The ACTUAL State of Linux Gaming

let's talk about the actual state of Linux gaming and I say this because I saw uh some big YouTubers come out and mention specifically lineus Tech tips and ordinary gamers I think they're under an impression that Steam OS is going to be ready for General release in 2025 and the reality and Truth is that couldn't be farther from the truth because I doubt we will ever see a general release of Steam OS and I I want to explain why and whatever all this new news is because there's massive misconceptions about what Linux is capable of

and what it's really good for because gaming has a place in Linux and it's amazing and I want to go over all the developments but I also want to show you the challenges that we face in the Linux Community comparative to the windows Community because you need to know they're not Apples to Apples kind of comparisons here massive differences between just the structure and uh how things are made so first off why would it never get a general release and the big things is Linux is so different from distribution to distribution Hardware to hardware and

what goes into it is massively different how Windows works is you tack on drivers you install them after the fact which is great for Windows I mean it's it's it it works for them I think it's a terrible system and I think Linux is much more stable when it works but the big thing here a general release is you have to account for all the different Hardware out there and the Linux kernel is where those drivers sit and that's like the brain of it think of it's just not something you can touch or easily add

to you can add drivers but not in the way you think on Windows it's not nearly as easy and typic Ty Al it is developed over a long period of time so there's like this sweet spot in Linux when it comes to gaming where you want Hardware that's about 1 to 2 years old and has really good massive adoption because you know that's going to be in the Linux kernel where all the drivers or the drivers reside you know and I want to break that down and I'm talking simple terms here so I I know

there's going to already be neck beards calling me out in the comments I'm trying to do this so your normal Gamers of the world can understand Linux gaming so that's the first challenge uh bleeding edge hardware and just the different configurations it's just almost impossible the second is there's two different renderers in there uh and there's different subcategories of those renderers and I want to explain that xorg vers whan and I've done videos on these in the past if you want to go deeper Dives but the long short of it is what exor and whan

do is they render graphics on your screen and then there's compositors underneath that that can give transparency effects it can kind of sits between the renderer and the game so it can do really cool things and what valve is done is they've picked whand right whand is what they really like which is great and they have a micro compositor called gamescope you've probably heard of these terms and gamescope can do really cool stuff that you can't even do in Windows right so this is where the Linux Gamers really nerd out and like dude I can

change my resolutions really easily I can switch between like the fake full screen mode there's a lot of really cool Tech built into gamescope and whand but and this is a big butt uh Nvidia kind of sucks and doesn't work very well on Wayland a lot of Nvidia people can get it working in Wayland and support is getting better in the future sure it's almost there but just as general Linux as a whole if you're an Nvidia user you typically don't like whan that much however it is getting better it's just not quite there yet

and maybe in next year or two but uh whan came out about 10 years to you know kind of take away from exor because exor is this really old bloated mess of a renderer and it's just taken a long time to develop because it's not paid by a billion dollar company or trillion dollar company to to develop so whan's taking a long time to really kind of iron out these Kinks and frankly they're not not there yet and I don't know when it will be for the past six seven years I've been making videos I

honestly thought oh it'll be a year out when I first started and here we are so maybe this year maybe maybe next decade I don't know so that's the first thing the render and then obviously the hardware we've talked about the Nvidia issues um this is another thing where Nvidia has I guess they leaked their drivers in some way and it's kind of Open Source there's something called Nvidia - open and those open source drivers are getting better and uh they're also really rough around the edges so a lot of people install an Nvidia proprietary

driver on there where if you install that uh you need to update it with your kernel every time you do an update doesn't sound like a big deal but there's been sometimes if you've ever done Linux desktop for an extended period of time and you're an Nvidia user you probably had some time problems where the screen came up and you forgot to do like a no mode set and it came up all wavy and you're like I can't see anything but obviously there's some activity or you just get a black screen on an update because

the NVIDIA drivers or drivers I should say uh the curdle module that gets tacked on afterwards uh didn't work properly which does happen with Nvidia so a lot of people skew towards AMD this is why valve in the steam deck made them with just a built-in and baked like AMD chip or if they were going to do an external card or do like a steam machine again like they did like about 10 years ago now they would do it with an AMD GPU and not an Nvidia GPU and then desktop environment choices in here I

I I wrote down uh they mainly just stick with KDE there's a lot of different flavors out there there's a lot of different ways and I only kind of put this in here because a lot of people have existing systems or existing things that uh you like in your Linux install like some people are gnome users the weirdos out there but you know who am I to judge but KD is uh kind of their choice and I couldn't see them ever sticking or or or moving from that because it's uh only used every so often

on the steam deck but obviously if this was your desktop this is what you'd live in and I don't know if that one size fits all approach would work here obviously I think that's probably what they would push but something to consider as well so we've talked about that and probably the biggest point that I think most people Miss as well is games and Hardware are built with Windows and Mac in mind meaning you don't make a game and put it in Linux first it's always an afterthought it's always oh well does it work in

there I don't know somebody some neck beard will probably figure it out and post like some how-to script on how to make it work and that's the one thing that's really big here now Val obviously is almost a Linux first platform in a lot of ways but they still Champion Windows because all the most of their customer base is Windows users so it's really important to know that so valve obviously does but the thing about Steam OS where it will never really work for a general release what about all your other non- Steam games yes

there's heroic launcher yes you can do like UD deck and other things for emulation there's a lot of really awesome resources out there but for the average day user that's never really going to be a thing valve's not going to directly interface with epic games they're never going to you know partner with heroic launcher and bake all that in that's never going to be a thing for a general release and anybody doing Linux gaming is going to want those things there's going to be times where you're like hey I now want to play World of

Warcraft or whatever it might be on blizzard and they're going to switch off of steam and go to Blizzard or they're going to go to heroic launcher because there's some game over there that they got for free because that's the only people that use heroic launcher so these are the things that are hiccups that will never really be solved not because of a Linux shortcoming but just because it's just the way of the world it's how business is done and they're never going to build these games or hardware for Linux uh at least not in

the next several years or even probably decade uh it's just very rare that you see that now having said that I want to you know not break down all these categories these are just generally touching on hey this is what the problems of Steam OS General release is and why they would never do it Steam OS is a fantastic thing though like you need to realize that it has drastically improved the Linux gaming experience for everyone not just steam users they've done really amazing work with the entire open source community so I don't want to

uh minimize the impact of the steam deck the steam deck has been fantastic I absolutely adore the steam deck it's been a lifesaver I use it almost every single night when I'm laying in bed it is a great machine and I think that's going to continue what you're seeing with the YouTubers that brought this up is they saw a bunch of powered by Steam OS and these types of systems steam will partner with like Lenovo they were going to partner with other brands that make handhelds like AO Neo and other different uh manufacturers of these

handhelds and they will say hey here's all the little things here's how to make it nice and neat because they want them to run Steam OS and they have a captive thing a captive audience and they know hey this is the hardware that will work for it and after they say yes we're going to use all this Hardware then they go okay slap the Steam OS sticker on there that's the thing they control the Hardware which makes the experience for the enduser seamless to where they don't even know they're in Linux which is fantastic and

that's where the Steam OS future is it is going to make millions of new Linux Gamers but they're not really going to be on Linux desktop they're going to be in the steam ecosystem using these handhelds because it is a fantastic experience I would even say it's a better experience than playing it on Windows especially when you have decent Hardware doing it so what about the you know average Andy you know hey I want to install a Linux Spin and I want to play I would say bite when it comes to bite it uses Universal

spin it uses Steam OS is its Benchmark and it's very flexible it has Nvidia support it has a lot of really cool stuff baked into it and the team has done massive optimization to make a good gaming experience as long as you check like proton DB and if you're interested in basite I did a video specifically over bite which I highly recommend checking out it's a great like desktop system I did a little micro PC actually I did two videos one was a micro PC running bite and then the other one was actually bite itself

uh where I ran it on my desktop for a full month with I did like PCI pass through and a bunch of complex stuff with it so the downside to baz side I'd say is it's pretty heavy uh as you can expect from a gaming Atomic desktop but it's very reliable and flexible at the same time where Steam OS is a lot more rigid so if you're actually using your machine as a desktop I would even let's say they did have a general Steam OS release obviously I could install that uh as there is instructions

on how to install Steam OS today on your system it's just not a very good experience where bite's going to have a way better experience and there's other uh projects out there hollow ISO also gets tossed around by these YouTubers guys this went end of life the beginning of last year so hallay ISO is no more uh Chimera that that's been around for a little bit it's also another good alternative and you how's wines app if you want like a portable Steam OS that's written by Luke uh Luke Smith prominent uh blogger I think for

Android authority and he's great I've talked to Luke as well so just so many great projects out there my personal pick I'm not even give you a choice if you're a gamer and you want a good experience to me I think the best one for your average user is bazide it has the easiest setup it has less things go wrong if you're a power user and you're a gamer and you want more control than having like an atomic or a universal blue spin like bite I would recommend nuara that's also a video I made several

years back that's also another good gaming Spin and and that's kind of where I want to leave this video stop recommending or telling people Steam OS is coming out it's not and if it does it's going to suck and valve knows this and they don't want to support your 5-year-old rig running Nvidia cards they just don't it's a nightmare they're micro compositors specifically highly optimized for AMD and they Hardware uh and I don't see that changing now there are a lot of people out there that are working on getting the microc compositor game gamescope working

for uh I think basite the basite team I think just leaked a new image for NVIDIA that might have that uh does have some of that capability so it is coming but it's not going to be valve that brings it to you and I want to temper your expectations as I've ranted way too long here let me know your thoughts in the comments and uh this is the date of gaming on Linux it's never going to be 100% it's never going to beat a Windows in compatibility because things are built for Windows uh and well

I think a Chromebook will probably beat the Macs so you you know no no no Gamers actually use a Mac right right you better not that's just weird