If the game was crashing to desktop, it was probably not a graphics card thing, but that you were running out of ram and the system was just automatically killing the program when that happened. That’s a system stability thing, it prioritizing the needs of the system and desktop over a program so as to prevent the whole system from crashing.

The easiest solution to that is to increase the “swap” size (IE a bit of storage that gets set aside to act as back up memory). That is a system level thing, but it’s not really a big deal to change.

If you were getting to the command line, Linux was running, although, if it was just the command line then it may have been an issue with the desktop or window manager not starting. And if it was an issue with the desktop or window manager, then I could see changing some boot loader settings fixing that. Like, making sure the boot loader automatically starts the desktop when the computer boots. not sure how you got from messing with graphics card to the system only booting in command line, but, shit happens. I’ve broken my system in weirder ways while pulling at the guts.

By switching from cinnamon to XFCE desktop you may have solved the issue with the game crashing simply because you had more memory available, as XFCE is a much lighterweight desktop.

If the games was slowly slowing to a crawl before freezing up completely but not outright crashing to desktop, that could have been an issue of running out of video ram for the the GPU, I’ve had that happen with helldiver’s 2. I don’t remember exactly what I did to fix that, something with the launch options that affected the graphics settings or capped the frame rate I think. Not sure how changing between desktops could have fixed that though.

Did you find mint easy? I am a bit of a computer person, and I've been struggling a bit with it

I'm gaming with an NVIDIA GPU, so my VRAM is kind of limited. I'm at my limits in games because the company cheaped out on VRAM in their GPUs after the 10 series.

Well, screen is running at 4k, so i think its normal.

Huh. That’s odd. I guess it balances out though.

Interesting, my devices always come without OS. And on preconfigured Windows for family first thing I do is wipe it to get rid of all the bloatware it comes with.

I see your point, but installing your usual linux distro on a new device is quite easier than switching to linux for the first time, which is what people don't wanna do.

I've seen it first hand recently with a friend who sought advice regarding a low budget laptop purchase for school work and multimedia use. While he was open minded about what hardware to choose, there was no convincing him to ditch Windows. I told him he'd be better off using a lightweight linux distro on such modest hardware, but he insisted on Windows 11 based on questionable arguments ("I need office"), even knowing it'd be slow, bloated, full of ads and AI features no one care for. Old habits do die hard.

People buying Steam decks are likely the majority of those numbers.

The Steam Deck shows up as Arch Linux in the steam numbers; Arch is only 10.7% of the Linux user-base on Steam. And this is on top of the fact desktop Arch Linux is a thing as well sharing space in that line-item.

The Steam Deck (and Microsoft tomfoolery) certainly was the catalyst for the current wave of adoption, but it is barely a notable percentage of Linux installs on Steam.

What do you mean OSes are sticky as hell?

What are your feelings on switching to a different OS, such as MacOS?

I’m currently on Arch ... I’m thinking of switching to gentoo

These are both the same OS: Linux. And one of the nice things is Linux lets you switch around so much at-will as you are thinking of doing.

Until they want to play a multiplayer game with their friends, that doesn't work because of Anti-Cheat

It's my understanding that anti-cheat CAN work in Linux and does with some games. The point is still valid of course. If a specific game someone wants to play doesn't work, that's going to be a frustrating experience. But still I foresee the percentage of Linux gamers will continue to grow. And gaming companies increasingly making sure to use anti-cheat software that does work with Linux, as that market share is becoming too large to ignore.

Almost all multiplayer games work fine. It's 9noy the garbage that companies like EA put out that choose not to. Just think of it like being a console exclusive, and you don't own that console. Ignore it. Their games aren't worth playing anyway. It's the same garbage as the last 10+ years.

It's Linux because for devs it's a Linux platform.

And yeah 11% growth month to month compounds quickly. It won't hold forever but all things like that are sigmoidal Wich does start as an exponential growth.

I use steam, I do check protonDB but I've never had to tinker with much.

Historically I've used lutris but more recently I've been observing more broken scripts than not. But Lutris is extremely handy for mapping to a pile of game data that I might grab from Itch for example. I also havent been gaming as much lately so maybe I'm just hitting some weird games and that's all.

I've heard good things about Heroic Launcher which apparently is actually sponsored by GOG, but I've yet to try it on my Linux machine