dude, the whole Linus sticking his finger up at nvidia meme? Its still real in 2026. The opensource ABI whatever the fuck they call it is trash. I'm absolutely ready to purchase an AMD card next GPU I buy. I don't want to give nvidia anymore money, I'm done. It'll be AMD GPUs from now on no matter the performance diff, purely because they've got a better attitude to supporting non MS deployments.
There's too much TPM/SecureBoot/Enroll key hoops you have to jump through that a lot of distros just haven't bothered with.
If I'm being completely real, I'd be running FreeBSD 15. I just could not get a working nvidia driver going in 15 and get a working X installation. Supposedly 15.1 fixes it, we'll see in June. I've always preferred the BSD design, fs layout, etc, and I would love to have a FreeBSD desktop with a wine 11 install that actually plays games.. the dream!
Nah, nvidia drivers on Linux 2026 is hands down just as easy as AMD. I’ve had no more issues than running an AMD card and everything works flawlessly. They’re 100% right at the absolutely generational improvement in nvidia drivers since they’ve released the open drivers. Linus himself straight up said anyone trying to say this stuff in current year is being super disingenuous twisting his words from ages ago and that he considers nvidia a fantastic partner nowadays. And frankly, anyone unironically trying to use X in 2026 deserves the pain, it’s been officially deprecated for a while now and they maintainers were ultra clear that the only reason to use it now is for compatibility reasons and that you should expect issues if you do. Wayland is so far ahead of X now that anyone still trying to use X is being purposefully obstinate.
to give you a single data point, I've finally committed to linux on my desktop machine at home (I posted in another comment on this thread regarding my sim setup, thats another issue), but on the desktop machine, I installed steam, proton, downloaded a few games from my library, and they just worked on install, no stuffing around at all, no searching the web for fixes to get it going. It's probably been 6 years since I tried it, and last time I tried pretty much every game needed _something_) to be done to get it working. The level of technical knowledge required to get it going now is minimal, so maybe 2026 is the year of linux
the one caveat was, ubuntu 24.04 LTS still didn't recognise my xbox wireless controller out of the box, and I needed to get xone and compile it and install the driver, a minor inconvenience, but something that would be beyond one of my daughtrs or wife. I've since moved back to debian though but already armed with that knowledge so it wasn't any kind of surprise.
next step will be to migrate my work machine, but that one is more difficult because the primary dev is in Delphi, so it'll probably be a case of linux on the hardware, and virtualbox running a win10 VM to do compilations, the other parts of the job are basically all o/s independent python dev, so no problem there.. although I will miss toad for oracle.
There is value in the gaming specific distros since they already include all the stuff like controller drivers. I installed Bazzite on my desktop which I have plugged in to the TV and it's been every bit as seamless as the steamdeck. It boots up direct in to steam big picture mode and I can do everything with my xbox controller.
Bazzite is an immutible os which is absolutely the future of linux. Your install will never break on updates since rather than a normal update migration process, it simply boots the next version of the OS image, which if it doesn't work will just revert back to the old image where you can wait for the bug to be fixed to update again.
One of the straight-up benefits of TV gaming that Bazzite (and presumably any KDE environment, but it's been a bit since I used another) has over Windows is that you can label your Bluetooth devices. I have blue controller, pink controller, white controller, damaged white controller. 90% of my gaming is local multiplayer games and I switch between an actual PS5 and PC, so this is super useful.
Can't do it in Windows 11 for some reason. No option to label them in the new settings app and the option to label them in the old control panel does not work. They all got saved as "Dualsense Controller" and you just had to guess which one you were reconnecting.
I've been using an immutable Linux for the last year or so, and it's gone quite well, but not without pain points.
There's a lot of stuff that I do which does not have a flatpak or package baked in. To get around this, I've been using distrobox to run these things in Ubuntu containers. So I will do "distrobox enter sdr" to have a terminal open up in that environment. You can export applications so that they show up in the applications list. It really takes some experience to shift your mindset, but it was worth it for me.
I agree that development sometimes takes extra steps, but honestly setting up dev environments almost always takes too many steps anyway lol. Overall it's worth it for the stability.
Bazzite KDE picked up my 8BitDo controller immediately, with no prior configuration. I didn't even have to manually pair the Bluetooth. I was very impressed.
Where can I find more information on that? I use CachyOS but never heard of that. Googling didn't find a single result (surprisingly, not even your comment)
Yeah I think for the not-so-tech-savvy gamer, there are better distros than Ubuntu. Ubuntu(and Debian) tend to lag behind the cutting edge a bit too. For such users I'd probably recommend fedora (or one of it's variants) or just straight up steamOS
As a Fedora user, I would actually recommend Ubuntu for gamers new to Linux, just because companies that offer Linux builds tend to only support Ubuntu. It's a bit more work comparatively to get to smooth sailing on Fedora. I think that work is worth it, of course, but new users might beg to differ.
I tried cachy, but I decided I hate the kde plasma environment, I should have chosen some other window manager but wanted to try the recommended one
there is also something to be said, negatively, for the number of distros now, cambrian explosion since the good old days of slack, deb, redhat, suse lol
I honestly believe one of the main, highly supported Distros like:
Debian, Arch, Fedora, Gentoo, Ubuntu, Nix, etc are all better choices than Catchy, Manjaro, Bazzite or whatever else niche distro exists.
I commonly find myself running into weird issues that I would of never run into otherwise. Bazzite for example by default, opens Steam on boot. This caused my games drives to not be mapped in Steam. (I assume Steam somehow booted before my drives were properly mapped) I helped my friend for hours troubleshooting his fstab config, rebooting, etc, but then realized it was just a default that he never set.
He quit Linux because of this (and some other minor gripes) and I don't think the gaming distros do much to properly help.
On my wife's laptop, I've uninstalled MS AI 3 times. I'm just about to lose my mind. I'd have already wiped the machine and moved it to mint but the data in her one drive, bookmarks, etc, I'm sure migrating her over won't be a totally seamless experience. I also have not tested battlenet under linux wine in a long time, and I expect some level of anti-cheat to give me hell there.
On all of my machines bar one, windows is completely gone. I have a simrig, currently running win10, but the hardware there, simucube base, simucube pedals, require some drivers I don't believe exist under linux, and/or don't work properly, and then there is iracing with it's easy anti cheat usage, from my understanding I'm screwed there as well. So it'll live on Windows 10 until the day iRacing stops supporting windows 10, or start supporting linux.
after having written that, I wonder if the simucube tools will just work under linux anyways, the UI is all written in QT, maybe simucube has/is developing linux drivers, given they're finland based :) .. I'll need to test it out
Simucube uses the hid-pidff driver which is built into the kernel. For setting up the base using the SC2 software there is a guide available[0]. I’m not an SC owner myself but there are a few people on the SimRacingOnLinux[1] discord who seem to have everything working nicely.
You can install programs under Steam that are not distributed through Steam.
You can install battlenet under Steam and use all the proton magic to make it work. Starcraft 2 and diablo 2 both work very well (those are the only two I've tried). At least for SC2, anti-cheat did not cause any issues if it's even there at all.
Seriously the only thing stopping me from putting linux on my wife's laptop is the fact that she uses a cricut, which has software that doesn't work well on linux.
Also, I really dislike cricut as a company. Such a scammy business model.
AC works fine just requires a little extra setup, either use this script[0] or use the latest GE-Proton (with a fresh prefix), I recently updated protonfixes to fix a CM/CSP issue. The latter is better as newer Proton has some definite performance improvements.
Fresh should mean creating a new prefix. For example, Proton-GE enabled wow64 in Wine by default, but it requires recreating the prefix to use it. Should be easy enough with Protontricks or even Winetricks.
Yes very much this. It is possible to modify an existing prefix but there are quite a few things to do, it's easier to back up savegames and game config files and then create it anew.
Thank you very much to both of you. Got it running flawlessly with CM on Steam Deck OLED at 90fps using GE-Proton10.34 and LSFG-VK for frame-gen. This one goes straight to the top (alongside DR2.0 and AC Rally) as favourite gaming on the go.
In my (admittedly limited) experience, it does run, even with quite comparable performance, but getting a wheel to interact with the game has been a bit challenging. But this could be resolved with a custom driver for my specific hardware.
Using the community standard mod manager seems to resolve the UI jank by completely bypassing it.
yeah, I've heard this too.. and I'd rather my rig just works rather than try and stuff around making it work under linux + I know iracing is cooked anyway, and I've spent enough money on the rig to just want it to work, and not get stuffed over by some anti-cheat, maybe soon
Conspiratorial thought - did OpenAI shut down Sora because one of their models started attaching it's weights to all the output videos, and some how escaped the farm? Not an original thought, "If Anyone Builds it, Everyone Dies" authors proposed this is an option for an AI to escape the sandbox. lol. Imagine.
I feel like this commitment to Windows quality post is actually just copilot generated slop.
Someone in the comments here said nobody loves Windows. I probably did love Windows 7. I felt that it was the best of all worlds, huge support for hardware, basically rock solid on good hardware, gaming performance was fantastic.
In my opinion, Windows has spiraled downwards ever since 7. So much so that I finally switched to Linux permanently. Windows 11 and the forced AI integration was the absolute last straw for me.
The only thing that had really kept me on Windows lately was the gaming side of it. As I've gotten older, the games became less important. Now Proton pretty much gets me compatibility on 172 of 173 games in my steam library. Sure I had to search and find and compile my own controller driver, but it wasn't super painful, probably beyond the realms of an average user still.
It's an interesting issue, personally I wouldn't look at someones employment history, and working with legacy tools/environments, as a black mark, but it could be indicative of someone who simply refuses to move to new technology.
I've also hired some younger people who were actually interested in picking it up because they were keen to learn anything they could, and you can learn plenty from Delphi despite it's warts.
Over time I've described myself as suffering a kind Stockholm Syndrome w/ Delphi now, and some of the guys on my team have flat out refused to learn it for maintaining some of our systems.
And Turbo Pascal was CHEAP, I think in terms of what you got for your $50? I can't remember the original retail price, you couldn't beat it. Hell, if you kept your eye out you could get copies of Delphi, / Delphi 3 for the cost of a "introduction to Delphi" book which almost always came with a standard license of Delphi.
Hobbyist Borland was the best Borland. A really amazing company that fully embraced those original tinkerers... Enterprise <X>, full vomit, but hey, that's where they got to charge many thousands per seat, so you can't really blame them.
Up until Delphi 5 or 6 the cheapest Delphi would be just $100, it wasn't until Borland became Inprise and chased that big $$$ enterprise money that their prices skyrocketed.
Turbo C was actually about the same price, I paid £32 I believe, and then paid £50 for the upgrade to Borland C++ 3.1 (all as a single purchase), vs paying the £200 or so for C++ on it's own. I remember it arriving the day after in a huge 'crate' full of books.
There's too much TPM/SecureBoot/Enroll key hoops you have to jump through that a lot of distros just haven't bothered with.
If I'm being completely real, I'd be running FreeBSD 15. I just could not get a working nvidia driver going in 15 and get a working X installation. Supposedly 15.1 fixes it, we'll see in June. I've always preferred the BSD design, fs layout, etc, and I would love to have a FreeBSD desktop with a wine 11 install that actually plays games.. the dream!
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