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.
It’s because SteamOS identifies itself as Arch. Omitting this information is either dishonest or uninformed.
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.
Steamos identifies itself as “SteamOS Holo x86_64”. Either way it is Arch-based and is appropriate to group with the other Arch-based distros.
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?
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 StesmOS.
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.
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.
Good on you for owning up to it though. Cheers mate!
Never attribute to incompetence what may be attributed to sleepy posting.
How? SteamOS is still Linux.
Because you hear “Arch” and it gives the impression that they’re being played on a Linux desktop, not a Steam Deck
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.
They’re all linux, friend.
Yeah, I misspoke lol. I meant to say Arch but I shortcirced or something.
btw
Dang it’s me. The % .10 Mint guy over here. Good shit.
I do most of my gaming on mint, but not for much longer as I am going to move my new configs and change to the same distro as my laptop at some point
Minty Bois unite!
We like our shit boring and working. Lol.
Green Ubuntu squad is here and ready to serve
Look you’re not really living life unless something explodes on your system at least once a year and you have to go fucking around with a tty prompt.
mint’s just as valid as any other distro!
Sure! Except Mint is the one I use. So it’s special to me. :)
Ah, I see how what I said sounded.
I meant it as a positive, as in “mint is also good”!
Sure! I didn’t take it any bad way.
6 hours of Monster Hunter: World today on my Mint desktop while my wife hunted with me on her Steam Deck!
If Mint would just implement HDR now, it would be my perfect system.
BtwOS is finally seeing proper representation :3
Based
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!
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?
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.
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?
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.
I wander if there are several of us gaming on openSUSE …
There are dozens of us!
Exactly. It’s not broken, so I never had any reason to fix it.
How do you do it ?
Hello! I’ve been using openSUSE Tumbleweed as my daily (as much as I can anyway, some things still only truly work best under Windows unfortunately) but here are some things I did to get openSUSE ready for gaming:
- Open up YaST. I prefer to use KRunner for most of my tasks, and to bring that up I use Windows key + Space on my setup, yours could be different if you’ve tinkered any.
- Go to the Software Repositories and ensure that OpenSUSE Tumbleweed Tools for Gamers repo is checked. Close out when done.
- Open up Software Management next. In here, search for gamescope. Tick the box to the left of the gamescope row. (I don’t have mangoHUD installed on my own, but you can search for it and install it too if you prefer. I don’t know what it does, so look it up and research it if you think you might want it!)
- Next, search for gamemode. Tick the box to the left of it as we did previously.
- Click the Installation Summary tab near the top, then click Accept near the lower right if you are satisfied with what is being installed. It never hurts to always read about whatever you are installing!
- Open up Discover with KRunner (or however you please) and search for Steam. On mine, there were two options. One option is the flatpak version which I didn’t like because of the way it can’t interact with the system files as easily as the one provided by openSUSE themselves. So, I installed that one, but of course you can install either one you prefer! I just wanted my folders to be more legible/easily accessible for myself.
- Depending on what GPU you have, you might be ready for Steam to download some games and play. If you have an nvidia GPU like me, you will probably need to make sure your drivers for it are installed correctly and updated.
- I recommend you play around with some of the Steam settings, but the ones I want to focus on for you here are the games that aren’t native to Linux. For example, Metaphor: ReFantazio does not support Linux out of the box. So, what I had to do was click the game in question, and then click the cog wheel to the right and usually under the banner picture for the game. Click Properties, and then click Compatibility on the left hand side of this window. Tick the box next to “force the use of a specific Steam Play compatibility tool”, and now a dropdown box will show up underneath that. Click this dropdown box and notice the options for the version of Proton you now can use. I think Experimental might work for the most part, but for Metaphor I used 9.0-4 (as of writing, and even then I still see some graphical hiccups quite constantly, but I don’t want to move over to a different Proton version because of how I have personally set my system up. It shouldn’t be as much of a headache for you.) If whatever version you choose to use doesn’t work, select another version and keep going until you find one that does work. If none work, I won’t be much help, but you can always look into trying through Lutris, as it will give you more fine grain control I believe?
- Test. Test. Test.
- Enjoy the fruits of your labor!
Hopefully that helps out some. Generally when I run into a problem, I’ll search like so:
how to get xxxx running on openSUSE Tumbleweed? openSUSE Tumbleweed xxxx issueand so on and so on.
Good luck on your journey!
P.S. Steam can be kinda wonky on Wayland, which I forgot to mention in the steps, but to fix the flickering issue with my setup, I went into Steam’s settings > Interface and turned off “enable GPU accelerated rendering in web views” and the flickering stopped.
*Also, I think Wayland works better for playing newer games. I just know that on my own setup, xorg runs like garbage even on the desktop, while in Wayland, it is as buttery smooth as it can be, even better than Windows! So, look up how to change into that mode. You can log out and do it right from the login screen!
I’ve been considering these: Crystal, Archcraft, Arco, Exodia. Are these any good?
I’ve looked at Archcraft (not any of the others), and the only thing that seems unique about it is that it’s riced (themed) out of the box and offers several DE options. Otherwise, there’s not really anything that sets it apart from, say, EndeavorOS (which has a handful of DEs and a great install process) or CachyOS (which has a nice install process, an optimized kernel and packages, and as many or more DE options as Archcraft).
The other thing that gives me pause with Archcraft is the fact that it’s maintained by only one person. What happens if/when they get burned out?
Theming is already an advantage, i tried theming in VM and broke the system with it. If the maintainer stops it, i’ll just switch to an another one. Also, what is Cachy based on?
Cachy is Arch. They use automated build processes to optimize everything from the kernel to packages.
Hello from Bazzite, just floating along somewhere in the numbers~!
I think we’re probably counted under “Fedora”
Well I use
ArchFedora btwBazzite is by far my favorite linux so far and great for gaming
Isn’t it because SteamOS is based on Arch?
Guix! Yay!
Previously was a Manjaro gamer, and had a perfectly seamless experience.
Migrated to Fedora, got some weird new issues, but running games through Steam solves everything.
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
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.
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.
