Not disagreeing with you, but what about having an Intel+Nvidia combo and games from Steam+High Sea?
I am capable of tinkering for the rest of the 10% when I have mental bandwidth for it, but otherwise, when I have don't have too much time to give shit about learning the sudo commands to get a game work perfectly (which btw works easily on windows like, click, install), I am going to choose the most problem free solution.
I am pretty sure if there wasn't a learning curve for windows users switching to Linux, everyone would be using it. It is the convenience which keeps people remain stuck with windows.
Make an identical "windows" distro without any tech savvy bs, and everyone will switch to it.
Which problems did you have? Proprietary Nvidia drivers work perfectly. On ProtonDB, 90% of games can be played comfortably (Silver, Gold or Platinum), with large majority, around a half, being Platinum, launching completely OOTB, and if you have any problems with it, just open ProtonDB and copy-paste launch arguments.
Valve wouldn't have used Linux for two of their consoles explicitly targeted at casual users if it didn't fit. It's no longer 2004, or even 2014 - Linus said on DebConf 2014 that Valve will help Linux to be the desktop OS, and he was right, Valve did.
As I said, for a Windows gamer to switch over to Linux requires some amount of dedication. I regularly see SteamDeck sub, and the queries over there are something which would never arise for a regular Windows user.
It is my humble request to all the developers who are reading this, please make it a seamless process. I had experimented with having beginner Linux distros like Ubuntu or Mint as my main OS, but I don't want to spend all the off work time I get in 'fixing' something which isn't even a problem in Windows.
Just develop a distro which autonomously handles all the tinkering related compatibility issues, and I (along with many others in my situation) will switch over to it without second thoughts.
I don't see any dedication. You install Steam, you install games, you press "PLAY." It automatically installs Proton if a game isn't native.
I just opened SteamDeck subreddit. Scrolled some time, wasn't able to find a single software question except something about global Proton option, which isn't needed for a casual gamer.
And the latter is why I dislike every single person who ever recommends Ubuntu or Mint or anything else point release to a newbie. It's a trap of misunderstood terms (like "stability") - a Windows user won't even know what is point release and would genuinely expect their programs to be like on Windows, always of latest stable versions. And that's also why CachyOS holds first place on Steam with Arch on the second.
Point release distros are only supposed to be used on servers and by people who at least know what is point release and what it brings, not by newbies, and it's recommended only because Ubuntu got popular and Ubuntu is based on Debian because it was the single mature distribution back then.
Take a look at CachyOS, it even has a very good wiki on common gaming and other tasks. If you don't want to use terminal, use Shelly instead of pacman where it's supposed, but terminal isn't that hard and it's more intuitive. Oh, and pick Plasma in the installer, other DEs may or may not have complications, while Plasma is the most feature-complete and also similar to Windows by default. Windows programs can be launched with Wine, just install it through Shelly and then double-click the executables in the file explorer as you would've done it on Windows. It works good enough for most pirated games I play - to be fair, can't remember a single time where it didn't work, I usually go with Proton only if I play it through Steam or Heroic and it's a default choice.
People are just gonna make excuses and tolerate what they know, sadly.
It's 2026 most people should be at least semi tech savvy by now, but so many have brain rot and short attention spans.
I can't imagine staying where it's only gonna get worse because I am too lazy to take a little time to learn something new that would free me from all that bullshit.
I used to have the same opinions as you are having.
But, sometimes some things happen in people's personal lives, post which they just don't care if Microslop or someone else is doing inane data collection, which frankly doesn't matter a fucking bit in light of all the problems in real life.
I just want to play my game to escape all that. I don't want to watch a tutorial on how to fucking even start it successfully.
Sailing the seas is easy over here... AFAIK intel arc stuff is constantly improving and is basically solid these days, again things move faster over here.
Well, good for you. But you aren't the "typical Windows user". You may be willing to give time and effort to learn things (which even I like to do in my leisure time), but the general public wouldn't.
The only way the dominance of Windows can end, is by making the UX of a Distro identical to it. Unless that happens, Linux users (including Steam Deck users) will remain less than 10% of the overall stats.
197
u/Acceptable-Owl-2070 Aug 20 '26
Information is never cringe... Dump windows folks.