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Steam has now officially stopped supporting Windows 7, Windows 8, and Windows 8.1.
(www.theverge.com)
this post was submitted on 02 Jan 2024
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How's the experience, overall? I love the Steam Deck OS UI, so I'm thinking of building an AMD machine to run Chimera OS. I've heard nothing but problems when it comes to Windows 11.
I don't intend on playing competitive shooters, so idc about kernel anticheat keeping me out of Call of Duty or whatever.
I play exclusively on Linux. Almost every game I tried worked flawlessly. The very few that didn't, crashed on startup or a few minutes after. If you don't play AAA online games with anticheat then you should be good. As a rule of thumb, if it works on the Deck then it will work on any Linux distro.
Hell yeah! I've only experienced a few crashes on SD, and so far only on 2 emulated games that I'm okay with just not playing. I love that Valve started really investing in Linux support to make it possible for idiots like me to have somewhere to turn when Microsoft phones it in.
If you are using steam, there's protondb, where you can check how well game runs on linux
I appreciate the link, but I was more asking about the general experience than about game compatibility. I have a Steam Deck and am enjoying the game functionality, and I haven't hit too many snags in general PC usage on it yet in desktop mode (but I've barely used it for that). I'm really just asking around as a medium level Windows user about fully replacing my Windows laptop with a Chimera build to see what concessions I'll need to accept to have realistic expectations. I'm optimistic that frustrations will be mostly at the "dang it, oh well" level which I could either live with or find a layman level solution to kinda fix. So far, the only real concern I've found with my plan to build a modern Chimera steam machine is that the parts I want will cost me like $1500, and that's pretty hard to justify when I already have a Steam Deck, PS5, and a 2015 Windows 10 laptop. It's another expensive device that kinda just does what my current shit can already do, just all in one rig. If my laptop or PS5 died, I'd have a lot more reason to go for it.
If you already have a Steam Deck, then you are basically already familiar with Linux gaming. The software-side of things (Steam, Proton, etc) is going to be the same on desktop Linux.
If a game is compatible with the Deck, then it is also comaptible with desktop.
I've been a Linux gamer for about a decade now. I stick with single player games, so I generally don't have any issues, other than a minor tweak or DLL override I sometimes have to do, but that's no different than trying to run older games on Windows.
Only real issue would be installing mods, which is possible, but could require some extra work, such as manually setting DLL overrides. I've had trouble getting Reloaded II to work in Linux, for example, even though they claim they support Linux.
Maybe the opinion of someone who switched recently would be more useful to you. I'm probably a little biased since I've been exclusively running linux for almost 20 years now
It's very easy to create a bootable USB stick to just try it out and, if you have enough hard disk to spare and your experience is fine, make it dual boot. This way you can assess if it works for you or not
Wow, I can't believe I didn't think of using a USB stick to try this out. I feel like an idiot lol.
But now that I think about it, I don't think it will work right because my laptop is Intel/Nvidia and I keep seeing that Chimera doesn't work great unless you're running AMD/AMD. If it runs at all, I'm sure it won't be representative of the experience I'd have with the build I would want. But that's something pretty straightforward that I completely overlooked, so thanks for the suggestion!
I'm a fairly casual gamer these days, but nonetheless it's been a very long time since I encountered a game on Steam that wouldn't run at least tolerably well under Proton, with most of them running flawlessly. As long as you check the DB before buying, you're fine. As you say, it's only really the anticheat software which causes major road blocks most of the time.
Performance is amazingly better on Linux via Proton than it is on Windows quite a lot of the time. It's an incredible achievement.
For non Steam games, Lutris also provides as easy, one-click experience for getting many games working, and although I don't have a lot of personal experience with it (Steam covers most of my needs) when I have used it it's been a pleasure, and it has a good reputation.
I use bog standard un-tweaked Ubuntu. One would assume that the performance on the specialist gaming distros may be even better still.
I'm always blown away by how well gaming on Linux is in this era.
Especially if you're not gonna play stuff that the anticheat locks you out from, the experience is great. As other commenters have said, ProtonDB.com has resources for how well games on steam run under Proton / On Linux.
Although, I would recommend Nobara Linux over Chimera OS due to a lack of experience with Proton and other gaming-related tools (as in, Chimera developers' lack of experience). Nobara Linux comes from the same developer as Proton-GE (GloriousEggroll). Proton is the tool that Valve developed to run Windows games pretty much seemlessly, and Proton-GE adds extra features and patches on-top of it that can help support more games or get the slightest extra bit of performance out of Proton. Nobara Linux extends this concept to the entire OS, with a stable Fedora base that gets a major update every ~6 months.
Nobara also consitently outperforms other Linux Distributions and even Windows regularly.
(This doesn't mean that you don't get updates for 6 months, just that major releases, e.g from 39 to 40 happen every ~6 months)
Ooh, I'll look into that! I was interested in Chimera because of some articles and videos I've seen which were praising its similarities to Steam OS. I liked booting up into Steam directly via the controller like it's just another console, but having the freedom to use it as a PC. And it seemed popular enough that if I hit a snag I could probably find somebody out there who had the same issue and already found and posted a fix. Plus continuing support, which is something I learned is not the case for HoloISO. I guess I was looking for the closest thing to Steam OS which is Arch based, so I thought I had to run an Arch Linux to have a good console-like UI/UX.
It's sublime. Pretty much every game you throw at it works perfectly.
Don't lie them.
There are games that don't work, Some due to draconian and oppressive DRM or invasive anti-cheat. Some don't work just because.
Generally, the ones that work dont just because will eventually become playable. I've had a few games I had to back burner for a while, but a few months later became perfectly playable with proton updates and such.
But on the flipside I have Day 1'd quite a few games, some perfectly (Mostly games with older engines like Starfield), some not so perfectly (Like Cyberpunk 2077), but they were all very playable with patience and understanding.
@MrVilliam I suggest you hit protondb.com and check the games you commonly play. If they are gold or higher you should be good.
As for Distro, I'd personally recomend Nobara for gaming on Linux. Its a great experience, smooth, and has pretty much everything you need packaged in the install already, so you don't have to deal with any tedious bullshit like having to compile something if its not packaged for your distro.
I dont mean to repeat myself, but patience and understanding is going to be key in successfully getting it going. You're gonna be learning a completely new OS, and new procedures, from scratch. There will be moments where it may be frustrating trying to figure things out, but you don't have to be a Tech Savant to get through it, and once you get your head wrapped around it.. installing and playing will pretty much be as seamless as you're used to on windows. Its not perfect by any means, regardless of what anyone says, but its pretty god damn good where its at now, and is rapidly getting better.