Valve's latest Steam survey highlights Arch's popularity among Linux gamers, with EndeavourOS joining the list.
  • soul@lemmy.worldEnglish
    9·
    20 hours ago

    Literally spent the second half of my holiday vacation moving from dual boot Mint+Win11 to EndeavourOS. The last few days has been fun getting the latest Plasma to be themed out how I want it.

    To ease my move, I repartitioned my secondary NTFS days drive to free up space for an EXT4 partition and moved my /home to it. Once that was done, bye bye to the other 2 OS installs and hello to a nice clean install of eos.

    It’s worked very well so far. As a long ago Arch user who battled the AUR back in the day, I was hoping for the experience to be better now. And to my joy, it is. (It’s been probably at least a decade since I last used Arch.)

    Since almost all of my Windows needs are now covered natively and the few that aren’t are something I’ve gotten working via WinApps for a (mostly) seamless experience, in pretty comfortable with where I’m at now.

    I’ve even got my 2024 Kraken Elite working via NZXT CAM so I have full control over the cooler until that is eventually supported elsewhere. (Including control of the screen.)

    • Victor@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      14 hours ago

      I must have joined the Arch community at the perfect time. I have been using it for probably over a decade and have had close to zero issues. AUR is amazing, and helpers make it even simpler. Only after using Arch for years did I understand that people have had serious issues with it in the past.

    • WillBalls@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      11 hours ago

      There’s dozens of us!

      I’ve had to do very little tweaking overall to get most games working, with the one notable exception being dragons dogma 2. The solution was proton GE and a new .nix file with GPU tweaks and now I’m getting slightly better performance than the average windows experience.

      • shadowbroker@lemm.eeEnglish
        1·
        38 minutes ago

        I have to admit, that I have some experience with nix on 2 servers and 1 desktop, but installing steam was just 1 line in the config and everything worked. My biggest concern were the nvidia drivers, but that worked as well. Currently playing RE4 Remake.

    • gingernate@sopuli.xyzEnglish
      8·
      20 hours ago

      I did not know nix users had time to game due to the hours messing around with their dot files hahaah

  • Naz@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    1·
    15 hours ago

    Holy shit there’s so many sub-distros in this thread:

    Arch

    • EndeavorOS
    • Cachy
    • Void
    • Nix
    • Manjaro

    Which one do we install for gaming, or do we wait for SteamOS on Desktop?

    • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      12·
      8 hours ago

      Void and Nix aren’t Arch-based.

      Which one do we install for gaming

      If you have to ask, I recommend Linux Mint. It’s not Arch based, which is a good thing because it’s going to be really stable and easy for people new to Linux.

      Steam is the same regardless of distro because it ships all of its own dependencies, even for Linux games. So if a game works on Arch or SteamOS, it should work on Mint, Fedora, etc.

      If you want something that feels like SteamOS, I’ve heard good things about Bazzite, but my recommendation is still to use Linux Mint and install Steam and Heroic, and then you’ll be good to go. I personally use openSUSE Tumbleweed, but again, I recommend Linux Mint for someone new to Linux, because gaming should be nearly identical between distros and Linux Mint has a large community of people to help when you run into issues.

  • Statick@programming.devEnglish
    3·
    23 hours ago

    I tried a few distros this year. Landed on vanilla arch using KDE Plasma. Love it so far. Unfortunately I do some hobbyist stuff with Fusion 360 and my friends and I started playing PUBG again so i need to boot into my windows partition for those.

    • JackbyDev@programming.devEnglish
      1·
      5 hours ago

      Fedora was going to be my plan. Arch just freaks me out, I don’t want to do that much work. I think I know Ubuntu the best, but I haven’t heard anything good about the direction Canonical is going.

      I just want something that works good enough. I have a 3070 ti GPU.

  • Allero@lemmy.todayEnglish
    1·
    20 hours ago

    Previously was a Manjaro gamer, and had a perfectly seamless experience.

    Migrated to Fedora, got some weird new issues, but running games through Steam solves everything.

  • Waffle@infosec.pubEnglish
    74·
    2 days ago

    Exciting to see endeavoros making the list. I’m one of the 0.06%! There’s dozens of us!!

  • ampersandrew@lemmy.worldEnglish
    10455·
    2 days ago

    It’s because SteamOS identifies itself as Arch. Omitting this information is either dishonest or uninformed.

    • patatahooligan@lemmy.worldEnglish
      641·
      1 day ago

      This is very obviously false. With the default filters with all OSs shown, Arch has 0.20% marketshare and Linux has a total of 2.29%. That means Arch is about 8.73% of all Linux systems in the survey. If you select the Linux only results, then SteamOS appears as its own entry, alongside a few others like Flatpak. We can see two things here:

      • SteamOS Holo is 36.47%. This was very clearly not counted as a part of Arch Linux in the all OSs tab.
      • Under these filters, Arch is even higher at 9.7%.

      What’s impressive here is not just the confidence with which you called the article dishonest and uninformed while not spending half a minute to check your false assumption, but also how many people upvoted you. This was trivial to prove wrong and in fact people have already done that below. Why are people so eager to believe the article is wrong that they will jump to agree with a blatantly wrong comment while having no knowledge of the situation themselves?

      • ampersandrew@lemmy.worldEnglish
        53·
        1 day ago

        I’ll take the L on this one. It’s a combination of the article only using the screenshot of the first view as evidence and me late night posting on Lemmy while falling asleep via NyQuil.

      • rooster_butt@lemm.eeEnglish
        4·
        1 day ago

        Am I missing something or is 36.47% not greater than 9.7%? Why is SteamOS not shown as the most popular Linux distro without the Linux only filters?

        This contradicts the article claiming Arch dominates the Linux gaming scene and not SteamOS.

        • patatahooligan@lemmy.worldEnglish
          3·
          23 hours ago

          SteamOS seems to not be counted at all in the first page. Apparently, it’s not just “All OSs combined” vs “Linux only” but there are additional filters applied. Perhaps the first page is desktop-only. The article either also cares about desktop gaming specifically or is uncritically parroting the survey page. I think both Valve and the article writer should be clearer about what they’re talking about.

    • Voyajer@lemmy.worldEnglish
      761·
      2 days ago

      Steamos identifies itself as “SteamOS Holo”.

      Also, that article isn’t measuring SteamOS in the first place. When you look at the steam survey with the default filters it won’t list SteamOS. If you switch it to Linux only it will show SteamOS as 36.47% of Linux installs (0.84% of all steam installs) so it’s clearly not feeding into the Arch percentages.

    • Virkkunen@fedia.io
      19·
      2 days ago

      The only uninformed here is you, since SteamOS does not identify itself as Arch, but rather as SteamOS Holo and it does show separately from Arch on the stats.

      • Elgenzay@lemmy.mlEnglish
        61·
        2 days ago

        Because you hear “Arch” and it gives the impression that they’re being played on a Linux desktop, not a Steam Deck

        • hellofriend@lemmy.worldEnglish
          2·
          2 days ago

          While that may be true, I still use my Steam Deck in desktop mode for a bunch of stuff besides gaming. Writing, job applications and interviews, using reddit because it’s the only device I have that isn’t detected for ban evasion, watching shows/Youtube. Maybe I’m atypical, but I don’t see why the Deck would offer a desktop mode if it wasn’t meant to be used.

        • LucidNightmare@lemm.eeEnglish
          5·
          1 day ago

          Hello! I’ve been using openSUSE Tumbleweed as my daily (as much as I can anyway, some things still only truly work best under Windows unfortunately) but here are some things I did to get openSUSE ready for gaming:

          1. Open up YaST. I prefer to use KRunner for most of my tasks, and to bring that up I use Windows key + Space on my setup, yours could be different if you’ve tinkered any.
          2. Go to the Software Repositories and ensure that OpenSUSE Tumbleweed Tools for Gamers repo is checked. Close out when done.
          3. Open up Software Management next. In here, search for gamescope. Tick the box to the left of the gamescope row. (I don’t have mangoHUD installed on my own, but you can search for it and install it too if you prefer. I don’t know what it does, so look it up and research it if you think you might want it!)
          4. Next, search for gamemode. Tick the box to the left of it as we did previously.
          5. Click the Installation Summary tab near the top, then click Accept near the lower right if you are satisfied with what is being installed. It never hurts to always read about whatever you are installing!
          6. Open up Discover with KRunner (or however you please) and search for Steam. On mine, there were two options. One option is the flatpak version which I didn’t like because of the way it can’t interact with the system files as easily as the one provided by openSUSE themselves. So, I installed that one, but of course you can install either one you prefer! I just wanted my folders to be more legible/easily accessible for myself.
          7. Depending on what GPU you have, you might be ready for Steam to download some games and play. If you have an nvidia GPU like me, you will probably need to make sure your drivers for it are installed correctly and updated.
          8. I recommend you play around with some of the Steam settings, but the ones I want to focus on for you here are the games that aren’t native to Linux. For example, Metaphor: ReFantazio does not support Linux out of the box. So, what I had to do was click the game in question, and then click the cog wheel to the right and usually under the banner picture for the game. Click Properties, and then click Compatibility on the left hand side of this window. Tick the box next to “force the use of a specific Steam Play compatibility tool”, and now a dropdown box will show up underneath that. Click this dropdown box and notice the options for the version of Proton you now can use. I think Experimental might work for the most part, but for Metaphor I used 9.0-4 (as of writing, and even then I still see some graphical hiccups quite constantly, but I don’t want to move over to a different Proton version because of how I have personally set my system up. It shouldn’t be as much of a headache for you.) If whatever version you choose to use doesn’t work, select another version and keep going until you find one that does work. If none work, I won’t be much help, but you can always look into trying through Lutris, as it will give you more fine grain control I believe?
          9. Test. Test. Test.
          10. Enjoy the fruits of your labor!

          Hopefully that helps out some. Generally when I run into a problem, I’ll search like so:
          how to get xxxx running on openSUSE Tumbleweed? openSUSE Tumbleweed xxxx issue

          and so on and so on.

          Good luck on your journey!

          P.S. Steam can be kinda wonky on Wayland, which I forgot to mention in the steps, but to fix the flickering issue with my setup, I went into Steam’s settings > Interface and turned off “enable GPU accelerated rendering in web views” and the flickering stopped.

          *Also, I think Wayland works better for playing newer games. I just know that on my own setup, xorg runs like garbage even on the desktop, while in Wayland, it is as buttery smooth as it can be, even better than Windows! So, look up how to change into that mode. You can log out and do it right from the login screen!