Sadly enough, the same is applicable for regular programs…

If it were only this hard for bad stuff, you might have a point, but this also being an issue for good stuff is why linux is such a PITA to use…

I think you’ve gotten some good replies here.

My comment isn’t meant to scare away people, but to keep our feet on the ground. Linux gaming has made amazing progress. If you play recent, mainstream games, it’ll be very well documented, and most things will work, unless they’re explicitly made to not work (such as certain anti cheat systems).

If you play lesser known indie games, really old games, or more specific things (not sure how good VR support is?), you’ll quickly encounter issues that may or may not be well documented. Also, in another reply thread to my post, someone commented a game not working because he has multiple monitors on linux. Stuff like that is also still happening.

So it can be really decent, but know that you might encounter issues. Give it a try and see if it works for the games that are the most important for you :).

I think you’ve gotten some good replies here.

My comment isn’t meant to scare away people, but to keep our feet on the ground. Linux gaming has made amazing progress. If you play recent, mainstream games, it’ll be very well documented, and most things will work, unless they’re explicitly made to not work (such as certain anti cheat systems).

If you play lesser known indie games, really old games, or more specific things (not sure how good VR support is?), you’ll quickly encounter issues that may or may not be well documented. Also, in another reply thread to my post, someone commented a game not working because he has multiple monitors on linux. Stuff like that is also still happening.

So it can be really decent, but know that you might encounter issues. Give it a try and see if it works for the games that are the most important for you :).

It’s just my experience when playing around with bazzite on my legion go.

But look at the other replies, there are people mentioning issues they encounter (like one guy replying a game not working because he’s using multiple monitors. If that’s breaking games on linux… that’s a far better description of the current state than the title of this thread).

And some of the other replies here are “launch steam, press play”…

1. why are we all running to steam when we’re using linux to have freedom of software? I’d expect more GOG love in a thread like this.
2. steam is indeed nice, but we also have lutris, and heroic, and i’m probably missing some other launchers here.

And i’ll give you a quick example of what i encountered: i thought of giving visual pinball a go on my legion go. It’s a free project, not on steam. Checked lutris, it was on there, but an ancient version, not kept up to date. But since the latest version, they have an actual linux build, gave that one a go, and had to manually tinker with it expecting a symlink for a certain dll to exist, but bazzite is fedora based, and uses a different convention for that dll than other distros, so had to manually make a symlink so the game could find it.

I’m a programmer, the above is an hour of frustration until i have solved it, i can manage. But that’s an example of what i encounter. I’ve got some older games in my steam library that have warnings that there are controller issues with them, …

And that is just the linux experience. Wrong distro? it might not work. Multiple screens? It might not work. The latest hardware? You’ll never guess it, but it might not work. It’s tuesday? It might not work… I’m amazed with proton etc… how much progress linux gaming has made, but we have to keep our feet on the ground, and be honest with ourselves. If we act as if we’re already there, while we’re not. How will we actually get where we need to get if everyone acts as if it’s good enough already?

As if that’s an acceptable explanation.

Why the fuck is that breaking games… Reminds me of when i was playing around with linux 15 years ago, and i saw how poor multimonitor support was compared to windows back then. And they’re still managing to have stupid issues like this in 2025…

This is why the linux desktop keeps failing “i want to play a game but it doesn’t work because i have 2 monitors”… Who wants to use that as an OS??

I know, i’ve got steam, and lutris, and heroic. And some games work in some of these things. For some free games i only find ancient versions in these launchers, …

All i’m saying is that it’s still far away from “just working”. It’s made incredible leaps, but if someone reading this will think “this’ll be easy”, and they try to play an older or less known game, they’ll quickly be disillusioned…

If you only play new popular games, and buy them on steam (and not GOG which is a platform that’s far more aligned with the linux way of thinking), sure. But i’ve got plenty of old steam games that have issues, or require me to muck around with custom control stuff, have warnings that they might not be fully supported, …

I love that we’re all moving to linux to be free, and then be using steam iso GOG XD.

And how many run on linux via a well documented way?

I’ve been playing around with bazzite a bit, and for sure, i can run a lot of games on it, but you often end up googling which launcher to use, which settings to use, … And then even if you find something, it doesn’t always work.

Linux is making good progress in this regard, but this title feels a bit over optimistic (or at least, users who take it at face value will quickly be disappointed when they can’t get 90% of their games to work).

Which would be most people?

meh, it’s not as if there’s anything better on TV

I’m not supposed to tell you this, but this is not random. you’re basically in the truman show, and you’re the central character. They noticed you thinking about it, so made sure it became relevant again!

I don’t think it has much to do with how “complex or not” it is, but rather how common it is.

It can completely fail on very simple things that are just a bit obscure, so it has too little training data.

And it can do very complex things if there’s enough training data on those things.

Do you have more concrete examples? I’m reasonably familiar with OpenXML, and seeing the date issues in microsoft systems (Excel having the same bug that considers 1900 a leap year, to stay compatible with Lotus Notes), i can imagine them redefining everything just to be in full control ^^'…

The point i guess with the main OS’s like windows/macOS, is that microsoft/apple put in the time to support most edge cases, and most things you can try either work, or aren’t that hard to make work (assuming you don’t go against things they try to force. But that’s not something that most users we’re talking about here do). So for windows, want to install that app for windows XP from 20 years ago? no problem. As mentioned in the article here: want to install that up to date program made for another distro? good luck…

And that’s in the end what it boils down to… It’s a fragmented ecosystem, and many slightly advanced things require that you understand how your computer & OS work. Things that a slightly advanced user can handle in Windows via some UI, will most likely be far harder on linux…

I’d love to use a linux desktop more, but sadly my time is also precious, and i just don’t have the motivation to use it fighting with the linux desktop >_<…

I’ve heard this comment about OpenXML (the xml format of the office documents) before, and i’m a bit on the fence about it.

It’s of course indeed ridiculously complex, but so is office. Microsoft both adds a shit ton of functionality to their documents, and keeps an impressive amount of backwards compatibility.

In the past i heard complaints about part of the OpenXML spec that also allows older binary data in there for backwards compatibility reasons, which of course means for OSS implementations that they don’t just have to implement this spec, but also the older spec that came before to be truly compatible with everything a modern office version can open.

But on the other hand, if i look at it from the side of Microsoft, they opened up their format, they’ve got a gazillion functionalities, should they remove functionality to appease the open source developers? If so which? Should they stop being backwards compatible with documents of decades ago to appease the open source developers? If so how long should they support? Are you going to tell their customers?

Office is an immense program with an immense amount of legacy features, backwards compatibility, …

It’s incredibly complex by nature. And might they have made the format more complex to dissuade competition? Could be. However, in this instance Occam’s razor pushes me more to “write a huge program over a timespan of many decades, with thousands upon thousands of programmers working on it, and you’ll indeed most likely end up with something very complex…”

Then i don’t know what you’re doing with your computer, but every time i use linux, all those things that are “awesome and just work on linux” somehow still have lots of annoying gotchas that waste too much of my time.

I’ve got some nice linux servers running that i’m really happy with. But once you go for the linux desktop, it’s just a world of pain compared to windows, no matter how you look at it. I’m more than experienced enough to get it running in the end, but claiming that linux “just works” is delusional…

Just the fact of how the ecosystem is fractured (which is also mentioned in the article here, with running a debian package on fedora), is already something that’ll make it too complicated for a lot of people to handle. And even the things “that just work”, just don’t. For example, i’ve got a steamdeck like device now, with bazzite (steamos like OS). Yes, it’s amazing at running windows games in linux. I heard so many people say how with proton “running windows games on linux just works”. If you stick to the ultra popular games, it for sure does. Go to a game that’s a bit older or lesser known, and no it isn’t. Make time to figure out settings to get it to run, tinker with controller mappings, and in the end, it might just still not work. And pretty much everything on linux feels that way, the initial impression is decent. If you stay on the safe path, it’ll work pretty well. Do something a bit less common: you’re on your own.

And that’s its commonly accepted for trolls to blame the user, and be like “it’s free, so accept it the way it is” when someone dares to ask questions or … even… (do i dare say it?)… complain… Doesn’t make for the most constructive environment…

Linux has achieved many great things, but the linux desktop sure has its use if you’re willing to spend your time on it, but acting as if it’s a better experience than the windows desktop is just delusional. There’s no other way to put it.

Is it worthless to say “(the current iteration of) AI won’t be a huge revolution”. For sure, it might be, the next decade will determine that.

Is it worhtless to say that many companies are throwing massive amounts of money at it, and taking huge risks on it, while it clearly won’t deliver for them? I would say no, that is useful.

And in the end, that’s what this complaint seems like for me. The issue isn’t “AI might be the next big thing”, but “We need to do everything with AI right now”, and then in a couple of years when they see how bad the results are, and how it negatively impacted them, noone will have seen it coming…

This topic was about the larger power market, so big industrial things. But even for people putting solar panels at home. Make it more expensive than getting regular power and see how that progresses… There are of course always some fanatics who will want it for the cause, but most people do it because it’s also economically advantageous for them.

I’ve been trying to find how much % of (renewable) power generated these days is from home solar installations, but it seems hard to find…

But try to follow the topic a bit, we were talking about the big players on the grid, not small home solar installations that don’t take part in the system discussed here.

I love how the title is basically also the problem.

Who the fuck has some obscure library that is the basis of many other tools as their “favourite project”, even though it might be a fundamental part of many other things that are actually the favourites of people.

My premise of how things currently work, so what the current incentives are for more renewable energy is completely flawed?

Sure, make renewable energy not profitable and see what happens…

I get what you WANT the world to be like, but it ISN’T like that right now, and it’s good to have aspirations on how it should be. But can we just accept what it is, and what implications that has for how things work?

If you can get your dream up & running overnight, go for it. Until then making sure green energy is profitable is the way forward for it, whether we like it or not.