Reading this on smartphone in browser with desktop mode permanently enabled (and increased dp beyond smallest display size limit in dev settings).
I just wish it was 16:9. These ultrawide aspect ratios are terrible for a phone. Hell, I just want something like those old phablets.
My first "smartphone" was a 7" tablet with SIM card. Perhaps I should just try something like that, but tablets tend to be underpowered.
This was me last week when my wife wanted to play a PC game together and I threw the PC to the TV via HDMI for the first time since I switched from Windows to Arch. The audio would not work at all despite all the settings being very clear that it should be sending the audio over the HDMI. Same physical/hardware/cable/TV as the setup that worked flawlessly in Windows. Still not thrilled about that one.
Make sure it's sending to the correct port, if you go into the audio device management of whatever your desktop environment of choice was you should notice that you have the advanced options on the HDMI to select which HDMI port it's going to
Still a couple deal breakers for me, though most stuff otherwise runs fine.
No HDR support. Sucks if you have a great monitor but can't use it.
No nvidia broadcast. Necessary for my mic+speaker setup, common alternative such as noisetorch are convenient, but don't even come close to echo filtering quality from the speakers. Yes, that's super subjective obviously.
Performance tends to be noticeably to only slightly worse on max settings with nvidia on highly specialized, very demanding games.
Some anti cheat tools struggle with compatibility modes.
We're getting there, but it's tough with nvidia not caring. :/
I understand the HDR thing dealt with the standards for it being absolute undecided mess; but it's looking like we'll have support cranked out before the end of 2024. Here's hoping, I do all my multimedia stuff on KDE.
HDR monitors have been standardized more poorly than Bluetooth was, so I could kind of see this sort of producer interference coming. It didn't help that the average user doesn't even understand what that means.
Most modern hardware works out of the box on Linux, and often runs a stripped down kernel as its own firmware.
My intent was just to provide a viewpoint from someone that loves and uses Linux aplenty, but spends a lot of time with Max quality gaming, using high end hardware.
And while things have improved massively over the past years and probably will get even better in the next years, nvidia's monopoly on top performance GPU means I'm being bottle necked by their shitty Linux support.
Sure, I can play almost any game out there on Linux, but not with the performance and sometimes not even the same quality I can achieve with Windows. I know this is no fault of Linux, but it's the pragmatic reality I'm confronted with.
One of my friends and I end up troubleshooting for an hour before we can actually start playing games. Every single time. Linux just doesn't want us to play games together, I guess.
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.
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!
Funny coincidence, that game was sitting in my backlog for a while and was the first game I installed on my deck. It's impressive how beautiful they were able to make such a dark and bleak forest. And yeah, 0 problems so far.
Thats not the point. You buy Games by Developers with limited resources. They dont care about FOSS you could say, in many cases. So you are unsupported.
Linux runs Linux Apps, its Essence is that it is a free OS, that you can trust.
Running proprietary stuff made for other Platforms is interesting but a Battle. It makes no sense you could say.
It makes Sense for Valve, as they save themselves Billions in Windows Licenses and they can make a tailored device. And they sell Games.
For you, paying for Games and then working to make them run, I dont know.
Not that I dont like the idea, but its the job of Developers to make the Games run.
Sure... Which is why Valve has built Proton, which makes nearly all PC games run on Linux... Sure, the developers of the games themselves should have made the Linux port, but for many developers it's cost prohibitive to support another platform with very few potential customers.
But the more players who run Linux (and Steam Deck by extension), the larger the incentive for developers to support Linux natively. And in turn more games will get made for Linux, which will draw in more people to switch to Linux.
So as long as my game runs, then I don't care whether it was the original developer, Valve or an open-source developer why wrote the code that made it work. And luckily I'm one of those people that don't mind having to tinker a bit to make things work (hence why I'm on Linux in the first place)
If we as gamers stubbornly refuse to switch to Linux until our games are natively ported, then developers might as well just develop their games for Windows, where the players are...
Most shit works, that said your expectations should firstly be that any windows only game doesnt work even if its not the case because the fact that its running most windows only games without major problems is really impressive, show me how to do that on windows (VM not allowed as Wine and proton arent VMs)
What games are you trying? Off the top of my head, I've played monster hunter world, hunt showdown, cyberpunk 2077, baldur's gate 3, norman reedus and the funky fetus, elden ring, deep rock galactic, doom (the new ones), apex, the dark souls games, warframe, and a few more over the years.
I havent played a multiplayer game for more than an hour in years, but I especially avoid trends like fall guys and fortnite, so it isnt anticheat or anything.
As for the card, I bought it before it became apparent how overpriced it was, and it was a major upgrade from my second hand 970 anyway. And I didn't splurge, I saved and bought what I thought made sense for me, when I could've 'splurged' on a 3080.
Okay but with a 1660 super even on Windows that game won't run too well. I know its above minimum reqs but that card is old. Even my 2080 TI is starting to show some age with framerates and what.
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)
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.
