Should you stick to Windows for gaming?

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[bradenculver]

I’m a guy who can use a command line pretty well. Bash isn’t that hard. But anyone saying a command line is better or a good user experience for “gamers” or any mass market is just wrong. A gui is always easier for most users, command line use requires a degree of knowledge.

[komenisai]

From working in IT for over 10 years I've come to the conclusion that 99% of people have ZERO idea of what they're actually doing on their PC and are just blindly following memorized steps.

[NuggDavis]

Former Distro dev here. I'm loving the talk about the disjointedness and also false pretenses of some distributions for being user friendly when it's just not the case. I'd love for some consolidated (and hopefully actionable) feedback at the end of this experience.

[echidna]

I'm personally very comfortable with the Linux terminal, but 100% agree that for gaming to be truly successful on Linux, it has to "just work" as far as possible, just like on Windows or a console.

The design language for games that run on Windows/consoles do *not* expect users to type in commands, and that should extend to Linux.

What I love about Linux is that you *can* do everything through the terminal, but this is a learning curve and it should not be a prerequisite for people trying to game or work that isn't related to coding.

[computerup]

Gamer != IT enthusiast. I know so many gamers who are just as "beginner" in terms of using a computer as your average Joe. There are many IT enthusiasts who are gamers too, but most gamers don't want to bother with learning to understand how you install apps through the command line, or copy a file using the command line using sudo (or whatever the task is that needs the command line to do it). That's what SO MANY OF US forget. For US it might be second nature, but for most people, it's not. Do you perform surgeries on yourself? Do you know all the ins and outs of laws and regulations? Do you have years of experience with carpentry? Can you fix your own car, down to the last bolt? Of course, you might say yes to some of these examples, but not all of them. And imagine that your local garage says "well it's just really easy, just take apart the carburetor and adjust this bolt in this spot, easy peasy" when you don't even know what a carburetor is in the first place. Okay, carburetor's might be a bit old fashioned, but you get the point.

[TheGameBench]

I have a certain level of nostalgia for command line gaming from back in the DOS days. Doesn't mean that I'm in the mood to do it now.

[tumaru]

Guides being out of date and snobs gatekeeping "easy" distros of linux has been my experience every single time I've tried it. I thought it would eventually get better but it never did.

[kevinamery]

Seems there's still a subset of the Linux community who believe the answer to Windows dominance is *everyone* from children to grand parents become expert sys-ops.

As a Linux sysadmin/devops that is also a gamer I will agree that for average Joe's daily use, the command line is not faster. You can do a lot of cool things from the terminal, but you need to know your way around Linux and most people are not going to. It's very fast for a very wide range of specific tasks, but for flipping a setting or opening an application it makes no difference.

[afsarhp]

Every sentence is a point of improvement for linux. I genuinely wish that linux gets better for all of us. Away from all the monopolies.

[mvm]

I agree with Linus, I'm a software engineer and I use all 3 platforms often. And when I want to close a process, my goto option is the gui. If I'm working on something that requires frequent kills/restarts, I will open a command line and use that. But most of the time it's gui.

[dogunboundhounds]

I'm that "devops" with linux and does everything with linux.

GUI is still NEEDED. cmd line is slower in some cases, GUI is slower in some cases. Every tool fits a purpose.

[sdtechconsulting]

I daily drive Linux. I game exclusively on Linux. It's an okay user experience most of the time. Many times it's not. To me, the ONLY reason to game on Linux is if you are willing to make sacrifices to not use Windows. You have to be willing to sometimes have games not work, have games be harder to run, have performance issues, not have hardware support etc. But it only makes sense if you just can't stand to support Windows. Because Linux gaming will drive you crazy.

And even when you just use steam and you just use games that are platinum rated on protondb or even Linux native it can still sometimes be a hassle.

But...I'm willing to make sacrifices for Linux. That's just my take. If I were giving advice for the average game I'd say stick to windows. It's generally a way better experience for gaming.

[narwhal]

In my opinion, Linux can be best summed up in two sentences:

I can use the terminal.
I shouldn't have to know how to use the terminal.

[MatthewStidham]

I've been using Linux as my daily driver for almost 20 years, since I was a kid. I'm comfortable with Mac and Windows as well, and have all three for multiple reasons, but day to day if I just need to get something done, I use Linux. I totally agree that as time goes on if Linux is to be something the average person can pick up and use for gaming that you should be able to plug and play things, and while Valve has done an incredible amount of work on that, and gaming on Linux is so much better than it was a decade ago, as you showed, there are still some indie projects where installing on Linux is not straightforward. Hopefully this will improve, and it needs to improve. You are absolutely right that UX is the most important factor when giving an average person a computer. Doesn't matter how much you can do in command line (and Linux wins that battle with absolutely no competition) if the average person doesn't know what to do.

[GianfrancoGallizia]

As a PC user I think that Windows is losing contact with the "P" (as in Personal) part of PC. Windows had a CONSISTENT User Interface refined for YEARS (Windows 9x, Windows NT 4 and Windows 2000) and then they said "let's make it more beginner friendly and themeable" with Windows XP. They got some hits (the green hills desktop background is iconic), some misses (changing the Beta theme with Luna was a little too radical) and some things that were a little too ahead but that we (the users) learnt to love (the redesigned start menu). And either directly or through tools (both from Microsoft and from third parties) you could really make your computer personal. As a user of both Windows and Debian GNU/Linux I say that I miss the days when you could change the Windows' windows borders any way I wanted the same way I can still do it on the majority of X windows managers (I use icewm because I'm old).

[devil-sad]

I actually think LMG has a really good opportunity to create a nice introductory guide to gaming on Linux. The community could pitch in with ideas for each section.

[kaerakh]

For the past ten years, this video, specifically this story 7:00 has been my entire experience with Linux every single time I try to do anything. Every detail they mentioned, down to the experts being wrong or hilariously telling me to write my own drivers. Linux's greatest strength, open source and community based, is also its greatest weakness. Luke is 110% right, it's a circular loop of irrelevant excuses.

It's great as an ephemeral os for a container or a server, but it's terrible as an end user product.

[furiousfellow]

pretty true about the linux bubble, after my first 2 months in linux the command line became so natural, efficient and everyday thing that I forgot the time I just stared a blinking cursor not knowing what that is

[rafaelpalmalima]

Every Linux expert has once been where Linux and Luke are now... I am seeing myself many years ago. I'm loving this series on Linux gaming. Congrats for the effort!