Yeah, except the Steam Deck has been giving a huge reason to provide compatibility with Linux, and Valve/WINE have been pushing hard as hell to help facilitate it.

Unity pushed me to go with Godot. Unity already had a Linux editor, but this has pushed me to also move from Photoshop to Krita, since we’re in that kind of mood.

I tried several games last night that were rated gold or platinum rather than native on ProtonDB. While some people provided launch options, they all worked flawlessly out of the box. I’m even the first person to file a compatibility report for Furry Cyberfucker, let’s fucken go.

Piper let me configure my mouse and keyboard without the need for GHub. My HOTAS works flawlessly without the Saitek software, since I’m used to configuring buttons in-game.

I tried this last year, and went back to Windows with the same “it’s not quite there” response as everyone there. But I’ve been keeping an eye on this since I had to use ndiswrapper to get Ubuntu to play nice with my wlan adapter, and this month, I installed PopOS, and have been getting along pretty well. I haven’t encountered a single issue or compatibility that outright breaks this move for me, and I’m generally stubborn as shit to learn new things.

It may not be the “year of the Linux desktop” for everyone, but it is for me. If you’re expecting some monolithic mass adoption, keep dreaming, but this progress doesn’t seem to be slowing down.