Tell me the Downsides

November 29, 2025

If you cannot tell me the downsides, you are uninformed. If you will not tell me the downsides, you have an agenda. If you rationalize the downsides, you are biased.

I notice this issue a lot in discussions about gaming on Linux.

I recently watched a video entitled "Gaming on Linux(Mint) is almost identical to Windows Gaming". The creator claims that every game he plays works fine on Linux. Not a minute later he explains that "a few multiplayer games" are unplayable on Linux because of their anticheat. Well, which games? A website called areweanticheatyet.com keeps track. Out of the 1136 games it catalogues, only 194 (17%) are supported on Linux. The explicitly unsupported titles include League of Legends, Fortnite, Battlefield, Apex Legends, Valorant, and Destiny 2. These are some of the most played PC games at the time I am writing. Furthermore, we are not talking about "a few games", we are talking about nearly 1000 of them known to not be fully functional. The video creator addresses this by assigning the blame to Riot, not Linux. This blame game is true, but is laughably unhelpful.

A commenter pointed out that NVIDIA drivers hardly function on Linux, and often don't function at all. The creator justified that "Nvidia is crap for me, don't like the company, don't know how it work[sic]. never had Nvidia card." Well, I do. The Steam hardware survey in 2023 found that 82% of its participants used NVIDIA GPUs. The creator's advice to just don't use NVIDIA GPUs is stupendously unhelpful.

An unbiased title to the video would read "Gaming on Linux is impossible for the most popular games and graphics cards." All of these games and GPUs work on Windows. If you rationalize the downsides, you are biased.