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there are a plethora of reasons to transition your daily driver gaming rig

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over to Linux you could be sticking it to the Man or wanting to support the

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open source Community maybe you daily drive Linux for work already and all

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your games are natively supported anyway or maybe you just want a new and

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challenging hobby but if what you want is a simple painless gaming experience

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then let this be a cautionary Tale one of Trials tribulations and of course

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sponsors thanks to AO for sponsoring this video Caro is a digital eim

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Marketplace that allows you to directly download a flexible data plan for one of

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over 190 countries without ever having to leave your living room try your first

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e at the link down

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below for most of our one month challenge Luke and I avoided

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specifically seeking out titles that would either validate the Linux gaming

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experience or intentionally make it look bad we just focused on playing the games

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that we would normally want to play or at least we tried to because not all the

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games that we wanted to play actually worked the very first day I installed

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Linux I also tried to play the battlefield 2042 beta the previous day

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still on Windows i' owned some noobs with my buddy Joe and we wanted to play

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again the next night but that wasn't going to happen due to this challenge it

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was reassuring I guess that even more advanced Linux users were also unable to

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play but that didn't actually remedy the fact that I couldn't play games with my

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friends it's funny because I assumed that this challenge would be more

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painful for me than it would be for Luke I mean after all he has years of Linux

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experience while I came in with basically none but here's the thing I

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game mostly by myself as a way to relax or to hang out with my kids and I am

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extremely flexible about what game I'll play if something doesn't work screw it

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I'll just play something else Luke on the other hand whose Social Circle is

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deeply immersed in gaming culture has so

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much more on the line if he can't solve a problem yeah like I literally had a

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friend ask hey dude when are you going to be back obviously I had never

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actually left but I was a lot more difficult to include as a lot of

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competitive games that have anti-che just don't work or it took me so long to

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get a lot of games to a satisfactory level that by the time I was ready

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everyone else was just done gaming for the night and as a lot of my friends

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like to just try random games out for fun this actually happened a lot our

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goal is not to spread fud about the state of Linux gaming though so it's

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time to get specific about some of our less good experiences first up is steam

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or rather not steam valve's goal of

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reaching 100% compatibility with the entire steam game library is admirable

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actually incredible as noted by this

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here Reddit post the steam game library is chock full of amazing gaming

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experiences from AAA Studios and Indie developers

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alike but it's also not the Silver Bullet that it would have been 10 or

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even 5 years ago when nearly every game worth playing was available on Steam

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half of twitch's top 20 games at least at the time of filming this are not on

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Steam and I know being a popular game to stream doesn't necessarily mean it's

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popular with random Gamers out there but

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these are all very big name games and being on Steam isn't an automatic win e

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look at Apex Legends and New World both

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massive games both listed as borked on

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proton DB native Linux games are obviously going to be your best bet want

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to try one of my personal favorites crosscode click install click play and

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as simple as that I mean I was amazed at how painlessly my Xbox One controller

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worked though I should note that I stuck with a wired connection rather than

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trying to tackle getting the unofficial X driver working Val meanwhile ran

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amazingly and immediately demonstrating how even smaller developers can make it

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work if they've got the will in addition to that while not necessarily native I

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played Legion td2 TowerFall Ascension

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faster than light slay the SP Path of Exile and rust and they all worked

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perfectly with zero actual effort and interestingly enough Dota 2 and csgo

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both had completely gamebreaking problems that weren't isolated to my

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system during the challenge they seem to be solved now but it goes to show that

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just like with Windows because a piece of software was made for it doesn't mean

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it's actually going to be perfect I didn't have any issues running csgo even

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got me some kills boys but I did notice

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significantly more stutters than I'm used to seeing on this class of Hardware

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that could be an NVIDIA driver issue or it could be something else entirely but

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for me it worked well enough that I didn't feel like digging any further

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into that rabbit hole not when I could be digging for a sweet hoodie like this

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one on LTT Store.com instead the next tier is Windows native games that valve

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officially lists as Linux capable via steam playay but before we go any

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further I just want to say massive respect to the incredible teams who have

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worked tirelessly to make running Windows games on Linux possible valve's

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proton compatibility layer is amazing

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it's forked from wine which has been multiple decades in the making with

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about half of its source code written by volunteers that's freaking wild and of

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course honorable mentions all around for the dedicated communities that maintain

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tools like lutrus which automates hacky workarounds for newbies and proton DB

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which serves as both a troubleshooting resource and a reference for which games

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work so you won't have to waste your money on a bad experience with all of

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that said in spite of all of that work

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we're honestly just not there yet and

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we're mere months from from the launch of the steam deck when 100%

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compatibility is supposedly coming which

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as of writing this just got pushed back by 2 months to February also Doom

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maternal reported great performance on my system over 200 frames per second

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using the included tool I'm kind of reminded of the issues that we used to

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see in Old SLI configurations where the actual perceived animation smoothness is

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substantially less than what the Benchmark seems to suggest it should be

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again I thought maybe this is an issue with my proprietary NVIDIA driver maybe

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it's at a date but Manjaro begged to differ apparently I am up to date so

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your mileage may vary another problem that's been a thorn in the side of the

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Linux Community for years is anti-che

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now the game launches and seems to run totally fine but while theoretically

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enabling battle eye anti-che in rainbow six Siege is as simple as Ubisoft

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reaching out doing a little bit of figuring and off we go cuz battle ey has

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supposedly supported Linux for ages Ubisoft hasn't done that yet why well

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because natively supporting Linux is seen by some developers as a somewhat

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brutal experience Ben GIS has a rather

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enlightening Thread about this on Twitter he goes on to explain that while

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Linux Gamers were a very vocal part of

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their pre-launch Community they accounted for less than 0.1% % of sales

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yet they generated more than 20% of autor reported crashes and support

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tickets he also stated that near the end of his time there nearly 100% of tickets

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were still Linux related despite Linux

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receiving the majority of the engineering effort meaning the company

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likely spent hundreds of thousands of dollars supporting a community that made

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them a few hundred in sales revenue and

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this isn't the only version of this story and every time problems like these

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happen it's just more ammo for developers that would rather spend zero

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time working on Linux versions of their products I believe that is why over 65%

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of reported anti-che enabled games have not confirmed Linux compatibility

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despite many of the anti-che developers getting on board and as much as everyone

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already knows it it Bears repeating the fragmentation problem continues to be

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desktop Linux's greatest obstacle to widespread ad option Take It Takes Two

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For example this is a gold rated Windows native origin game that I got running

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effortlessly though I did buy it through Steam and I did launch it through Steam

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at least it was effortless until I wanted to have two controllers running

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at the same time kind of a requirement for this particular game if I want to

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play it with the wife that sent me on a quest to proton DB to see if anyone else

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had had the same problem and no not really everyone else's

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problems are basically random so guess we're not playing that game for now one

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of my other favorite games Supreme Commander forged Alliance was as simple

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to run as clicking install and enabling a couple of launch Flags awesome but if

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you want to play multiplayer ohoo boy here's the story when gas powered

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games went under a small community arranged to preserve multiplayer support

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for the game by building their own launcher it is an amazing example of the

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way that the PC gaming Community can come together to preserve experiences

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that would otherwise be completely lost due to corporate butth H holdery

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unfortunately every guide I could find to get the forged Alliance forever

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launcher working on Linux was either hopelessly out of date or not applicable

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to my particular drro I don't blame the devs really

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nothing but love for you guys but Linux Gamers and more broadly the Linux

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Community needs to understand that until the burden of supporting Linux is

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reduced significantly this is always

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going to be a problem we actually live streamed trying to work through the

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forge Alliance issues on Floatplane subscribe by the way there were more

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than a few comments in the chat criticizing us for choosing to play that

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particular game because it's old it's

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just some crappy Java game it's it's obscure or because it's not fair to

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Linux or whatever but the bottom line is that none of that matters what matters

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is that we like it and we wanted to play it but instead of doing that we played

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terminal command simulator and honestly

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I've gone through enough of that over the last month that it has sucked a lot

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of the enjoyment out of using my computer like I have a pretty busy life

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and when I manag to salvage an hour to relax and play video games that is what

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I want to do and it's really opened my eyes to why so many people choose to

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play on Console instead of on PC like this has got to be how a not super

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computer savvy user feels about updating a driver or fixing a firewall setting

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every time they just want to play a bloody game to be clear I would never

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say that just because some old game doesn't run it means that Linux sucks in

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fact I've permanently switched my laptop over to Linux because there are a lot of

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things it just does really well even for someone more on the noob side of things

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like me what it does mean is that gaming on Linux can kind of suck it's not that

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I don't enjoy tinkering with PCS as a hobby I mean man the rush when 1800

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launched after spending a bunch of time fighting with it it was phenomenal I

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felt like the king but then the next 45 minutes of

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okay why isn't multiplayer connecting completely destroyed that Vibe you know

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is it because Luke installed the game through the script on the lutrus page

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and then I lutrus Ubisoft connect and installed the game through that

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resulting in a version mismatch is it because of some kind of mangaro firewall

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nonsense the answer ended up being being that multiplayer used to work which

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helped ano 1800 get a gold rating on proton DB but now it does not which

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isn't to say it won't ever work again if

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you're a Linux developer wizard you might be able to fix it yourself or you

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might end up just needing to wait for the community to patch it but anything

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that relies on an external service that updates independently of your computer

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can just unexpectedly break and that's a

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lot of games these days so you always need to make sure that you

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read especially the recent comments rather than just relying on the rating

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on proton DB another prime example of this is Minecraft dungeons works great

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apparently well as long as you happen to own it through Steam rather than through

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Microsoft directly with the old launcher because in that case apparently you can

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make it work but for most people I think it's safe to say that you're just going

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to have to Reby the game so I haven't been able to play that with my kids in a

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month that ended up being an ongoing theme of

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this challenge proton DB again respect for all the work that you do it can save

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you a lot of time but it won't just automatically fix all your problems gold

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to me should mean a pretty typical gamer can do it so while the rating system

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makes for a very impressive story on the homepage did you know fellow Gamers that

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78% of the top 100 games are gold or

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better on Linux wow the truth is a lot less Rosy and there's

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another big problem with proton DV it only includes Steam games and while you

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can use the proton compatibility layer on non- Steam games even considering

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tools like lutrus the compatibility picture outside of steam is not as

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simple as well proton DB says Linux

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gaming compatibility is good I mentioned escape from tarov earlier it's been

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broken for so long that due to battle state games adding anti-che their Linux

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Discord has turned into a matchmaking channel for other games so they can have

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some fun while they wait genin impact

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kind of a huge game right now no Linux

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compatibility and while I did manage to find a honestly really great Russian

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guide from penguin gang that I could probably follow it illustrates a point

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that I haven't really talked about much yet being on Linux can take a lot of the

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spont out of gaming you can't just be like oh

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cool that game looks neat and expect to be playing it in just a few minutes I

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also hope you're not necessarily a fan of playing games right on launch for of

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horizon 5 for example amazing straight

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up fantastic that people got it working within just 5 days of launch but that

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also means that it wasn't working for 5

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days after the launch and if all your friends were playing they now have sick

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cars and you're stuck trudging through the swamps for a barn find to be clear I

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don't want this to take away from some of the great experiences that I've had

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gaming on Linux in the last month after an extremely short setup my daughter was

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happily hanging out in a Discord voice Channel with her siblings playing

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Minecraft Java Edition and had no idea she was on a completely different

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platform that's freaking amazing Luke and I had some awesome Don't Starve

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Together sessions totally stable no crashes and more recently my son and

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Luke and I had a blast pin each other to walls and TowerFall using remote play

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together which worked great on Linux

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overall I'm really happy I did the challenge I learned a lot and it gave me

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a lot of Hope for the future and I will absolutely be trying to stick with Linux

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when the steam Deck shows up sometime next year but to summarize the question

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that we set out to answer is this the year of the Linux desktop for gamers the

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answer is no I'm sorry and the more

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Niche your use case gets you know maybe you're super into modding or the racing

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or flight Sim scenes or maybe you're a big VR lover the more resounding that no

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gets and if I'm being honest I'm in the same camp but something has given me a

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lot of Hope and that's how much positivity we've seen from the Linux

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community in spite of our concerns because even if I'm not ready to convert

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my gaming rig just yet it gives me hope that one day the meme will end and the

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year of the Linux desktop will come I'm as antimonopoly as anyone and I'd hate

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to see the status quo maintained forever I know what I don't hate is our sponsor

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thanks Squarespace for sponsoring this video we use Squarespace like no joke we

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use it both our Linus Medi group.com and LTX expo.com websites were built quickly

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using Squarespace and are easily maintained if we need to make any quick

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changes like say canceling our Expo for two years in a row if you haven't heard

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already Squarespace is an all-in-one platform that makes it simple to get

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your website up and running quickly if you have a home business you defin itely

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need one you can even sell things you can choose from tons of different

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templates and find the one that makes the most sense for you and then just run

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with it and if you trip while you're running you need help Squarespace offers

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webinars a full series of help guides or you can contact their 247 support team

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to help you build your site so go to squarespace.com

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and get 10% off today now that the

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challenge is over it's time to go back and watch the previous Parts because while the overall conclusion was no

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there's a lot to really like about the L experience