Steam Machine

Pretty much the only reason I boot to Windows anymore is to play games with my kids and family. The direction of this thing is dangerously close to being all I'd care about from a desktop computer.

If Valve pivoted into making a well-supported laptop with good hardware that ran Linux and played games...

Just wondering, what games are you playing that dont run on Linux yet? I can't think of games I'd play much with family that dont work well

I was in the same shoes, then one day I decided to give a shot to Bazzite. To my surprise the installation was extremely smooth, and everything worked right away. Now I’m playing almost everything on it (Arc Raiders, EU V, HLL and Horizon FW recently). If you want to _try_ all you need is 15 minutes, some HDD space and an empty USB. You don’t have to give up Windows at all, dual booting is also pretty smooth.

I used to also have a dedicated Windows machine just for gaming, but two years ago I formatted the Windows drive and put SteamOS (via ChimeraOS) instead. I can legitimately say that it has been more stable than running the same games on Windows. Just flawless.

I have a bazzite box connected behind my TV. Even with a non optimal choice of graphic card (an old Nvidia) it works better than I was expecting.

I do not believe that _you_ are trolling with this question, but answering this is just asking to be trolled.

That said. Fortnite. Yes, I still play it with friends and cannot play it on Mac or Linux. :(

I'm sure others have similar examples. Also there are just simple things like playing with friends and streaming on Discord. Anybody streaming from Windows always comes across smooth and HD to the other participants while anybody on Linux seems to consistently be received (I don't know where exactly in the chain the problem exists, so just "received", as it may not be a broadcasting or encoding problem, I'm not an expert in this) with a lot of artifacts and lower framerates.

A friend of mine, a Linux user, says he installed Windows for gaming. Apparently the main issue isn't actual compatibility for games, but that a lot of games require some kind of kernel level anticheat (rootkit?).

I've been using Pop_OS, buggy as hell but steam games work great!

Everything is kinda a dumpster fire, but they nailed steam games.

Yes. Valorant and Battlefield 6, for example.

Fortnite & Call of Duty

If I could travel back in time and prevent my kids and nephews from ever learning about Fortnite, I might do it. Instead I'm out here trying to keep from getting sniped by a Simpson character.

Fortunately, it seems like the rest of the family is getting tired of COD's ceaseless churn, and might be willing to pick up something else.

Yes, this is broadly true. Just about everything that does not have Linux-disabling anticheat runs wonderfully on Linux these days. You can check https://protondb.com/ to see how any given game runs.

Yes and they could just make it(the rootkits) work on linux. It's more about the publishers/devs actively opposing linux.

Yep anticheats are one of the big hurdles to 'porting' a lot of online focused shooters to linux. It's an unfortunate situation but I get it from the company's perspective, not having any anticheat leads to shitty situations for way more players than not having a linux version of their anticheat and a vast majority of players have Windows devices or are willing to dual boot.

Alternatively it's still a pretty small slice of the market that's not willing to dual boot for the major games that do require windows only anticheats so it's just not worth their dev and support time to try to serve that small slice. Valve's work on Steam Machines/Decks is the thing needed to actually push developers to supporting it by providing a relatively consistent target OS and a large enough install base to justify spending the money to support.

The major anti-cheats do support Linux, but it's opt-in on the dev side because they're significantly easier to bypass than the Windows versions. It's not even close, getting around the Linux ACs is child's play. It sucks but nobody really has a good solution yet.

This is true. Battlefield 6 is in this boat

It’s a few games, but a few very important ones.

GTAVs online ecosystem with custom servers. Rust hasn’t enabled Linux Battleye support. Valorant

Some releases that are temporarily popular like BF6, playtest of Battleye games where Linux support isn’t enabled (Fellowship, Exoborne). All games in this paragraph also by Swedish developers. Kom igen, linuxstöd

BF6 and any multiplayer EA games with anticheat

Battlefield 6, GTA V online, Escape From Tarkov, likely GTA VI

Imagine not supporting the latest releases that all your friends are playing.

Fortnite is a fun game though, it's the only game holding me back from fully switching to Linux. Cloud streaming just doesn't cut it, latency is way too high (+ more money for a single game)

Trying to get RDR2 to work on Linux, so far no luck.

Loved the concept, tried it out, didn't work, at least not for RDR2 which I was trying to play. But how would it work, there is Linux, Bazzite, then there is Steam, RDR2 needs the Rockstar launcher, it's such an intricate web of dependencies, I'm not surprised something isn't working.

Pop_OS is pretty rough. Theyre running on a super outdated base while working on COSMIC

For me it's only games the specifically don't support Linux, which are mostly competitive multiplayer games with anti-cheat software. Apex Legends used to work great on Linux, but they removed support as an attempt to combat cheaters (there are still tons of cheaters).

Zero of my friends are playing any of these games. GTA VI will probably do the console first release thing anyways.

Edit: Fair enough to the other ones though. This comment wasnt meant to be inflammatory or argumentative, but clearly someone else believed it was.

Apex is an EA game and actually ran great on Linux until they removed support. Unfortunate, but they said it was necessary to combat cheaters though that claim is somewhat dubious since cheaters is perfectly viable on Windows still.

Ah I had kinda forgotten Fortnite exists haha. I think I assumed your kids were younger.

I dont think I'm getting trolled, I know that loads of games still dont work. I just wanted to get an idea of which games are the current biggest ones holding people back.

What's the point of arguing like this? You're asking for experiences from people, then when people give you proper answers it glides off with "well no one I know plays those anyways". Isn't the discussion larger than your personal and private experiences, if you're discussing in public like this?

You seemed to have some initial claim that "all games actually work perfectly fine, prove me wrong" but then you don't seem to actually want to engage faithfully anyways.

In addition to what others have said, a group of friends still plays enough League of Legends that I don't both dual booting. Also if you play RuneScape (RS3, not OSRS) the best 3rd party add-on, Alt1 Toolkit, only works on Windows.

I play it on Linux, try Proton hotfix.

FIFA is another one that comes to mind, or however they call it these days.

Also from EA

RDR2 has a gold rating: https://www.protondb.com/app/1174180

It should work with some tinkering.

I've played it on the Steamdeck without issue.

I have finished RDR2 on Bazzite (story mode), zero issues.

Escape from Tarkov is the only reason I have a Windows Hard drive still. It doesn't have anything else on it.

I also bit the bullet and did a bazzite install and am blown away how seamless it has been for what I need. All the games I like run on Steam. Even Diablo 4 runs through the Blizzard launcher which does take some work to get installed, but nothing you can't find in a youtube video.

No issues using the system as my daily driver for personal things. I have dual monitors, one oriented vertically and one 144hz. All works great! I'd recommend it to anyone

Steam Box 2 will be out before GTA VI

FWIW, PvE and modded Tarkov does actually run fine on Linux (Streets map doesn't, nor does Arena).

It's definitely not the same, but between Arc Raiders and PvE I get my extraction shooter fix. Online Tarkov is mostly populated by Gaming Wizards™ anyways.

Like other commenters, I also recently made the switch. Figured I would dual-boot windows but have never needed to boot it back up again.

ProtonDB is a goldmine when a game doesn't work. Oh, and switching from Nvidia GPU to AMD GPU seems to have worked great to get games to "just work".

Some intrusive ones (EA's anti cheat for recent Battlefields, Activision's anti cheat for Call of Duty, anything from Riot to name a few) do not work.

However, EAC - who is a major player in this field producing generic solutions - does support Linux. The involved publisher, however, needs to approve this and the developer need to turn on a feature flag. That's it.

However, some publishers simply deny this for... totally mental reasons ...and this means that the game is marked as borked in protondb even though the game could as easily be played on Linux thanks to EAC's Linux support.

The pop shop app being single threaded is just embarrassing. Do a search, the entire UI freezes up until the search is complete.

Also updates regularly break my KDE session and I have to restart my display server.

Sometimes I have to switch to a tty and back to my graphical console to get my display back.

It is a mess all around.

I haven't managed to get my GPU working in Docker, ugh.

That said, it does work. Mostly.

They think HN is Reddit, notorious with its flaming war

For me the thing that pushed me to reinstall windows after I got a cheap $10 copy was Kerbal Space Program. Though, in my specific case I strongly suspect it was older hardware & driver issues than anything else, since I've not had any major problems on steam deck.

I do have more random crashes on certain games even on steam deck, but not as bad as Kerbal Space Program on my old (12 yr) desktop.

Factorio seems to work better on Linux. Which is both good and bad (since it's so addictive).

one limitation for Bazzite for instance would be some titles that require anti-cheating won't work but just like OP, only use case I have for windows is gaming and running some banking app which won't work on non-Windows device

love to see more and more users realize they can game just fine on linux

When silly DRM or a game launcher is all that is keeping you from enjoying a game, that is when you get the pirated version without any of this bs and enjoy it without remorse.

"EAC supports Linux, but devs just won't turn it on" is the clickbait answer, but the details are more nuanced. EAC has multiple security levels that a title can set based on the threat model of the game, and most games with heavy MTX that use EAC shy away from it, largely because Fortnite doesn't do it. EAC is owned by Epic, and if Tim Sweeney says that you can't do MTX on Linux safely, then any AAA live services game with in-game MTX is going to shy away from it, regardless of how true the statement actually is.

The whole Universal Blue image ecosystem is so polished, consistent and coherent. Bazzite is their gaming image variant, I’ve also recently switched to Bluefin which is their Gnome variant on my workstation and everything works so nicely together, it’s the most joy I’ve had using a computer in a long time.

EFT has a pretty ridiculous history with attempts at anticheat. Several years ago they set up their servers to kick anyone with virtualization enabled because cheaters had been using VMs to intercept network traffic (the network traffic wasn't encrypted for tarkov then). The response from cheaters was to use a seperate bare metal build to intercept the traffic. The devs "fixed" it right before windows 11 came out with virtualization on by default.

"MTX" as in, microtransactions?

What do microtransactions have to do with anticheat?

Depends on your friend group; statistically speaking they're more like to play ARC raiders than EFT which does run on Linux

Yes I am playing Arc Raiders now instead of Tarkov because switching is not worth it. Until it will be!

This promises 4k 60fps gaming and Valve is good with hardware, so this is an immediate buy from me if it's under 1000€

No need to mess around building a gaming PC anymore.

Battlefield, Call of Duty, Apex Legends, PUBG, Rainbow 6 Siege, Fortnite

Basically all the games I play regularly with my friends.

RDR2 works great on my AMD Linux machine.

granting clientside without paying, things like that

The Finals has mtx, is protected by EAC, and is playable on Steam Deck.

Throne and Liberty, which is also protected by EAC and has mtx, is also playable on Steam Deck.

So this is bullshit and it clearly shows it's the publisher's choice. What Sweeney thinks has nothing to do with it.

Same, if they also released something like a Steam Machine Pro with more ram+vram and bit higher specs I would instantly purchase it. Nvidia and AMD have been rightly criticized for releasing 8GB video cards in the past year and valve shouldn't be immune to that criticism.

Microsoft Flight Simulator

It's time to stop buying such games and send game studios a signal that we won't tolerate rootkits and/or closed platforms. Anti-cheats should run server-side, or better yet, servers should be community-operated. I would probably bought BF6, but since I exclusively use Arch, EA lost a sale -- too bad for them there are thousands of other games that work flawlessly on Linux.

Extremely hard pass on a laptop. They already have the steam deck, and now they have this. Whether you want it portable or not, there are options. Laptops always end up being just... so disappointing.

You don't want someone having a skin that you are charging money for among other things.

the limit last time was anything competitive or multiplayer that required a weird launcher or some low-level permissions or something. I just want to play CS2 and hunt showdown.

I want to echo a previous comment of mine on this topic:

With the rise of mainstream-compatible, as in a standard gamer can get them running and use them with a similar frustration level as Win11, Linux first systems like steam deck, steam machine and even steam frame, there is a real, even if currently low, pressure for big publisher to support Linux/SteamOS. I somewhat hope/fear there will be a blessed SteamOS version that supports anticheats enough for publishers like EA, Epic and Riot to accept the risk.

Would be great of Valve to just drop a Steam Machine Max++ with an AMD Ryzen AI 395 and 128GB unified memory. I know this is not going to happen, but SteamOS should boot fine on that SoC, so you can DIY a Steam Machine that also runs LLMs (albeit a bit slow) :).