I hear that, after it left beta, the number of games that you can play on GeForce NOW is greatly reduced. I have read that you can no longer play arbitrary games from your Steam library (like you could in beta), and furthermore, a few major publishers have pulled their games from the service.
So the advantage of Paperspace would be that you can play many more games than you can on GeForce NOW.
I don't know how to show you an actual list compared to my Steam library but I only know a handful of games that have been removed (The Longest Dark was big drama a few weeks ago) but I'm sitting here testing a bunch of my most popular games (Bannerlord, DOS2, POE2, Destiny 2, LOL, Space Engineers, etc) and I haven't hit a game yet that I can't play.
Some publishers have been very anti-competitor regarding it and taken down their entire libraries but there is still a ton to play.
On the flip side, none of the games I play are available on GFN. It's incredibly frustrating. I've moved on to Shadow where I'm not subject to the arbitrary whims of publishers and developers. I can install any game that I own and nobody can do anything about it.
If your use case is gaming, does Linux support matter much? If anything I would think this would be for someone who has a Linux setup but wants to access games that aren't available.
"If your use case is gaming, does Linux support matter much?"
It really depends on the game.
For instance, Factorio, which is enormously popular on HN, has a perfectly functioning Linux version. Many other games do too, and some games even perform better on Linux than on Windows, not to mention having a better user experience on Linux (especially if you are technical and know what you're doing).
I have an old Linux laptop, and Factorio performs well enough in single player, but I run in to serious performance issues on multiplayer. It's be nice to be able to run this Linux game on a more performant Linux machine, without shelling out the $$$ for a new gaming rig.
Further, I'd like to avoid Windows as much as possible, where it can be avoided.
Shadow.tech I have had good experiences with. It does take a while to go from sign-up to them actually spinning up a machine for you but the latency is extremely good for cloud gaming.
