Yeah, compatibility on Linux is better now, especially with Valve implementing Proton so games would run on the Steam Deck.
But there are still incompatible games, and non-Windows operating systems are generally not a priority for many game developers. So, you have to hope that either Valve or the community have found a way to make them run on other systems.
And then there's the aforementioned niche stuff. Yes, your games may be compatible with Linux, but what about the tools needed to mod them? Plenty of modding and ROM hacking communities only develop for Windows, so anyone looking to get involved in those scenes has no real choice other than to use Windows. Wouldn't be surprised if plenty of non-gaming communities made heavy use of tools from the days of Windows 95 or MS DOS too, whose creators haven't bothered to update them in years or who have no interest in porting them to Linux in general. Bonus points if the tool is closed source freeware from some site that looks like it was made in 1995.
Implementing a strict "no fiddly shit on my game machine" policy was one of the best choices for my mental health that I've made: It's a dedicated machine for gaming, with nothing really sensitive on it aside from gaming related accounts, and its only purpose is to play games with the least amount of immediate hassle. In other words, if the choice is installing something ugly or fiddling, that launcher, kernel level anticheat or whatever it is gets installed.
Windows is now the OS that fucks with me and causes grief, since moving to cachyos the experience has been so bloody blissful it's not funny. I can, amazingly, just come home and launch a game and play the game and not deal with bullshit like taking 30 minutes to install some random update. Nothing randomly breaks. Nothing updates unless I let it. Nothing randomly pops up asking me to do some bullshit I'm not interested in for a result I don't care about. etc.
1. Amd HDMI 2.1 fiasco and adapter workarounds -> debugged the adapter compared to the displayport spec pdf, emailed the company, got a firmware update, patched my kernel. Fixed! This one is going away for good with FRL support upstream soon.
2. Game stops responding to controller input after playing for a bit. Debugged, turns out the service for doing something fancy with shaders has shared fate with the steam input process. It launches a zillion threads and OOMs from virtual memory exhaustion which takes out steam input; fixed by adding a wrapper script for steam that reduces thread stack sizes to the windows default size.
3. Xbox elite series 2 controller back buttons not supported in 2.4ghz wireless mode; reverse engineered the USB packets, contributed support to out of tree xone driver.
4. Flydigi controller software not supported on Linux; find random GitHub project that reversed their hidraw protocol. It's got bugs, so fix them and use it.
5. Terrible banding in Silksong. Set up gamescope to apply dithering; this breaks steam input, figure out all sorts of incantations with LD_PRELOAD
But all of these are very much off the beaten path problems, lots of people have fun with normal controllers, no VRR, etc. My steam deck has been just perfect with zero effort, and I assume that's because I'm not treating the system configuration like a puzzle game.
I occasionally have to right click a game and enable the compatibility in the settings - that's just a single checkbox. Steam handles the management of pulling whatever the most recent version of Proton-GE is for me and everything pretty much works. There's a setting in Steam itself that you can set a default compatibility tool.
The only games that do shaders preload are Marvel Rivals and Monster Hunter World/Wilds, and even those are quick and can be canceled if I cared to. Even modding is fairly straightforward using something like r2Modman for Steam games or Prism Launcher for Minecraft.
If that's too hard for some people then I bet they also don't run adblockers, which means I've written them off as actually knowing how to use a computer at the most basic level.
I'm waiting for that to go away before I consider the jump. I figure there'll be enough people sick of that behaviour it'll get sorted.
Windows can be just as bad, I'm quite happy to restrict my games choice a bit to run them on a console that someone else makes work.
My friends and I play Halo Infinite sometimes and I've had some performance issues with it on Linux so I've always booted into my Windows 11 partition to play it. It's about as vanilla Windows 11 install as it gets.
But over the last few months it has been crashing all the time. It started happening very frequently - like once every ~30 min. It was a vanilla install. Basically just the game and graphics drivers. And everything was up to date.
I started playing it on Linux and now it just works. There's still a weird performance problem, but I can live with that because it's at least stable.
And from the article: "Technician's know how to get around this, but not everyone using a computer is a technician."
To use an alternative, you need to know someone with the knowledge and ability and able to request their time. Backing up data, burning USB sticks, installing, setup new backup solution, resyncing bookmarks, creating shortcuts to their email, replacements for the apps they use... all the details takes a lot of time, and it is ongoing work. Someone has to become 'the technician' and provide support. Otherwise, people have no option except to keep bumbling along with the default or somehow become 'the technician' themselves without any guide but web forums and ChatGPT.
Fortunately, my old pal Claude Code is always there for me. Need something installed/fixed/changed? Just ask... in plain English.
I don't need him for Windows, but man, that dude can make Linux walk and talk.
Is this just a form of changing one subscription for another?
An account with an AI provider gets me the ability to submit prompts and run agents with their model. I pay them, I get a useful service in return, and I can stop or switch providers anytime. Conversely, I get absolutely nothing in return for logging into my own machine with a Microsoft account. It benefits Microsoft -- somehow, I guess, who knows? -- but not me.
Not everyone does everything from a web browser.
The lag will be with you. VNC won’t be any better.
He’ll, even some YouTube videos are overly taxing from Firefox in Linux.
Also Stream seems to think Windows is more equal than Linux…
You should be using Sunshine/Moonlight for that anyway. You will get ultra smooth low latency 4k@120fps streaming to and from linux.
I regularly play games streamed from my noisy big linux pc all the way across to the living room linux pc. It's brilliant.
I remember the first time I partitioned my hard drive and did a dual boot and I was really unsure about so many things. It is intimating.