Quoting: Mountain ManI've never had to do anything special to make a game work in Linux beyond the occasional routine problem solving that you have to do even in Windows, but that's par for the course for PC gaming. If people want truly trouble-free gaming then stick with consoles.

Sorry to say but it's not everyone's experience. I've switched to Linux since a little over a year and my gaming experience is nowhere near what it has been on Windows. I've had a Windows 7 install that worked flawlessly for years without any reinstall and I've never had to do ANYTHING special for a game to work properly, the only issue I had jokingly is that I had to spend hours searching how to get the XBox One controler to work wirelessly.

On the other hand in Linux I stumbled on a lot of issues, from Steam not launching, to games not launching or not working properly. My latest issue is regarding Absolute Drift which I just bought in the Humble sale, on my main rig it doesn't launch at all (I have a black screen popping up and immediately back to the desktop) and so far I didn't find a solution (Googling didn't help this time), on my SteamOS box (Intel NUC with an i5) the games launches without a problem but then it is constantly blinking, nearly unplayable.

I for one decided to ditch Windows for good and I'll accept to have to wait to properly play this game for example, but I know a lot of people that would not tolerate this any minute...

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I don't know if I won't grab Distance and Absolute Drift :)

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I think that if by the end of Windows 7 support we have reliable graphics drivers and a little more games from big publishers we might see a spike of users switching to Linux rather than going to Windows 10, if they've been avoiding Windows 10 until the end there's a good chance they'll be tempted by another alternative :)

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Strange or not, the Top 15 only consists of December articles ? Is it a regular pattern (i.e. there are generally more viewers in December each year) or has the site audience been growing lately ? The latter would be a good sign as it might show more people become interested in Linux gaming.

By the way are there signs of growing interest looking at the site audience ? I've never seen an analysis on this I think :)

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Don't worry we know Electronic Arts are not doing early access, they sell plain Alpha games and patch them when customer base gets too angry :D

If they were to propose some of their alpha's to Linux I might buy them however ^^

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Looking forward to the Linux version. I'm ready to pay for this ^^

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Quoting: edddeduckferalAsking and seeing what the community like in forums certainly helps as it gives you an idea of how popular the game would be among a smaller community, also helps get a feel for how hard it might be to get the news out to the Linux gaming crowd. Word of mouth is powerful in smaller communities as often it's hard to get the word out about your games, the response to enquires also helps you judge how many people will be excited and post about your game if you do release.

Did Feral note how often the word "Dirt3" comes up in the comments on this site ? Certainly is a sign that this community likes it a lot ^^

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I don't understand why people are saying getting Street Fighter V would blow their mind when it's probably due for Linux this month :D

https://www.gamingonlinux.com/index.php?module=calendar

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Battlefield 1 (or Battlefield 4), Battlefield 4 is the only game I'm still dual booting for to play with friends (Sup Com Forged Alliance also but that might be working under Linux somehow). Then I could dump Windows 7 for good ^^

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Quoting: Mountain ManWhat? I've never had to "fiddle around" to get games working in Linux. Sure, I have to tune some of the in-game settings to get optimum performance, but you have to do that in Windows, too. Linux "just works" in my experience. If I want to play a game, I click "Install" in Steam. It installs. I click "Play". It plays. You shouldn't have do any "fiddling" beyond that unless there's something wrong on your end.

Seems not everyone is having the same experience. I've ditched Windows about a year ago and probably won't return, however I've never had to put such amount of research on the Web and fiddling to get things going on Windows.

First anytime I install Steam on a fresh Linux install it will not start, there are some libraries to wipe or some driver to switch so that it accepts to launch. Then some games won't launch either, you have to take a file from another working title and paste it in the folder of the said game. Then when the game finally launches Feral says your GPU is not supported, it will work but not flawlessly. All in all it quite runs on my Mint 17 rig but on the kids rig with Mint 18 only a few games are working correctly (like Dirt Showdown), the others won't launch lately (Euro Truck Simulator for example), when launched the desktop display changes to 640x480 and nothing else happens, I'll have to take another 2 or 3 hours to find a solution on the Internet to solve this.

Then I decided to give a try with a DRM free game to see how this would work. I bought Oddworld New'n Tasty from GOG, installed it on the kids rig (by the way there's not such thing as a double click to install the game as in Windows, you have to open a Terminal, navigate to the folder where you downloaded the game and run a .sh command, that's not something my mom can do for example) and.... no luck, it wouldn't launch. Then installed it on my PC, there it launches but so far I've been unable to configure my Xbox One controller to play the game so I've just given up and cross my fingers thinking that maybe the future Mint 18.2 will magically solve things.

All in all I'm still happy with Linux but I must go with compromises, not only on the number of games available but also on the difficulty of getting everything running. And I don't think most of my gaming friends would accept to make such compromises just for the sake of not being spied and locked in the Microsoft environment.

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