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OP might be confusing hardware design and manufacturing with software availability.

I have wanted to switch from Windows to Linux so many times, and I would love to ditch my Google phone for PinePhone. But for me, this always gets back to the problem of well-maintained software on Linux vs corporate systems. The last time I tried switching to Linux a few months ago, all of the programs I use on a regular basis had some impossibly complicated setup or program-crashing bugs (that I reported) that made me give up after a few days trying to migrate.

Don't get me wrong, the OS (Ubuntu) installed just fine and I was able to browse the internet (which should be sufficient for most people). But anything beyond turning the phone on and having everything self-setup is asking way too much from a mainstream user. Therefore, this argument is always an economic one - not a conceptual one. You need a greedy corporation that is incentivized to make a friction-free experience for the end user. Too many well-meaning, but way too smart for their own good developers think everyone else thinks like them.

https://xkcd.com/456/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rlg4K16ujFw

Vouching for this, because while the topic is controversial and we could have done without the tone of the edit (true or not, it derails the discussion further), there is definitely some truth to what's said!

> "Typically" is not good enough. Windows and MacOS don't make people do that, and neither should Linux distros.

> A ton of people say "it works for me on my hardware" or "I didn't need to compile any drivers" or "the games that I want to play work fine". In fact, this comment thread has good examples of this type of reaction. So what? Until it works for everyone it's just not good enough.

I'm also someone who has run into problems with Linux, albeit with some slightly obscure hardware, as described in my comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29816615

The difference is probably that on Windows installing drivers is as easy as running an .exe or an .msi file, whereas on Linux the process can be more involved due to how different distros can be from one another, how the kernel versions might require different headers and how compilation of drivers might involve dropping down to the terminal which people sometimes forget isn't comfortable for people who don't necessarily use Linux in that capacity.

Wouldn't it be incredibly nice to have something like AppImage or Flatpak, but for drivers? Not the controversial distribution/update practices (though those criticisms are more about snap), but something that's as conceptually simple as clicking on an icon in a GUI somewhere to launch the installation and handle everything behind the scenes?

As for games, look at a recent video by Linus Tech Tips, "Gaming on Linux is NOT Ready... - Daily Driver Challenge Finale ": https://youtu.be/Rlg4K16ujFw

(Linus also demonstrated accidentally bricking his distro by not reading a terminal warning about problems with installing certain packages in the 1st video of the series, which is a really good example of some of the other problems in regards to usability)

There is a lot of progress, but also a lot of problems to solve.

70% of games big asterisk

The giant youtube channel Linus Tech Tips has done a recent series of videos on gaming on linux. On Jan 1 they published a 15 min summary video that covers that 70% claim in a much more nuanced way: https://youtu.be/Rlg4K16ujFw

Punchline: it's kinda true, but there's plenty of struggle for new and multiplayer games still.

⬐ smoldesu

It may be true, but it really depends on how new the games you want to play are. I don't consider myself a hardcore player, but I'm perfectly happy with the games I've got on Linux; Overwatch, Diablo 2/3, Warframe, Risk of Rain 2, the Fallout series... they all work fine. It's certainly no Mac when it comes to game compatibility. Really, the only time a game doesn't work on Linux is when the developers go out of their way to ensure you aren't running Linux; with the prevalence of anti-cheat that has indeed seen a bit of a fork in the road. But developers can also whitelist Linux users, and now that the Steam Deck is getting ready to ship to hundreds of thousands of future owners, those devs have an incentive to get their games on Linux.

I think "asterisk" is warranted, since there are still show-stopper games that won't run without their precious kernel-level anti-cheat (sorry professional Valorant players), but the asterisk is shrinking, not growing. It's a fairly small caviat at this point, especially for more casual audiences, and I kinda wonder why it was such a sticking point for Linus. Wine is not a panacea, but if you look at the landscape and see the majority of Windows software running, I think there's hope in that.

⬐ donio

I am sure it heavily depends on the kind games we play but I've had a 100% success rate over the past couple of years. I have to keep reminding myself to check protondb just in case. There are even a few games with native ports that I run through proton to avoid bugs in the native versions.

⬐ eptcyka

Whilst rarely a turn-key experience, there are plenty of games that run on release date on Linux.

⬐ hn8788

There are even bigger caveats to that number than what they mentioned in the video. Since all the ratings are based on user reports, there is no standard for what is considered a working game. You can look through pretty much any game and find positive reports that mention frequent crashes, performance issues, missing textures, requires a custom proton version, etc., but since it launches, they gave it a thumbs up. I've tried platinum rated games that are completely unplayable, ProtonDB ratings are a general guide at best.

ProtonDB also considers a game as "working" if even a single person gave it a thumbs up, so the big "17,984 games work" on the home page is very misleading.

⬐ als0

I can already envisage some poor Valve employee who's going through each ProtonDB entry to make individual workarounds for the Steam Deck release.

This reminds me of the recent Linus Tech Tips series on gaming on Linux[1]. Their conclusion is that although many games work out of the box (although usually not at launch), Linux is not ready for mainstream gamers. Not many people would have the expertise or the interest to troubleshoot the problem as OP did.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rlg4K16ujFw

⬐ xfer

> Not many people would have the expertise or the interest to troubleshoot the problem as OP did

Not many people have the expertise to do this on windows either(i would expect even fewer). Bear in mind that the developer sells this game as supported on Linux. The main reason is developers understandably don't care for bugs encountered by 2% users, which makes it a completely different discussion.

⬐ INTPenis

Then again I play Papers Please through Steam and have no problems, so maybe they're using the 32 bit version.

I agree that Linux use in general requires troubleshooting skill. We shouldn't assume there will never be any issues worth troubleshooting and recommend Linux to novices as a Microsoft killer. We should instead assume problems will happen and therefore a robust restore process is much more valuable to a novice Linux user.

This is why I believe in btrfs that Fedora uses. Imagine having the powerful restore options many Windows computers ship with. Just press a key, go into a menu, select a point in time recovery, restore.

But that said, what I really wanted to say was that I play exclusively on Linux now thanks to Proton and it's amazing. I can play big titles like Witcher 3, RDR2 and more, but I mostly play smaller titles like Oxygen not included, Rimworld and Ostriv.

⬐ spijdar

It definitely isn't. I've been a huge linux nerd since my preteens in the late 2000s, I jumped on to squeeze more performance out of the thoroughly mediocre hardware I had access to. I wanted to program, and I found Visual Studio to be incomprehensibly dense and confusing, while Linux tools were so much simpler, with GCC, GEdit, makefiles and the like being more to my liking. I fell deep into the rabbit hole, learned emacs, then vim (it was more responsive on my intel atom-powered netbook), became a "shell guru", eventually went to college at 16 and started doing cybersecurity work/pentesting professionally. I've even made a tiny contribution to the Linux kernel, which I'm pretty proud of.

All this anecdata to say, I consider myself pretty okay at using Linux, I "prefer" Linux, but I don't use Linux for gaming. Not unless it makes sense. I play Minecraft on Linux, and FOSS games that were developed on Linux. There's a POWER9 desktop on my desk that runs Linux, and all my professional and hobby work goes there. I love it.

But any commercial games? They go on my old college-days Intel desktop, running Win10. I can do the work to get games running on Linux, but why bother? Like Linus says in that video, when I have time to play video games, I really don't want to pull out a debugger and strace and crap to do more $DAYJOB work.

Not to say I never do that for fun. I do. I've done some work with https://github.com/ptitSeb/box86, and that involves a similar process. But I just frankly don't find doing it to your average Steam game to be very fun. Sometimes the muse strikes, usually it doesn't.

And for your average Linux user, much less your average computer user overall, you can forget about it. IMO, unless you have a strong ideological reason to only use FOSS OSes (and all the power to you!), the reason you use Linux is because it's a vastly superior tool for certain problems.

Playing your average commercial game is not one of them.

⬐ wildrhythms

Have you tried Steam's Proton compatibility layer yet? I was surprised to find many (not all) games in my library running with near 1:1 performance and stability to Windows.

⬐ CorrectHorseBat

It's not, but it really has come a far way and I'm extremely impressed. I'm kind of the other way around, I've never been more than a very casual gamer and I'm simply not interested in keeping a separate Windows pc or dual boot install for games. If I can't get it working on Linux I'm not bothering with it. Right now I can play any game I want to play with very minimal tinkering (that probably says more about me than the state of Wine/Proton, but still).

⬐ spijdar

Linux has absolutely come very far, don't get me wrong!

I'm also mostly a casual gamer, and only have my "dedicated gaming PC" because it's 7 year old hardware I've replaced with a dedicated "workstation" I bought after getting a job and saving some money.

On all my other hardware, I just run Linux, and I pretty much do the same as you -- most of my games work fine on Linux, a surprising number natively!

Linus brought this up in his video as well, that if you don't really care which games you play, you'll be fine. The problem is there are a few games I like playing or like to play with my local friend circle that just don't work well on Linux.

The problems are really stupid, too, and often not the fault of Linux per se. Garbage like Elder Scrolls Online still relying on a TLS cert signed by a CA that's been almost universally revoked, so the launcher will silently hang on linux. Bypassing this relies on either adding the (revoked for security reasons) CAs to your system's trust chain, or man-in-the-middleing the game process to force the updates regardless of the cert problems.

It's not like I really care that much about this specific game, but it's nice to play every now and again with friends. Maybe my long rambly point is, if you primarily use Linux for other reasons and occasionally play games with it, it's awesome. But if you're the average "PC gamer" whose computer is primarily for gaming, Linux will probably disappoint you.

⬐ Schnitz

Where does this sentiment come from that Linux has come very far when it comes to gaming? When Doom 3 released in 2004 I had to use a hex editor to hand patch the executable to get sound working. Luckily someone did what OP did and posted the instructions on a forum. I've used Linux/Unix for 20+ years but I wouldn't recommend it for gaming unless you enjoy debugging Linux software and want to do more of it. Frankly, you can learn a ton by doing so, it's not a waste of time, but priorities and frustration tolerances change as people get older.

⬐ Schnitz

Where does this sentiment come from that Linux has come very far when it comes to gaming? When Doom 3 released in 2004 I had to use a hex editor to hand patch the executable to get sound working. Luckily someone did what OP did and posted the instructions on a forum. I've used Linux/Unix for 20+ years but I wouldn't recommend it for gaming unless you enjoy debugging Linux software and want to do more of it. Frankly, you can learn a ton by doing so, it's not a waste of time, but priorities and frustration tolerances change as people get older. Then the demographic that no longer wants to debug their games tends to also be the cohort that has more money and is more willing to spend for a better experience, which means more money is being allocated to the platforms they are on as opposed to Linux.

⬐ CorrectHorseBat

>Where does this sentiment come from that Linux has come very far when it comes to gaming?

Look at what you could run in Wine in 2004 and what you had to do to get it working and what you can do now in Proton. It might technically not be "native Linux" but I couldn't care less as long as it works.

>I've used Linux/Unix for 20+ years but I wouldn't recommend it for gaming unless you enjoy debugging Linux software and want to do more of it.

I game a little bit on Linux and have never touched a hex editor to do it. Right now I only have one game where I have to manually download a dll, all the rest I want to play works flawlessly. I only have to enable Proton in Steam and that's it. Yes, they're mostly older games and I still certainly wouldn't recommend Linux for gaming, but there is definitely progress.

⬐ badsectoracula

I disagree, in my experience with the recent improvements to Wine, drivers, etc, if you have a bit of Linux knowledge you can get games work just as fine in Windows - with the possible exception of games that use anticheat malware (because frankly, software that relies on kernel-level hacks, etc is basically malware). Though personally i stick with SP games anyway.

Also...

> Like Linus says in that video, when I have time to play video games, I really don't want to pull out a debugger

...Linus is most likely blind to all the issues he may have to get games to work under Windows because he's used to them. I've been playing games on Windows for decades and it was never a plug-and-play experience (...or it was, if you consider the original PnP experience back in the 90s :-P). If games worked perfectly under Windows you wouldn't have sites like pcgamingwiki.

Hell, i remember buying Tomb Raider 2013 back when it was new and having to trace through its registry calls on Windows to get it to work properly because its launcher was broken on my PC at the time. Incidentally that was supposed to be my relaxation time when i went home after work.

(of course i do not expect Linus -or most people- to do the same, they'd most likely just drop it for some other game and wait for a fix - but i had just bought the game and i wanted to play it right then)

In my experience it is rare to have a PC game on Windows play right away without any issues. If anything when it comes to slightly older games on Windows i had to use wrappers like DXVK to get games working properly due to the broken AMD Windows drivers.

At the past i might have written here that if you want a problem-free experience stick with consoles, but judging from videos i see from channels like DigitalFoundry, it seems consoles have a ton of issues nowadays too (it isn't common but i found it amusing that some people seem to jailbreak their Switches to make games work better :-P). And these come with their own issues anyway, personally i wouldn't touch any locked down DRM riddled system anyway.