This is good. This data will eventually help influence game developers to support Linux. It won't happen over night, but we this trend continues, it'll eventually start getting some attention.
this post was submitted on 04 Aug 2025
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Okay, I finally installed a new SSD yesterday so I could dual boot and put CachyOS on it. Played a few games and it worked surprisingly well.
But it did take quite a bit more doing than installing Windows. The USB drive wouldn't boot when made with Rufus and I don't quite get how to manage the games installed in Proton (like where is their virtual C: drive?).
I plan on migrating more of my stuff onto Linux in the coming days and will see if it can't replace Windows eventually for me.
Welcome to gaming on Linux!
how to manage the games installed in Proton (virtual C drive)
They can be found in: ~/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/compatdata//pfx/drive_c/ For Elden Ring for example the path is: ~/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/compatdata/1245620/pfx/drive_c/
Biggest blockers are games with invasive and unsupported anti cheat or very new games. Check https://www.protondb.com/ for the latest reports on games.
I've had a lot of success using Ventoy for my USB drive writing needs. Every steam game has it's own folder for it's virtual windows directory. You want to look in /home/your_name/.steam/steamapps/compatdata The folders are all strings of numbers, each being the ID of the respective steam game. You can find the ID for any steam game just by going in it's store page and looking at the URL. You don't usually need to mess with this though, just browse the game files in your /steam/common folder.
Yeah Ventoy did the trick for me eventually but then I ran into the next issue, namely that the instructions said to place the ISO on the drive. What I actually needed to do was to mount the ISO and to copy the files contained therein to USB.
Thanks for pointing out the folder location. That was it. Now I don't have to launch the Battle.Net installer each time I want to play Hearthstone (added it to Steam as an external game, which is not a bad idea, if a bit awkward).
Next will be how to share my Steam libraries between OSes and retain access to my (cloud) saves. Making first steps there with mounting my existing drives... but now I have to learn how to edit FSTAB... sigh.
Just putting the ISO directly into the ventoy folder on the USB should just work, it's odd that you had to mount it and drag the files. If you're trying to use games installed on one drive between windows and Linux, I do not recommend attempting that. Windows can't natively read Linux drive formats like ext4, and if you try to play games on an NTFS drive on Linux you WILL run into problems. Your cloud saves should just work normally though.
if you try to play games on an NTFS drive on Linux you WILL run into problems
What kind of problems? I REALLY don't want to have hundreds of gigabytes in duplicate files on my system.
For fstab editing, try running "mount " and check if it succeeds before rebooting, so you can still edit if there are mistakes. FYI if you do a sytax mistake in fstab the entire OS might fail to boot. If it happens don't panic, it's easy to fix: you can use the install usb drive to edit fstab on your disk and try again (no need to reinstall!)
There are also graphical tools. I never used them, but it might be easier if you are not feeling super sure on what to do: https://superuser.com/questions/346606/is-there-any-gui-tool-to-configure-etc-fstab
I also use steam to manage external launchers. It's a bit clunky, but it keeps proton updated and works quite well once it's set up.
Welcome to linux, and do ask around for help / tips if you need!
I tried setting up Windows 10 in a virtual machine recently and damn, what a miserable experience that was. "Please wait. We're getting things ready . . . please wait . . . We're getting things ready. Hey, you want Cortana? Tough shiat, we're installing it anyway. Do you need an Office App? Well we're going to install Live365, whether you like it or not. Also, we really want your email address. You don't have a choice. Just give us your damn email address. And your phone number, too."
Installing Linux: 15 minutes later: "You're done. Enjoy."
Haiku, 30 seconds later... Your all set
No to suggest that anyone should install Windows, but if you install Rufus then you can make the Window ISO skip most of the bullshit questions and TPM requirements before you write your flash drive.
Microsoft Recall and Steam Deck and Proton are why.
It would be so hilarious to see historians refer to the market shift as "The Great Microsoft Recall" as like a literal recall in addition to the name of the feature.
I've been running Bazzite OS on my living room big screen gaming PC since May. It's a really slick fedora-based distro that installs out of the box with Steam, proton, and graphics drivers ready-to-launch for gaming. It was really easy to use, and my games worked perfectly.
My high school age son got a new AMD proc/mb for his birthday, and I was surprised when he said he wanted to try dual booting Bazzite and Windows when we set it up. 2 weeks later, and he decided to kill the Windows boot and just use Bazzite full time. He has no linux experience and just figures it out.
Windows 11 is shit and Linux alternatives are prettier, easier to use, don't shove AI down your throat, and don't steal your data for profit. The time has come.
Your son is a badass.
Linux really is in a good place I've been on it for some months now. It feels like win 7, it doesn't get in your way, it does what you want it to do when you want it to. And if you fuck something up its because you fucked it up... go fix it...
"Fixing it" has been a lot easier to do lately as well. Most distros set up a rollback feature of some kind these days.
I don't remember what i did... but i completely fucked my system up... linux wouldnt start at all...
I tried looking online for help and i basically needed a flash drive with linux to "fix" the issue...
I didn't have that, i lost it or whatever...
I took a shot with asking chat gpt and for all its hate... it was somehow able to explain some weird boot loader thing I've never heard of and i punched in some commands into the command line, and everything was fixed...
Im not sure the point of the story, but don't go changing system level shit when your trying to fix your graphics card from crashing while playing no mans sky... i did fix the issue though changing the desktop from cinnamon to xde or something...
But its like a memory bug or something that hopefully gets fixed for amd at some point
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Yeah, by a whole permille I bet.
I've been running Linux on my desktop for more than 30 years, so I've switched for a while. And while I'd certainly like to see it become more commonplace, I'm not sure a few decimal points are really going to change anything. It's nice that it's making progress, of course, but all in all, it's rather insignificant.
While it's under 10, or more likely 15%, nobody will care about it.
Developers already care about it. Not all of them, not all the way, but many are aiming for steam deck compatibility via proton. It's not perfect, and some devs are vehemently holding out, but it's progress!
That doesn't seem to take a lot of effort. It's still a windows binary. And it's unfortunately simpler than figuring out if the user runs X or not.
macOS is barely 15% and people care a lot about it.
People care a lot about macOS because you can charge users $15 for a GUI wrapper around a terminal command and they will pay and even recommend your app. I'm not even joking, there are a thousand examples of apps like this. If your app actually does anything, you can charge $30 and they will pay.
Now on Linux you could release the cure for cancer for $0.99 and you'd get screamed at. And I say that as a Linux user. Which means you need significantly higher numbers than macOS to achieve the same revenue, which also means the companies developing the commercial software that holds back adoption of Linux will take a long while before starting to care.
In all seriousness fuck charging for cures, especially for cancer. Life is about more than getting paid. I just lost someone yesterday to cancer so I'm sure this is an outsized response, but seriously, cancer fucking sucks.
not outsized at all, capitalist greed sucks even harder in the medical field. its literally playing with people's lives for money.
Isn't it the same on Windows tbh?
The knowledgeable users on MacOS install Homebrew (or nix if being a hipster) and get most of their cool tools for that.
With Windows, the default assumption is that the user has less money than a MacOS user so all the useless shit on Microsoft Store is cheaper than MacOS, but it's still money for software that shouldn't be paid.
It's not so much about users switching, it's more about the ones that will stick with it. And that we can't know for a few years yet.
I've been using Arch for a little over a year, and it's been fun. I've learned so much more about computers and Linux itself. I highly recommend trying out Linux and you can do it here: https://distrosea.com/ - It's a website where you can try out different Linux distros in your web browser.
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