Nah, Valve will turn the tide.
Gamers switching is more a result of Microsoft’s decisions and direction: copilot, recall, etc, instead of steam and linux becoming more compatible.
The announcement could simply be they are killing all those initiatives and gamers wouldn’t consider linux any more.
No platform is good for gaming under capitalism. The majority of pain doesn’t come from the platform choice itself anyway; it comes from the gradual conversion of video games into something like a digital combination of arcades and casinos, where gameplay is made to have as little differentiation from spending money as possible while still retaining player interest. “Gamers” get treated as semi-sentient wallets.
When their legitimate concerns are expressed with outrage, they get dismissed as “taking entertainment too seriously.” When these same concerns are expressed with polite attempts to provide constructive criticism, do compliment sandwiches, and generally “be nice” about it (which is the majority of complaints expressed), they get almost no results at all because they typically have little to no power in the equation. They come to learn that kicking up a shitstorm of bad PR for a company is often the only way to get anything to change because it forces the company to contend with their broader public image. Still, this tactic is rarely used in practice because gamers are largely unorganized, their outrage rarely in agreement about what the most pressing issues are, and even among those who might otherwise join them in it, some of them are so obsessed with tone and their own reputation, they’d rather disavow outrage of fellow gamers than associate with it. All it takes is a company to claim (without evidence) that someone got a “death threat” and you can have a bunch of people doing an about face and giving up on their own concerns to go disavow a given game “community” as going too far.
Why couldn’t I have been into rock climbing or something instead?
The changes microsoft is making to windows indicate the writing on the wall. They want to take their OS to the next-level, and will probably succeed seeing as they’re a major corporation developing a major OS. We laugh about recall and copilot now but in 3 years it might be standard on all OSes. Even dev-oriented linux users are saying it’s a good thing to add agentic AI on distros but due to how linux works it will be easily decided by the end user themselves (and to be clear I’m all for agentic AI, it’s just microsoft’s way of doing it that I don’t trust or want).
I don’t know if linux will really become the gamer’s OS of choice. I mean, it’s been standing at sub-5% market shares for decades and through previous scares. But, it’s definitely a workable OS without having to relearn everything. I moved to zorin and everything felt familiar, to the point that shortly after I deleted my windows entirely. But I think there is still work to be done to onboard complete newbies especially in the installation. Install timeshift to keep hourly backups of your system files just in case something goes bonk, and during install don’t connect to the internet to download the updates. You will get the updates with
sudo apt update && sudo apt upgradeanyway after the install, so I don’t even get what this button is there for except mess up the installation process but I digress.Cause I get that everyone might have a slightly different pet peeve with linux, and mine happens to be in the onboarding. I know other people had trouble creating the partitions, for example, or didn’t know about the app store and install from the internet instead. It’s tough to please everyone especially when the people making these distros are not doing it commercially.
As for gaming it does seem like my games are more stable on linux, i.e. able to sustain the FPS more easily. I don’t even need specifically proton most of the time, wine 8 works fine. That’s kind of the problem with windows, it needs to do everything because it’s such a big OS on the market, and we come back to the original problem: people are not responding well to copilot, recall, broken updates etc because they can tell it’s a major shift to a new kind of OS and they’re not necessarily ready for it. Or rather, they don’t trust microsoft to deliver that new phase (remember windows 8 and how they wanted to remove the desktop?)
Now that Microsoft has said it, it will surely happen! They are never wrong with their predictions!
Today i just uninstalled the newest windows update because it wasnt compatible with my 7800xt and kept showing me the basic windows graphics driver. Restarted over 3 times and fucked with my AVR and hdmi cable and it didnt change anything. Uninstalled the update, restarted, and immediately working again.
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Valve won’t do a thing, truth is that Linux is stalling as a videogame platform, and it’s largely due to either unwillingness or active prevention to support from software/videogame developers. The average Gamer™ is not going to make the decison to use the less invasive operating system at the cost of losing access to half their potential game library. It’s a rigged business.
“Half” is just completely untrue. Windows games that don’t work with Proton are exceptional. The only big games that don’t work are games with anti-cheat that specifically prohibits Linux, like Riot’s Vanguard, and many games with anti-cheat do have native Linux support, like Nightreign and Easy Anticheat.
I didn’t say half the games, I said half the games that the average Gamer plays, on average According to sales figures, your call of duties, battlefields, Fifa, valorant, Fortnite, Roblox and so on. Things like Grand theft auto and apex even retroactivly decide to screw up their proton compatibility, which adds on a whole other problem that a library that is decently supported today could be severely impacted in the future due to updates. The truth is that unless you’re a hardcore niche enthousiast, the chances that something you want to play isn’t supported on Linux either due to anti cheat or other compatibility problems is just way too high for most gamers to make the choice to use Linux.
“I didn’t say half the games, I said half the games that a gamer would game”
Okay
Why are you getting weird, you know what I meant, the biggest part of the customer base
Half? Only if you’re a fan of online multiplayer games and nothing else.
I’m not a fan of multiplayer games, but I’m impacted nonetheless as a load of developers have given up native Linux versions of games to just rely on proton. Sometimes it’s fine, but there are serious issues in some cases that make it a real pain. Paradox is a good example, they did native Linux versions of every game they developed for a while, but their recent releases like Europa Universalis V No longer come with one. That just goes to show that even a studio that used to make that effort don’t see developing for the Linux market as a worthwhile use of their resources anymore.
Are you sure that they see no value in Linux as a platform? Protons existence and the quality of it incentivizes developers in skipping the development of Linux native builds of their games. If Europa Universalis V running on Linux through the Proton translation layer performs equivalent or even better to the windows native build on windows then there is zero reason to spend time building and testing two separate builds of the game. It’s just as likely that their exclusion of a native Linux build is a sign of confidence in the proton translation layer. This is a matter of labor and capital. There is no incentive to produce a Linux native build of a game when you can use the “free gift” that is proton.
There would need to be a massive drop off of windows market share for developers to actually make the switch.
Citation needed.
Zero of the games I’ve wanted to play in the last year had issues on Linux.
The average person isn’t going to go out of their way to do anything, but that’s because people don’t care about anything.
The average person isn’t going to go out of their way to do anything, but that’s because people don’t care about anything.
That’s kind of my point, nothing is changing this, especially for video game players, if anything they’re likely the last bunch who will stick with windows till the bitter end because they can’t justify giving up playing Destiny 2 or something that they’ve invested loads of cash into for years.
I think everyone is on their own journey. A guy I used to work with who is extremely basic in many ways switched to Linux. I don’t know exactly what pushed him over the edge- probably a combination of the steam deck and peer pressure from me- but he made the switch.
I don’t think it’ll happen overnight but it can snowball. As more people switch it gets easier to switch.
I’ve tried the same with a few of my colleagues, but the ones who were dead set on not switching were those that happened to also play videogames, it’s a sunk cost that they were unwilling to give up. I think it’s at this point the only reason windows will remain relevant for a lot longer than it should have.
no thanks. i suffered with windows simply because of gaming for far too long. i learned about linux back in the late 90s but always had to dual boot to play any games. that’s really not the case anymore except for certain games like Battlefield that require kernel level access in windows to function. doesn’t matter, i just won’t play those games then. i’m done with windows for good.
