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2022 is officially the Year of Linux Gaming

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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.
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About the author -
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I am the owner of GamingOnLinux. After discovering Linux back in the days of Mandrake in 2003, I constantly checked on the progress of Linux until Ubuntu appeared on the scene and it helped me to really love it. You can reach me easily by emailing GamingOnLinux directly.
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74 comments
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matiaslavik Apr 17, 2022
And also thanks to you, for providing news and valuable info about Linux gaming and Steam Deck! 😉
Mountain Man Apr 17, 2022
Hooray! It's the year of Linux! \o/

Again.

How many times have we heard this story? While Linux is never going away, I have given up all pretense that it will ever be a dominant operating system on the home computer. The Steam Deck is explicitly a Linux device, so of course people who try to put Windows on it are going to have a bad time, but I really don't see this leading developers to broadly embrace Linux. Most of them seem content to let Valve do the heavy lifting to get their games working in Linux via Proton.


Last edited by Mountain Man on 17 April 2022 at 5:16 pm UTC
mr-victory Apr 17, 2022
Quoting: Mountain ManHow many times have we heard this story?
Only once from the owner of a website called gaming on linux?
Tchey Apr 17, 2022
As 2022 is the last year before the end of the world, it was about time !
slapin Apr 18, 2022
  • Supporter Plus
wishful thinking...
Liam Dawe Apr 18, 2022
Quoting: slapinwishful thinking...
I would rather be wishful and have plenty to be excited about (which there is!), than just negative for no reason :)
3zekiel Apr 18, 2022
It sure seems to be going smooth. Compare to the time of steam machines, we have clear momentum and hype, I am confident millions will sell.
I don´t think the number of Desktop linux user is going to skyrocket, but I expect that as the steam deck gains popularity, and once valve releases SteamOS on the desktop, we will see more pc-building enthusiast go for it. I would'nt be surprised that we rise above the 5% mark in 2023. Not a very big number yes, but MacOS managed to have more ports than we did with half that - and combined with steam deck that would begin to give us a big enough market.
sarmad Apr 18, 2022
Quoting: 3zekielIt sure seems to be going smooth. Compare to the time of steam machines, we have clear momentum and hype, I am confident millions will sell.
I don´t think the number of Desktop linux user is going to skyrocket, but I expect that as the steam deck gains popularity, and once valve releases SteamOS on the desktop, we will see more pc-building enthusiast go for it. I would'nt be surprised that we rise above the 5% mark in 2023. Not a very big number yes, but MacOS managed to have more ports than we did with half that - and combined with steam deck that would begin to give us a big enough market.

There is no way the Linux market share can hit 5% in only 1~2 years. 5% in a PC landscape is a huge number and there is no way Valve can produce this much Steam Decks in just 2 years. And desktop/laptop Linux machines won't change much since there are still no ready made Linux gaming machines that are good enough to sell in masses (and most people would just use whatever the system comes with).

However, Linux doesn't need to hit a percentage higher than other platforms; it only needs to hit a percentage where it becomes a profitable platform for all developers to not ignore, and that seems to be well within reach in the next year or two.
slaapliedje Apr 20, 2022
Quoting: Nocifer
Quoting: slaapliedje
Quoting: NociferHey, what do you mean "imagine that"? Outside of Steam (which manages its prefixes automatically) I still use a single, manually configured prefix for all my games! Granted, nowadays I hardly do any post-setup because between Wine, Proton and Proton-GE most everything is already integrated by default (I just add a drive letter for quick access to the Games partition and install PhysX for compatibility with some older games) but still, "one prefix to play them all" is my mantra :D

I only use one prefix as well, unless there is some sort of weird requirement for a program to use. Most things I have thrown at wine lately doesn't take much more than 'wine $program.exe'.

Yeah, it's incredible how nowadays I only get surprised and/or annoyed on the rare occasion that something doesn't work with a simple 'wine $program.exe'. Gaming on Linux has come a long way indeed!

Quoting: slaapliedjeThough now that GCA5 (GURPS Character Assistant) it once again does not work under wine... shame, as they finally got GCA4 working right!

WTF? I'm a GURPS die-hard (though admittedly I don't play all that much nowadays, nor do I lurk in the forums) and that's the first time I've heard about SJG updating GCA to a new version! Finally! Kthxbye, I'm off to try and make it work in Wine :P

EDIT: Got some errors at first but all it needed was .NET 4.6 or later (I installed the latest 4.8) to run without a hitch, at least for starting up, loading a couple of data sets and creating a character. It also runs better/faster than GCA4 and doesn't require any weird dll overrides for ancient libraries, so it's looking good in my book :)

Sweet! I'll give it a shot! Yeah, I absolutely love GURPS. Was playing with the beta of GCA5, but kept having issues in wine. Didn't try too hard to get it to work (been rather busy with other projects lately) so it's awesome to know that it looks like it's working great! GCA4 was SLOW in Wine, but at least under Wine the help files worked, as WinHLP has been dead for a few Windows releases...
slaapliedje Apr 20, 2022
Quoting: 3zekielIt sure seems to be going smooth. Compare to the time of steam machines, we have clear momentum and hype, I am confident millions will sell.
I don´t think the number of Desktop linux user is going to skyrocket, but I expect that as the steam deck gains popularity, and once valve releases SteamOS on the desktop, we will see more pc-building enthusiast go for it. I would'nt be surprised that we rise above the 5% mark in 2023. Not a very big number yes, but MacOS managed to have more ports than we did with half that - and combined with steam deck that would begin to give us a big enough market.
Yeah, and Apple is just bordering on being openly hostile to game developers. Killing off 32-bit support, not keeping an up to date OpenGL, pushing Metal instead of providing Vulkan, etc.

It actually warms my heart to see games released for Linux and Windows natively, and macOS being skipped. Until I actually got an m1 macbook, which is a serious love/hate relationship. I love the speed, the battery life, and the hardware in general. I hate macOS... oh so much... Can't wait until Linux works really really well on it!
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