Thad

@freddy You know who’d respond to a bunch of people calling him an asshole by reviving the conversation to announce that he “touched a nerve”?

An asshole.

@DarkThoughts I wish *you’d* stayed on Reddit.

@nieceandtows Yeah, I love GOG’s DRM-free ethos and I’d love to support them, but they sure don’t seem interested in supporting me.

I’d like for Steam to have good competition because monoculture is bad and competition is good for everybody. But if you’re a Linux gamer, nobody else compares to Valve.

Itch.io is really the only other game store that shows anything like Valve’s level of support for Linux, and it’s great but it’s not a Steam competitor.

@Potatos_are_not_friends Two things happened that changed everything: Proton and the open-source AMD graphics stack.

@sunred @EveryMuffinIsNowEncrypted GOG used to be better than most about making Linux versions available, but sadly that was a long time ago. I like their DRM-free ethos and would like to support them, but I’m not going to buy games that don’t run on my computer.

I wish Steam had more competition, because competition is good and monoculture is bad. But you really can’t beat Steam for Linux gaming; nobody else is even trying. (Maybe itch.io, but they’re not really a Steam competitor.)

@warmaster Interesting. I’ve been using Manjaro as my primary for a while and I like it a lot but I’ve had some unpleasant interactions asking for help on the forums so I keep an eye out for other options.

@FishInABarrel @mouse I struggled with Nvidia’s drivers for a decade or so before switching to AMD (which used to have even worse Linux driver support than Nvidia but now basically Just Works).

I know “just buy a different graphics card” is not useful advice, so that’s not what I’m saying. But if you intend to use Linux in the long term, I’d definitely recommend switching to AMD next time you’re in the market for a new card.

@Anomandaris @mouse My experience has largely been that games Just Work if you stick with Steam, but that running games from other sources is a lot more hit-or-miss. Lutris and Heroic are great but can be really fiddly.

Dual booting is a great way to start. I did it for years. Linux gaming eventually got good enough that I don’t need to dual boot anymore, but YMMV; your use case may be different.

(I still keep a Windows machine around for TurboTax and Comic Collector Pro, but not for games.)

@Privatepower42 @CAPSLOCKFTW @JVT038 IME Lutris has more options but Heroic is easier to use.