I'm a pretty prolific gamer, but at the start of the year I finally kicked Windows to the curb.
It's been fine. Surprisingly few games I'm interested in to begin with have anticheat that doesn't work on Linux, and it's comforting to know games aren't allowed to just shove trash into kernel space at will.
I dropped my Game Pass sub immediately after they upped the sub price and unplugged my Xbox Series X. I have a Bazzite machine, but I've had issues with the NVidia drivers and not enough patience to deal with it. So i'm currently ONLY using my Steam Deck OLED for gaming. When i want to play big AAA games at my desk (SD in docked mode), i'll use GeForce Now and all of it has been a wonderful experience, even the online "competitive" FPS games like BF6. Much better than my experience on either Windows or Xbox. I'll never go back... and i'm impatiently waiting on my Steam Machine!
If you play older games, Linux ironically works better than windows now for stability. The only game I have seen any issues with (note I don't really play multiplayer much) is the Harry Potter game, but proton eventually fixed that.
Yep same; have had Linux on my laptop for a decade plus, but finally switched my desktop over a few years ago, and I have no regrets. The real magic is that I no longer feel the need to do any research before buying a game; it usually just works. Granted, I don't really play competitive multiplayer games, so YMMV (but even that might be about to change if the Steam Machine sells well enough).
Until Valve starts shipping native SteamOS games, they were and are right.
Games are developed on Windows, using Windows APIs and development tools, and then Valve does the job studios don't see any value in spending development resources on, even though some of them use engines that also target GNU/Linux.
Talking about Linux gaming with Proton is no different than if Windows users would start talking about Windows being their favourite Linux distribution due to WSL 2.0.
A lot of people give high praise to Yabridge, but I myself haven't tried using it for my existing VST library and just found alternative plugins that work with linux.
The sad thing is linux, like MacOS, is often vastly superior for audio routing and latency.
Personally I gave up all my audio productions tools that don't support Linux, but since music/audio work is just a hobby for me that's easier to do. I do miss my old DAWs (Ableton/Reason), and I miss a lot of VST plugins.
Not everyone can just re-base their setup on linux (for me Renoise & VCV Rack), but I can get plenty of joy out of a complete lack of Windows, license management crapware, invasive rootkit level DRM, etc.
Side benefit: it pushes me to get some more external hardware, but I have to do investigations on how some companies do firmware updates which often require MacOS/Windows or Chrome Browser (fucking webmidi looking at you Novation)
Fruity Loops 4 was my first DAW, and yeah it has been hard to ever leave computer based production behind since then.
The only hardware sequencing that has ever clicked for me is the Polyend Tracker, which is just a tracker so I hesitate to even call it hardware sequencing. I also dig Elektron's sequencing, but its an entirely different headspace I have to spend time in to get used to everytime I fire one up.
I'm lucky that most of my projects only use 4-12 channels of midi/audio, because I can't stand massive projects with 40+ channels of things going on like some friends I've worked with. Hard to imagine trying to do that in hardware alone.
It is a VERY weird device to say the least. I found myself not really enjoying it. The issue with hardware is when you want a final result mastering and splitting up tracks is like teeth extraction.
Vs using software where you can just export stems and hand it off to someone else.
However, with software you end up spending a lot of money on non tangable goods.
I can sell my Polyend. Selling a software license normally isn't possible.
Plus say you own a license to version 10.x. The day version 11.x comes out, the previous version might be worthless.
Vs vintage audio gear which might actually go up in value.
I was pretty surprised that the Polyend Tracker could spit out channel stems at least. I ended up selling mine when I needed some extra money to made ends meet, will buy one again eventually.
>However, with software you end up spending a lot of money on non tangable goods.
Yeah it sucks that this also keeps us locked into platforms for so much longer. I've been buying Reason updates for a decade, and own a bunch of Korgs VST releases of their hardware synths (Op-Six, Modwave, etc). If I can at least get the Korg stuff running on Linux one day that would be nice. It might be possible but I haven't tried.
>Plus say you own a license to version 10.x. The day version 11.x comes out, the previous version might be worthless.
Shout out to Renoise for being affordable and you get a whole versions worth of updates. Which after over a decade I still haven't had to pay again, but will gladly when the time comes. Plus I can even run it on a raspberry pi now.
It's been fine. Surprisingly few games I'm interested in to begin with have anticheat that doesn't work on Linux, and it's comforting to know games aren't allowed to just shove trash into kernel space at will.