It's unfortunate but at the same time if enough people switch to Linux then they'll be forced to change their ways.

So if you can go without those games or don't play MMOs that is rootkits then switch to force their hand.

Besides, them installing a rootkit on your machine is not an acceptable practice anyways. It's a major security issue. Sometimes we need to make a stand. Everyone has a line, where's yours?

> which the Linux wrappers (mostly the wine project) refuse to support for security reasons.

It's more that there's no sensible way they could do it even if they wanted to. Emulating the Windows kernel internals is well beyond the scope of what WINE is trying to do, and even if they did do it, there would be no way for the anticheat vendors to tell the difference between the AC module being sandboxed for compatibility versus sandboxed as a bypass technique. Trying to subvert the AC in any way is just begging to get banned, even if it's for beingn reasons.

As a competitive old school arena FPS guy, I have also had a very hard time getting the same smoothness and low latency (input, output, whatever it is) on Linux. The games I play are very fast and twitchy, and milliseconds matter.

There seems to be too many layers and variables to ever get to the bottom of it. Is it the distro itself? Is it a Wayland vs. X11 thing? Is it the driver? The Proton version? Some G-SYNC thing? Some specific tweak that games based on this game engine needs?

BattlEye works on linux nowadays, so there definitely is progress in this direction!

> That's because almost all of the big players in that space

To the OP's point-- there are soooo many games nowadays, that if you and your friend group can skip some of those "big players," there are still hundreds of multiplayer games to play.

Even PVP is starting to “just work” via Proton. Arc Raiders runs just fine on Linux and is a strictly PvP game. Over time I think this will be less and less of a problem.

Vote with your wallet, as the saying goes. If you quit paying money for the privilege of installing a rootkit, maybe they'll stop selling rootkits.

> ...which the Linux wrappers (mostly the wine project) refuse to support for security reasons.

I mean, several of the major anticheats can be configured to work just fine on Linux. [0] It's up to the game dev whether or not it's permitted. So, yeah, unless the game is one where its dev makes huge blog posts about how "advanced" its anti-cheat is (like Valorant or the very latest CoD/Battlefield games) it's quite likely that multiplayer games will work just fine on Linux.

And if they don't, and the faulty game is a new purchase on Steam, then ask for a refund and tell them that the game doesn't work with your OS. Easy, peasy.

[0] I have 100% solid, personal knowledge that Easy Anti Cheat can work on Linux. On Linux, I play THE FINALS, Elden Ring, and a couple of other EAC-"protected" games without any troubles. I have perhaps-unreliable memories that at least one of the games I play uses Denuvo, which is only sometimes used as anti-cheat but does use many of the same techniques as kernel-mode anticheat.

The greatest PvP game, DOTA, works on Linux, and once you get hooked on that you'll never want to play another PvP game.

> People tend to generalize, but what they probably mean is "it's not reasonable for gaming for the games I play.

This. The corollary is also that people take the such quips way too literally.

I, personally, don't play that many games, and those that I do play tend to run faster on Linux (with an AMD GPU, which I bought specifically to avoid nvidia headaches).

But I still game on Windows. Why? Because I still have a Windows box, "because Linux is not reasonable for photo editing". I actually daily drive Linux, but I can't be assed to move from Lightroom and photoshop, so I still keep a windows pc under my desk. I just play games on it because it's much beefier than my 5 yo ryzen U laptop, and since I don't interact with that box all that much, I didn't feel like partitioning my smallish drive for no tangible benefit. My laptop is more than enough for all my other needs.

Ok, if you want to be stubborn about it then leave Windows on a partition and only start it when you want to play that one game. Problem solved.

In many ways, moving to Linux is like starting to live on your own. Your mommy might be a better cook than you, but is that a good enough reason to keep living in your parents' basement?

Over the last year or so, nVidia support for the 3+ series of hardware has gotten pretty stable.

With that said, I'm probably going to grab and AMD or Intel card once my 3060 becomes too much of a pain to continue using. It's a little ridiculous that the 5060 gives very little reason for my to update my 5 year old video card.

FWIW my 4070 Ti Super has had zero headaches in Linux. It’s only older Nvidia cards I’ve had issues with. Seems like there was a major driver change starting with the RTX 20xx series.

FWIW, I've been gaming with a 1660 on Nobara OS for the past 3 months w/o issue.

I've gamed since 1979 and have used nVidia on Linux since the early 2000's...without issue.

Again, all these games are available on console (mostly) so the excuse to not support Linux is conscious. Those ARE Linux machines. Essentially. (Yeah yeah, they have their own tool chain and rendering) but if they are using Vulkan, DX12, DX11, and a window - it can run on Linux.

I find this mostly applies to the competitive games due to most standard anti cheat apps not working outside win32.

> My next PC upgrade will probably be getting rid of my Nvidia 1660 super and getting something AMD for less headaches.

Then you'll have AMD headaches. NVidia is the only accelerated graphics card fully supported on Linux.

You only get acceleration in AMD if you use their binary-only drivers and they only support cards for about a year.

> But I have to say it either runs the game you want to play or it doesn't

Can you elaborate on this?

For example, it was convoluted getting StarCraft 2 to run. Then it did eventually work, though it felt ever so slightly laggy.

Anno 1800 ran though it occasionally slowed way down, occasionally crashed, and multiplayer never worked.

Hogwart's Legacy ran but crashed, and ran massively slower / lower quality settings than on the same hardware but in Windows.

All of those were not binary "runs / doesn't".

This. I’d move to Linux in a heartbeat if certain anticheats for certain competetive games had supports for it. (i.e. faceit anticheat)

Basically all games work, except some multiplayer games with kernel anticheat. You can look up the status of games here:

https://www.protondb.com/

And specifically the state of multiplayer games with anticheat here (which is a much less favorable % of working games):

https://areweanticheatyet.com/

I personally wouldn't install any kernel anticheat on a computer that I intend to use for anything important, so I would personally refuse to install the incompatible games even if I was using windows.

From Steam’s 2025 top X charts (https://store.steampowered.com/charts/bestofyear/2025?tab=3)

11/12 top selling new releases (the exception is battlefield 6, because the anticheat blocks Linux)

9/12 top selling (COD, BF6 and Apex block Linux)

11/12 most played (Apex blocks Linux)

So if you’re into competitive ranked games (especially fps), you might face problems due to anti cheat blocks, but practically everything else works

What you sacrifice in feature parity, you gain in user freedom and principle. To me, that is a worthwhile tradeoff. Especially since it's really not that much different at this point. You're not sacrificing much in most cases now. It's really quite remarkable.

VR is rough at the moment, but one would hope that Valve is prepping an overhaul for SteamVR on Linux since they're launching a standalone VR headset which runs Linux soon.

I ran into the issue where I didn't know that you can tell Steam to always prefer NATIVE LINUX programs over everything over Proton. This was causing a ton of issues with VR, I havent gone back to try it yet though, havent found the time.

It was very broken for a long time. Since fairly recently you have WiVRn (specifically wivrn-dashboard on Arch) for Oculus (more supported though) and I would daresay it works better then SteamVR used to do for me on Windows

Hardware for flight sim games is also in a similar boat. It's hard to configure most of the newer hardware, but a lot of the old low quality joysticks work alright out of the box.

I have both a Reverb G2 and a Pimax both working great via Monado.

or DRM for old games that check stuff like the cd being present

I have owned the index for a few years, running it on ubuntu/mint. It is a pain. But VR is a pain generally. I go months without using the thing. Then when i do use it some bit of software has been updated and i inevitably have to spend an hour getting it to work correctly again. Honestly, VR on linux feels like using windows again.

VR is bad because nobody cares much about it. The hardware is clunky, the market tiny, and costs great. As the hardware improves it will get more attention from the FOSS community and so too will the overall experiance.

While I agree it's unreasonable, it's also kind of a chicken and an egg thing. These things won't change until Linux becomes big enough to ignore. I'm not sure what the solution is though, as I don't think it's realistic to make people give up what they enjoy to get there. That's not gonna happen. But Valve has at least made a dent with the Steamdeck and Proton in general, and maybe more with the upcoming Steam Machine. Devs actively target the Steamdeck nowadays for games where it makes sense, so it is taken into consideration at a whole new level compared to years past.

Not much else to do. You either convert people, convert the companies to support Linux, or convert the government into cracking down on whatever makes it difficult for Linux to be supported. The latter is highly unlikely, and the 2nd only cares if people shift their habits.

So there's only one channel left.

I play multiplayer games with anti cheat all the time. The only ones that don't run are straight up malware.

The familiarity is great but the thing that really draws me to Plasma over Gnome is that the KDE developers seem to have an attitude of just implementing the features people want even if it's not perfect yet. Gnome is polished, but it's missing so many basic configuration options out of the box.

I didn't know that. Thanks. Setting up my mac once in 5 years means it isn't a screen I've seen very often!

You might need it for the App Store if anything, but even then... You don't need the app store for installing software. Mac is at its peak currently, though the new glass UI stuff is a little over the top for me. I miss the old simpler UI. I'm sure I'll get used to it eventually.

It isn't. There's no such thing in macOS. Local and iCloud accounts are not necessarily linked, never been.

Yes, as pointed out, I was mistaken, but then in my defence, I've only ever set up one Mac, 5 years ago, so I've only seen 'that screen' once.

Microsoft had realyl good engineers and talent. Microsoft internally has gone to shit. They hire an army of H1B's and all the talent has left. Shell of a company on the Windows side that anyone working with them can see. It started a couple years ago, but it's really gone off the deepend and will just get worse. I say this as a windows expert and someone who thinks linux is crap.

Been on / off Linux for the desktop since about the same time. Recurring theme across my AMD and NVIDIA gpus. Support has always sucked!

Over the years it felt like a game of whack a mole finding the right combination of driver versions, open or closed source. R9 390 owners back in the day will understand... Fast forward to now, the same problems keep occurring albeit better off then they were.

It's been an unfortunate re-occurring issue for me as well. Recent hardware is much better about this, and I too have seen the performance bumps at the cost of software compatibility. I feel like if Adobe brought their CC suite to Linux I'd have no reason to ever use Windows outside the random game that _needs_ it.

> I started using Linux in like 2007 but the GPU was always an issue.

Were you running Nvidia hardware? I've been running Linux since like 2000-ish, have always run ATi/AMD hardware on my desktop machines, and (aside from overheat issues brought on by the undersized replacement fan attached with bread ties to that one board) haven't had troubles. On the other hand, I don't suspend my desktop or servers to RAM or disk, so maybe that has intermittently or always been broken... I'd never know.

I've only had Intel hardware in my laptops, and I can't remember ever having trouble suspending those to RAM or disk.

>Most people had never even heard of Linux.

My experience is that people fear linux, rather than not knowing. I am the lonely Linux user since c. 2005, and people see half my screen is always a console, the other half a browser. So they fear linux is for console wizards, not for regular users. Nothing will convince them otherwise, even when they are 100% of the time using online webapps. I have some coworkers using browser + VS code + WSL2 all the time, but they don't switch because they fear the console-to-config-everything instead of Control Panel.

thats not a kernel issue its an anti cheat issue. No kernel except the windows kernel is going to allow him to play battlefield and cod.

I don't believe there are any serious technical obstacles to providing a graphical installer in something like an initramfs environment. Many distros do provide graphical installation mechanisms using PXE, which loads the kernel and installer-initramfs over the network (and is similar in the sense that it won't touch local storage unless you tell it to)

I don't have a way to quickly around to check, but I thought the arch install media used squashfs? In which case I wouldn't have thought it was safe to blow away the backing store.

Fair enough, but I wouldn't generally direct that audience to vanilla arch linux as "gamers first distro" anyway.

I'd direct them to something like Bazzite (Immutable), or CachyOS for staying arch-based but providing a GUI installer and tools, Endeavor OS, even Fedora, etc.

It's really a (good IMHO) sign of the times that us old hats have to remind ourselves that most new comers to Linux today aren't necessarily adept at installing another OS, let alone using the command line. The first time I installed Arch was maybe four years ago, but the very first dual boot setup I made was between Win 3.1 and OS/2 2.1 in 1993 when I was 10, and I've been playing with Linux since the mid-late 90s. When I first installed Arch the "hard way" I said to myself--"I don't understand why it has this reputation... this is all stuff I've done before countless times." Frankly, I'm still trying to figure out the distribution graph of Linux knowledge and how to engage with different skill levels.

Assume they mean having to recompile the AUR package they were trying to install using yay.

If users mental model is mostly "yay is like pacman but can also install packages from AUR the same way" wihout thinking deeper about the difference then I think it using it is very risky and that you should just stick to pacman + git/makepkg. Only consider helpers once that's become second nature and routine. Telling people to "just yay install" is doing them a disservice. An upgrade breaking the system isn't even that bad compared to getting infected with malware due to an old package you were using being orphaned and hijacked to spread malware or getting a bad copycat version due to a typo.

I think EndeavourOS is doing users a disservice if they provide sth like yay preinstalled and ready to use out of the box. It isn't installing packages from a shared repo: It's downloading code from arbitrary locations and running it on your machine in order to produce a package. Being able to read and understand shell script (PKGBUILD) is kind of a prerequisite to using it safely.

That's assuming you do system upgrades through paru/yay. However, you may not want to upgrade the packages you've obtained from the AUR and so you upgrade using pacman. That may cause the updated libalpm to become incompatible with the installed yay/paru.

  > Having used Arch I can easily maintain almost any distro out there, but it doesn't work the other way around.

I'd also like to tell any Linux newbies, the Arch Wiki is your best friend. It doesn't matter if you're using Ubuntu, Mint, or whatever. The Arch Wiki is still usually the second place I go to for when I need help. The first is the man pages (while there's some bad documentation out there it is quite surprising how well most man pages are written. Linux really has shown me the power and importance of writing good documentation)

Absolutely. I would also think that the amount of money "lost" on license keys specifically on the "regular consumer" side pales in comparison to the data that they get once you're on their operating system. How many non-power users bother with disabling telemetry and other data that MS collects through their operating system? How many people bother configuring a Local Account? All of that is probably worth way more than a ~$200 license key.

On the business side, businesses make it a focus to be in compliance with licensing agreements so they still see whatever oodles of money from companies that have fleets of computers that run Windows.

I've used Ubuntu since 2006 and started using Kubuntu (I prefer KDE) about 2 years ago. Ubuntu (or Kubuntu) are very solid for gaming. It puzzles me how often I see highly customized distros like Bazzite and CachyOS touted for gaming after looking into some of the wild tweaks those distros do; it's amazing to me that they run at all.

PS I keep Snap disabled.

I'm genuinely curious as to what the key differences are (especially those that would cause someone to switch), as someone who is pretty tech savvy but whose use of Linux as a daily driver is admittedly pretty weak.

Folks capable of running linux pick the best distro for the job at hand. They are tools, there is no progression like you're implying.

My homeserver is Ubuntu, my gaming PC is Arch.

There's a whole lot of asterisks that you're leaving out of that statement.

M1&2 yes with slight caveats, m3-5 not really (at least yet)

It's been a very long time since I moved to Arch, but I swear that something like 12 years ago it did have some form of menu-driven installer.

Nowadays, there are so many ways to partition the drive (lvm, luks, either one on top of the other; zfs with native encryption or through dm-crypt), having the efi boot directly a unified kernel image or fiddle with some bootloader (among a plethora of options)...

One of the principal reasons why I love Arch is being able to have a say in some of these base matters, and would hate to have to fight the installer to attain my goals. I remember when Ubuntu supported root on zfs but the installer didn't it was rather involved to get the install going. All it takes with Arch is to spend a few minutes reading the wiki and you're off to the races. The actual installation part is trivial.

But then again, if you have no idea what you want to do, staring at the freshly-booted install disk prompt can be daunting. Bonus points for it requiring internet for installation. I would have to look up the correct incantation to get the wifi connected on a newer PC with no wired ethernet, and I've been using the thing for a very long time.

> 1) very stable due to rolling-release producing small changes

Having very frequent updates to bleeding edge software versions, often requiring manual intervention is not "stable". An arch upgrade may, without warning, replace your config files and update software to versions incompatible with the previous.

That's fine if you're continuously maintaining the system, maybe even fun. But it's not stable. Other distributions are perfectly capable of updating themselves without ever requiring human intervention.

> 2) the skill barrier to getting a full system is “basic literacy, to read the wiki”

As well as requiring you to be comfortable with the the linux command line as well as have plenty of time. My mom has basic literacy, she can't install ArchLinux.

ArchLinux is great but it's not a beginner-friendly operating system in the same way that Fedora/LinuxMint/OpenSUSE/Pop!_OS/Ubuntu/ElementOS are.

> very stable due to rolling-release producing small changes

Can you elaborate on the chain of thought here? The small changes at high frequency means that something is nearly constantly in a <CHANGED> state, quite opposite from stable. Rolling release typically means that updates are not really snapshotted, therefore unless one does pull updates constantly they risk pulling a set of incompatible updates. Again, quite different from stable.

>the skill barrier to getting a full system is “basic literacy, to read the wiki”

if GenZ knew how to read they would be very disappointed right now

in the age of tablets and tiktok, basic literacy is quite a big ask

I've started my Linux journey a decent year ago. It's been fun but I'm happy that they're such a great community to troubleshoot along with me. Never tried Arch but I do love a barebones no fuzz system.

If ubuntu had stuck with APT for software installs instead of snap and whatever else, it would be a lock less headachey