Took the plunge 2.5 years ago. I'm more likely to give up gaming than move back to windows at this point. It's so pleasant to be able to use the same reasonable tools I use for development to customize my environment for gaming. For example I use a custom Babashka script to switch off various things like mouse acceleration and night shift when a game starts. I have a repo of Ansible tasks to take a stock Ubuntu install and customize it exactly how I like it. I can take a ZFS snapshot of my entire library and revert instantly if a mod installation goes wrong.
My experiences with single player games have actually been quite a bit better on Linux since I made the switch then they ever were on Windows. A lot of Windows users seem to forget just how much fiddling is actually required to get games working that are only a couple of generations old. Alt-Tab often broke a lot of games too. More games on Linux just work out of the box in my experience, and it's getting better all the time.
I'm not fond of crediting Valve exclusively for this gaming utopia since it was a massive team effort from a wide variety of developers, but it was clear that a powerful player was always necessary to crack Microsoft's monopoly.
> I'm not fond of crediting Valve exclusively for this gaming utopia since it was a massive team effort from a wide variety of developers ...
Yeah, Proton is built from many puzzle pieces. Massive kudos to Valve where credit is due for assembling those bits (and for contributing patches / code back at the upstream projects), but the various projects (WINE, DXVK, etc) on which Proton was built deserve their credit as well for sure. No way Valve would have built all that is Proton entirely from scratch (at least certainly not in the time-frame they were working with).
Amazingly, even things like VR "just work." If you have a standalone headset like a Quest, you will have to jump through a few more hoops to connect it to your PC, but the actual VR just works. Even the UEVR mod to convert Unreal Engine games to VR works.
I am still on windows only for some specific games that can’t run on Linux but I am constantly monitoring the state of progress on that field. I know Steam is in for the money of course and it’s in their best interest to move away from windows or at least differentiate a little, but still I am grateful for backing that horse.
I haven’t needed windows for a game in over 3 years. between proton and lutris I have all the games I’m interested in covered. There are multiplayer games I can’t play, but I have little trouble with blizzard games. I’ve had a few games I’ve had to come back to when proton fixed things, maybe 2% of the games I’ve tried. AMD graphics cards have done me well.
> Unless games use some funky video codecs or kernel-level anti-cheat, a lot of the time they do just work with the click of a button.
He glosses over this but I suspect that is almost all the newer multiplayer games that are popular.
I was gaming on Linux from about 2020 to this year. I went back to Windows for gaming. It was either constant faffing or there was always at least one game that doesn't work that well. I don't want to spend an hour or messing with various launch options in Steam.
Performance is often claimed to be better on Linux than Windows. However it is highly dependant on the distro, kernel, GPU, game and whether you have particular magic settings configured. I am sure it is faster if you are running bazzite or one of the other gaming focused distros, but I run Debian on pretty much everything. So I just decided to use Linux for serious stuff and Windows for gaming.
Don't get me wrong it is loads better than it was, which was pretty much non-existent. But it will be fairly niche for quite a while yet.
My experience is that it's really just the upper end of AAA games. Things like Call of Duty, Fortnite, Apex Legends. You might run into problems if it's a game that requires an external launcher. These days, Windows doesn't seem to be in a much better state. I've been watching friends and coworkers complain about getting the Battlefield 6 beta to work. One of them had to do a fresh install of his computer, because he was using MBR partitions (which is now a no-no, apparently) and bricked it while trying to convert to a GPT scheme.
I use a pretty quirky setup on Linux and I find something that doesn't work properly out of the box maybe once every 2 years. I play a lot of popular multiplayer games with friends, but none of the billion dollar AAA blockbusters.
Took the plunge 2.5 years ago. I'm more likely to give up gaming than move back to windows at this point. It's so pleasant to be able to use the same reasonable tools I use for development to customize my environment for gaming. For example I use a custom Babashka script to switch off various things like mouse acceleration and night shift when a game starts. I have a repo of Ansible tasks to take a stock Ubuntu install and customize it exactly how I like it. I can take a ZFS snapshot of my entire library and revert instantly if a mod installation goes wrong.
My experiences with single player games have actually been quite a bit better on Linux since I made the switch then they ever were on Windows. A lot of Windows users seem to forget just how much fiddling is actually required to get games working that are only a couple of generations old. Alt-Tab often broke a lot of games too. More games on Linux just work out of the box in my experience, and it's getting better all the time.
I'm not fond of crediting Valve exclusively for this gaming utopia since it was a massive team effort from a wide variety of developers, but it was clear that a powerful player was always necessary to crack Microsoft's monopoly.
> I'm not fond of crediting Valve exclusively for this gaming utopia since it was a massive team effort from a wide variety of developers ...
Yeah, Proton is built from many puzzle pieces. Massive kudos to Valve where credit is due for assembling those bits (and for contributing patches / code back at the upstream projects), but the various projects (WINE, DXVK, etc) on which Proton was built deserve their credit as well for sure. No way Valve would have built all that is Proton entirely from scratch (at least certainly not in the time-frame they were working with).
Amazingly, even things like VR "just work." If you have a standalone headset like a Quest, you will have to jump through a few more hoops to connect it to your PC, but the actual VR just works. Even the UEVR mod to convert Unreal Engine games to VR works.
(Shameless plug time! I'm building an app to make UEVR on Linux easier to use: https://github.com/LorenDB/kaon)
I am still on windows only for some specific games that can’t run on Linux but I am constantly monitoring the state of progress on that field. I know Steam is in for the money of course and it’s in their best interest to move away from windows or at least differentiate a little, but still I am grateful for backing that horse.
I haven’t needed windows for a game in over 3 years. between proton and lutris I have all the games I’m interested in covered. There are multiplayer games I can’t play, but I have little trouble with blizzard games. I’ve had a few games I’ve had to come back to when proton fixed things, maybe 2% of the games I’ve tried. AMD graphics cards have done me well.
> Unless games use some funky video codecs or kernel-level anti-cheat, a lot of the time they do just work with the click of a button.
He glosses over this but I suspect that is almost all the newer multiplayer games that are popular.
I was gaming on Linux from about 2020 to this year. I went back to Windows for gaming. It was either constant faffing or there was always at least one game that doesn't work that well. I don't want to spend an hour or messing with various launch options in Steam.
Performance is often claimed to be better on Linux than Windows. However it is highly dependant on the distro, kernel, GPU, game and whether you have particular magic settings configured. I am sure it is faster if you are running bazzite or one of the other gaming focused distros, but I run Debian on pretty much everything. So I just decided to use Linux for serious stuff and Windows for gaming.
Don't get me wrong it is loads better than it was, which was pretty much non-existent. But it will be fairly niche for quite a while yet.
My experience is that it's really just the upper end of AAA games. Things like Call of Duty, Fortnite, Apex Legends. You might run into problems if it's a game that requires an external launcher. These days, Windows doesn't seem to be in a much better state. I've been watching friends and coworkers complain about getting the Battlefield 6 beta to work. One of them had to do a fresh install of his computer, because he was using MBR partitions (which is now a no-no, apparently) and bricked it while trying to convert to a GPT scheme.
I use a pretty quirky setup on Linux and I find something that doesn't work properly out of the box maybe once every 2 years. I play a lot of popular multiplayer games with friends, but none of the billion dollar AAA blockbusters.