter in this context.
I don't think that's very relevant when we're talking about AMD CPU usage, although it does mean that Phoronix may very well be technically wrong when talking about "Linux" gaming statistics. That said it's quite clear they mean GNU/Linux desktop gaming using x86_64-based systems.
What you guys are referring to as Linux, is in fact, GNU/Linux, or as I've recently taken to calling it, GNU plus Linux. Linux is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning GNU system made useful by the GNU corelibs, shell utilities and vital system components comprising a full OS as defined by POSIX.
Many computer users run a modified version of the GNU system every day, without realizing it. Through a peculiar turn of events, the version of GNU which is widely used today is often called "Linux", and many of its users are not aware that it is basically the GNU system, developed by the GNU Project.
There really is a Linux, and these people are using it, but it is just a part of the system they use. Linux is the kernel: the program in the system that allocates the machine's resources to the other programs that you run. The kernel is an essential part of an operating system, but useless by itself; it can only function in the context of a complete operating system. Linux is normally used in combination with the GNU operating system: the whole system is basically GNU with Linux added, or GNU/Linux. All the so-called "Linux" distributions are really distributions of GNU/Linux.
Linux is an endless source of audiovisual issues and friends that use it join Discord and find their audio/mic is super low bitrate/crackly or simply doesn't work at all, consistently between the various distros that they move to every couple months, flavour of the week, etc.
I haven't gone back to trying linux as desktop since pop_os bricked my Dell XPS (even bios recovery doesn't work, it's completely bricked by some UEFI extension or something that pop rammed onto it).
Before that just getting multiple monitors to work consistently/each in their own specific resolution was an absolute nightmare.
The SD is really what Linux should be targeting: "it just works" but if you want, you can crack it open and change what you want. Linux is mostly still a pain in the butt to get up & running, plug monitors & other devices in and just have the damn thing work.
Let alone all of the _choices_: distro, window manager, audio manager, etc, etc. Nobody _cares_. That's why it's not been year of the Linux desktop yet; you install Windows or you buy a Macbook and you get Windows or MacOS. Try to decide which window manager to use based on the internet's option; you'll find forums & forums like HN of people bitching over which WM is superior etc.
The question is how many people are also just switching because they're being forced to go to 11 despite not wanting to, yet again, and so Linux seems like a stable reliable option for most of them?
Most don't do significant PC gaming, right?
Just browsing the web and sharing files, right?
Hmmm.... Many will just get the millenial in the family to install Ubuntu or mint and be done with it..
At least that's what has consistently happened in my family, with people rarely if ever going back to windows (without any real tech support, it "just keeps working").
Steam survey doesn't represent reality, imho. When was the last time you were asked to participate? On how many machines, assuming you have more than one.
I am sure Valve collects way more than they let on. Linux gaming is at a good place. However, I really wish AMD would release their CPU and GPU control software for Linux. Running newer AMF cards is painful because the stock BIOS settings are anything but sane. Gotta burn power to win benchmarks...
The field of statistics is kind of based on the idea that you can take a sample and it might represent a population. Maybe you have a more specific complaint about the Steam Survey methodology in mind that I'm not picking up on?
I'm in the market for a new desktop (it's been nearly nine years since I purchased my gaming rig). My current plan is to leave Windows behind finally.
I'll be getting a Linux rig of some sort. And it won't just be for gaming, it will be for running and training local LLMs, which is far more brutal on the hardware than any games I've seen; I can still play most titles on my 1440p screen with my current "potato."
I've been running Microsoft operating systems for decades: Windows, and DOS before that since DOS 3.3. With all the attention sinks stuck into the new Windows (pops on the menu, pops from the dock, ads everywhere on my machine) it's time to leave it. The two viable alternatives are Mac OS and Linux. Work has me on Mac, but the hardware I want to run... Linux is the right choice. I'll game on the system I have.
I have to wonder how many PC gamers will follow suit as they get older.
Most of the systems I've been pricing out for Linux desktops are AMD Threadripper builds. Intel Xeons would be better for AI workloads, but they're way more expensive.
Basically the state is getting to be that almost every game exluding some, which require specific anti-cheat engines, will work.
In some cases it is just a matter of enabling EAC linux support by game publishers.
If you’re going to be investing much time and energy into AI/ML on your GPU, I urge you to consider going the nvidia route rather than an AMD GPU. (CPU-wise, either AMD or Intel is just fine.) Using ROCm instead of CUDA may be possible, but it’s unloved, unsupported on consumer hardware, doesn’t even build with PyTorch at its current minor version, and generally a frustrating time-suck.
The proprietary nvidia driver situation is unfortunate, and if you’re sufficiently driven off by it, ROCm can work, sometimes, eventually. But do consider the effort and time it’ll cost.
I think Arubis didn't push the point hard enough. Nvidia is a long way ahead of AMD in AI/ML hardware capability, from my very limited experience.
I got a Stable Diffusion thing up and running locally on a relatively old AMD RX 580 with 8GB of memory, and default settings of 512x512 with 10 (I think) passes, and it takes about 10 minutes to generate an image. On a similarly aged Nvidia 1060 with 6GB of memory that a colleague of mine uses for their local Stable Diffusion instance, it takes about 20 seconds to generate an image.
I don't know how apples and oranges this comparison is, my OS is Linux and his is Windows, for example, but 10 minutes versus 20 seconds is, for me, a massively disappointing difference.
I'm sure the gap has decreased in the intervening 6-7 years, but I don't know how much - such that I'd be opting for a second hand Nvidia over a new AMD (and I philosophically prefer AMD).
When you say "unsupported on consumer hardware", make it clear that it does work it just isn't supported if you run into issues.
My experience with a RX6800 was that compiling ROCm for myself for use with Pytorch just worked, though from reading online it's clear that's a rarity. Current gen cards apparently don't even work.
Microsoft is losing this particular market, but they don't seem to care.
I would pay good money for a Windows version that had a more professional and consistent interface (Win 2K comes to mind, but Win 7 interface was still OK) no advertisement inside the OS, no telemetry, automatic update notification but manual installation, no unexplained HDD usage when idle that goes away as soon as I open the system monitor, WSL support.
Closest thing is LTSC but it is discouraged and hard to legally buy.
Linux can do all of this. Compatibility with games is good enough and better in some edge cases. KVM performance running a VM is good enough for running MS Office for work, and still a better experience than in bare metal as you can limit core usage and the computer will run cooler and use less power.
I built dozens of gaming desktops as a kid and young adult, but lately the time demands of adulthood means it's hard to keep up with the latest trends. Like you I got sick of fighting Windows just to launch Steam. But I also had numerous bad experiences with desktop Linux, and with not wanting to deal with Proton and Wine. When I want to relax I just want to get in a quick game for an hour or two, not go through a ton of driver updates etc.
To that end, GeForce Now has been... no pun intended... game changing. It works miraculously well, and has almost top of the line hardware. Paired with my ultrawide QHD screen, most games run beautifully. Shooters are out due to the input lag (small but definitely noticeable) but all the other genres feel fantastic. No fan noise, no heat, no giant tower taking up space, no worrying about upgrades... It's an amazing service at a terrific price point. I have a Mac but just plug in a Windows keyboard and mouse and it works flawlessly. Same with an Xbox controller.
People pooh poohed cloud gaming for so long, but these days it's so easy and seamless I'm honestly worried about the future of the gaming PC market. Nvidia seems well on their way to providing data center and AI cards and just renting games as a service. (Honestly, that's fine with me...).
1. Provide great value to the user while you are weak. Provide them a great deal and a disproportionate amount of the surplus value of the exchange.
2. Provide great value to your corporate partners once you become stronger than your consumers can organise against. Provide your corporate partners a huge amount of the surplus value of the exchange.
3. Take all surplus value for yourself once you're stronger than your corporate partners.
Cloud gaming is at stage 1.
I have seen this too many times at this point of my life to ever trust a good deal like this again.
Investing in things you own is an investment in yourself.
I wish there was a plug-and-play cloud gaming box I could just plug into my TV. I’m willing to pay a monthly subscription but not hundreds of dollars to buy into a console ecosystem.
Stadia seemed perfect for a casual gamer like me, but it had so few games at launch and I knew better than to buy into a Google consumer product. I have a MacBook, but using it to game on my TV would be a wonky setup.
I left for NixOS instead of upgrading to Windows 11.
Honestly it can play anything I can throw at it. Including FFXIV which has zero official Linux support. And it might play even better than it does on Windows.
I built a new PC with AMD Zen 4 CPU end of last year, after using Intel for more than 10 years before that (last AMD I used before was an Athlon in the early 2000s! Intel Core 2 made me switch back to Intel then)
I also use Linux exclusively, and play games on Steam using Proton (which works great for modern games. I do single player games though)
However, no idea why there would be a correlation between Linux Gaming and AMD: I didn't switch to AMD because of Linux but because of AVX-512.
I had no problems using Steam with the Intel CPU before that. But I find it wrong of Intel to not support AVX-512 in consumer CPUs (and having efficiency cores in my desktop PC is not something that excites me, and it's because of those that they dropped AVX-512), while AMD embraced it. If new Intel CPUs would have been simply like the i9-11900 but better (in a different way than the efficiency cores, more like faster, more performance cores, more SIMD etc...), I'd probably just have kept getting Intel ones out of habit.
Makes sense - article mentions Windows is the opposite (with Intel's share increasing, and AMD's sitting at ~32%), and Windows users are much less likely to care about open source drivers and contributions.
The intersection of technically apt people and value conscious gamers looking to squeeze more fps out of limited dollars picks the value brand with a rep for friendliness with open source.
I didn't switch to AMD because of Linux but because of AVX-512.
Woah. While wou don't specifically say it was a "gaming PC", you did say that you game on it. What is your use case that AVX-512 became a deal-breaker?
As someone with a 5900x I wish I had picked a more efficient cpu. Do consider idle and low usage power draw. My room turns into an oven even just watching YouTube.
Personally, I've found over the past few years that AMD parts tend to have better perf/watt than Intel parts for both laptops and desktops and I think most benchmarks tend to corroborate that experience: https://hothardware.com/reviews/amd-ryzen-5-7600-ryzen-7-770...
Someone mentioned Eco mode (which is easy if your BIOS supports it) - another option is futzing with PBO2 Curve Optimizer. Most chips can support a -10 on all cores but lots of people run up to -20 or even -30. This can make a pretty huge difference in temps/wattage. I lowered my CPU temps by >10C w/ no performance loss on my 5950X. You can also set the PPT to whatever max power you want to use. Here's a guide if you're going to explore some that more: https://skatterbencher.com/amd-precision-boost-overdrive-2/
Actually, Nvidia is what allowed many Linux users to enjoy high quality 3D graphics on Linux for more than 20 years. You remember fglrx and that stuff? Well, Nvidia worked.
This was me. I had a Radeon 290x. It worked alright, but fglrx was terrible (and the config UI was the only non-English app in my system, it didn't respect locale settings), and when AMDGPU first arrived, it was a horribly buggy flickering mess. I upgraded to a 1080Ti after high-end Vega failed to materialise, and nvidia's drivers kind of just worked, especially on Ubuntu (they were proprietary of course, but so was fglrx).
It wasn't really before Wayland started being a serious option that nvidia started to become a problem. I've now upgraded to a Radeon 7000 series GPU, and the open source drivers are a breeze and Wayland works much better than it does under nvidia's drivers. But I maintain that at least during the GTX 900 series through probably the 2000 series, nvidia was the only reasonable choice, even on Linux, especially if you wanted anything mid-range or above.
yep. nvidia was the only choice back then. I don't see how folks have forgoten that. But, now it's all AMD for me, because amd doesn't require a closed source driver or userspace. Apparently that will change in the next year or so though. It'll be interesting to see how the open nvidia stuff compares in the future.
> Nvidia is what allowed many Linux users to enjoy high quality 3D graphics on Linux for more than 20 years.
That was very welcome at the time, but the bar has been raised. I now have the option of a GPU that plays games and integrates well with all my other OS features, so I switched. It's great to be free from the endless annoyances that came with Nvidia's drivers.
Maybe my experience is vastly different, but Nvidia just works. I have a laptop with 3080, a Threadripper with 2x3090 and an Intel with a 4090 and A6000 and it works without any fuss in Linux (I mostly use it for Deep Learning but sometimes gaming as well).
Not really. On some/several/many Nvidia cards (I had a few), one can't even boot with a stock Ubuntu CD, because Nouveau has (unfortunately) a very lacking support, and proprietary drivers are not preinstalled by default on the CD.
AMD's drivers are at least open source and integrated in the kernel. On the other hand though, having owned several Nvidia and AMD cards, I didn't find any brand to be noticeably more stable than the other (each one had issues).
> Also dealing with AMD GPU drivers is just as difficult.
This was true ten years ago, and remains true only for hardware dating back to that time period. My old HD7850 is a royal pain to get running properly on a modern distro.
For any remotely recent GPU that's supported by what's built into the linux kernel, it's pretty much seamless. There are no specific driver updates to deal with, which model of card does not matter, etc. It's all just built into the kernel.
Just as difficult? AMD GPUs are plug-and-play on linux (if you have latest gen you should run a recent enough kernel but that's basically it), whereas Nvidia GPUs need their proprietary drivers which adds much more complexity for beginner users.
I'm not even sure why people have this myth that AMD's GPU support is good on linux. Having an upstreamed driver doesn't mean much when it's just as buggy and unstable as the closed drivers were 10-15 years ago. Everyone I know using a modern AMD GPU on Linux evangelize the fuck out of them while simultaneously complaining about constant black screens/hard freezes/poor performance in games/etc. I've never experienced such issues with nvidia and besides the annoyance of having to make sure you have the proprietary blob installed there's no real issues.
I’ve stuck to nvidia for years and it’s reliable on Linux. Needs proprietary drivers for full performance. I don’t think they’re actively hostile since they have drivers available. It used to be that you struggled to get acceleration. Nvidia drivers were the only reliable way. I had an ATI GPU too and drivers were not as good on Linux.
Article is about CPU, though, and both manufacturers seem comparable. I have Ryzen for price/performance.
Both these statements can be true. Their drivers can be excellent but try to do anything with your Linux machine after the Nvidia drivers are installed and you run into trouble.
Ubuntu release upgrades used to be impossible w/ Nvidia drivers. You'd get into a situation where you'd boot into a text-only console, but because nvidia didn't do kms you'd get 40x25 with the first few characters off the screen.
I've had nothing but issues with AMD on Linux. 7970,280x,rx580 and vega64. All of them had horrible bugs for what I was doing and amd opengl sucks.
I eventually got sick of all the hard lock bugs running emulators, and the driver devs not wanting to fix it because Nintendo was their customer.
Then I switched to nvidia and everything just works with similar performance to windows.
Unless installing the drivers is too hard, nvidia is the best was to game on Linux
Installing the drivers is easy, but that doesn’t mean they work immediately. I got a fairly old computer a couple of years ago and put an RTX 3070 in it… I tried installing several distros and each of them would go through the install fine, then give a blank screen when I tried to boot. I tried all sorts of configuration and driver installations, both free and offical NVidia. I finally got one to work like it should, but it took about 10 days of messing with it.
Yeah what I found with these recent generation combo of nvidia + intel while powerful and while I can install linux, had issues with serious over heating causing a shut down where the nvidia driver was causing heat issues on the laptop, once switching back to windows 11, no more thermal issues.
Citations and facts needed. Also, please enlighten us why NVIDIA owes Linux or its users anything. Please. Just take it slow.
> The worst part about gaming on Linux is dealing with Nvidia's drivers.
NVIDIA [Linux] drivers have been the staple of quality and features for the past two decades sans rare f ups, such as 3090 Ti's dying (took them a week to fix) and frequents BSODs on Windows Vista (due to a completely new driver model which took them quite some time to polish).
I'm pretty sure I've dealt with NVIDIA a lot more than you've ever done but I cannot relate to this statement at all despite being an NVIDIA Linux user for over two decades. I wouldn't claim that you're lying through your teeth, but I'm pretty sure that this post has a ton of emotions and very little essence.
I'm not surprised to see hatred towards the company but in absolute most cases it doesn't mean anything.
If you've been a 20-year Nvidia Linux user like I have, you'll have countless horror stories of system upgrades and kernel revisions breaking NVidia drivers, leaving you with a non-working desktop.
How about all the times lightdm/sddm/gdm would make a tiny tweak, and Nvidia users would have to downgrade in Arch or Ubuntu or Gentoo because the driver's house of cards completely collapsed?
How about all the times that XF86.conf or xorg.conf would get completely corrupted upon a system freeze, and you'd end up having to reconfigure X in order to use your login manager again?
How about every time XF86 would refuse to even recognize your card occasionally for absolutely no reason?
If you didn't experience any of the above, at least once every 6 months, you either never upgraded your distro, or you weren't using Nvidia cards in linux 20 years ago.
the positive/negative parasocial relationships people have with AMD and NVIDIA (respectively) borders on "splitting" in the personality-disorder sense. AMD represents everything wholesome and good about computing and nvidia represents everything bad and malicious about computing, to a lot of people. And when they see one of the brands they just have to hammer that post button to signal their virtue.
Not very significant. Linux gamers represent 1.5% of the market share, 40% of them are steam deck users, which use AMD components. But the steam deck is closer to a game console, people don't really chose the hardware and OS, they buy a pre-built system, and who care what's inside if it can play games well. It is more hackable than a Nintendo, but hackers are, I think, a minority.
If you remove the steam decks, AMD market share goes down to 50%, similar to their Windows counterparts.
Gamers in this category have a choice between Steam Deck and Windows alternatives like the Asus ROG Ally, GPD Win, and many others. One could see the success of Steam Deck as being directly related to it's choice of OS. As a consumer, I want a game device, not another copy of Windows to administer.
It was one of the deciding factors for me when choosing between the Steam Deck and Asus ROG Ally. I don't want to deal with Windows and all of the BS that cokes with it on a device meant for fun.
I am using AMD Ryzen CPU because I don't need to use water-cooling, and I get a really decent performance out with 8 core/16 threads. Intel CPU runs way too hot, and I don't want to spend more money on AIO, when I don't need to. AMD CPU generally runs much cooler (except on the high-end and thread ripper stuff, but I don't have high-end).
So far, my Linux 5800x was my second most stable machine after a Haswell Hackintosh (i5 4590), honestly, I am keen on returning to that, my intel machine has caused me immense trouble tbh.
I just built a Linux computer with a Ryzen 9 7900 paired with an intel a750 (couldn't resist the 200 dollar price tag).
I boosted the power target to about 125 watts and it runs like a charm. The GPU also just friggin worked. Not "just worked" as in "forget about your Nvidia driver, compile a kernel and end up with a text only boot". I haven't done anything, and suddenly I can do av1 encoding or run 3 screens in 4k60 without a hitch.
Right now I run 100% Linux with a Ryzen 9 and RTX 3070.
Everything works perfectly. My only gripe would be nVidia's driver isn't on parity with the Windows one, things like video upscaling haven't made it through yet.
That said I haven't come across games I can't run. Steam / Proton just work, very rarely do I need to go in and tweak something.
Highly recommend Heroic Launcher as well. Very polished Epic/GOG client, get the FlatPak version as that has max compatabilty.
Readit News
The survey comes direct from Valve's Steam Survey. Potential bias aside the Steamdeck alone is estimated at 40%. Arch and Ubuntu ~8% each.
Is there any other trustworthy metric of all "Linux Gamers" out there? I'm curious how much using the Steam Client effects or tilts results towards systems that easily run Steam. Self selection at it's finest. My logic side knows that with only a 1.5% rounding error to the total "PC" gaming isn't market significant. I should be happy with the trend.
I own a Steamdeck. But it's like how my friends use their Nintendo systems. As an extension of my PC windows I was already personal project time with SteamOS and SteamLink. Point is, I wouldn't consider myself in the 1.5% even though I game wherever.
But the Steamdeck uses very much a full-blown Arch-derived Linux distro. So I'm not sure it makes sense to categorize their users as anything other than "Linux gamers".
The fact that AMD landed on the Steamdeck vs. NVIDIA or Intel is noteworthy. Their continued investment in mainline Linux support has clearly paid off.
The Deck uses a special, low power (specifically targeting ~9W), graphics heavy AMD SoC. It was actually the first of a new laptop CPU line that AMD seemingly canceled:
https://videocardz.com/newz/amd-ryzen-2021-2022-roadmap-part...
AMD coincidentally had the right CPU at the right time. Intel and Nvidia had nothing comparable for Valve to use. In fact, the successor to the Deck chip is kinda an existential problem, as AMD's CPU-heavy laptop line (including the Z1) is less suitable.
It depends on what you’re using this data for.
If you are a game developer deciding what platforms to support then Steamdeck is fully distinct from Linux, imho. Support Steamdeck, it’s likely worth it (depends on type of game)!
However supporting Steamdeck may not require a native Linux port. It turns out the best way to support Linux May infact be to simply use the Win32 API!
And even if you do support Steamdeck with a native Linux port it may not be worth your time to try and support Ubuntu and a billion flavors of Linux that are each broken in different ways.
Supporting Linux clients beyond Steamdeck is likely not worth it for most games.
Source: have shipped games with Linux support. Was extremely painful and not worth it.
But why does having anything "GNU-like" determine whether or not something is Linux? Surely the fact that it is literally running Linux makes it Linux more than some related software (GNU) not being used.
- Android isn't quite Linux
- A good number if not the majority of 'mobile games' are gachas/cow-clickers.
At least to me, it's a bit like lumping old folks who play at churches into a 'Gamblers that visit casinos once a week' metric.
Dead Comment
Many computer users run a modified version of the GNU system every day, without realizing it. Through a peculiar turn of events, the version of GNU which is widely used today is often called "Linux", and many of its users are not aware that it is basically the GNU system, developed by the GNU Project.
There really is a Linux, and these people are using it, but it is just a part of the system they use. Linux is the kernel: the program in the system that allocates the machine's resources to the other programs that you run. The kernel is an essential part of an operating system, but useless by itself; it can only function in the context of a complete operating system. Linux is normally used in combination with the GNU operating system: the whole system is basically GNU with Linux added, or GNU/Linux. All the so-called "Linux" distributions are really distributions of GNU/Linux.
I haven't gone back to trying linux as desktop since pop_os bricked my Dell XPS (even bios recovery doesn't work, it's completely bricked by some UEFI extension or something that pop rammed onto it).
Before that just getting multiple monitors to work consistently/each in their own specific resolution was an absolute nightmare.
The SD is really what Linux should be targeting: "it just works" but if you want, you can crack it open and change what you want. Linux is mostly still a pain in the butt to get up & running, plug monitors & other devices in and just have the damn thing work.
Let alone all of the _choices_: distro, window manager, audio manager, etc, etc. Nobody _cares_. That's why it's not been year of the Linux desktop yet; you install Windows or you buy a Macbook and you get Windows or MacOS. Try to decide which window manager to use based on the internet's option; you'll find forums & forums like HN of people bitching over which WM is superior etc.
Most don't do significant PC gaming, right?
Just browsing the web and sharing files, right?
Hmmm.... Many will just get the millenial in the family to install Ubuntu or mint and be done with it..
At least that's what has consistently happened in my family, with people rarely if ever going back to windows (without any real tech support, it "just keeps working").
I am sure Valve collects way more than they let on. Linux gaming is at a good place. However, I really wish AMD would release their CPU and GPU control software for Linux. Running newer AMF cards is painful because the stock BIOS settings are anything but sane. Gotta burn power to win benchmarks...
Recent enough I still remember being mildly annoyed as I went to opt out. Again.
I'll be getting a Linux rig of some sort. And it won't just be for gaming, it will be for running and training local LLMs, which is far more brutal on the hardware than any games I've seen; I can still play most titles on my 1440p screen with my current "potato."
I've been running Microsoft operating systems for decades: Windows, and DOS before that since DOS 3.3. With all the attention sinks stuck into the new Windows (pops on the menu, pops from the dock, ads everywhere on my machine) it's time to leave it. The two viable alternatives are Mac OS and Linux. Work has me on Mac, but the hardware I want to run... Linux is the right choice. I'll game on the system I have.
I have to wonder how many PC gamers will follow suit as they get older.
Most of the systems I've been pricing out for Linux desktops are AMD Threadripper builds. Intel Xeons would be better for AI workloads, but they're way more expensive.
I, like you, switched from windows to Linux for gaming. This is the first year I haven’t owned a windows machine. End of an era.
I don’t miss it at all.
Future is here!
The proprietary nvidia driver situation is unfortunate, and if you’re sufficiently driven off by it, ROCm can work, sometimes, eventually. But do consider the effort and time it’ll cost.
I got a Stable Diffusion thing up and running locally on a relatively old AMD RX 580 with 8GB of memory, and default settings of 512x512 with 10 (I think) passes, and it takes about 10 minutes to generate an image. On a similarly aged Nvidia 1060 with 6GB of memory that a colleague of mine uses for their local Stable Diffusion instance, it takes about 20 seconds to generate an image.
I don't know how apples and oranges this comparison is, my OS is Linux and his is Windows, for example, but 10 minutes versus 20 seconds is, for me, a massively disappointing difference.
I'm sure the gap has decreased in the intervening 6-7 years, but I don't know how much - such that I'd be opting for a second hand Nvidia over a new AMD (and I philosophically prefer AMD).
This may be a worthwhile read if you're looking to squeeze the most performance: https://timdettmers.com/2023/01/30/which-gpu-for-deep-learni...
My experience with a RX6800 was that compiling ROCm for myself for use with Pytorch just worked, though from reading online it's clear that's a rarity. Current gen cards apparently don't even work.
I would pay good money for a Windows version that had a more professional and consistent interface (Win 2K comes to mind, but Win 7 interface was still OK) no advertisement inside the OS, no telemetry, automatic update notification but manual installation, no unexplained HDD usage when idle that goes away as soon as I open the system monitor, WSL support.
Closest thing is LTSC but it is discouraged and hard to legally buy.
Linux can do all of this. Compatibility with games is good enough and better in some edge cases. KVM performance running a VM is good enough for running MS Office for work, and still a better experience than in bare metal as you can limit core usage and the computer will run cooler and use less power.
I built dozens of gaming desktops as a kid and young adult, but lately the time demands of adulthood means it's hard to keep up with the latest trends. Like you I got sick of fighting Windows just to launch Steam. But I also had numerous bad experiences with desktop Linux, and with not wanting to deal with Proton and Wine. When I want to relax I just want to get in a quick game for an hour or two, not go through a ton of driver updates etc.
To that end, GeForce Now has been... no pun intended... game changing. It works miraculously well, and has almost top of the line hardware. Paired with my ultrawide QHD screen, most games run beautifully. Shooters are out due to the input lag (small but definitely noticeable) but all the other genres feel fantastic. No fan noise, no heat, no giant tower taking up space, no worrying about upgrades... It's an amazing service at a terrific price point. I have a Mac but just plug in a Windows keyboard and mouse and it works flawlessly. Same with an Xbox controller.
People pooh poohed cloud gaming for so long, but these days it's so easy and seamless I'm honestly worried about the future of the gaming PC market. Nvidia seems well on their way to providing data center and AI cards and just renting games as a service. (Honestly, that's fine with me...).
1. Provide great value to the user while you are weak. Provide them a great deal and a disproportionate amount of the surplus value of the exchange.
2. Provide great value to your corporate partners once you become stronger than your consumers can organise against. Provide your corporate partners a huge amount of the surplus value of the exchange.
3. Take all surplus value for yourself once you're stronger than your corporate partners.
Cloud gaming is at stage 1.
I have seen this too many times at this point of my life to ever trust a good deal like this again.
Investing in things you own is an investment in yourself.
Subscriptions are signing up to be a tenant.
I feel like a combination of a few comments here. Itching to put together something that can bring justice to Zelda and tinker with AI
Apparently there is a way to stream games from your own machine similar to GeForce now. It's built into their GPUs -- https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2023/04/nvidias-gamestream-is...
Stadia seemed perfect for a casual gamer like me, but it had so few games at launch and I knew better than to buy into a Google consumer product. I have a MacBook, but using it to game on my TV would be a wonky setup.
Honestly it can play anything I can throw at it. Including FFXIV which has zero official Linux support. And it might play even better than it does on Windows.
I wish I had migrated way earlier.
I also use Linux exclusively, and play games on Steam using Proton (which works great for modern games. I do single player games though)
However, no idea why there would be a correlation between Linux Gaming and AMD: I didn't switch to AMD because of Linux but because of AVX-512.
I had no problems using Steam with the Intel CPU before that. But I find it wrong of Intel to not support AVX-512 in consumer CPUs (and having efficiency cores in my desktop PC is not something that excites me, and it's because of those that they dropped AVX-512), while AMD embraced it. If new Intel CPUs would have been simply like the i9-11900 but better (in a different way than the efficiency cores, more like faster, more performance cores, more SIMD etc...), I'd probably just have kept getting Intel ones out of habit.
I do my part not to give Apple money, but as Ford Prefect said about foie gras:
“You can’t care about every damn thing.”
EDIT: Ohh CPU not GPU. Oh well enjoy the joke
As someone with a 5900x I wish I had picked a more efficient cpu. Do consider idle and low usage power draw. My room turns into an oven even just watching YouTube.
Personally, I've found over the past few years that AMD parts tend to have better perf/watt than Intel parts for both laptops and desktops and I think most benchmarks tend to corroborate that experience: https://hothardware.com/reviews/amd-ryzen-5-7600-ryzen-7-770...
Someone mentioned Eco mode (which is easy if your BIOS supports it) - another option is futzing with PBO2 Curve Optimizer. Most chips can support a -10 on all cores but lots of people run up to -20 or even -30. This can make a pretty huge difference in temps/wattage. I lowered my CPU temps by >10C w/ no performance loss on my 5950X. You can also set the PPT to whatever max power you want to use. Here's a guide if you're going to explore some that more: https://skatterbencher.com/amd-precision-boost-overdrive-2/
They bin CCDs for performance (max attainable frequency, thermal efficiency, etc) and include a good one and a not-so-good one on a CPU.
I got a 5950x a couple years ago and it's quite well known in the AMD space.
Intel's "efficiency cores" are almost the exact same thing - cheaper lamer cores to keep core count higher.
Nvidia is actively hostile to Linux users. The worst part about gaming on Linux is dealing with Nvidia's drivers.
To echo Linus Torvalds, and for good reason, fuck Nvidia
Actually, Nvidia is what allowed many Linux users to enjoy high quality 3D graphics on Linux for more than 20 years. You remember fglrx and that stuff? Well, Nvidia worked.
It wasn't really before Wayland started being a serious option that nvidia started to become a problem. I've now upgraded to a Radeon 7000 series GPU, and the open source drivers are a breeze and Wayland works much better than it does under nvidia's drivers. But I maintain that at least during the GTX 900 series through probably the 2000 series, nvidia was the only reasonable choice, even on Linux, especially if you wanted anything mid-range or above.
That was very welcome at the time, but the bar has been raised. I now have the option of a GPU that plays games and integrates well with all my other OS features, so I switched. It's great to be free from the endless annoyances that came with Nvidia's drivers.
Not really. On some/several/many Nvidia cards (I had a few), one can't even boot with a stock Ubuntu CD, because Nouveau has (unfortunately) a very lacking support, and proprietary drivers are not preinstalled by default on the CD.
AMD's drivers are at least open source and integrated in the kernel. On the other hand though, having owned several Nvidia and AMD cards, I didn't find any brand to be noticeably more stable than the other (each one had issues).
This was true ten years ago, and remains true only for hardware dating back to that time period. My old HD7850 is a royal pain to get running properly on a modern distro.
For any remotely recent GPU that's supported by what's built into the linux kernel, it's pretty much seamless. There are no specific driver updates to deal with, which model of card does not matter, etc. It's all just built into the kernel.
Article is about CPU, though, and both manufacturers seem comparable. I have Ryzen for price/performance.
Nvidia has excellent Linux drivers.
Ubuntu release upgrades used to be impossible w/ Nvidia drivers. You'd get into a situation where you'd boot into a text-only console, but because nvidia didn't do kms you'd get 40x25 with the first few characters off the screen.
Now I buy AMD.
Chrome and other stuff still don't work great but is that NVIDIA's fault? Honest question, I don't know.
Then I switched to nvidia and everything just works with similar performance to windows.
Unless installing the drivers is too hard, nvidia is the best was to game on Linux
Citations and facts needed. Also, please enlighten us why NVIDIA owes Linux or its users anything. Please. Just take it slow.
> The worst part about gaming on Linux is dealing with Nvidia's drivers.
NVIDIA [Linux] drivers have been the staple of quality and features for the past two decades sans rare f ups, such as 3090 Ti's dying (took them a week to fix) and frequents BSODs on Windows Vista (due to a completely new driver model which took them quite some time to polish).
I'm pretty sure I've dealt with NVIDIA a lot more than you've ever done but I cannot relate to this statement at all despite being an NVIDIA Linux user for over two decades. I wouldn't claim that you're lying through your teeth, but I'm pretty sure that this post has a ton of emotions and very little essence.
I'm not surprised to see hatred towards the company but in absolute most cases it doesn't mean anything.
How about all the times lightdm/sddm/gdm would make a tiny tweak, and Nvidia users would have to downgrade in Arch or Ubuntu or Gentoo because the driver's house of cards completely collapsed?
How about all the times that XF86.conf or xorg.conf would get completely corrupted upon a system freeze, and you'd end up having to reconfigure X in order to use your login manager again?
How about every time XF86 would refuse to even recognize your card occasionally for absolutely no reason?
If you didn't experience any of the above, at least once every 6 months, you either never upgraded your distro, or you weren't using Nvidia cards in linux 20 years ago.
And the worst part of gaming on AMD is dealing with AMD's drivers, no matter the platform.
Deleted Comment
Deleted Comment
Dead Comment
If you remove the steam decks, AMD market share goes down to 50%, similar to their Windows counterparts.
Intel might
Using less power (thus less W to dissipate that will end up heating your room) for the same computing power? Who wouldn't want that?
Unless you're running an overclocked i9 or something, claims of Intel's heat generation are greatly exaggerated in practice.
I boosted the power target to about 125 watts and it runs like a charm. The GPU also just friggin worked. Not "just worked" as in "forget about your Nvidia driver, compile a kernel and end up with a text only boot". I haven't done anything, and suddenly I can do av1 encoding or run 3 screens in 4k60 without a hitch.
Right now I run 100% Linux with a Ryzen 9 and RTX 3070.
Everything works perfectly. My only gripe would be nVidia's driver isn't on parity with the Windows one, things like video upscaling haven't made it through yet.
That said I haven't come across games I can't run. Steam / Proton just work, very rarely do I need to go in and tweak something.
Highly recommend Heroic Launcher as well. Very polished Epic/GOG client, get the FlatPak version as that has max compatabilty.