zlacker

You don't need Windows for gaming any more. Ubuntu 22.04 comes with graphics drivers. Steam has Steam Play and Lutris has a huge library of install scripts, so everything is handled for you.

The one thing you will need to do occasionally is experiment with different Wine distributions. This means you will need to right click on your game and select the distribution from a drop-down box. Exhausting, I know.

>>moss2+(OP)
Did linux eventually get HDR support or is it still one (of many) sacrifices you make to game on linux?

>>jjoona+21
It's far from being ready, but as usually Valve is making the most progress: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/HDR_monitor_support

>>jjoona+21
HDR is currently experimental.

Red Hat is working on getting it integrated, and Valve have it in their display manager.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/HDR_monitor_support

But for general users, out of the box, no.

>>moss2+(OP)
That's not entirely true. Most games are still built for Windows, and all of the tools for playing games on Linux have come a long way, but there are still a lot of combinations of games and drivers that don't work.

>>moss2+(OP)
If by "gaming" you mean "be able to play a selection of games you might or might not be interested in, in varying states of support and performance", then yes - absolutely true.

None of the games I've played recently even are on Steam, so no, your answer is misleading at best.

And no, I've not tried it recently on my main machine but I've tried it often enough that my summary is still: Feel free to try it, but many (or most) of us still have to stick with Windows even if we don't like it.

>>jjoona+21
There’s no AutoHDR at all, so yeah.

>>moss2+(OP)
Here's the thing... I have limited time for gaming and when I want to play I just want to sit down and play. My days of sodding about with (the equivalent of) autoexec.bat, config.sys, QEMM configurations, drivers and IRQ allocations are way way behind me for one when one of these combos of drivers and scripts doesn't work, or my game isn't supported, and I just want to spend a hour or two gaming to chill out.

>>darren+Xg
Steam on Linux is like that 99% of the time. Download the game and play it.

>>rjh29+1i
Better yet, check reports of other users in ProtonDB: https://www.protondb.com/

They are not necessarily applicable to everyone, but most of the time they are accurate. Makes it easy to see whether setting it all up under Linux is worth it for your library.

>>rjh29+1i
I didn't even know about this when I installed steam on Linux in order to play two games. "Nice, they support linux" I thought. It wasn't until the third time that I understood that they were windows games supported by steam/wine

>>wink+M8
Unless you are playing the competitive games that won't turn on anti-cheat for Linux, this seems statistically incorrect. Valve prioritizes fixes for the most popular games, so the games most people want to play will work (if they are not actively prevented by the publisher as with anti-cheat).

>>rjh29+1i
What distro would you recommend for maximising gaming performance and compatibility do you think? Valve seem to have gone for Arch but

>>darren+pu
I think Manjaro is a great choice for gaming rigs. You get easy access to latest kernels and drivers without having to babysit your computer.

Only problem with Linux gaming is that you don't get stuff like fan, voltage, frequency control for newer AMD hardware. This hasn't been an issue for me until I got a 6800XT. I thought about RMA until I remembered their Adrenaline software exists. I wish I could save my settings to the card's BIOS.

I no longer use this machine for anything but gaming. Going back to windows sucks

>>thesui+E5
I'm past the deadline to edit this, but rereading it after coffee, I wanted to add: If you haven't tried in a few years, definitely try gaming on Linux. You will be surprised at how much just works. But I wouldn't suggest to someone who has no Linux experience that they can just wholesale drop Windows.

>>rjh29+1i
I really want to second this.

All games I want to play these days work under Linux without effort. Older titles work even better where under Windows you could run into compatibility issues not so under Linux because of the great effort put on backward compatibility by Wine.

Also, a bit susprising and unfortunate, the Windows version of a game that has native Linux support often runs better.

I run Manjaro Linux and have an Nvidia GPU for if it matters. My Steam games I run with Steam and for the games I bought on GOG I use Lutris.

I would really suggest people to check out how far it has come.

>>jjoona+21
It's in progress, but it's one of very few sacrifices you make. Anti-cheat is really the only other one of note, and many games are now supporting anti-cheat on Linux.

>>beebee+Jw
https://github.com/ilya-zlobintsev/LACT

This application lets you adjust everything and the settings are saved on reboot

>>darren+Xg
Steam deck runs most games as well as Windows, some even better than windows. Of course it runs some worse or not at all… but it’s precious little.

It’s really mind blowing that winapi is the binary cross-OS API of choice.

>>happym+O2
Funny that SGI some 20 years ago supported more than 32bpp.

>>darren+Xg
Your comment describes the perpetual state of Linux desktop use in general. Every couple of years I check it out again because people on HN, Reddit, or some other forum *swear* that it "just works" now and you don't have to mess with config files, drivers, or spend hours researching some strange issue. After booting a Linux distro I learn that's still not true within 15 minutes or so, and go back to Windows.

>>wink+M8
Its a two click thing to run non-steam games with proton through steam.

>>jjoona+21
FWIW, desktop Windows 10 HDR is broken too.