Valve's latest Steam survey highlights Arch's popularity among Linux gamers, with EndeavourOS joining the list.
  • Waffle@infosec.pubEnglish
    83·
    2 months ago

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

      • Waffle@infosec.pubEnglish
        3·
        2 months ago

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

    • Bjornir@programming.devEnglish
      2·
      2 months ago

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

      • pathief@lemmy.worldEnglish
        3·
        2 months ago

        Boot up a VM and install vanilla Arch Linux using the wiki instead of archinstall. Notice that Arch Linux isn’t very pretty out of the box and take the time to set some “sane defaults”. Imagine having a person who is new to Linux to jump through all those hoops when they’re not even sure if Linux is for them. Imagine all the little things that could have gone wrong in this process and how a clueless person would react to them.

        EndeavourOS is extremely easy to install. Next next next and it’s done. It looks pretty out of the box and has sane defaults. The only reason I don’t recommend Endeavour to newbies is because it lacks a software manager/store, which REALLY help newbies out. The very frequent updates are also not for everyone.

        I love EndeavourOS but it’s certainly not for everyone.

    • gusgalarnyk@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      2 months 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 months 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.

      • pathief@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        2 months ago

        If you’ve already installed vanilla arch on your laptop then you’re good to go, that’s the hard part. EndeavourOS has a very user friendly installer but still uses Arch’s official repos. I like to think of it as a quickstart installation, but still feels pretty much like arch. I wouldn’t recommend Bazzite to a main computer, especially since I believe their gaming stack is optimized for AMD.

        Gaming on arch/endeavour is pretty straight forward

        • Install your nvidia drivers
        • Install steam
        • Go to Steam > Settings > Compatibility and enable “Enable Steam Play for all other titles”
        • Play your games
        • gusgalarnyk@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1·
          2 months ago

          Thanks! That’s what I wanted to hear. When researching distros they always talk about them being optimized for gaming or what have you and I was worried some of that wasn’t as simple as installing the drivers and fixing steam.

          I look forward to converting this weekend or next!

          • pathief@lemmy.worldEnglish
            2·
            2 months ago

            Optimized gaming distros often have stuff pre-installed, such as nvidia drivers, steam, heroic launcher… But you can pretty much install whatever you want and replicate that behavior.

            Bazzite in particular provides a fantastic gaming experience but, in my personal opinion, a bad desktop experience. It’s great for devices used almost exclusively to gaming, not so great if you have to work every day.

  • ampersandrew@lemmy.worldEnglish
    10556·
    2 months ago

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

    • Voyajer@lemmy.worldEnglish
      801·
      2 months 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.

    • patatahooligan@lemmy.worldEnglish
      681·
      2 months 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
        57·
        2 months 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·
        2 months 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·
          2 months 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.

    • Virkkunen@fedia.io
      20·
      2 months 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·
        2 months 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·
          2 months 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.

    • JackbyDev@programming.devEnglish
      1·
      2 months 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.

    • gingernate@sopuli.xyzEnglish
      15·
      2 months 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
      5·
      2 months 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
        4·
        2 months 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.

  • soul@lemmy.worldEnglish
    11·
    2 months 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 months 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.

  • doggle@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    11·
    2 months 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
      9·
      2 months 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·
        2 months 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

    • highball@lemmy.worldEnglish
      5·
      2 months 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·
        2 months 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 ₊˚⊹♡₊

  • HakFoo@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
    101·
    2 months ago

    I feel underrepresented as a Void user.

    Although the absurd number of hours I’ve played a certain popular gacha under Lutris might not trigger the Steam metrics, I demand credit for dumping 45 hours into a poorly translated RPG Maker looking project!

    • 𝕽𝖚𝖆𝖎𝖉𝖍𝖗𝖎𝖌𝖍@midwest.socialEnglish
      3·
      2 months ago

      I’ve thought about Void. And LFS. And I submitted some packages for Alpine, although I’m not running it anywhere except as container bases.

      Last time I really strayed from the Arch ranch was Artix, and that was TBH pretty painful on a day-to-day basis.

      I’d like something like Arch but with less systemd. ChimeraOS looks promising, once it stabilizes. But how’s Void treating you? How’s xbps? I’m pretty in love with pacman; rolling release is a must, but IME you really only realize how good or bad a package manager is after it’s too late, and you’ve been using it long enough to hit your first dependency hell/upgrade issue. After years of hell with RPM and deb, pacman was a godsend.

      runit isn’t my favorite initd alternative (dinit ftw, at the moment), but it beats systemd and I don’t have a huge amount of experience with it. Do you like it?

      Critical to me is being able to easily toss together package manager recipes for stuff that isn’t in the official repo; I really believe in keeping systems clean by only installing through the package manager. Pacman packages are stupid simple to write and easy to work with, and yay makes things even better. How’s xbps in this area?

      EFS boot is easy? Stuff like btrfs boot partitions and snapper support easily available? No idiocy like trying to force users onto Wayland prematurely?

      • HakFoo@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
        2·
        2 months ago

        Runit works well enough for me; I’ve only added one nonstandard service (launch a custom tool to drive an external stats display) and it works fine. My ,xsession has to load some polkit and pulseaudio stuff but that could be because I’m not using a full desktop like KDE/GNOME/XFCE that do those things for you.‘’

        I don’t really try to do custom package recipes because I tend to ./configure;make;make install stuff I want at random.

        EFI boot is no problem. I think my root is btrfs, but the /boot/efi is vfat. Refind is pretty first-class, but sometimes it has stupid conditions where it tries to default to the wrong kernel version if you have multiples installed (I think it sorts by timestamps or filenames in a way that sometimes work counterintuitively; discarding old kernels largely fixes it)

        Haven’t really had too many showstopper problems with xbps. I probably sledgehammer it a bit-- occasionally when it says a repo certificate is out of date, I usually end up doing a full update rather than selectively upgrading packages.

        • 𝕽𝖚𝖆𝖎𝖉𝖍𝖗𝖎𝖌𝖍@midwest.socialEnglish
          1·
          2 months ago

          Thanks for the answers!

          I used to do side installs, usually into /opt, which worked well, except when it didn’t. Usually when other things, like Python, expected stuff to live in a certain place and not somewhere unexpected, like /opt. But then, installing stuff manually would sometimes interfere with package manager files, which always ended up taking time and being a pain. I think that’s why I like pacman so much; making packages are trivial, and then all of the file management, clean uninstalls that don’t leave artifacts behind, conflict checks (if not resolution)… all of that stuff that was at times a PITA with autoconf/make install became non-issues.

          I need to look at xpbs. I mean, I’m happy with Arch, but Void seems to be a little leaner, and Arch is fully onboard the systemd train, with Artix being am example of how hard it is to climb out of the avalanche.

    • Lettuce eat lettuce@lemmy.mlEnglish
      2·
      2 months ago

      I’ve been enjoying void on an old Thinkpad just to mess with. How’s the gaming experience been on it? Any issues with Steam/Proton running well?

      • HakFoo@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
        2·
        2 months ago

        Steam runs fine. I think I had to install some Vulkan packages manually because I was getting some hallucinogenic colours in Genshin Impact (installs fine via Lutris). I have a few minor issues with games not loving losing the mouse cursor if you move it onto another display, but I think you can tame most of them by running in Gamescope so it doesn’t realize there’s a second monitor the mouse can leave to.