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Linux surpasses the Mac among Steam gamers

(arstechnica.com)
433 points Sporktacular | 1 comments | 04 Aug 23 00:36 UTC | HN request time: 0.253s | source
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mkatx ◴[04 Aug 23 02:03 UTC] No.36994570[source]▶
Steam gets all my gaming budget, as I really try to stick to Linux.

If it ain't on steam, I don't play it, and they don't get my money.

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andrewmcwatters ◴[04 Aug 23 02:21 UTC] No.36994692[source]▶
It’s sad to me that you and many others have this opinion, which is fine, but Valve takes a significant tax from small companies while gamers, a cheap demographic, complain about the price of games.

Games don’t need to be on Steam to be good.

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doix ◴[04 Aug 23 03:11 UTC] No.36995066[source]▶
I won't buy a non-native Linux game that's not on steam. The steam Linux stuff "just works", I don't need to mess around with wine/wintricks/proton or different wrappers like lutris.

If the developers have a native Linux version that I can buy directly from their site, I might do that as well to show my support (but still buy it on steam since it's just too convenient).

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badsectoracula ◴[04 Aug 23 03:39 UTC] No.36995229[source]▶
I am on Linux and i vastly prefer DRM-free stores as i keep my own offline backups of games (and other software) i buy. As a result i have almost 1000 games from GOG, Zoom Platform and other non-Steam places.

In my experience 99% of the games work out of the box with wine-staging, DXVK and VKD3D-Proton (which works with wine-staging just fine). No need to mess around with anything, just install wine-string, install DXVK and VKD3D-Proton and you are ready to run pretty much everything with "wine installername.exe" or "wine gamebinary.exe".

I never had to use winetricks, lutris or anything of the sort.

I also play games on Steam and even got a Steam Deck (on which i also play games i got outside from Steam), so it isn't like i am Valve-free, but you certainly do not have to tie yourself on Steam if you are gaming on Linux nor your experience will be any worse.

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1. doix ◴[04 Aug 23 06:03 UTC] No.36996010[source]▶
This is not my experience at all, I recently had to go through this dance to get D4 working. The latest versions of those things in the arch repositories don't/didn't work. Needed to get some older specific version, so now you can't use your package manager (since you can't have multiple versions). Then you need to mess around with paths and configs so that the correct versions are used.

I very quickly gave up and just used Lutris, copied someones settings/versions from Reddit and it worked, but I wasn't too happy. I _really_ wanted to try Diablo4, so I put up with it, but normally my patience for such things is pretty low.

I am not averse to messing around with things, I've got a pretty good idea of how things work in Linux. I've written my own .so files to fix bugs in closed source software using LD_PRELOAD. I just don't want to deal with that when gaming.

There's more to Steam than just the pre-configured proton. Their controller support stuff is top notch and so is the stream link/stream stuff. Not using steam would definitely make my experience worse.