Well, they will. Two things drive the trend, in my view:

1. Lack of informed opinions. If you don’t know that other options exist, you’ll buy whatever because you think it is the baseline.

2. Convenience. This one is a killer. People regularly give up a lot – even rights – in the name of convenience.

Between those two factors, it’s a hard sell for the average consumer to not support this kind of corpo garbage. A nihilistic view, maybe, but I think it’s an accurate one.

In a similar vein, it’s pretty easy to show someone that consoles have these needlessly expensive proprietary links, plus games which are very expensive for the same reason. But it is very hard to convince someone that the cool thing they saw on TV isn’t, in fact, “cool” because of the aforementioned reasons. And ultimately, people like having cool things, even if that coolness is subjective.

Historically, it’s been a push-pull between groups, but everyone has had a different future. Now that things are being consolidated wholesale – e.g. physical media going out the window because so many are happy to stream and never own anything – it is more necessary than ever to call out #1 and #2, since the market itself is changing for the worse.

It is intentionally difficult, of course.

The real solution is not to buy the console.

If they make a Connie Refit, I will have no choice.

I hope they don’t.

The fact that consoles still get away with this inflated proprietary crap is shocking

I think the issue is a bit more nuanced. Graphics have gotten so good that it is relatively easy to get character animations which sit in the uncanny valley.

The uncanny valley is bad. You can have beautiful, photorealistic graphics everywhere, but if your characters are in the uncanny valley, the overall aesthetic is more similar to a game which didn’t have the photorealism at all.

In the past, the goalpost was at a different spot, so putting all the resources towards realism still wouldn’t get you into the valley, and everyone just thought it looked great.

By and large, unless you are playing one of a few multiplayer games which require kernel-level anti-cheat schemes, you won’t have issues running Windows games on Linux. Note that kernel-level anti-cheat is also a huge issue in general, for privacy and other reasons, so it’s not really something that should or will be fixed in Linux – it’s up to developers to stop requiring such schemes.

I’ve been a Linux gamer for about 3 years. 3 years ago, I had occasional issues. Now not for a long time. But I play almost entirely single player titles.

Hardware does matter a bit. AMD is extremely Linux friendly and drivers for AMD hardware tends to be in the Linux kernel, so there’s nothing else to load. Nvidia makes things more difficult.

I don’t even check ProtonDB anymore before buying a game. It just works the vast majority of the time, even without additional configuration.

Welcome, there are dozens of us

They sell fine. Look at BG3.

What they don’t do is make money hand over fist without the need to design more product, as happens with subscription-based, game-as-a-service multiplayer titles. Some companies don’t want to make good games. They just want to make good money.

I see the point about KDE, though I don’t think the learning curve on Cinnamon is hefty. I also think that KDE being so configurable can seem overwhelming to new folks.

Same reason everything in the US is expensive: we have largely unregulated, runaway capitalism which pervades every facet of life. Everything from housing to academia to health care is for profit – not only profit, but for obscene year-over-year increases in profit. Those at the top regularly make money hand over fist even selling basic necessities, and if they don’t continue taking more and more, they’re seen as failures and replaced by one who will.

The cherry on top is that, for the most parts, the citizens no longer have any real power to change any of it.

Around the same time that health care becomes affordable in the US (major hypothetical, of course), it probably means a wind change has occurred such that university costs would also be coming down. But it would be a systematic change.

This is generally true, but I’d also caution that the B580 is a brand new card with (somewhat lacking) Linux support.

In general, if you aren’t using bleeding edge hardware, you won’t have such issues. This is especially true of AMD hardware, which tends to be extremely Linux friendly.

Exactly this. Many people have a lot of apprehension until they actually try it.

Fair enough. I tend to agree, but I like to give people the benefit of the doubt, because, you know, FOSS and freedom.

Yes, anti-cheat specifically is a problem. That’s you fighting against the corpos, to be clear. Not really an issue with gaming on Linux itself.

Edit: not only against the corpos, but more generally against the idea of “kernel-level anti-cheat”. If you’re giving any corporation kernel-level access to your machine, you basically no longer control your machine. That’s true of Windows too.

It’s a big issue and the lack of support on Linux is a bit of a feature, not really a bug.

But… Why not now? I can’t think of a single reason.

I wouldn’t say SteamOS for new folks, tbh. Flatpaks are very different from the typical Linux flow.

This is fair. I should have given my own suggestions.

Mint is probably the choice at the moment for new folks. Also, this will be controversial, but feel free with Ubuntu. It will get you started, and that’s great.

Edit: I added some (open-ended) suggestions to my original comment.

To anyone reading this thinking “once SteamOS comes out, I’ll switch”, you should know:

Gaming on Linux is already here. Pick a distro and game. You can take advantage of Proton right now. You don’t need to wait for one specific distro.

I’ve personally been gaming on Linux exclusively for about 3 years. Windows games, not Linux games.

Edit: based on other commenters’ suggestions, I’ll give you some.

I have gamed for those three years on PopOS. It is a distro based on Debian, ultimately, which means it’s also related to Ubuntu and Mint. Realistically, you can pick any of those 4 and you should have a nice experience.

Arch is popular with the übergeeks, and I do use it on my laptop, BTW, but you shouldn’t use it as a first distro.

The concept of “distro” doesn’t really exist for Windows, because you pretty much get one monolithic product. But basically, it is a specific mix of software that works together and relies on the Linux kernel. Imagine it as a “version” of Windows with specific goals, some of which are overlapping (e.g. Mint and Ubuntu tend to cater to the same audience).

If you get far enough into it, the freedom that Linux allows means that you can turn any distro into any other distro.

Same. Never looked back.