That's it, I'm done, finished. It's "mission complete" now is it not? 2022 is officially the Year of Linux Gaming. Yup, that's something I am now proclaiming and I'm also putting a flag down into February 25 (the Steam Deck release date) as Linux Gaming Day every year.
While the long-running joke of "Year of the Linux Desktop" might take forever to actually be a thing, Linux Gaming is now a lot more mainstream. Thanks largely to Valve of course bringing over Steam to Linux, and eventually producing the Steam Deck — putting the power of Linux and open source literally into peoples' hands.
Of course that's not to say it's all Valve. There's a massively long list of open source contributors who have helped to make this happen. From drivers to desktop environment upgrades there's so many different people, companies and organisations to thank. We wouldn't see the Steam Deck without open source and without the Vulkan API. I've said for years that we needed "hardware, hardware, hardware" with more vendors to properly jump in. It's not enough to have good marketing, or a good desktop, people needed a reason to use it to actually sway them over and clearly the Steam Deck is doing wonders.
If you follow the Steam Deck Reddit, you'll see a lot of people trying out (and actually enjoying) the KDE Plasma desktop mode on the Steam Deck too. Plenty of the fixes coming into KDE Plasma are as a result of people trying it out too, and finding issues, which then benefits all users. You only have to look at the regular This Week in KDE blog posts from developer Nate Graham to see how much effort goes into it.
The community building up around it is quite fantastic too, we've already seen a Plugin Loader come along which will be fun to see progress. We've seen multiple emulation tools appear like EmuDeck and RetroDECK, masses of developers moving to improve their games to add in gamepad support and better text sizing and the list goes on.
There's been times recently it felt like I woke up in a different world, when sites like PC Gamer told people to stick with SteamOS and not Windows and even LinusTT thought SteamOS did better overall. Never did I ever expect things like that to happen. Heck, even Jeff Grubb from Venture Beat said this in a recent Twitter post:
Steam Deck makes me want to puke from thinking about how stifled everything is by walled gardens. The community has already made Steam Deck so much better, and it all works together because it's open source. A better world isn't just possible; it exists.
Steam Deck, Linux and open source are finally starting to get through the cracks — it's incredible. After writing about it for so long, this really does feel like the "what a time to be alive" clip that came from The Simpsons and is now a fun meme for this sort of thing.
Heck, you even have Microsoft of all companies jumping in to repeatedly talk about their games on this Linux handheld, and even doing a guide to get Xbox Cloud Gaming to work. It might not be Game Pass on Steam (yet?), but who had any of that on their bingo card? I sure didn't.
More companies are even now looking to go with Linux like OneXPlayer because it's showing its worth, something sadly GPD don't see.
Even Epic Games are doing a little like making sure Easy Anti-Cheat can work easily on Linux, and getting Unreal Engine into a better state for Linux with Unreal Engine 5.
Obviously, this is heavily focused on the Steam Deck, but you need to remember that apart from the Steam Client, practically all of SteamOS is open source software and all improvements go on to benefit Linux Gaming everywhere. I think we're finally starting to hit that turning point for Linux Gaming as a whole thanks to this. Absolutely tons of people are now learning more about it, enjoying it and sticking with it — exactly what we want to see.
Now if you'll excuse me I'm off to go sit on my sofa and load up a AAA game on a Linux handheld.
While you're here go follow me on YouTube and Twitch.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
In truth I don't want it to be either, Let the idiots stay on winXX and let those that actually have brain cells between their ears come to use Linux
Last edited by pete910 on 16 April 2022 at 8:08 pm UTC
Quoting: setzer22The work Valve is doing for the Linux gaming ecosystem is undeniable, but they're acting as a for-profit corporation, and I'm afraid sooner or later their interests might start to deviate from this community. What happens then?
DeckOS or OpenDeck? Calling dibs on those names btw. We just need to move faster than what they can change mind.
StalePopcorn Apr 16, 2022
Last edited by StalePopcorn on 16 April 2022 at 7:13 pm UTC
Steam Deck gave me hope that enough development time is going towards compatibility and I gave daily driving Linux another shot.
I've been using Arch for a few months and my 17 y/o son has been daily driving Mint for a few months more.
Most of the games that I play work, the ones that don't immediately work eventually do. After, dare I say it, a fun fight with the command line and internet articles?
It's great that my son is on another more full featured out of the box distro too. Sometimes something I am doing does not work on Arch but is working just fine on his system. It allows me to know that what I am trying to do definitely does work on Linux and I just have to find out why it is not working in my particular environment.
I think that 2022 might just be the year of gaming on Linux. I am operating just fine. Sure, there are frustrations occasionally and I am still waiting for the Division 2 to work but nothing has come up so far to make me rage quit back to Windows. :P
For me though, the massive milestone on the timeline will forever be when the Steam client arrived for Linux. That was *the* snowball for all the rest to follow.
Last edited by Beamboom on 16 April 2022 at 4:18 pm UTC
mr-victory Apr 16, 2022
slaapliedje Apr 16, 2022
Quoting: constQuoting: slaapliedjeI've come to the conclusion the reasons that it isn't 'Year of Linux on Desktop' is mostly because of Microsoft and their methods of locking down people to needing Windows. Much like back in the day, what the corporate space uses, is what people end up mostly being stuck using at home. If we can get more penetration into the corporate workspace, then maybe one day we'll have the 'year of linux on the desktop'.
Really looking forward to getting my Deck, maybe they'll let me throw my money at them next week....
As someone who is a Linux nerd for over 20 years by now and can decide weather to use Linux or Windows at work, I can tell you it's not that easy. The fact that Linux can be restricted a lot means corporate admins will do that. Also, corporate workstations are using up to 10 years old distributions. It's a nightmare. No one I work with chooses Linux at home because of our experience at work, rather contrary. People take those restricted environments as "That's linux. Reliable but missing features and comfort. It's fpr Servers and CAD." as granted.
Ultimately that's another reason why flatpak etc. are so important. When distributions with flatpak make it to these spaces, it will extend usability a LOT. Yet there will still be other hefty restrictions making everyone mad.
Ha, just because people are doing it wrong and not updating for 10 years, doesn't mean what I said is was incorrect. Just sounds like your corporate environment could do with a bump to something at least only 5 years old :P
BlackBloodRum Apr 16, 2022
Do you remember when the public used to think we were geeks/nerds? Or that GNU/Linux is obscure and difficult? Or that it can't play games? it's just for servers? These are things people used to say, but they simply don't anymore.
I mean sure, we still get the odd numpty who thinks those things but mostly their just misinformed, where as years gone by it was honestly mostly true (it used to be a nerd/geek thing tbh).
I mean, it's not just in the area of games that GNU/Linux has grown. Let's look at the desktop environments, notably KDE 5.24 - honestly just look at the functionality it has now.. and it's not even a buggy mess! It mostly works perfectly. (If you remember when KDE 4 was released.. you'll understand what I mean)
It retains the ability to highly tune the environment to how you like it, while also being able to be just left as a default for those who like defaults. Yet highly stable too!
Then there's the backend, we had iptables - and sure enough it was "simple" enough. Once you spent months studying the documentation (assuming you didn't just cheat and use something like Shorewall, which admittedly I did on servers for years despite that I RTFM and understood iptables well).
But now we have firewall-cmd that's included across multiple distros by default - that's good from a sysadmin point of view, it means being familiar with a tool regardless of the distro you are using. But of course, it's not mandatory and of course you can drop back to simple iptables if you wish, for example to still run Shorewall on some systems. But firewall-cmd is so simple and easy to use, realistically there's no reason to not use it.
Then there's systemd, this one is controversial. It's a bit like marmite, you either love it or hate it. I admit when it was first announced I had that kneejerk reaction and hated it too. Then I had no choice but to work with it (RHEL, Fedora) and honestly once you figure it out it's crazy simple to use and has some neat tricks up its sleeve.
I mean, some that even apply to gaming. Don't want that wine game (or any app tbh) to access the net? Systemd will fix that without needing to mess about with user groups or firewalls:
systemd-run --scope -p IPAddressDeny=any wine ping duckduckgo.com Done, no more net for that wine instance. (Yes, this requests password, but the game itself will run as the user that executed it, ofc you want to replace "wine ping duckduckgo.com" with your game launch command.)
It's the simple things like this that I like about systemd, then there's the simplicity of units.
Now, hardware.. oh hardware. Honestly, in this day and age it's quite difficult to find a piece of hardware that doesn't work out the box with GNU/Linux, pretty much most things will work straight away! ( Except nvidia ;) )
This is a huge step away from older GNU/Linux, where the answer to your question of "How do I make wifi work?" was "Don't bother, go get an ethernet cable!"
And look at ATI/AMD now! I remember a time when it was the general advice: Whatever you do.. don't get an ATI card if you want to play wine games! Get a nvidia card, sure you'll need to install the nvidia drivers from their binary file (anyone remember that old blue nvidia TUI install screen?) but it's the only way you're going to get any 3D performance.
But now.. the whole thing is flipped on its head, generally now the advice is to go get that ATI/AMD card, and avoid nvidia if you can.
Other usable things like suspend to ram, suspend to disk - these things used to notoriously hit-and-miss as to whether it worked on your hardware. In my case it wasn't until the mid 2010s that I actually got it working.
And since then? Once again mostly works on any hardware! Albeit I did get a kernel panic during a suspend to ram attempt the other day, I got to see the classic flashing CAPS/NUMLOCK LEDs.. oh I missed seeing that, it has been years xD.
But still, far better state than it was before.
Of course, if we have to talk about games (it is a game website after all).. yup gaming is a lot simpler now too! I was using wine long before valve came along and games that worked were often slow. We had to manually choose our overrides and setup our prefixes manually (some people didn't even use separate prefixes back then, imagine that), later PlayOnLinux helped with this somewhat, but it was still very much hit and miss.
Then valve blasted proton at us and boom.. wine has never been easier.
.. and this is getting all too long... tbh.. I could talk all day about the things that have changed. But if I'll say one thing, GNU/Linux is much more mature now and ready for the general public than it ever was before.
Sure, it has changed. But in my view, it's worth it.
Overall big +1 for GNU/Linux from me.
Oh.. but there is one huge negative too!
I spend too much money on games now!
Last edited by BlackBloodRum on 16 April 2022 at 11:20 pm UTC
Quoting: pete910Erm, NO and NO! And never will be !!!!
In truth I don't want it to be either, Let the idiots stay on winXX and let those that actually have brain cells between their ears come to use Linux
Have you seen some of the software reviews on GNOME Software or KDE Discover by any chance? I don't think you have to be a computer expert to use desktop linux lol.
Honestly in my opinion, people who are interested in linux are already using it in some capacity and everyone else could care less. It doesn't help that the only 'gaming' PC you're going to find that comes with it preinstalled is the Steam Deck.
Last edited by udekmp69 on 16 April 2022 at 11:57 pm UTC
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