Personally, a small group of friends and I had, up to recently, mostly been playing Empyrion: Galactic Survival, which, while not a native Linux game, runs basically flawlessly via Proton, with the usual anti-cheat issues (I host my own server for it, begrudgingly, on a Windows Server VM that I keep around for such situations). Unfortunately, their latest update started causing some very strange issues with blocks being replaced when you weren't looking with ones that shouldn't even fit (e.g. the cockpit of a Small Vessel turning into a Capital Vessel double-door... but at teeny tiny scale), I think related to spawning in blueprints.

Since we didn't want to risk screwing things up any further, we've shelved that one for now to give them time to hopefully identify & hotfix.

Instead, we've gone back to 7 Days to Die, which does have native Linux builds of not just the dedicated server (again, running my own), but the client as well (interestingly, I believe both Empryion and 7D2D are Unity games, but only the latter has native builds). Interestingly, it looks like as of the combo of 'my weird bleeding edge Gentoo setup', 'actually working AMDGPU drivers now that I've switched away from nVidia', and the current game build of A19.3, the 'not fully implemented yet' Vulkan renderer (via the 'Show game launcher' option when starting) seems to be working like a champ for me, and gives me way better/more stable frame rates over OpenGL.

One note, if you have multiple GPUs like, say, an onboard Intel iGPU as well, you may need to edit the Command Line Options in Steam for 7D2D and include something like:

Spoiler, click me

export VK_ICD_FILENAMES=/usr/share/vulkan/icd.d/radeon_icd.i686.json:/usr/share/vulkan/icd.d/radeon_icd.x86_64.json; %command%
or, in my case, adding in MangoHud and suspending KDE Plasma's compositor:
export MANGOHUD=1; export VK_ICD_FILENAMES=/usr/share/vulkan/icd.d/radeon_icd.i686.json:/usr/share/vulkan/icd.d/radeon_icd.x86_64.json; qdbus org.kde.KWin /Compositor suspend;mangohud %command%;qdbus org.kde.KWin /Compositor resume
the 'export MANGOHUD=1' and running 'mangohud %command%' are likely redundant, but I seem to remember one of them covers the OpenGL use case and the other Vulkan, so having both means you can switch back and forth for testing without editing this again.

I used NitroGen to create a custom map per my friend's request: 'a lot of big cities'...


Embiggen Map

In addition to our core 4-player team, we ended up bringing in another 3 or 4 of our friends, and their friends, who had either never played the game at all before, or at least had less than 10 hours in it (I'm personally just over 200 hours in, while it's my friend's partner's favourite game, and they have over 1000 hours and counting), and we've had a... blast... taking over a military camp PoI that spawns surrounded by landmines and turning its underground bunker into our home. Playing with 7-8 people at once is... an exercise in coordination, for sure, but it's hilarious hearing the new players' reactions to certain jump scares in PoIs we've been to plenty of times, seeing certain enemies for the first time, etc.

After stints in previous playthroughs as the 'heavy armour + shotgun in a concrete pillbox / mining' guy and the 'stays at home and ascends the Intelligence tech tree to make vehicles, traps, and other cool shit' guy, I think I've settled on going for the oft-maligned Agility tree, because the Parkour skill (higher jump height, less fall damage, immune to breaking your legs, etc.) is just... too fun. On horde nights, my job is basically to run around and kite dozens of zombies back and forth just outside our walls so our snipers can pick them off without getting harassed as much. Cue Yakety Sax.

Between 7 Days to Die sessions, I like to mess around with the Paradox Grand Strategy games, like Hearts of Iron IV (also native Linux builds and basically flawless ones at that!), or even good old modded Minecraft, leveraging MultiMC to manage various modpacks and, again, hosting my own server(s) as needed - though that's on my FreeBSD system directly in Java of course.

Games I've poked at and want to come back to when our current 7D2D stint is up include Raft (also flawless via Proton), Satisfactory (again, great with Proton, though you may want to look up how to increase network usage/bandwidth caps for multiplayer), Eco, and of course, Stardew Valley.

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The #1 reason why Stadia != Desktop Linux, in terms of support? It's, well, support.

Stadia build has a bug because of the peculiarities of their specific hardware/distro/etc. combo? Google could help the dev fix it, or the dev can at least reproduce it easily, because of the console-like nature.

Desktop Linux? Oh, that bug only applies to people running... say Manjaro, who have this specific nVidia driver and kernel version. When the moon is full. On Sundays only. But damn if the people affected aren't going to complain, refund, etc. and tarnish your game's reputation for being buggy.

People are more accepting of a weird Windows glitch messing things up, and with more people running it, there's more incentive for a dev to squash bugs that could be affecting 20% of their players. But for a vocal 0.1% running that Frankenstein's monster of a tricked out Gentoo build? Not only do they likely have no hope of reproducing the environment, they likely can't afford the time to care.

How many times have we heard the 'dev drops/abandons Linux build because they can't support it' song and dance, now?

Stadia may have the tools and trappings of a Desktop Linux distro under the hood, but it's a single, console-like platform with a huge corporate behemoth and technical expertise behind it. Only Valve and the Steam Linux Runtime are sort of close in scope, but even using that specific set of libraries doesn't help if things like kernel drivers suck. Only devs who are committed to the ideal really stick it out.

It's better than it was, even 5-10 years ago, sure, but 'Linux' as a platform is way more complicated and fragmented than even Windows is, let alone a standardized, console-like environment, regardless if it's Stadia, or say, PS4/5 (BSD + OpenGL and Vulkan)

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Quoting: Purple Library GuySecond, Stadia itself, at the server level, is Linux. That means:
2a) For a game to be on Stadia, developers had to develop it on Linux and
2b) The game has to be, somewhere out there, running on Linux.

Counterpoint: Android runs on Linux, but the development is so different that it's not like we see a bunch of Android <-> Linux cross-ports outside of things that started life on the Linux side.
The PS4/PS5 and Apple ecosystems are all underpinned by BSD, and I certainly don't see a ton of FreeBSD-native games.

Just because Stadia 'runs on Linux/Vulkan' doesn't necessarily mean that it's not also abstracted to heck on top of that. Could be something like Proton, or just another iOS/PS OS ecosystem style layer on top. Just because it's running the Linux kernel + video drivers doesn't mean it's 1:1 with your typical desktop Linux solution in terms of the libraries and things game devs are focused on.

'Stadia means Linux-native games' is of the same caliber as 'Android means Linux-native games', IMO. Technically correct (the best kind of correct!), but not what most of us here are hoping for, I feel.

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Paying a monthly fee for access to something and then full price for the games on top, that you could lose access to any moment (if Google shuts Stadia down), vs. MS' finance-an-Xbox initiative where you get their amazing Game Pass deal, to boot (in the US, anyway), and you get to keep the Xbox after it's paid off?

I want more Gaming on Linux, but Stadia isn't it, for me, and MS is way more entrenched, with the better deal, unfortunately.

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I still haven't quite figured out what causes my menus/drop downs to instantly disappear the moment I click them, but still have their options selectable if I click on the right empty space, in every Qt5 app running under Plasma on Wayland. (totally fine under Xorg) I even switched to building from master/head for the KDE part, but I'm suspecting this is a config/driver thing (Radeon RX 580) or a Qt5 thing.

The joys of running Gentoo, I guess. ;p I'll either find a Qt5 upstream ebuild overlay (i.e. a -9999) and try that or just wait and see. Other than that, though, Wayland support is looking solid!

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Quoting: BoldosApologies, I was not specific enough:
By "available directly in EU" I meant if they are sold directly in EU.
What you confirm is they "ship" into EU, but that technically means "import", so we have to pay VAT and customs fees. And that makes it painfully expensive....

Ah, okay - that makes sense. I don't know much about them, but Tuxedo Computers appears to be based out of Germany, and at first glance sounds like kind of the same idea?

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Quoting: BoldosSystem76 is not available directly in EU, is it?

Looks like at least Western Europe, actually!
https://system76.com/shipping

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This... this is what I'm waiting and hoping for. Time to start saving my pennies.
Hopefully somebody like System76 can get their hands on these and put an all-AMD Linux gaming laptop together, free of binary blobs - that might just be the thing that replaces my 6-9 year old desktop + laptops finally.

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Not really the scope of the article, as I would not recommend it for new users (unless they're really technically inclined and want to go deep), but I switched back from Ubuntu to Gentoo because of just how many times I had to compile things from source because no one was maintaining a PPA, or because of licensing/redistribution issues (e.g. like half of what makes ffmpeg useful, and stuff like NVENC support in OBS).

After spending literally over a year having to grab the Debianised sources, edit the configure options, troubleshoot what other unlisted dependencies those introduced and grab those (some of which may not have up to date .deb files anyway)... my own homebuilt /usr/local/src was ridiculous, pushing 20+ different things I was tracking where repositories couldn't or wouldn't carry them.

If I were a stronger developer, I suppose I could try taking up the mantle of maintaining PPAs for those things, but I figured if I'm compiling half my shit from source all the time anyway... and oh look, the Gentoo ebuilds have USE flags doing exactly what I was trying to do recompiling stuff all the time, handling the dependencies those draw in gracefully, even if the end resulting binary is legally non-redistriubutable. What am I doing with a half-binary, half-source Frankenstein's monster of a system?

So yeah, not a system I'd recommend to anyone starting out, and if your goal is 'use Steam and Lutris and maybe a couple big well-known projects', honestly any DEB or RPM based distro that's kept up to date should do you fine. But if you find yourself in a situation like mine where you're manually walking dependency trees to get the things you want, the way you want from source? Gentoo's probably already got a USE flag for that, and portage rips off my other love, the FreeBSD ports tree. ;)

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I ended up 'downgrading' my GTX 980 to an RX 580 a few weeks ago by swapping with my partner's computer, and the difference between messing with nVidia's binary blobs and AMDGPU + Mesa is night and day. No more dealing with routine kernel upgrades breaking X. The only obvious thing missing is CUDA but I'm not a heavy user there anyway. Heck, I could drop the nVidia USE flag on Gentoo for stuff like NVENC in ffmpeg and OBS since Intel and AMD's encoders are supported. It also looks like multi-GPU support between the RX 580 and my i7's iGPU might work now, judging from logs (I haven't tested this yet).

Performance is a little worse just because of those specific models, but yeah - until nVidia opens up and gets their drivers mainlined, it's just AMD and Intel really at this point for me.

At least until more open hardware takes off (you bet I'm waiting for RISC-V desktops like the stuff SiFive is announcing in a couple days). One day we'll get beyond the blob firmware, too.

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