Linux Gaming
Discussions and news about gaming on the GNU/Linux family of operating systems (including the Steam Deck). Potentially a $HOME
away from home for disgruntled /r/linux_gaming denizens of the redditarian demesne.
This page can be subscribed to via RSS.
Original /r/linux_gaming pengwing by uoou.
Resources
WWW:
Discord:
IRC:
Matrix:
Telegram:
Thats pretty much my argument when people say "There are more bugs on Linux than Windows! Linux bad!".
No, there are not more, there are more found. There are just as many (or more) on Windows, but never found or properly reported. Which is a bad thing.
There are more bugs reported. That makes all the difference.
People used to closed source everything are trained to eat shit and find a workaround.
Hi, Micro$oft Community Advisor Alicia here!
I'm sorry to hear that your software occasionally crashes. Trying some of these steps may help you:
- Go to Windows Update and search for the latest drivers
- Run 'sfc /scannow' in command prompt
- Reinstall Windows
Please mark my post as "Answer" if this helped you solve your problem! Thank you!
Jfc every goddamn time I need to fix something on my work laptop this is the exact (and only) response I find
This is a good point and one I think explains this phenomenon well.
Linux users are more willing to report bugs because they actually get fixed. Especially when the bug report is extremely detailed.
Some time ago all the tech "news" headlines where "Linux is less secure than Windows, look at all the CVEs open !", well yes Linux has tones more CVE reported because anyone can audit the code, bugs are discovered and reported, people are informed and can put mitigations in place, unlike with Windows...
Also, statistically, a lot of Linux users are more technically minded and capable of identifying and reporting issues. This will naturally lead to higher reporting numbers, skewing stats.
I always always write strong feedback and extensive bug reporting for games. Doesn’t matter the platform. However, my daily is Linux and my daytime job is director for cloud eng and ops which is all linux distros. We write and manage massive nix fleets. Shit my career started writing and doing linux kernel work. It really made me appreciate good feedback and extensive reports on bugs.
BTW I use templeOS
Based and holy pilled
That doesn't surprise me.
Linux users are biased towards higher technical expertise, and they have a different mindset - most of the software that we use is the result of collaborative projects, and we're often encouraged to help the devs out. And while the collaborative situation might not be true for game development, the mindset leaks out.
And this is one of the reasons why we should continue buying indie games and supporting indie devs!
I've never once touched the logs button until I used linux. Over my time asking for help with anything wrong on my machine I've been asked to provide logs, replication steps, what went wrong and what's supposed to happen. This has trained me to be a good reporter and sometimes these issues help me fix them myself. Thank you Linux community for providing these skills. This isn't gaming industry specific but even with things like protonvpn, vmware, virtualbox, and stuff on Arch I use.
Part of it too is that logging on Windows is just dogshit. No one uses event viewer so it's not like the end user even knows where to look for logs, and most of the shit in there is like"lol computer crashed and idk why go fuck yourself"
Some games have such community, that it treats life as this game. For example community of certain factory optimization simulator was so enlightened, that optimized it and made 30% faster.
But if too many Linux users now have a lot of games to play the development of all softwares will grind to a halt.
My only problem with reporting bugs in a game, despite knowing how to report a bug and playing a lotta games, is that I don't always have the knowledge a thing happening is a bug and not the intended design. It's not like I, as a regular every day player, have insight into what was supposed to happen that would indicate a bug.
Obviously a bug like my guy doesn't jump despite pressing the jump button is pretty easy to recognize. But how am I to know the damage calculation is fucked up when I'm not told what the formula is supposed to be?
That is still extremely valuable feedback.
"If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck."
If it looks like a duck, swims like a dog and barks like a dog but I am still telling you it is a plain old duck, there is a miscommunication between me as a game developer and you as the player.
I think part of this that I'm not seeing talked about, and perhaps confused for "more tech savvy users", is just the user hostility of Windows.
9 times out of 10 when a Linux app or game crashes I get a verbose error and more often than not one that I can simply copy and paste.
9 times out of 10 when Windows, or much of windows software, crashes it gives some random number or code and in a window I can't even copy and paste out of.
My skill level doesn't change. Linux just isn't user hostile in nature making it easy to search for fixes and report issues. Where as on windows I can't summon the care or effort to manually transcribe the error so I can then do something with it.
I would report so many more bugs if there was a way to do so easily, in app, without having to create an account somewhere or signup to some website or specific forum. Give me a one-click “report bug” box and I’ll do it. BG3 did this well.
BG3 did everything well, no surprises there
Bc linux users are not only more tech literate on average, but also have more of a sense of community and shared responsibility. Yeah, if we get annoyed by something, we know we're not the only ones, and if we can't fix it ourselves, we tell the ppl who can. You don't just assume it will always be broken, or assume a future update will magically fix it.
Real nice unique looking game too. Gameplay is good but the look and feel you can tell was a lot of effort and thought and love. Definitely glad I made the purchase especially after seeing this post. Cool dev
One issue with developing for linux is that userspace isn't consistent between repos. Steam has solved this by vendoring all of the most commonly used libraries like zlib or whatever.
Assuming the bug is in-game then this information would definitely be useful for developers.
Edit: meant distros instead of repos
I remember a gamedev complaining about this on Twitter but the outcome he came to was that he hated that Linux users submitted bug reports, stating the OS itself was broken and he refused to help any of them.
That's surprising to me. I get the vast majority of bug reports from Windows users. But I use auto generated crash reports that the user clicks OK to send and it's a music app, not a game, which might be different.
contributed a comma in some obscure Gentoo pkg to fix a compile error I had. think it was a 1 line dif. yw
I don't daily drive Linux anymore but it taught me to write up better bug reports