I was a long time Windows user, starting with XP. I only tried Linux a few years ago, and while I loved it, at the time I had to dual boot for a couple specific Windows only things (VR and flight/racing sim hardware).

A couple months ago though, I got sick of it. I figured if I really wanted to do those things, I could boot up a VM, or just force myself to be patient and wait for a proper Linux solution. So, I wiped all my drives and installed Arch. Around this time, I also got an AMD RX 7600XT, so that was a nice performance boost, plus it waranted a switch to Wayland.

Let me tell you, I have been so pleasantly surprised by basically everything I’ve tried. Cyberpunk 2077 through Heroic Launcher, for example, with 15 odd mods. Runs at a solid 80fps at 1440p on high settings, the only graphical issue I noticed was flickering volumetric clouds. This game ate my old card (the venerable GTX 1080) alive even on Windows.

Just last night, I found my joystick, an old VKB Gladiator + Kosmosima grip, plugged it in and it worked perfectly.

What has really, really impressed me though is VR. I have a Quest 2 that I used to use via Steam link to play my PC wirelessly. Obviously that isn’t an option on Linux (yet) but that’s where ALVR comes in. Sideload the client on the quest, run the streamer on the desktop, start SteamVR, and bam, it works. The first game I tried was Elite Dangerous, one of my all time favourite games and easily my favourite VR epxerience. Now, I won’t go ahead and claim it’s perfect, hence the 99% in the title. After fiddling with the settings and making sure I had hardware encoding/decoding set up right, I had very good clarity, up to 120hz refresh rate, but occasional blockiness and artifacting, especially in heavier graphical scenes, like during docking. However, out in open space, it felt just like the ED I know and love.

At this point, I’m just going to look at fiddling with some settings and hopefully smoothing out the stream, but the fact that I can play my favourite games, with my favourite hardware, with great performance and in VR, and the amount of setup is really comparable to what it is on Windows is just kind of wrinkling my brain. Plus, only a couple months ago, this wasn’t the case. Support for things that were once doomed to be dual boot material for the foreseeable future is coming along rapidly. This is a great time to be a Linux gamer.

      • A_Random_Idiot@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        9 months ago

        You are going to always be reactive to cheating.

        If you are pro-active, you’ll just make it easier for cheaters to iterate and experiment and find ways around the pro-active… and what happens then? You’re back to reactive. Not to mention, pro-active anti-cheat tends to be rife with false positives, resulting in very public ban waves against innocent people.

        It cant be helped, No amount of giving your butthole over to big daddy game company and their rootkits will make a game cheat-free. all they can hope for is to catch the cheaters, drop the hammer on them in bulk, so they struggle and panic to try and find out how it was detected so you can increase their cycle time before they have a new working one out.

          • melpomenesclevage@lemm.eeEnglish
            1·
            9 months ago

            But if youre banning people based on operating system, of what’s now the only viable consumer operating system, youre basically sacrificing 100% of ‘keep the game fun longer’ for those players.

            So if that’s the philosophy, it would be wildly counterproductive to even put that on the table.

              • melpomenesclevage@lemm.eeEnglish
                1·
                9 months ago

                But people only refuse to switch to Linux because the anti cheats stop it.

                And you can’t quantify joy like that. What’s your investment in windows?

                • Douglas Kilpatrick@mastodon.social
                  0·
                  9 months ago

                  @melpomenesclevage (my personal investment in windows? 0%? I don’t have a windows PC, at home or work. I’ve been Linux primary since … shit, 1994 or something? I’ve got some “bought in store” style linux games? I remember when pre-compiled packages were a feature. I’m an old.

                  I’m trying to help explain the incentives driving the behavior toward kernel-level anti-cheat so that arguments against it can be well formed. I don’t want that stuff infecting linux gaming)

                  • melpomenesclevage@lemm.eeEnglish
                    1·
                    9 months ago

                    Oh. Yeah I’m not in favor of kernel level anti cheat. That’s fucking unacceptable. That’s like the third to last thing I’d ever want to give that level of access.

          • A_Random_Idiot@lemmy.worldEnglish
            1·
            9 months ago

            That’s … not entirely wrong, but doing more to raise the barriers higher keeps the game fun longer before the cheaters ruin it.

            If you are pro-active, you’ll just make it easier for cheaters to iterate and experiment and find ways around the pro-active… and what happens then? You’re back to reactive

            • Douglas Kilpatrick@mastodon.social
              1·
              9 months ago

              @A_Random_Idiot Yes, I think everybody has a reactive component to their plan? In the current situation, being reactive in some form appears to be table stakes.

              But keeping higher barriers (is believed?) to make it easier to do that, and keeps some of the initial noise down, and pushes the timing off.

              AND PUSHING THE TIMING IS A GAIN (to the makers of competitive PvP games)