Valve's latest Steam survey highlights Arch's popularity among Linux gamers, with EndeavourOS joining the list.
  • doggle@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    11·
    2 days ago

    Still plenty of Debian/Ubuntu out there. And with bazzite even Fedora’s getting in on gaming.

    Arch distros have made some truly impressive gains in userbases recently, though. Especially for being based on a distro that explicitly eschews user-friendliness

    • yonderEnglish
      8·
      2 days ago

      Once you’re a bit familiar with linux, arch becomes much more user friendly due to the Arch wiki and it’s wide coverage of topics. Knowing exactly what packages I need to use my Intel card to render with Blender is very handy. If you use a distro like EndeavorOS, you don’t even have to do any special setup: it installs like any other distro.

      • doggle@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        1·
        18 hours ago

        Oh, I’m keenly aware! I’m running vanilla arch on my laptop right now, and planning to migrate my desktop this year, I’m just pleasantly surprised how many have been willing to take the plunge

      • pyrflie@lemm.eeEnglish
        2·
        2 days ago

        I feel like people discount just how useful a good wiki is. Especially on “how to” topics. It makes it better for the specifics of gaming just due to people testing and documenting it.

  • soul@lemmy.worldEnglish
    11·
    3 days ago

    Literally spent the second half of my holiday vacation moving from dual boot Mint+Win11 to EndeavourOS. The last few days has been fun getting the latest Plasma to be themed out how I want it.

    To ease my move, I repartitioned my secondary NTFS days drive to free up space for an EXT4 partition and moved my /home to it. Once that was done, bye bye to the other 2 OS installs and hello to a nice clean install of eos.

    It’s worked very well so far. As a long ago Arch user who battled the AUR back in the day, I was hoping for the experience to be better now. And to my joy, it is. (It’s been probably at least a decade since I last used Arch.)

    Since almost all of my Windows needs are now covered natively and the few that aren’t are something I’ve gotten working via WinApps for a (mostly) seamless experience, in pretty comfortable with where I’m at now.

    I’ve even got my 2024 Kraken Elite working via NZXT CAM so I have full control over the cooler until that is eventually supported elsewhere. (Including control of the screen.)

    • Victor@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      2 days ago

      I must have joined the Arch community at the perfect time. I have been using it for probably over a decade and have had close to zero issues. AUR is amazing, and helpers make it even simpler. Only after using Arch for years did I understand that people have had serious issues with it in the past.

  • Waffle@infosec.pubEnglish
    82·
    4 days ago

    Exciting to see endeavoros making the list. I’m one of the 0.06%! There’s dozens of us!!

    • Bjornir@programming.devEnglish
      1·
      1 day ago

      It is really great, even with a NVIDIA. Never understood the complaints about arch, but maybe I have Endeavour to thank for that

      • Waffle@infosec.pubEnglish
        2·
        2 days ago

        Definitely about ease of use. After borking my system a few times it was just easier to go with endeavor.

    • gusgalarnyk@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      2 days ago

      Can anyone comment on how difficult it is to get gaming working on vanilla arch vs endeavor or… Bazzite I think the other one is.

      I’m about to transition my main PC to Linux and I haven’t decided. I transitioned my laptop to vanilla arch and got everything working but it’s not a gaming laptop so that was the one thing I didn’t do. Worried it’ll be hard or impossible to get Nvidia card going and I’ll have to redo everything for one of the more prepared options.

      • TheBeesKnees@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
        2·
        2 days ago

        I’m on EndeavorOS, but I basically use Arch’s wiki for any troubleshooting/guidance. I wanted Arch with an easy installation and I got just that.

        No huge issues gaming-wise, but you do need to be comfortable referencing Arch wiki as needed regardless of your installation. My installation defaulted to the on-biard graphics processor instead of the gpu, so I had to install the proper stuff manually.

        If you need help in the future, feel free to reach out.

    • gingernate@sopuli.xyzEnglish
      11·
      3 days ago

      I did not know nix users had time to game due to the hours messing around with their dot files hahaah

    • WillBalls@lemmy.worldEnglish
      4·
      2 days ago

      There’s dozens of us!

      I’ve had to do very little tweaking overall to get most games working, with the one notable exception being dragons dogma 2. The solution was proton GE and a new .nix file with GPU tweaks and now I’m getting slightly better performance than the average windows experience.

      • shadowbroker@lemm.eeEnglish
        3·
        2 days ago

        I have to admit, that I have some experience with nix on 2 servers and 1 desktop, but installing steam was just 1 line in the config and everything worked. My biggest concern were the nvidia drivers, but that worked as well. Currently playing RE4 Remake.

    • JackbyDev@programming.devEnglish
      1·
      2 days ago

      Fedora was going to be my plan. Arch just freaks me out, I don’t want to do that much work. I think I know Ubuntu the best, but I haven’t heard anything good about the direction Canonical is going.

      I just want something that works good enough. I have a 3070 ti GPU.

  • ampersandrew@lemmy.worldEnglish
    10555·
    4 days ago

    It’s because SteamOS identifies itself as Arch. Omitting this information is either dishonest or uninformed.

    • patatahooligan@lemmy.worldEnglish
      661·
      3 days ago

      This is very obviously false. With the default filters with all OSs shown, Arch has 0.20% marketshare and Linux has a total of 2.29%. That means Arch is about 8.73% of all Linux systems in the survey. If you select the Linux only results, then SteamOS appears as its own entry, alongside a few others like Flatpak. We can see two things here:

      • SteamOS Holo is 36.47%. This was very clearly not counted as a part of Arch Linux in the all OSs tab.
      • Under these filters, Arch is even higher at 9.7%.

      What’s impressive here is not just the confidence with which you called the article dishonest and uninformed while not spending half a minute to check your false assumption, but also how many people upvoted you. This was trivial to prove wrong and in fact people have already done that below. Why are people so eager to believe the article is wrong that they will jump to agree with a blatantly wrong comment while having no knowledge of the situation themselves?

      • ampersandrew@lemmy.worldEnglish
        55·
        3 days ago

        I’ll take the L on this one. It’s a combination of the article only using the screenshot of the first view as evidence and me late night posting on Lemmy while falling asleep via NyQuil.

      • rooster_butt@lemm.eeEnglish
        4·
        3 days ago

        Am I missing something or is 36.47% not greater than 9.7%? Why is SteamOS not shown as the most popular Linux distro without the Linux only filters?

        This contradicts the article claiming Arch dominates the Linux gaming scene and not SteamOS.

        • patatahooligan@lemmy.worldEnglish
          3·
          3 days ago

          SteamOS seems to not be counted at all in the first page. Apparently, it’s not just “All OSs combined” vs “Linux only” but there are additional filters applied. Perhaps the first page is desktop-only. The article either also cares about desktop gaming specifically or is uncritically parroting the survey page. I think both Valve and the article writer should be clearer about what they’re talking about.

    • Voyajer@lemmy.worldEnglish
      791·
      4 days ago

      Steamos identifies itself as “SteamOS Holo”.

      Also, that article isn’t measuring SteamOS in the first place. When you look at the steam survey with the default filters it won’t list SteamOS. If you switch it to Linux only it will show SteamOS as 36.47% of Linux installs (0.84% of all steam installs) so it’s clearly not feeding into the Arch percentages.

    • Virkkunen@fedia.io
      19·
      4 days ago

      The only uninformed here is you, since SteamOS does not identify itself as Arch, but rather as SteamOS Holo and it does show separately from Arch on the stats.

      • Elgenzay@lemmy.mlEnglish
        61·
        4 days ago

        Because you hear “Arch” and it gives the impression that they’re being played on a Linux desktop, not a Steam Deck

        • hellofriend@lemmy.worldEnglish
          3·
          3 days ago

          While that may be true, I still use my Steam Deck in desktop mode for a bunch of stuff besides gaming. Writing, job applications and interviews, using reddit because it’s the only device I have that isn’t detected for ban evasion, watching shows/Youtube. Maybe I’m atypical, but I don’t see why the Deck would offer a desktop mode if it wasn’t meant to be used.

  • NazEnglish
    4·
    3 days ago

    Holy shit there’s so many sub-distros in this thread:

    Arch

    • EndeavorOS
    • Cachy
    • Void
    • Nix
    • Manjaro

    Which one do we install for gaming, or do we wait for SteamOS on Desktop?

    • sugar_in_your_teaEnglish
      42·
      2 days ago

      Void and Nix aren’t Arch-based.

      Which one do we install for gaming

      If you have to ask, I recommend Linux Mint. It’s not Arch based, which is a good thing because it’s going to be really stable and easy for people new to Linux.

      Steam is the same regardless of distro because it ships all of its own dependencies, even for Linux games. So if a game works on Arch or SteamOS, it should work on Mint, Fedora, etc.

      If you want something that feels like SteamOS, I’ve heard good things about Bazzite, but my recommendation is still to use Linux Mint and install Steam and Heroic, and then you’ll be good to go. I personally use openSUSE Tumbleweed, but again, I recommend Linux Mint for someone new to Linux, because gaming should be nearly identical between distros and Linux Mint has a large community of people to help when you run into issues.

    • highball@lemmy.worldEnglish
      5·
      3 days ago

      lol, I’m sure you could just casually walk away from them in a serpentine pattern and avoid any harm. Likely they are too busy clearing Cheeto dust from their neck beard anyways.

      • Waffle@infosec.pubEnglish
        2·
        1 day ago

        Hey! There’s not too much cheeto dust because I eat the cheetoes with chopsticks to keep my fingies clean and because the chopsticks are  ₊♡⊹˚₊ kawaii ₊˚⊹♡₊

  • Statick@programming.devEnglish
    4·
    3 days ago

    I tried a few distros this year. Landed on vanilla arch using KDE Plasma. Love it so far. Unfortunately I do some hobbyist stuff with Fusion 360 and my friends and I started playing PUBG again so i need to boot into my windows partition for those.