Because when I want to play a game, I want to play a game, not debug someone's hacky attempt to make it work on Linux.
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.
FWIW, with minor exception, Linux is better at "no fiddly shit on my game machine" now. I feel strongly about this too, to come home from work and debug some shit going wrong on my gaming system is no bueno, I'd rather just not play games. It has to work without fucking around.
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.
I mean this is sort of true in that windows is constantly introducing trash, but I've run into all kinds of nonsense:
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’ve long ago learned to ignore people that pretend that the system they use just works, go look at any mac user or windows users workflow, for most people there are dozens of hacky BS things they do to work around the inherent problems of the system they’re using they (naturally) just make excuses for their existing tools ignoring all of the workarounds and arcane knowledge they’ve accumulated while acutely feeling the pain of any new arcana that they have to learn for a new system.
Funny enough, I just switched to Linux for a game I play because it was a hassle on Windows.
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.
Yeah, people who talk about how "fiddly" it is to game on Linux must not have tried recently, or have a very low tolerance for doing anything other than clicking play.
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.
Go away? I've been replaying Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory (2005) and it recompiles the shaders even on alt-tab (to clarify that feature has been there always since release). It's more on the developers to fix. After all, not even Windows games on winodws are free from shader stutter (with less ways to fix it than linux!)
If I'm understanding that they're waiting this 5 minutes when they try to launch the game, there's a setting (go to Downloads, scroll down) to do the shader compilation in the background
There's one use case where VMs don't work, real time media processing. Mac is the preferred platform for this kind of think by most users but I use one application which is windows exclusive: rocksmith. It's theoretically possible to get something that's only marginally worse than the native experience, but I've never seen it done. Even if I could do it, I don't know if I could accept how the app behaves in practice.
It is too intimidating to change for one. Most users I deal with are terrified and bewildered by settings and can't even take the few steps to install an adblocker (and they want the adblocker!)
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.
No, because pretty much any model and harness could be used as a robotic Linux admin instead of Claude Code. I haven't tried Codex or Gemini for that, but I'm sure they'd be fine. Ultimately that particular Linux box is going to be used to host local models, which should also work.
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.
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.
a lot of the compatibility stuff on Linux runs windows software, so that's usually not a huge blocker. Having recently switched to Linux as my main (used to run it in a VM) the real issues are all these things that don't quite work out of the box (different distros might get different results). For instance my audio when playing dota2 would randomly cut out and not return when using discord. It took a bunch of fiddling around to get both to work. Then there's weird compatibility things depending on choices you make, for instance, I used RustDesk a lot in windows. But it doesn't really work well in linux with wayland. So while my overall experience is Linux is pretty good... I'm now in a world where I can end up with all kinds of random issues, all likely solvable, but all likely semi unique to my setup.
Uncertainty of how it all works is my opinion. Like how is it installed. What is making a partition and what are these warnings? What happens to all my pictures and documents? What distro is best? Do I lose all my paid for software? How do I now do all the things I am used to doing?
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.
Because they feel (rightly or wrongly) there is no viable alternative. It might be that they have software which requires Windows, it might be that they think it's too complicated to set up Linux, or it might just be that they aren't aware any other option exists. But those all boil down to the same thing: people think they have to use Windows, so they tolerate its nonsense.
