Comment by wyldberry
3 months ago
It will depend on if gaming studios continue to invest in a Linux Desktop experience. It's common to run your game server on Linux, but MS, partially through DRM support to the big media companies, creates an environment very strongly suited towards shipping your game binary to a hostile environment.
This is partially why major (effective) anti-cheats have migrated to the Kernel. Windows allows the big-budget games, which are often competitive games, to operate with a higher level of game integrity, which leads to more revenue generation.
MacOS is not an attainable gaming support platform in general, as the people who are interested in the AAA games are going to need a Pro series or similar quality device which prices a large part of the current windows gaming audience out.
As an example: it's not too expensive to buy a laptop that runs valorant, and then be funneled into the skin shop. You can get a lot more sales that way than you can through the crowd of people who are on MBP, though perhaps the MBP crew is more likely to be a whale.
note: Valorant is not supported on MacOS due to the anticheat requirement, but the hypothetical still stands.
IMO the rise of handhelds like the Steam Deck has a decent chance of pushing big publishers to consider releasing for Linux/Proton. These handhelds fit the niche between smart phone and console gamers [1] that might have some potential growth left in it. Even the availability of Windows first handhelds was not as bad for Linux gaming as SteamOS and other gaming handheld focused Linux distros have been ported to them.
On the other hand the anti cheat side has been really ratcheting up with newer releases requiring Win 11 and Secure Boot. I somewhat hope and fear we might get a blessed version of SteamOS for the Deck that is heavily locked down and has kernel/hypervisor level anti cheat functions added to it. Essentially allowing for a boot mode similar to current consoles. While it goes against the open spirit of SteamOS, it might serve as an argument to invest a bit more into the Linux side, potentially improving the ecosystem as a whole.
Or all of it might be the usual "year of the Linux desktop" pipe dream.
[1] leaving out the Switch which is heavily focused on Nintendo IP and has comparatively weak hardware
I have a Steam Deck and run Linux on all my machines and I am a pretty big Gamer. Typically I have no problems.
Same, but I mostly play indie, older and/or singleplayer games. I now often don't even check ProtonDB when buying games, it has gotten that good. Anything AAA, multiplayer and new tends to cause problems due to anti cheats though.
Proton already runs the vast majority of games just fine. Gamers should categorically refuse rootkits and give the cold shoulder to studios that release games that require them. Anyone with a bit of maturity can do that, and nowadays there are thousands of other games to choose from.
> Gamers should categorically refuse rootkits and give the cold shoulder to studios that release games that require them. Anyone with a bit of maturity can do that, and nowadays there are thousands of other games to choose from.
the problem is, the wide masses still keep buying the latest AAA game thanks to literally sometimes hundreds of millions of euros worth of marketing (GTA V already had 150 M$ marketing budget well over a decade ago), and the free-to-play "whale hunter" games are even worse.
With ye olde purchased online games, like UT2004, you'd think twice before cheating, otherwise you'd get your serial number banned (sometimes not just on one server, but on an entire fleet of servers run by the same op) and you'd have to buy a new license. That alone put a base floor on cheater costs.
In contrast, Fortnite or other f2p games? These are overrun by cheaters, there is no cost attached at all, so it's obvious that the only solution is to ratchet up the anti-cheat measures.
All hail capitalism and the quest for f2p developers to lure in the 1-5% of utter whales that actually bring in the money.
> MacOS is not an attainable gaming support platform in general, as the people who are interested in the AAA games are going to need a Pro series
The M5's GPU cores are expected to pick up the same 40% performance boost we just saw in the newly released iPhones.
AAA games written for the M4 already work just fine, the extra performance is needed when you are also emulating other graphics APIs and CPU instruction sets to run Windows games.
Windows on ARM has the same issues, but Prism isn't as good at x86 emulation.
Attainable isn't about benchmarks and performance, it's ecosystem such as supported kernel hooks for AAA games to invest the time in maintaining their anti-cheats and other parts of the game-as-a-service platform.
It's also about the market accessibility and penetration. When the base level MBA at it's lowest RAM settings is reliably running AAA games is when you might see more interest in the platform from those studios because much like the iOS market, people running Mac tend to be more readily monetized, especially through things like in-game cosmetics.
The cheapest base M4 Mac Mini has 16 Gigs of RAM and plays AAA games written for Mac today.
The performance boost is needed when you are running Windows games under emulation.
Emulation overhead is also an issue for Proton on Linux or Windows on ARM.
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The gaming is the only reason that keeps me buying computer with windows
Regarding this article here, when you said about competitive gaming, I imagined a competition of that sort. I wonder how does a windows installation look in a big gaming competition that many players attend. It's never "BYOD" rather they get the windows preinstalled onto great gaming PC.
Do the players need to login to their Microsoft account? And Download their cloud cotents to someone else's computer? Or maybe there is a loophole for gaming contests that allow installation without cloud login?
If you have to play games, just have a separate Windows computer for that, and do everything else on a Linux box.
It's really easy for people who work in tech, or tech adjacent to recommend this, but in my experience, getting anyone to try nearly anything on Linux is very rough. Friends who wanted to "take control of privacy in their life" never made it beyond a week of trying to use a Linux distribution.
We have decades of training in the consumer market for very simple install patterns using UIs, and minimal messing with configurations. The people in gaming who overclock and tweak their settings are a huge minority in gaming. Those people are the ones most likely to be able to grok switching to Linux, but when they get there and find that most of their favorite apps don't work like they are used to, they go back to Windows or Mac.
My hypothesis is that for Linux Gaming to truly take off, you'll need a true desktop (not steamdeck which i use weekly) that makes it a handful of "clicks" to get whatever they want installed working. That means you'll need a commercially backed OS where developers maintain all the things needed to support near infinite peripheral connections for a variety of use cases, clear anti-cheat interfaces, and likely clear DRM hooks as well.
> Friends who wanted to "take control of privacy in their life" never made it beyond a week of trying to use a Linux distribution.
I wonder why. Something like Linux Mint isn't materially different from Windows in terms of UI. Any peripheral sold as "Linux compatible" that you plug in will just work, and Steams allows to play practically any game that does not require an invasive rootkit (aka kernel-level anticheat).
I think a good first step would be to start using common FOSS programs such as Firefox, Thunderbird, VLC, LibreOffice on Windows during a transition period.
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For myself personally the moment I stopped tweaking linux endlessly was when I installed the universalblue images (bazzite/aurora/bluefin). They made upgrading / using software so painless by providing sane defaults that I no longer feel the need to time my upgrades after the bugs have been patched out, or look up random commands to fix something. They are reliable enough that I feel comfortable recommending / installing them for family members, something which I would not have done before.
Dual boot seems like a more obvious recommendation? Or better still, play games on linux, except those that require kernel AC?
I find it annoying not to be able to run things at the same time. I've used dual boot many years ago but ran into the issue that one thing required one OS, another thing another OS. Kept having to close things down and reboot, reboot reboot. Nah, thanks. I'll use Linux with an offline Windows XP VM for Age of Empires and call it a day. One day, maybe I'll use a Windows 10 VM without Microsoft account to run modern software if the need arises
Some forms of kernel anticheat make dual booting harder, too. I can’t play valorant since that version of Vanguard requires secure boot, which doesn’t seem to work with my dual boot setup unless I invest more time fiddling than I care to. Easier just not to play that game.
If you can make it work, sure, but somebody will probably complain that it's too hard for the general population.
I agree, but I'm not sure that's acceptable to the general population
Fine, but the general population will have to accept whatever fate Microsoft has in mind for them.
Edit: I'd guess a lot of them just follow whatever instructions they are given, and create the online account. If Microsoft thought there was a chance of serious rebellion, they wouldn't be doing it.
These types of games are only a small part of gaming, I use a macbook for my main machine and I play games on my console. The majority of gaming has nothing to do with buying skins and we should all be rejecting this nonsense anyway.