It may be pretty good for previous-gen games and hardware, and that too after various compromises.
Current and next-gen PC hardware will always be optimized for Windows first, with some technologies being straight-up limited exclusively to Windows.
Not that gamers are losing out on anything valuable, of course. I run Debian stable and spend quite a few times gaming on it, and it turns out almost all the games that won't run on it aren't games worth playing altogether. But this is an opinion of the negligible minority like you and me. The Consumers will obviously care for the latest.
The Steam Deck is, at least for Valve, a first-class citizen of its platform. Tons of money and effort has been put in to bring it up to Windows. It’s not quite there yet, but it is a lot closer than you’re making it seem.
No DLSS or ray tracing. Those might work if I imported the game into Steam; the it would use the Steam settings where I think they do work, from what I've heard. But I don't care that much about DLSS or ray tracing.
Otherwise, I think I've got the highest graphics settings, though I haven't checked them.
The only app still making me want Windows is Paint.Net. It really feels by far the best, if not say perfect, non-pro picture editor ever. I would even pay for really good (Pinta is quirky although indispensable) Linux and Mac ports. I also love Visual Studio but JetBrains Rider seems more than a match. Games indeed have ended being a problem long ago. Perhaps some latest and greatest games still are, I dunno. Have anybopdy tried something like Hogwarts Legacy or Baldurs Gate 3 on Linux?
BG3 works well on my new recent install of Debian Bookworm with nonfree sw on, Nvidia RTX 2080 SUPER, nvidia prop driver 525 or 535 I think, KDE Plasma set to Xorg (Wayland caused some flickering, supposedly bad interaction between Wayland and nvidia drivers).
I think I don't have advanced stuff like DLSS and HDR though, maybe I could if I did some tinkering.
Which may be another motivation for them to buy up so much of the gaming industry. They can probably justify blanket banning anyone playing COD on Linux in the name of banning cheaters.
At the consulting company I work for Linux has been an option for 6+ years together with Mac and Windows.
Hey, even at the customer I work with now (a rather influential directorate), people have the option to choose Mac or Linux.
And: pro-tip, if you are going to work in such a place (public directorate), consider taking the Mac option because unlike with Windows PCs there are limits to how cheap the bean counters can get them and the budgets for hardware is optimised independently of the budget for hiring more people to cover for the fact that they aren't nearly as effective as they could have been and I am afraid - also the hiring budget. (The Linux option is the second best: you get the same hardware but with Linux you make the best out of it.)
That never ceases to amaze me: I mean, as software developers we usually get paid more in a month (or maybe two) than the company hardware we are using costs, so you would think it would be obvious to anyone that money spent on hardware which enables us to be more productive is money well spent?! But no, "do you really have to have the laptop with 32 GB RAM, isn't 16 GB enough?"...
This conversation exasperates me and has happened too often even at profitable and/or well funded companies. I don’t know what it is about ordering upgraded-spec computers that inspires people to desperately want to save money, but even as the decision maker on this I’ve had to repeatedly defend spending, say, and extra $150 on MacBook Pros rather than Airs to people who are oddly fixated on the topic.
That’s like one hour of the person using the machine’s time! To save them tons of frustration and wasted time from their computer thermal throttling while, say, hooked up to multiple monitors, compiling, and running a video call.
> I’ve had to repeatedly defend spending, say, and extra $150 on MacBook Pros rather than Airs
Funnily enough I've sometimes had problems with the reverse. I've got a bad back, and lighter laptops are easier for me to deal with than heavier ones especially when I'm on-call. But sometimes the only option available at work has been a 15" MacBook Pro or similarly sized Linux laptop.
I have a strong preference for Linux laptops but I'd really also like it to be small and lightweight!
My wife sustained a minor head injury when the weight of her new work-issued MacBook Pro caused her wheelchair to flip over backwards when she stood up momentarily. (It was hanging from the backrest.) MacBook Air is not an option currently on the menu.
If they'd see the skill discrepancy between Linux desktop users and Windows desktop users, businesses would never hire anyone with a Windows background again. I work in a heavy Microsoft environment these days and the skill level is just sad. If there's no button to click people are at a loss. If there's no GUI to consume the logs people don't know what to do. Whenever I interview, if you write C#/.NET but your daily driver is Linux, you're practically hired.
Probably a third of my colleagues is using Linux at work, me included.
And it is getting even more widespread as most of the "office" work moves to Office365 and such which are all cloud/web based, so which OS you are running literally doesn't matter anymore.
Fortunately the "corporate desktop world" (cough M$ Office cough) is getting less and less relevant the more things move to web apps. I'm not a big fan of web apps mind you, but at least that's a plus...
Enterprises have been pushing as much work as possible through the browser for a long time. Outside of a few niche applications I don't think they will have much of a problem migrating.
I'm glad to hear there have been some consequences to Microsoft's anti-user product direction. But where we need to see Linux permeate is outside of tech bubbles.
As I understand it, the most significant barriers for having all of the big games run on Linux are the anti-cheat software in multiplayer games.
Many of the games I've tried, just kind of work. Path of Exile, for example, worked on my PopOS system (AMD CPU / Nvidia GPU) with no fiddling. (I switched a couple of weeks ago.)
HL² on pop-os was ok (tried it last week), a bit glitchy though. Portal completely froze and had to be killed. Probably better with Nvidia; I was using intel graphics. Interesting to try it though
> Decided it's time to switch to Linux because everyone says windows games now work on Linux thanks to Valve's efforts
> Installed Nobara (fork of Fedora made for gaming) and proceeded to install my copy of Red Alert 2 (my most played game) via Wine
> Try to run game, 'Error: xxx32.dll not found' or something
> Spent over an hour looking up forum posts on fixing that error, manually copying that dll and other modded variants of that dll to the install directory, but no cigar, still same error or other error, don't remember exactly
> Throw in the towel and went back to Windows where Red Alert 2 'Just Works TM'. Definitely no "year of the Linux" for me. I don't care how many thousands of Steam games work on Linux if they're not the games and apps I own and play. But good luck.
Edit: nice to see I'm getting downvoted for telling a personal story on this topic. Very emotionally mature of you guys.
More generally, I usually have more success running older games under Wine than on Windows 10 or 11 - DXVK helps a lot with early directx9 games in particular, in my experience.
I use the DODI patched variant of Red Alert 2 which works out of the box on Windows 11 as it ships with all the necessary patched DLLs to work on modern Windows.
Maybe. But I ran out of patience after about an hour. If gaming on Linux is advertised to "just works TM" then it really must just work without hours of tinkering.
Always check protondb first. That will tell you how well the game works, and how to get it working. (I haven't checked what it says about RA2; there are games that really don't work.)
I actually thought the launchers (Steam and Heroic) would automatically take care of that, but that doesn't always seem to be the case.
My experience with RA2 is that it doesn't work on Windows or Linux without some patching. I redid the game lately and just applied some patch that I found to make it work on Windows and it worked out of the box on Proton for me.
Not sure if it's why you get downvoted but RA2 definitely doesn't work out of the box on Windows.
