That's because Steam/Proton has mostly solved this (with some qualified notorious exceptions), which used to be a real problem even just a few years ago, but not remotely as much these days; the meme is mostly outdated by now, I've lived both cases and it used to be a pain but these days? people are spoiled by Valve and many have never lived the OP situation (which is great news!)
Obviously I can't speak for everyone, but personally speaking I've had no issues playing the multiplayer games I play, which (in my particular situation) puts me above at least one of the windows users in my group
Installing things not through steam can take longer sometimes, but I always made sure to do that ahead of time anyway
Part of that I'm sure it's the fact that I work nights, but Windows refuses to acknowledge that during my work hours is not an appropriate time to install updates.
Simply stepping away to get a coffee or use the restroom is enough for Windows to decide now is the time to reboot and install updates for an hour or so and you better hope you saved everything before stepping away.
As a matter of fact, one of those instances is the one where the update broke my bitlocker encryption and I lost everything that wasn't backed up. That was my last day using Windows.
Was it your personal computer or a company managed computer? Either way, when to automatically start updates is just a setting that's easily set. As is the "pause updates for X weeks" so that you have more weeks to do an intentional reboot. There might be some major security patches they've forced through anyways? But I don't think I've had any windows update issues since like 2017 or 2018.
It was not managed, honestly I should've disabled bitlocker, I just never expected it to be a problem.
As to settings for when it installs updates, they didn't seem to stick or were not always respected in my experience. I spent a bit of effort trying to make sure it wasn't configured to do that but it would still just go for it anyway if the system ever became idle after midnight or so.
Anyway this story has a happy ending because after that I decided to give daily driving linux another shot, and none of the issues I had experienced previously still exist here.
In fact, incredibly enough I have found on average that the games I play perform better on Linux now than they did on Windows.
And my OS never installs updates without my permission, let alone forcing an unscheduled reboot.
I had Windows 10 do it once over however many years i was using it (was a fairly early adopter), and Windows 11 has never done it.
Anyone who can easily use Linux can just make Windows not do that kind of shit, and not auto-update, and block the connection from basically all Windows processes.
They'd prefer to learn nothing, blame the OS for not looking and operating exactly like Linux, and then claim it sucks not for the reasons it sucks but because they can't be bothered to try.
This is the thing which keeps me from switching entirely to Linux. A friend of mine needs twice the amount of Time to start his Games (which is something I would have no Problem with) and what makes it not worth switching imo is that he loses the sound from Discord when he plays. He needs to restart DC then. And no one knows why ._.
My bet would be wine grabbing the audio device and not using Pipe wire/PulseAudio. It happened to me once, I believe I solved it by recompiling something (PipeWire, wine or the gst plugins). I would recommend trying to run Discord and the game in terminal, it might show some error to help with troubleshooting.
The only things I can't play on linux are games with heavy kernel-injected anti-cheats and racing games (AC and BNG). Everything else "just works". Hell, I even managed to get Overcooked's cross-platform version to work.
If by AC you mean Assetto Corsa, it works, you just have to follow a guide (it's easy, you have to remove the Proton data for the game from Steam, then install the older Proton version, run the game with this older version until it crashes, then switch to new version of Proton and run it again. It will install required dependencies and will run fine, even my old G25 steering wheel worked without problems)
That used to be true a few years ago, but now games just works without any tinkering from my experience. Except some online games due to kernel level anti cheats (like Fortnite and Valorant), but I prefer single player games anyway
Yeah I've never been big on competitive multiplayer, my Halo days were mostly campaign and due to thats what my friends were playing. So linux being blocked by competitive games is a non issue for me as well
Now you mention it, I have spend so many hours on Windows trying to get the damn game to work. Trying to hide run Windows games on Linux, if it doesn't work immedietly and I can't find easy tweaks to fix it then I just assume it doesn't work on Linux. But when a Windows game doesn't work on Windows, I will spent hours making it work because I know it should!
I havent gamed on it yet but it is pretty responsive. My specs are nvidia geforce rtx3060 and amd ryzen 7. Also i am using KVM as the hypervisor since it is type 1 which means better performance and safety overall.
In regards to the VM, you can alucate as much ram and cpu power to it to make it performe better if needed (when setting up and you can also adjust it afterwards, at least in virtmanager (KVM) ). And there is an aspect I haven't really touched but heard that it improved performance which is gpu passthrough.
(I dont really limit processes and stuff, just simple alucation and configuration)
Anti cheat is the biggest obstacle now, can't overcome that and if you and your friends enjoy playing together on a game that doesn't support it then you're SoL. Unfortunately only 75% or so of the games my friend group plays are compatible.
Anti cheat is the biggest obstacle now, can’t overcome that and if you and your friends enjoy playing together on a game that doesn’t support it then you’re SoL.
The EAS anti-cheat is on Linux now too, so the small minority of games that require anti-cheat tech on Linux is getting even smaller; it's heading in the right direction.
But my point is more towards the fact that we're trying to apply memes to cover 100% of something when it's really covering 1% of something.
It gets tiring/trolling after a while, especially with it's repetitiveness.
Yes the steamdeck is phenomenal, but it is not perfect.
Noone said it was. But presenting the 1% (Linux gaming doesn't work) as 100% is not factual, its anecdotal.
And the meme leans into the 100%, which is tiresome to see over and over again, like if some company is desperate to try and sway/shape a narrative, instead of just people sharing humorous/insightful memes.
Why? Bleeding edge has newer packages which are often needed when trying to play some new game. That's why steam OS is now arch based when it used to be debian based. Too old packages
Yeah I used it as well, but I was missing a couple of dependencies and realized that I have to move the loadorder files around in order for mods to be loaded. Was pretty annoying but it worked in the end.
