this post was submitted on 13 Aug 2025
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Linux Gaming

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Gaming on Linux hasn't been great so far... | JayzTwoCents [27:59] (www.youtube.com)
submitted 3 months ago by grue@lemmy.world to c/linux_gaming@lemmy.world
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Follow-up video to https://lemmy.world/post/32690521

Spoiler alert: the main reason he says the experience "hasn't been great" is because shortly before posting the video his Linux install mysteriously broke and he had no idea why. Therefore, he recommended dual-booting Windows just in case.

Cue sea of comments explaining that the reason for the error he was getting was that Windows screwed up his bootloader (i.e. the problem was caused by dual-booting to begin with, LOL).

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[–] DFX4509B_2@lemmy.org 1 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

No, Linux doesn’t have “much better hardware support than Windows”. It is harder to set up and maintain, so it’s worse. It doesn’t matter if you can make it work. It doesn’t matter if you can make things work that don’t work on Windows. If I plug it in and it doesn’t go, then it’s worse.

Meanwhile all five generations of GCN are varying levels of abandoned officially on Windows while Mesa supports AMD cards going back to GCN1, and even more recently started to enable AMDGPU support by default on GCN1 and 2.

But yeah, as for Windows having better support, GCN1-3 are long since buried officially for that OS, and Polaris and Vega have a foot in the grave at this point as they're curtailed to security updates only officially on Windows, contrasted against Mesa still actively supporting that older hardware. Also, can't emulate RT on RX 5000-series and older cards on Windows, while you can on Linux.

And yes, I'm aware of R.ID modded drivers for those older cards in Windows, but for this context, I'm only counting official driver support.

[–] MudMan@fedia.io -1 points 3 months ago

You are listing edge cases. Nobody cares.

You buy a laptop, you install Linux and it goes. That's the bar for mainstream usage.

If you have an older computer that no longer gets MS or AMD updates it's cool that Linux can be installed on it and be marginally safer, but it's disingenuous to not acknowledge that in that scenario unsupported Windows still works, by definition. For people on older hardware their older hardware is already working.

Linux can, at best, have a lighter footprint (and be less full of decades of leftover garbage) and make some forward compatibility available on very old devices, but it's not unlocking hardware that wasn't working because it didn't have drivers. Windows does do that in general, and especially for newer or niche hardware. Lying to ourselves about this is not doing anybody any favours.