I am and always was a casual gamer, I like playing puzzles, strategy and builder games, sometimes I play with friends some 7 days to die or AoE2. I am on Linux Mint for more than a year now and was surprised how easy gaming was. From time to time I had problems with weird DirectX error messages, but all in all everything just worked.
My setup:
- AMD Ryzen 5 3600
- GeForce GTX 1660 Super
- 32 GB DDR4 RAM
So last week my girlfriend worked on my computer (we are not living together), she wrote some bills for customers and did some table stuff in calc. When I asked her at the end of the day how it was to work on Linux, she shrugged and said “Oh I didn’t notice” lol (using Cinnamon as DE btw).
Today she bought Until Dawn the remake on Steam while she is here and because she really wanted to play she downloaded it to my PC. She just started to play and everything was great. I wondered again if I should say something like “you see how great you can game in Linux”, but then it came to my mind - she doesn’t care and she didn’t even question it! The Linux Desktop got so mature, that non-tech people just don’t notice!
I think the biggest “problem” with Linux adoption is that it does not come preinstalled on computers, and this kind of proves my point I guess.
Yeah that’s all, I just wanted to share this with you guys.
P.S.: There were some bugs btw. but it turned out they have nothing to do with the OS.
Yeah - my wife has occupied for hundreds of hours the SteamDeck and really doesn’t care that it’s Linux. Her games do work. And after Microsoft switched off Win10, I moved her to Mint and she really had no issues at all with that. Everything she does still works the same. We just saved a few hundred Euros by being able to keep using the Laptop
Glad to see the “working as intended” responses. Linux as a computer for people to use and Linux as a hobby can sometimes be at odds. It’s not a problem at all if someone’s able to use a Linux computer without noticing.
My biggest issue with games is that they still don’t just work™, all the time, and they need to be seemless for people like that.
You download a game on a couple devices it doesn’t work on one, or you need to tune the configuration, or even when it does start there are sometimes graphical issues (unrelated to GPU capability, like not all layers rendering), or ghost input (one game I have circles round and round like the R joystick was glued right even with just a mouse and keyboard), or modern games designed to work only with a mouse when the developer could have easily supported keyboard and controller.
A couple of years ago, I might have still checked protondb for Linux compatibility before making a purchase, but it seems a waste of time now. Everything that I’ve bought through Steam, or bought on GoG / claimed for free on Epic through Heroic has Just Worked, and has done for years. I think it got better when the Steam Deck was released; put a lot of visibility on Linux compatibility.
If you aren’t in to AAA, and even then only the competitive multiplayer with intrusive anticheat, then Linux is all you need.
I can barely get anything to run on Mint, but it probably has more to do with the fact my desktop is 14 years old and I refuse to put any money into upgrading it.
Idk, my partner has an RTX 1650 but the PC runs Mint, is a Dell Optiplex 990 with stock mid-2011 mobo, Intel i5-2400 CPU and 20GB DDR3-1333 RAM (8+8+2+2). It runs really well, considering.
Yeah, 14 years might do it. Does your GPU have Vulkan support?
If not, yeahhhh, that’ll make basically anything not run
A slightly newer but still cheap GPU might work wonders. RX 580s are pretty cheap ($60 last we looked?) and if you can afford that, it’ll get you Vulkan support.
– Frost
I got an old RX 570 running on Bazzite that hasn’t had issues that weren’t related to using the same Steam installations on an SSD from when it was on Windows. I didn’t even reinstall the games.
To me, even with those isolated bugs, is a pretty impressive feat.
The “doesn’t come preinstalled” part is still huge, combined with the “doesn’t have first-party device manufacturer support”.
If you buy a PC with Windows preinstalled, that doesn’t only mean that you don’t have to install Windows, but also the whole set of hardware in there will work just fine under Windows. They don’t put a fingerprint reader in there that doesn’t have a Windows driver, or a GPU with bad Windows driver support.
And yes, most hardware natively works pretty well under Windows, but the manufacturer taking care that they only select components that work fine under Windows is a big part of why there isn’t a hardware lottery under Windows.
taking care that they only select components that work fine under Windows is a big part of why there isn’t a hardware lottery under Windows.
There isn’t a hardware lottery under Linux, either, unless you buy random hardware instead of choosing known-good components or turning to one of the system vendors who do this for you.
I find it kind of weird that people who would never take mystery medication without it being prescribed to them, and would never buy a paycheck worth of food without considering its contents against their allergies and tastes, would buy a computer without checking whether it will run the software they intend to use.
Perhaps the perceived problem would fade if we taught people that computers and operating systems are not all equal, and that just as MacOS is more likely to run on a machine made for it, Linux is more likely to run on a machine made for it. (Edit: The same is true for Windows, for what it’s worth.)
That’s a bit of a weird argument to make.
We were talking about PCs with preinstalled OSes. How often do you come across DIY-built PCs with preinstalled OS?
If you select your own components you never have a preinstalled OS.
Also, most people who switch from Windows to Linux do so on existing hardware. It’s rare for people to buy a completely new PC to try out an OS. Maybe if €1000+ is something you shell out on a whim, but not if you actually work for your money.
For existing hardware you always have the hardware lottery on Linux.
Perhaps the perceived problem would fade if we taught people that computers and operating systems are not all equal, and that just as MacOS is more likely to run on a machine made for it, Linux is more likely to run on a machine made for it. (Edit: The same is true for Windows, for what it’s worth.)
Congratulations, you just happened to get the point that I made. And for some reason you thought that was a gotcha.
My argument was that if Linux came preinstalled on machines (apart from the current selection of tiny boutique manufacturers), these machines would be configured by the manufacturer to include only components that work well with Linux, which is not the case if you use a device that doesn’t have manufacturer support for Linux.
All in all you ended up at the whole point I was making, but somehow you first had to claim that it’s all nonsense.
All in all you ended up at the whole point I was making, but somehow you first had to claim that it’s all nonsense.
No, I pointed out that the problem you described is completely avoidable, which wasn’t apparent in your original comment. This is an important distinction to other readers who are considering a move to Linux, since they otherwise might be put off by your suggestion that doing so is necessarily a hardware lottery.
It was a different perspective, not a personal attack.
Your combative, snarky response is unpleasant, unwarranted, and unnecessary. Goodbye.
I get your point, although probably most people install it on whatever hardware they have on their hands. Thus the lottery.
Trying whatever hardware one already has on hand is perfectly reasonable, but it’s not a lottery.
AMD drivers are so smooth on Linux!
The GPU is actually NVIDIA! But planning an upgrade to an AMD card soon.
I’m dumb, I mixed with CPU…
…but AMD drivers are still smooth !!!
AoE2DE never worked online for me. It always resulted in a desync error a few minutes in. I read between the lines that that’s been fixed?
Is this a known bug? I never had that problem to be honest.
I play with some friends on the other side of the world once a week. I’m on Bazzite (previously on Mint), one of them is on Mac, the other two are on Windows.
I almost broached the topic with my mother (60s) the other day about moving to Linux. She’s got a computer that sucks, and my other brother got windows 11 on there so it’s exceptionally slow. I was helping her with some documents and printing and whatnot so I started asking a couple of the questions you would ask, like what she uses the pc for. She uses this tax software and “needs” it installed (as opposed to the browser version) so I didn’t continue down that road but I’m pretty sure it’d blow her mind how much better this thing would run with mint. And other than that tax software, it’d be nearly identical for her, open a browser and go to the thing.
if you can, get a 2nd hdd/ssd and install linux in parallel
i actually have mint on two older pcs with hdds and while it takes some time to boot, once it’s up, it’s quick, unlike windowsMy mom was running slackware for a couple of years in the early 2000s. She kept downloading viruses on her computer and I was tired of her having her ship it across the country so I could fix it. I installed slackware on her computer and shipped it back, and walked her through setting up a port forward on her router for ssh access. She had no idea she was running Linux the entire time until she went to Walmart to buy Peachtree Accounting software. She couldn’t get it to install, so she called and asked for help. I got in with SSH and installed KMyMoney for her and she used that for a year.
It lasted up until she bought a laptop, one that came with Windows 7 I think. I stopped helping her after that because I didn’t really remember how to use Windows anymore. Windows had a subscription antivirus at that point, before Defender days, and she just paid for that.
I got my mom (about the same age as your mom) setup on Linux for her new laptop about a year ago. She’s been using it fine, and was even excited to tell me how she figures stuff out without me.
Honestly, I’ve had to do less work on her machines since I switched her over. Package management makes it easy for my mom to add or remove apps.
Meanwhile I have a riced setup with programmer dvorak keyboard layout and shortcut heavy interaction which makes my computer almost unusable to normies.
My partner is the same way roughly. Biggest issue she’s had was her drawing tablet pen not working. Turned out she was using the wrong pen for that tablet, the correct pen worked flawlessly. An hour of my life troubleshooting I can’t get back haha.
There have been a few games that have had issues, and the updates aren’t the most intuitive on Kubuntu, but she did manage the last update just fine on her own without me even being home, so that’s good.
Try installing opentabletdriver, it made mine work out of the box.
Hers did too without any extra software, she was trying to use the wrong pen from a different tablet.
drawing tablet pen
Soapbox: EMR is amazing. No need for charging, effectively infinite pressure gradient, no lag, open standard (which solves your issue because any stylus works on any tablet). The fact that Apple didn’t use it for the pencil is infuriating, and the fact that some other companies are moving away from EMR too is driving me up a wall.
As anti-competitive as Wacom can be, they cooked with that technology, and I’m so happy with my e-ink EMR tablet.
If she is immune to branding then marry that one! She’s rare.
Some vendors offer computers preinstalled with linux. For instance, laptopwithlinux lets you choose your own build, choose a distro (or no distro), and they put it all together and ship it to you
As of this year, same with Framework. For their 13 Pro, at least.
My mother, who is the stereotypical boomer that doesn’t get technology, got upset with all the privacy invasion of Microsoft, and has been running Linux for over a decade
For what? Recipe keeping?
I mean, if you have Windows like DE’s it’s really not THAT hard for a Windows user to use Linux. The issue is when you have Gnome and others installed.
But yes I agree with you. I definitely think we’ve come a long way from having to use the terminal for everything.
Linux Mint Cinnamon has been a blessing to me tbh
How so? If I’m not reading some blanket / feel good /empty statement like this about it, it’s bitching left and right about specific issues and actual experiences. There’s no karma system here, so why make karma farming posts?
I personally wouldn’t go as far as to call it a blessing… But mint was a super easy transition from windows for me. I’ve only had one issue where it locked up on login. Granted that’s fairly major but I was able to roll it back after a cheeky search engine review.
What was your reason for switching, and what do you use your computer for?
Nice it’s always great to hear the work millions of people put into the Linux ecosystem is paying off.
This is the kind of story we should forward to Linus Torvalds, the Linux mailing sublists and other volunteers so they see how their work gets recognized ^^
Excellent. That means it’s working as intended.
The best user interface is one that you don’t even notice. The seamless layer between you and your tool (or game in this instance).
