I remember when Proton launched it was like magic playing games like Doom and Nier Automata straight from the Linux Steam client with excellent performance. I do not miss the days of having the Windows version of Steam installed separately.
In the time I have been a Linux gamer, it has gone from “here is a list of games that work in Linux” to “here is a list of games that do not work in Linux.” Which some dictionaries define as “progress.”
That’s a perfect way to put it. From constantly relying on ProtonDB to occasionally checking areweanticheatyet.com.
Oh I’d never even heard of that second site haha.
That’s crazy! When I was last trying to run Linux full time in ~2014, you had WINE and then a commercial version of WINE (not by the WINE devs, but because WINE is licensed the way it is and is open source…) that would run a few more things, but I don’t remember what it was called.
So glad to hear it’s progressing this quickly and far.
I started out in 2014, and pretty much what I did was look to see if there was a Steam logo on the Steam store page to indicate Linux compatibility. With Proton in the last few years, I just don’t really worry about it. I will say my tastes have just about always lined up with the kinds of games, the kinds of studios, that are likely to publish for Linux, the nerd shit like Kerbal Space Program and Factorio. I don’t play Call of Fifa, Modern Fortnite or whatever.
What about Red Theft Autoredemption, or Overwatch of Legends? 😆
a commercial version of WINE
That would be CrossOver by CodeWeavers. They’re actually a huge contributor to upstream Wine and have worked with Valve (and I think Collabora?) several times over the past few years. I’m kind of tempted to buy a copy of CrossOver to support them even though I’d never use it, lol
In 2003, it was my dream to play FF7 in Linux. In 2019, my dream came true. Thanks Proton, Codeweavers, Wine, Valve, et al for helping me finally put down Sephiroth right.
Anticheat is about to force this progress backwards years as publishers push drm
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Publishers who do this make shit games anyway.
As someone who really wants to see desktop Linux grow, I try not to think like this because I know others care about these games…but goddammit if I don’t completely agree with you on the inside. I do not understand the obsession with these
gamesproducts, they’re exclusively designed to keep you playing and paying for as long as possible to avoid fomo for digital garbage.There are a tiny handful of non-live service games that still use anti-cheat, and most of those have already enabled support for Proton. Dragon Ball FighterZ is literally the only exception that I can think of, and even that’s playable offline IIRC.
Are we watching a “changing of the guard” where the studios that used to bring out the hits are dying, shedding their talent and new indie projects are blooming in the fallout? I remember Bioward being a fantastic studio during the Mass Effect (and prior) years. They’re a shell of their former selves now. I see this happening with Bethesda now too, although Starfield is not that bad. It’s just nowhere near as epic and fun as Skyrim was. Then you have studios like CDPR that seemed poised to take the crown with CP2077, and although it’s a great game, they certainly fumbled hard at launch. It’s an interesting time in the game industry.
Hey pro tip, if a game isn’t nearly as epic and fun as one that was released like 12 years ago, then its OK to call it a bad game. Cuz that’s certainly not good
Actually most anticheat now also supports Linux with Proton
True I just moved my gaming PC to Linux and wow!! Almost all of my games run on Linux. Thank you for everyone working so hard.
This is the main reason, other than gog’s lack of support, for not going full Linux.
You can use a launcher like Heroic to play games you have on gog or epic.
I buy mostly GOG games (like 90%) and with Heroic it’s quite easy.
I’ve gradually gone from being peeved at Proton for not being able to support certain brands of anti-cheat, to actively avoiding games with anti-cheat solutions that are fundamentally incompatible with Proton.
And to say that there used to be a time when “Linux gaming” was an oxymoron as it at most meant SuperTuxKart or mindlessly watching
glxgears.Valve literally went “you know what fuck the profits we need off Windows” and they did what nobody else has done before.
Imagine how much else humanity could do if they said that. Even just once more, fuck the profits, let’s give people a 4 day work week with 6 hours per day.
The only think keeping me from wiping Windows from my machine is Ubisoft anthicheat lol
I remember using bare wine to play games before proton. You would have to go and find the exact libraries needed to run the game, install them one way or another, pray a bit, and maybe the game will run with acceptable fps. If it ran at all.
And these days its just plug and play. Dont remember the last time I had to install a game dependency with proton, from steam or otherwise.
Freaky to read your account. I switched to ubuntu desktop like 3 weeks ago, bought a gpu, installed steam (ok, I had to reinstall from apr since snap didn’t work well), 2 days ago I installed cyberpunk and it runs at 80 fps mostly high-ultra settings without one crash so far, no special boot parameters. (I had to edit the exe today so it wouldn’t force controller config though)
It’s insane how far linux has come in the last 5 yrs. I hope it goes on like this. In opposition to amd, linux actually is our friend. :)
I was wondering that too. As far as I know, when it comes to Linux, AMD and Intel are the way to go. Nvidia are the ones who generally tend to suck on linux (although I never had problems with my nvidia gpu, its pretty old tho)
In this case, you need to take my comment more literally.
AMD does a lot better than nvidia but amd still makes a lot of business decisions that are not consumer friendly. For example pricing their gpus a lot higher than they used to instead of more competitive to nvidia.
They do good but in opposition to open source, it is still a company and therefore not our „friend“. Open source in contrast is made by us, therefore undeniably more our friend.
It was a figure of speech, not meaning to dump on amd.
most shit was literally click and play
Imagine a completely different OS running software made for your OS better than your actual OS could. This is Microsoft Windows
Not only OS - written using 3D APIs closed source available only for your OS.
Good, ditching windows entirely is in my near future.
Finally did it a few days ago. Not only gaming (and emulation in general) is more fluid, but the sheer amount of customization available makes me never want to go back to Windows.
Okay I can definitely back up the second claim. World of Warships, a DirectX only game, runs and loads better on Linux with Proton. I tested both on SSD and HDD, and in both scenarios the game runs at a higher FPS and loads faster. I legitimately have no idea why.
I originally tested on HDD and guessed that ext4 was just much better with the IO speeds because NTFS would fragment like hell. But then it also was the same with an SSD and now I’m not sure.
I want to switch but I have a Windows Mixed Reality device — will it still work on Linux?
I switched to Linux on my gaming PC about five or six years ago and tried a couple of different distros. Manjaro was the first one that worked really well for me, and I played through the original RAGE and Mass Effect using that setup, but for the last couple of years I’ve used POP!_OS, after Manjaro broke a couple of times. I’m never going back to Windows, mostly thanks to Proton. Even Elder Scrolls Online works really well using Proton.
Proton has better 32 bit compatibility than windows itself
Windows too busy using those cpu cycles to gather your usage metrics for sale to third parties.
Somewhat true, but the truth is that the CPU scheduler on Windows is just awful. It literally wastes performance because it doesn’t optimize instructions as efficiently as schedulers on other OSes.
Without going into details, we ported an application that I worked with that did complex scientific calculations to Linux. All the calculations code was done in C and C++ so it was 99.9% OS agnostic. We consistently got at least a 50% performance increase when running on Linux as opposed to Windows. We tested just about every edition of Windows from Windows 8/Server 2013 to Windows 10/Server 2019. The version of Windows that did best was Windows 7 and Linux was 50% faster. All the other editions were slower.
And the distro of Linux didn’t matter much. A few percent difference here and there, but all of them were astonishingly faster than Windows.
