This is interesting for a couple of reasons. One is that this is about as much market share as Mac ever had at its peak, and almost twice as much as it has currently. Another is that, if you click the link for the site’s Steam Linux Data Tracker, you can see that English-only Linux market share (a crude way of filtering out the ebbs and flows of Chinese players on largely-identical hardware and operating systems) is more than 6%, up from under 2% just 5 years ago. A lot of people are unhappy with Windows in general, and especially 11, and Windows 10 is about to force the issue in just a few months as it loses official support. I have a friend whose computer is still in decent shape for gaming but with TPM settings that don’t meet the minimum spec for Windows 11; at some point, he’ll lose compatibility and have to throw out an otherwise perfectly functional machine, so it’s good that some other OS is shaping up to be a good enough option for many people.
This has been an upward trend since slightly before the release of the Steam Deck, as you can see on the graphs, and I’ve come across YouTube videos from both James Lee Animations and PewDiePie about how they got to be so sick of Windows (and Adobe) they both switched to Linux with middle fingers raised at their old workflows. Folks like them making videos like that can have real effects on the market. Linux has been my daily driver for gaming for about 8 years now, and it’s matured so much in that time that I’ve hardly booted to my Windows partition for any reason. It’s not perfect, but if I’m choosing between the quirks that Linux has by accident and the deficiencies that are in Windows on purpose, I’ll take LInux every time, and it seems like more people are coming to that same conclusion.
No doubt the biggest remaining frontier is live service gaming with kernel level anti-cheat, but if Linux becomes a larger user base, as it’s doing right now, the developers making those games will have to solve that problem to reach that addressable market, and everybody wins.
I switched to linux because fuck microsoft. So far it’s been fine. A minor issue with crackling in the audio in one game, and I can’t figure out how to disable the “drag a window to the edge and it wants to tile it” thing (popos with the default gnome desktop environment). But those are minor things- my windows install I couldn’t get the bluetooth to connect to one device, and a bunch of other little annoyances were inescapable.
If you have an issue with the way gnome works by default, then you are using it wrong and you should feel ashamed for that.
- the Gnome dev team
For anyone in the future, I figured out how to turn off the edge tiling thing (which is what it’s called when a window touches the edge and it wants to resize it)
gsettings set org.gnome.mutter edge-tiling falseper https://askubuntu.com/questions/1107089/how-to-disable-auto-resizing-of-windows-when-moved-to-the-topYeah GNOME exposes a bunch of settings for advanced users and extensions, you can look through them with dconf editor. PopOS isn’t the best distribution for GNOME though as it’s stuck on GNOME 42 so you’re missing out on 3 years of updates.
I have that crackling thing sometimes too, but only on desktop and not on Steam Deck, so the issue lies in something that’s different between those two things. On my desktop, my usual use case is to have a bunch of programs open at any given time and put it to sleep at the end of the night rather than close everything and power off. While low spec games like Skullgirls are fine, if I boot up a higher spec game like Kingdom Come: Deliverance II after waking my computer from sleep, I’ll get the crackling. If I just rebooted, the crackling is gone. I don’t understand the problem, but at least I have a workaround, and it’s better than Microsoft determining when I should reboot my computer. It’s my computer. I decide that.
Yeah I don’t get it when just playing music or watching video. It’s mostly been when playing Guild Wars 2 in scenes with a lot of players. I wonder if there’s something like “when the CPU is in high demand, the audio gets less priority” happening. I saw some posts about a cpu “niceness” value but I’m not familiar enough to fuss with it, and it’s not a big deal right now.
I did fuss with it according to the directions in forums, and it didn’t change anything, but I also barely understood what I was doing.
Gamemode, that I mentioned in another message, among other things changes the niceness value.
Try searching internet for something like: Linux proton crackling
Are you using gamemode, and have you added your user to the gamemode group? Crackling is likely caused by buffer underrun. Many reasons why that might happen, but one is that if the game isn’t given high enough privileges, the machine can’t fill the buffer quickly enough. Gamemode should solve that. Check your distro’s guide how to set it up. If that doesn’t work, Pipewire/PulseAudio might have been configured to use too short buffer.
I don’t think I know what gamemode is. Is it https://github.com/FeralInteractive/gamemode ?
I’ll do some searching for crackling next time I’m at the desktop
That’s the thing. It’s most likely in your distro’s package manager, unless you are using CachyOS, which uses different app for the same thing. Remember to add your user to the gamemode group or it won’t do much for you.
Are those instructions current? I don’t see it on the readme on the git project, and installing it from Kubuntu’s package manager didn’t create a gamemode group (it also doesn’t come with a manual page).
You can just create the gamemode group and then add your user to it.
Use
gamemoded -tto test that it’s configured and working correctly. The configuration file should probably be /etc/gamemode.ini. Andgamemoded -stells if gamemode is currently active. Steam doesn’t support gamemode, so you have to addgamemoderun %command%to every game’s launch options.Would that same command also work through Heroic, or do they handle that kind of thing differently? Sorry, sometimes things are so abstracted from us that we don’t have to think about what it’s doing under the hood.
Heroic Launcher should have a setting for gamemode.
Thanks, it’s worth a couple of experiments, at least.