Four years, gamers have been asking, is this the year of Linux gaming?
And for just as long, the answer has been no.
Traditionally, Linux has actually been kind of terrible for gaming.
Missing drivers, incompatible games, and hours in the terminal just to launch Morrowind.
I play Koji, by the way. But these days, you can pick up a Steam Deck, press play,
and games just work. This might actually be the year, but why now?
And how is Microsoft suddenly the one trying to catch up?
For the last 30 years, Windows has been synonymous
with PC gaming, not because Linux machines
are not capable of running games, but because very little was built for them.
DirectX, the graphics API that most games use,
only works with Microsoft. Windows 95 is the game platform.
Thanks, Bill. Anti-cheat has been Windows only,
and Wine, the tool that translated Windows games to Linux, in spite of the developer's best efforts,
was often hit or miss. But that didn't stop people from trying.
Hobbyists built console-style Linux gaming OSes that were great for retro emulation, like Battissera,
but these were always kind of tinkerer projects. For Linux gaming to go mainstream,
somebody with real resources had to enter the chat.
And Valve did. You guys know Valve, the makers of Steam,
where you probably bought half or more of your PC games.
That's a pretty lucrative business, but it relies on the platform owner,
in this case, Microsoft for Windows, to allow you to conduct your business.
And ever since Windows 8, Microsoft has been making
slow but steady efforts to move more and more app acquisition
to the Microsoft Store. That's a troubling trend for someone
who has their own app store on Windows.
Also, as just an app on somebody else's platform,
Valve had no way to touch the operating system or the drivers.
That's why in 2012, they started building their own stack,
beginning with native ports of Team Fortress 2, Half-Life 2, Portal 2, and Dota 2.
Pierre-Luc Graffet, who led the effort, told us why that wasn't enough.
Back in 2012, one of the first things that we did
to pave the way for all this whole effort was to go through the exercise of porting
our own library to Linux. We found that it was a bunch of work, right?
We spent a bunch of engineering, and the game is not better,
the user experience is not better, it's just the same game on the same platform.
And our conclusion was like, it's not gonna scale to have all the developers
have to do the same thing. That's when we started looking at things like Proton
and other technologies so that we could spend the effort
once in a way that developers wouldn't have to do it again.
So next, they tried hardware. In 2015, Valve launched Steam Machines,
Linux boxes for the living room that ran SteamOS.
They flopped, and by 2018, Valve pulled the plug.
Apparently you just can't sell a Linux console when every game is built for Windows.
So in August 2018, Valve launched Proton,
a compatibility layer that automatically translates Windows games so Linux can run them.
Thousands of games were playable overnight,
but it still stayed kind of a nerdy curiosity
until 2022 when Valve made the move that changed everything.
And we'll tell you about it right after our word from our sponsor.
Yeah, it was the Steam Deck. It exploded onto the scene in early 2022,
redefining the entire handheld PC category,
and suddenly millions of people were gaming on Linux,
many of whom didn't even know it. And this created what's known as a virtuous cycle.
Developers fixed Linux bugs because deck users reported them.
Easy anti-cheat and battle eye had already added Linux support,
but the deck is what pushed game developers to actually enable them.
The chicken and egg problem of it being impossible to get started was finally solved.
So fast forward four years, and Linux gaming has gotten so good
that Microsoft has felt the need to make Windows better for gaming.
Finally, how the turntables have turned. They're clapping back with controller-friendly UI,
performance improvements, and a handheld mode for Windows.
But there's a structural problem here. Windows is a general-purpose operating system
that's trying to feel like a console. LBRPDX, who's worked on Battissera for eight years,
describes the issue with that. So when we receive handheld consoles
from chase manufacturers, they always come with a version of Windows 11
for handheld systems. I've tried really hard to use it.
We're not there yet. I hope that Microsoft is really working,
and I believe they're working in good faith
to make it more usable for everybody
because today what happens is those manufacturers,
they have their own overlay on top of Windows to make the experience better.
It's extremely convoluted or it's very nerdy.
I don't think that's what people really should focus on
when they want to have a console-like experience. They want to have something that just works
and that they can tune to their own liking.
Microsoft has got oodles of engineers on this, but billions of users across the globe
expect Windows to keep doing everything else
while they bolt a gaming mode on top. That is harder in some ways
than building a gaming OS from scratch, and Valve is taking another swing at hardware
with a new steam machine before the end of 2026,
this time with a mature operating system and thousands of already verified games behind it.
But here's the thing, Linux gaming isn't one OS or one company
trying to dethrone Microsoft. It's dozens of them,
all building on the same open source foundation that Valve has been contributing to.
Pierre Loup confirmed that that's by design.
There's a wide variety of right now of distros that are gaming focused.
A bunch of these distros, these Linux distributions are basically taking
all of the same components that we're shipping as part of Steam OS.
Proton and Gamescope and Steam for Linux, Impad UI, all the work that we've been putting together
and working on with the community is represented in all these other Linux distributions, right?
At the end of the day, the experience is roughly the same
and everyone involved in the community and us is working on improving it
in a way that benefits all those distributions. So the future of PC gaming isn't one company winning,
it's a whole ecosystem of specialized tools, each doing what they do really well,
which sounds really great until you try to pick one.
Ubuntu, Mint, Arch, Fedora, Bazite, Catchy OS,
those are all valid options and we haven't even gotten to some of the more niche ones.
So which one's right for you? Why not check out our video
on picking the right Linux distro for your setup here on TechWiki, make sure you get subscribed.