There's still room for improvement, but Linux gaming has come a long way in a short time.
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.
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
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.
"Did Loki port it?", which was a very short list, plus a few exceptions like Quake.
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.
Anticheat is about to force this progress backwards years as publishers push drm
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.
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.
Mindlessly watching glxgears is the greatest experience a GPU can render.
They're so smooth when you buy a high end graphics card.
Windows gamers will never understand the joy that glxgears gave us
I remember when Linux gaming meant Nethack.
I mean, Nethack is still great...
Is there something like vulkangears now?
vkcube exists in most repositories I guess
Edit: Looks like there is a vkgears too
vulkangears
I know that the vulcan-tools package has vkcube in it. Someone did make vulkangears as an example, along with some other examples, but I don't think its a published package in any distro repos so it'd need to be manually compiled to run it.
Been playing Warcraft 3 / DotA and Counter-Strike on Linux since 2005. Still playing Dota and Counter-Strike. Are there other games worth playing? 😂
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.
The only similar issue I faced seemed to be due to multithreading. I don’t know enough about the underlying architecture to point my finger at a specific ‘thing’ but I was beating my head against the wall seeing the same 50% drop in performance. The one way I was able to get comparable performance was if I limited the cores on the machine to 1. Windows was only a couple percent slower in that case. When I upped the cores windows couldn’t keep up. The weird part is that the utilization in task manager looked like all the cores were being utilized but the performance certainly didn’t reflect that. I was finally able to get the program manager off my ass but how they handled the situation really soured me on staying with the company so I left, feel bad for the next person to get hit with “get this application off Linux so we can be a 100% windows client shop” garbage.
They contracted the companies developers at over 600k for six months of support, I was dedicated to the effort for a year, and the CIO apparently instructed a PM that nothing else mattered and if it didn’t work I was personally responsible. Like MFers, I didn’t design the hardware, operating system, or the application, I’m doing everything I know how, how exactly is this shit my fault?!
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 remember back in the day I thought one of my favorite games, Elite: Dangerous, would never run on Linux. I dualbooted for a while just so I could play it. After a while I stopped playing it much and figured I could get rid of Windows, so I did. About a year later the community came out with a complicated setup you could perform to get it running on Linux through wine. It's just as you said, lots of manually finding and installing libraries, tweaking environments, and eventually got it working (jankily) at a pretty mediocre framerate. I thought that was the best I was going to get. Another two years and it was running seamlessly on proton with no configuration or tweaking at all. It really is incredible what Valve has done for Linux gaming.
most shit was literally click and play
I still remember installing the sims 3 on wine. This was before proton, before the sims 4. I started by looking the game up on winehq - the results were not promising. The rating was not exactly garbage, but still runs with problems. Some brave soul had come up with installation instructions though.
So I try to install the game using those instructions. Took me about 40 minutes of installing things like ms c++ runtimes. Then when I tried to run the game? Crash. Doesn't work. So I went back to WineHQ and found another instruction (luckily there were multiple ppl that made the game work)
After following it for another hour, the game still didnt work. After googling the error for some time im pretty sure I just downloaded some random dll that was missing from runtimes and put it with the game. Voila, the game ran! Laggy, but playable. Took only about 3 hours of research and tinkering.
Today? I'm pretty sure I can just download the game and it will run, just like that, no config required.
Valve literally went "you know what fuck the profits we need off Windows" and they did what nobody else has done before.
I'm not sure how Valve is seen to forfeit any Windows related profit.
They are still thoroughly supporting Windows. A Windows gaming system will have Steam on it, and most gamers still prefer Steam while on Windows.
When Windows 8 happened with the Microsoft store, Valve saw the writing on the wall for the eventual problems they would face, and did SteamOs and SteamBoxes. However, not much skin off their back, as they didn't "bet the company" or anything. It then pretty much let those efforts die off when the Microsoft Store wasn't quite the imminent existential threat it looked to be. However, the Xbox-ification of the Windows ecosystem may prove to be a more imminent and dire threat now that Microsoft realized that "hey, we actually do have a gaming brand that enjoys some popularity and is basically just a Windows box already".
So Valve saw that the Nintendo Switch was such a hit and extrapolated to PC space. They could have had a horribly awkward device running Windows, which has forever sucked at serving this form factor and is not even vaguely amenable to 'total controller control'. However they decided to revive the SteamOS efforts since it was moderately close to enable them to actually deliver a pad-first UI for a handheld, with Valve branding front and center rather than Microsoft.
So the closest I can see to that claim is that Steam Deck opted out of supporting a handful of games (that also likely don't work well on the relatively low end specs anyway) rather than trying to make a Windows hand-held work against all the design points of Windows.
What profits did Valve say that to exactly? They were shipping a device that didn’t have an existing OS that worked for it. I know companies have been shipping handheld PCs since the 90s but they never took off because the experience of Windows on a mobile device sucks, full stop.
I’m very happy they did this and it will help lots of things, but it’s about as altruistic as Apple making WebKit open source. A massive boon to the community that did help everyone, but the goal wasn’t altruism. It was to create a software solution where one didn’t exist to improve a for-profit device.
Plus, not having to pay Microsoft for OEM Windows licenses helps too.
You are looking too short term. Valve has been very concerned about Microsoft for a long time (maybe a decade now?). They have traditionally been dependent on the Windows platform while Microsoft has a competing built-in store and the Xbox product line. This means that they are dependent on one of their biggest competitors. If Microsoft wasn't concerned about anti-competitive legal action they probably would have smited them already.
Especially with macOS dying for gaming and iOS having no third-party stores they have made multiple pushes into Linux as a platform where they don't depend on Microsoft. While the Steam Deck has been very successful, they have already blown money of failed attempts in the past and running Windows on the Steam Deck would likely not be a huge cost (bulk licenses are cheap and they are spending a lot of money on Linux development).
So whether or not they are making more or less money in the short term doesn't appear to be Valve's motivation. Their primary motivation is to unlock themselves from Microsoft, whether or not that is best for profits right now.
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.
Yeah until you find a game which doesn't run only because of its dogshit Anti Cheat System Service.
Proton has better 32 bit compatibility than windows itself
Proton literally got me into PC gaming again. I switched to Linux in 2008, and stopped playing PC games. For a decade, I missed so much. Valve is awesome!
i mean that was your choice i was playing Wow on linux in like 2008
If I as an older person would like to start using linux, where would you recommend to start? Is there an easy guide I can follow on how to use linux?
Linux Mint is often touted as the most similar looking GUI to windows, so if you want Linux, but looking like windows that might be your best bet. You will find many guides for how to install Linux. If you want to just try it out first (and not just overwrite windows), you'll need to free up some disk space and create an empty partition to install Linux on.
Linux mint is just nice to deal with. I distro-hopped to see what was out there but I came back to mint. It plays my games and runs my AI and works with whatever old garbage i plug in without needing to download shifty drivers from a shifty site like with windows.
Honestly, your question will get a ton of different answers because it's so open to people's preferences. It's like asking "I want to start using a car, which one should I buy?" There will be so many different answers that it's practically useless, from people recommending a toyota aygo since it's cheap, easy and reliable to people recommending a Abrams tank "because it can handle everything".
imo, try Linux Mint or Ubuntu since they are accessable and bring most software out of the box. But it's up to you, you cannot really lose when picking a distro.
I'll recommend NobaraOS. It comes with everything set up out-of-the box and you can change interface to Windows or macOS style.
DO NOT SWITCH, until you've found that every software you use has a Linux version... Or an alternative which works on Linux as well as for you.
ALSO DO NOT SWITCH if you have the 30 or 40 series NVIDIA cards. Or any NVIDIA card for that matter.
YouTube channel recommendations - The Linux Experiment, Tech Hut, Gardiner Bryant (old videos, he just makes Steam Deck content now)
I had issues with my 4060 on the latest mint, but everything worked fine on Ubuntu 23.04. Everything can be fixed but Ubuntu worked out of the box.
Linux Mint or wait for SteamOS
or wait for SteamOS
good luck with that
As noob, who is not interested in learning the core of linux, but only want it to just work, I would recommend the new openSuse slowroll (based on own experience with tumbleweed which should in theory be less stable than slowroll) and for apps I recommend going for flathubs. I’m not sure if slowroll already released.
If you go down this route, even as a noob, whatever tech issues you may run into, it will likely be easier to find command line interface [CLI] solutions that you can copy and paste into your terminal aka console.
I know it seems extra and harder because it looks like something a hacker would do. But telling someone where to click a mouse over and over again is so much harder than "copy this into a terminal app, and send back the output"
As a fellow older gamer who is also technical, I'm using Fedora with KDE, and I install the Steam client and the Bottles app for non-Steam games.
If you're not technical, then I would suggest something like Linux Mint or Ubuntu, but KDE gives you the closest experience to a Windows desktop regardless of which version of Linux you're using (vs Gnome).
But as others have said, it doesn't really matter (for the most part) which version of Linux you use, it really comes down to using Steam and Bottles for the game support.
I'm just sad I have an Nvidia GPU 😢
Same. Luckily it's gtx980 so it's not I bought it recently. Next gpu shall be amd
I've got a GTX980ti, which runs fine with my POP_OS setup, but I'll be switching to AMD for my next GPU as well. If for no other reason than to not support Nvidia.
What is wrong with Nvidia gpus with regard to Linux? I have no issues with mine.
It's trouble is in that it severely lacks features that it have on Windows, especially newest popular stream add-ons like voice and background blurring, troubles with Ray tracing and dlss, and most infamous problem is that Nvidia drivers absolutely would break your system updates eventually, and it can break your whole system Edit: source: i have laptop with Nvidia gpu
The nvidia drivers can be a pain, and some distributions don't care about nVidia's support schedule and push a kernel update and nVidia will no longer compile.
Also, the fact that a kernel update means the nvidia driver must recompile is a pain.
I'm holding out hope for the open drivers (they basically moved all the proprietary bits to run on the GPU) to eventually mean that the premiere nVidia experience is already integrated at some point in the future.
Because Nvidia is a bunch of dicks.
I'm using an Nvidia GPU on my POP!_OS Gaming PC it runs mostly without issue. The few times there has been driver problems, there's been an easy fix on System76's homepage soon after
I still remember having to use Ubuntu back in 2007.
To cut a long story short, I used to have a crappy Packard Bell PC that was weirdly partitioned (the main C:\ partition named Programs had 20GB and D:\ named Data had 120GB allocated.)
A (obviously now former) friend at school who thought he was hot-shit with PCs nagged and pressured me into acquiring a copy of Norton PartitionMagic and merging the two partitions. Completely totalled the Windows XP installation and because I didn't have any recovery media, I was forced to wipe everything and install Linux.
Gaming on Ubuntu back in 2007 was a nightmare. Only thing I managed to run that wasn't some shitty FOSS game that looked like it was made for the Net Yaroze was WoW, and even then actually installing the damn game was a nightmare where I had to resort to literally copying files from each install CD because actually running the installer from the CD itself resulted in failure by Disc 3. Every other game I tried to run through Wine either refused to boot at all, had bugs that would soft-lock my PC, or put out 0.01 frames per second due to lack of OpenGL support.
Linux has evolved by leaps and bounds but still has some way to go before you could use it as a gaming OS. Hopefully the Steam Deck encourages more developers to support Linux.
Of course, some devs have turned their back on Linux, such as post-Fortnite Epic Games.
but [Linux] still has some way to go before you could use it as a gaming OS
maybe a nitpick, but I think it's more accurate to say it has some way to go before everyone could use it as a gaming OS. many many people can use it as is right now. All the games I play work great on Linux so far, I removed windows from my gaming PC months ago.
if you're already into Linux and you don't care about competitive games with anti cheat, then Linux is ready to be your gaming OS right now imo
Yup. I've played everything I've wanted to play on Linux with only one minor stumble getting ea launcher to work, and it was literally just selecting a different version of proton than I had as default.
It amazes me how many people come to the Linux communities on lemmy just to tell people that Linux isn't good enough and we have to still use windows...
I've overall had a decent experience playing games on my Steam Deck. A lot of incompatible games but the ones that not only do work but are verified have shocked me greatly.
Valve have single handedly evolved Linux gaming by leaps and bounds.
Friends don't have friends use Norton or McAfee software.
Windows will die if it cannot be pirated.
Ah, good times.
Only thing I managed to run that wasn't some shitty FOSS game that looked like it was made for the Net Yaroze
I was going to say this feels like supertuxkart slander, but I looked up the release date and realised that it probably wasn't released yet
Was more Tux Racer slander than anything else.
Also, Frets on Fire, which was a much shittier attempt at creating a freeware clone of Guitar Hero. Thankfully Clone Hero came out over a decade later.
Short time? Proton is built around Wine, which is 30 years old. 30 years is not a short time.
Remember the wine days where proton didn't exist? Barely any game was playable.
We got from unplayable to "download and play" within 5 years
Or you went from hell and back trying to install all the dependencies with winetricks
Guys, actually this stuff was written in C which has been around for 50 years. But yea, this happened quickly.
bullshit, you are either young or you got bad memory
Don't you people have something better to do than unironically doing the ackchyually meme? Follow the fucking post and its fucking intent, you fucking internet weirdos. You're not as smart as you think you are.
Steam Deck is the main reason for this and reasonable WINE emulation of DirectX & other APIs.
I bet the experience outside of Steam Deck depends a lot on the dist, the graphics drivers & card and someone's personal knowledge & willingness to screw around making everything work. Drivers are the biggest issue by far - open source drivers tend to be more limited, while binary drivers tend to be quite fragile, e.g. breaking after a kernel update & requiring reinstallation.
It's easier than you think. You can just download an exe, point lutris/steam to it (ie, just paste the path into the gui), and run the game. I have yet to find a game that doesn't work. Troubleshooting is rare, and in my experience only involves changing proton versions. I have never had to mess with drivers, aside from initial installation when I installed the OS.
I bet the experience outside of Steam Deck depends a lot on the dist, graphics drivers and card and someone's personal knowledge/willingness to screw around making everything work
In my experience, it's been about the same. Then again, I also use an Arch based distro on my desktop, but I dunno, even when I distrohopped a lot and used other distros and hadn't replaced some of my specs, gaming wasn't a pain to setup or do in general unless it was something that specifically didn't work with Linux (maybe modding was hard at first, but once I found out what worked for me, I was golden).
open source drivers tend to be more limited, while binary drivers tend to be quite fragile
And thank you for telling everyone what GPU you are using. Most mainstream GPU manufacturers support open-source drivers(AMD, Intel) and for some of them open-source dricers are the only option(Intel).
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.
I agree with this meme 100%
Unfortunately, the game I mainly play, apex legends, has started giving me all sorts of trouble this past year. I'm on PopOS so part of me wonders if it's related to their focus on cosmic (or maybe they aren't prioritizing fixing bugs?) But I also have no idea where the issue sits? Steam flat pack? Proton? Apex itself? PopOS? A weird config/setting on my machine?
But it actually highlights this point of this post because instead of playing apex I have played starfield with a single crash around launch.
Hmm, I'm a big Apex player myself on Linux, Nobara. Almost no issues for over a year now. What version of Proton are you using?
Ive tried so many, but right now I am on Proton Experimental.
It's been working, hilariously, since I made my post.
It looks like the issue is with how it updates. The errors I get are all failed to load .pak. the fix usually requires me to validate the integrity of game files, where it inevitably finds some files that fails validation and redownloads them. The irritating thing is that that doesn't always work. Sometimes it just stays broken.
This last attempt at fixing it I validated(needed to download some failed files), completely exited steam, relaunched, new update, exited steam, relaunched, new update, exited steam, relaunch and finally it had no updates. I did one last validation and launched and its worked since then.
Edit: so it said there was an update after my last session. I updated. The next time I launched (5min ago) I got an error:
I did the "verify game files" and wouldn't ya know it. Failed to validate 2 files.
The steam deck inspired me to finally ditch Windows for good. I have dealt with it for the past 15+ years professional and I grew so damn tired of it. Built myself a nice little gaming PC running pop is and I'm quite pleased!
Mac as a laptop, steamdeck for gaming. There is a Win 11 VM on my unraid server for the occasional poke at something but I can't say I miss windows in any way....
Same on the laptop and Unraid server actually, lol. But I don't run any VMs on it at all. Hardware is a bit old so I don't know how much it could run effectively.
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.
This is the way.
I've played MPO games only a few times, but I've never understood rhe anticheats..
This week I decided to try dual booting with OpenSuse again and see how much I still need Windows for gaming. Turns out: not much. For VR. And maybe for Game Pass games if cloud gaming turns out to be crap and I cannot get a VM performant enough for games.
All in all, very pleasing experience.
I also decided to dual boot Linux when I did a fresh Windows install this past weekend.
Because I hate myself I'm running Arch, but I was able to get Apex running well enough without too much fucking around. Problem is, I haven't been able to get OBS capture to run nearly as well as I can on Windows. I record at 1440/90 with high bitrate, and I haven't been able to get that working on Linux yet.
I really wanna jump full-on into Linux now and try living without windows, but sometimes I just need things to work without having to try 4 differently compiled versions of a program, and I don't know if I can get all my games running (Halo Infinite is giving me issues, if anyone has proton tips).
linux games, always reminds me of Tux Racer when I finally got X11 config right. https://www.google.com/search?q=tux+racer
Anyone still remember when this came out?
God I feel old now.
was 30 something about then invading a windows-centric IT dept. they feared linux as it replaced all their basic services. email, file servers, DB2 servers, online courseware...
Still can't run MS Office well /s
The fact that there's a competitive Excel scene makes this comment infinitely funnier to me.
Yeah, it's crazy and pretty interesting.
Crazy. Never heard of it till now.
For real, though, I really wish I could easily run Office with Bottles or something like that. Never managed to make it work
I never thought we'd see MS Office on Linux, and then they released Outlook for Android.
They have their Entire suite on Android. They just hate Linux
AFAIK Doom runs natively
How is mod support on linux for games? Does it work as usual via Proton?
Stardew Valley and Minecraft modder reporting in with no issues. In general, anything Steam is moddable without issues.
Minecraft is cross platform and has been perfect with modding on Linux for a long time.
It would be weird for a mod to break compatibility of a game unless it’s a DLL hack
Anything that's steam workshop should just work for the most part.
There's also steam tinker launcher which you can use as a shim between steam and your proton in order to hook modloaders like modorganizer for Skyrim.
Anything that's "drag and drop" should also work seamlessly.
Worst case scenario you can add your mod organizer as a non-steam game and browse to your game folder in the mod tool.
Same as far as I can tell. I installed model swap mods for several games, workshop mods for binding of isaac and terraria, and did other random things to games like tweak configs and shit. All of it worked fine. The biggest issues I had is installing random old games in my collection to my steam deck that weren't on steam already, and even that I still managed to make it work.
For most games I'm sure you can find a way to do it. If you use protontricks you are able to run an exe under a proton prefix for a game (basically a virtual windows drive in a folder for the game) which I've had pretty decent luck with.
If you play games that support mod organizer 2, there is a sh install script somewhere for support in proton/steam that works well (I can find if you like), but the program does run pretty slow and is fairly buggy. Usable with patience. Upside is it can run MO2 for a given game direct from steam if configured correctly
My son does tmodloader via steam, but I think its native Linux. Works without issue.
I play WoW and run Trade Skill Master (in the same wine bottle prefix). I also run RaiderIO/WoW Up/CurseForge (Linux native).
I had issues with mods for The Forest and Sons of the Forest. Never got them working.
FF XIV DPS meter worked after a lot of tinkering. Had to go to a specific discord to get the info as the modders didn't keep their READMEs in GitHub up to date. Wish that shit was searchable.
So, it's a mixed bag in my experience...
Cyberpunk 2077 mods work great from Nexus Mods. World of Warcraft mods work great from Curseforge.
I was able to add a couple of mods that I created myself to Rimworld just fine.
For terraria tmodloader works no issue, I think forge has a native client for WoW, and Minecraft is linux native anyway EDIT: I only ever modded terraria and minecraft so idk about any more
I think forge has a native client for WoW
Did you mean World of Warcraft?
+1 for everything you mentioned - I'll add Stardew Valley. Flawless mod support with SMAPI on Linux. I do love my mods.
It varies but generally if there is a will there is a way. Sometimes it just works, sometimes intervention required.
Typical things that may or may not be needed depending on game:
Windows packages and/or Dll overrides via launch arguments or winecfg/protontrick
Separate wine prefix with specific weird wine build to run mod managers or editors etc. with links to relevant directories in game prefix
Case insensitivity which can be set per directory on empty directories on ext4 (poorly made mods only usually)
Searching "[game name] mods [steam deck or linux]"
Regretting all of that to find that there is a Linux mod loader that works 100% but google stopped giving meaningful search results decades ago and the reddit trick doesn't work as well post api-suicide.
Absolutely! I play mainly two games. DayZ and Eve Online. Both run way faster on my Debian 12 rig compared to running on Windows 11.
Granted, it took a while to figure out how to self-sign the Nvidia driver (secure boot). But once that was sorted it was smooth sailing.
Not only it works very often but one can even check https://www.protondb.com before buying to make sure it does work. It also works for VR games. I recently tried a brand new game, supposedly "Windows only", and it worked without any tinkering. I then updated ProtonDB to clarify so that others could play too. It's simple I didn't boot on Windows to play for years now. I'm also traveling today and instead of bringing a laptop I bring my SteamDeck to play, to work I'll also bring a BT keyboard.
TL;DR: it works, even with VR, and ProtonDB can help to identify problems
Honest question: if you’re not a Steam user, what does Proton do that wine doesn’t just as easily? I’ve played games in wine prefixes for years now, but haven’t bothered with Proton or PlayOnLinux or any of the other wine front ends. Are they worth it?
If you're happy managing Wine prefixes, you aren't missing out on much. Running a game on Steam with Proton is going to be about the same quality of experience compared to running a non-Steam game with Wine + DXVK + D3DVK. Proton is great because it's already in Steam so everything "just works" if that's where your games are, but Valve upstreams basically everything they do so everyone benefits.
Proton is essentially a fork of wine thats fine tuned by devs bankrolled by Valve/steam to optimize it to work for any and every game they can (so that it works with the Deck which is linux and relies on proton alot). AFAIK regular ol' wine is more of a general emulator that in my exerience is hit or miss when it comes to getting games running. Proton almost always succeeds where regular wine fails especially if its a big bulky AAA game with multiplayer and stuff such as Elden Ring. Someone on github maintains builds of wine based off cutting edge proton experimental for Lutris. You can find it here
I think another point worth mentioning is that some anti-cheats allow proton, which is nice if you wanna play online with others in a competitive game.
I believe they do this by checking the hashes of a lot of the system32 type stuff, I'm not convinced it would just work in vanilla wine.
Steam is a dependency for official proton builds at least, but there are wine builds with the proton patches added in. Base wine will end up getting a lot of them too.
In the case that proton works, you install game via Linux steam and just play. Maybe override proton version and add launch arguments like dll overrides if needed for things like mods or nitpicky performance tuning.
Base wine will generally get the same improvements eventually. I use it via bottles for the odd windows program. I often need to use other custom wine builds for some of the more annoying programs. For games outside of steam, builds like wine-ge have all the relevant proton additions without the steam dependency.
Proton tends to work better because steam games are identified by an AppID and it has a list of tweaks/settings required for games that need them (protonfixes). If you install a game on steam and launch it, it just works, because it knows that you're trying to run game X and it needs patches Y and Z. On wine it will probably work the same, but you'll have to install winetricks or change settings yourself.
Wine builds for Lutris made by GloriousEggroll are based on proton and include most of the extra patches along with newest versions of things like VKD3D or DXVK. You just need to install redistributables by hand via winetricks.
It "just works" 95% of the time with no tweaks. That's the benefit. Games in your library will install and run with zero intervention, just like on Windows and at times with better compatibility because the tweaks and dependencies are already configured. It's nice not having to manage wine versions and prefixes.
If i'm correct proton adds a lot of gaming specific patches that increases game compatibility fixes in steam. Outside steam i've been using wine-ge which i find better than normal wine because it adds the proton patches and more which you can read about in the wine-ge-custom github.
Unfortunately Easy Anti Cheat doesn't agree with your allegations.
I think this may well be the thing that, at long last, eventually leads to the end of the Windows hegemony on PC. Linux compatibility being a prerequisite for running on the default configuration of the Steam Deck. Gaming is the Microsoft OS's last real stronghold.
Nah. Windows biggest customer is the corporate world. Windows is everywhere. Gaming isn’t much of a factor, especially when the majority of gamers are console players.
I'm still waiting for games to release on Linux with good compatibility, I hope that's the case since the steam deck has been out for a bit. Unfortunately every Linux native game I've tried so far has had some issues that were resolved switching to wine
Who do we thank for this? Steam or who is behind making proton viable? I guess they have donated a bunch of money for this.
Wine developers. Yes, Valve/Proton has given it a big boost in the last few years but the Wine project has been under steady development for 30 years, almost as long as Linux itself. I remember trying it for the first time back in the day and being amazed that it could run Minesweeper.
Wine
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.
I switched from Windows to Pop! OS, definitely pleasant.
I've used Ubuntu on many occasions but tried PopOS since last week.
It's surprisingly good. Lots of ergonomics over Ubuntu. They have a version of the iso prepackaged with Nividia drivers.
Most surprisingly, after some install busted my sound devices (they stopped showing up), I discovered PopOS has a system refresh button that saves your home directory but reinstalls the OS to a fresh state. Very convenient.
And I honestly love valve for taking wine which is an impressive project on it's own and making it even better.
Our last windows System bluescreened on us for good....
We' ve now setup our gaming rig with Garuda Linux and Proton and couldn't be happier!
Baldurs Gate 3 runs flawlessly on highest details. It. Is. Great.
Honestly, I’m considering risking the jump to something like Pop OS. If my games ran well on Linux, I probably would have no reason to stay on windows outside of for my work computers.
I tried Valheim on Pop OS an it ran better than on windows (where it crashes all the time).
I've ran the Linux native Valheim client for 100+ hours on my Kubuntu install and had zero issues with the game.
I daily Pop OS, it's overall pretty good. Drivers are super easy to deal with, and the Pop Shop has a lot of game-related apps ready to install. Biggest headache is that sometimes my Mic just won't work and I have to reboot. That, and steam does Vulkan Shader Compilation on every game launch it seems, which can be a pain
TWD (Total Windows Death)
I have to stick to windows only because of VR, once performance and UX improves I will nuke windows out of my PC but I still absolutely love linux, been hopping around distros like a madman almost 2 years ago until I settled on arch, couldn't leave the damn thing.
Hi, I used a Linux PC 10 years ago and have been waffling on getting a Linux build now that Windows is essentially started coming with pre-packaged adware and Spyware. What's Proton?
There is a software called "wine" that is used for running windows apps on linux. Proton is a version of Wine that specializes in running video games.
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.
Seems like CPU-intensive game, so it makes sense.
Mfw Guild Wars 2 ran like absolute ass on my Windows computer, and then I installed proton and it was smooth like butter.
The only think keeping me from wiping Windows from my machine is Ubisoft anthicheat lol
Does Linux have solitaire support?
Yes. Some distros even have airselot (I think that's how it's spelled) installed out of the box
It's spelled "aisleriot".
KPatience is my goto
I feel like the boss casually droping i'm gaming from linux and some people being like what how ?
And now I heard that official client of Genshin Impact was fully compatible with Proton at that time.
I prefer the unofficial client as it also allows you to mod the game to run at 120FPS.
Genshin being paid by Apple to withhold 120 FPS from other devices (and controller support from other mobile devices), plus their invasive anti-cheat, plus the fact that Mihoyo is a Chinese company (which makes the aforementioned anti-cheat even more scary to touch) makes me not want to touch the game with a ten-mile pole.
I want to switch but I have a Windows Mixed Reality device — will it still work on Linux?
check out the monado, they are getting it working but I couldn't tell you the functionality off the top of my head
Still waiting on Borderlands 2 to be playable
Force Proton in game properties, the native version kind of sucks but Proton works fine.
This is my biggest gripe with developers. More often than not the native version either has worse performance or poor compatibility whereas the windows versions just seem to work. It seems like they aren't putting effort into making their games compatible with newer compositors or something because proton "just works".
For some reason DXVK makes the lava disappear in this game, at least at the final boss. If you're a new player who knows nothing about this boss you'll die not knowing why
Isn't it? I finished that game on linux years ago, including a lot of multiplayer.
in my case pretty much all heavy games work much better on Linux than on windows(laptop came with windows, so tested before putting Linux on it and then compared). in many cases I get around 1.5 to 2 times the performance, stability is also much greater, this is both for new and old games. that said I tend to avoid those games with insane mallware(drm) in it.
system uses a apu and has only 16gb ram and 1.5tb nvme ssd. so might also be it has a much bigger effects on APU since Linux handles ram much better. but if a system suffers from other similar bottlenecks like: storage, ram, compute, TDP and thermal, etc. problems should also result in much better performance when switching to Linux. I guess the only exception would be if the GPU compute power would litterally 100% be the only bottleneck, or close to that, but in a APU(where one might assume games to be heavily bottlenecked by GPU compute power) GNU+Linux gives much better performance.
also this was tested on Garuda Linux KDE Dragonized edition, and changed the kernel to a newer one since by default it will use a kernel optimized or first gen ryzen. which gives some issues and lower performance.
Iam using a Laptop with a thunderbolt connected gtx1070. Does someone have experience or tips using linux and gaming with a setup like that. That and (solidworks) are the last reasons i didn't switch already.
because @clegko mentions shit support :( , maybe look at the framework laptop for your next upgrade? they are doing some stuff with replaceable parts, and the newest one even swappable gpu's.
Sadly my current laptop is kinda new (half a year) and I searched way to long, because I have a weird taste. (I am used to hardware mouse buttons, so thinkpads are mostly the only option. I also dislike the odd haptic gummy feeling of premium thinkpads, which only some models don't have (for example T490s, T14sG1 and G2) or the Yoga X1 series which is aluminum, which I gladly found a nice deal of the 2019 model.
This search went on for about a year. :O
It's an important milestone as it's the only effective way to make PC gaming available on operating systems other than Windows (i.e., reduce one of the Windows monopolies). Still, Linux gamers shouldn't take it too far. I'd advise everyone to still not support game studios which are openly hostile towards Linux gamers. This especially includes the ones who rely on client-side anticheat tools and then use those to block Linux gamers even though the game would run perfectly fine on Linux as well. Please do not support such games or studios (e.g.: Epic Games, EA, Bungie, Riot). Thanks to Proton, there is still a massive number of Windows games that can be played instead.
Serious question: how do nvidia drivers perform on Linux? I've heard they're not very good and missing features. Anything I should know about? I have an RTX 3060ti that I use for both games and stuff like blender, substance designer/painter, etc.
Its not nearly as bad as people make it out to be. I do think its distro specific. PopOS was rock solid with nvidia drivers. I had a 3070ti that worked really well with it. I ended up getting a 6700xt because I wanted to go full-tilt into linux land and everyone raves about the open source amd drivers. I figured if I was going to be all-in on linux, why not get a radeon card.
I traded some minor issues for some fairly significant limitations. Nvidia had stutters every once in a while on the desktop. Like maximizing a window would occasionally (1 time in 50) 'hang' for a half second then complete. For Apex Legends, there was a semi-manual step to pre-cache shaders to prevent stuttering in the game. That was actually fixed over a year ago with a proton and steam update. That was about it. It also ran everything else flawlessly.
When I switched to Radeon, I thought it would be smooth sailing. Its really just different issues. You obviously dont have the nvenc encoder. The radeon encoders all suck, but AMF, their new hottness, is supposed to be really good. Well, you can't use that with the open source mesa drivers that everyone raves about--the big draw for using radeon on linux to begin with. You have to use the proprietary ones if you want to use AMF. Cool, but if you do that your game performance can suffer because the amd proprietary drivers aren't as good as the mesa ones. Oh, and you can get occasional stutters on your desktop...
You can't mix and match so if you want to stream your games on twitch or record your gameplay, tough shit. Get used to throwing CPU cores at VAAPI.
Also, AMD absolutely sucks when it comes to AI/ML. Cuda is king and ROCM is trash. If you are doing anything with AI/ML stick with nvidia. I literally bought a used 1080ti and threw it in my server (ubuntu) to do some AI jobs, because I got tried of fighting with radeon, trying to get rocm to work.
All that said, my next build will very likely include an nvidia card --even though I plan on running linux exclusively.
For Blender, Nvidia is currently the only way to go on Linux. Cycles is horribly slow on my 6750XT, and Eevee shaders take way too long to compile on Mesa (although version 23.3 should include a patch to fix that).
In my experience, not great. I have a 1080ti and run 2k ultrawide. A bit dated but still a pretty powerful card. Some games weren't too noticably different but on cyberpunk for instance I took a huge performance hit and had to adjust my game to look basically terrible to get it playable compared to windows. I think I did this by setting superfx to performance.
I have to say though, I am running a pretty old processor (barely meets win11 spec) so that could be contributing to my issues.
Thanks! I've been looking harder at Linux, but the thing that's holding me back is that I'm not sure how well the modeling and texturing tools I use will run on Linux and dual booting is a headache.
Have you ever tried running windows in a vm, and if so, how well does it run? Only reason why I'm considering this is because I've heard some vm tools can do hardware passthrough to significantly increase vm performance. If the stuff I need to run works on Windows in a vm, then I might do that.
Edit: you might check cyberpunk again, I've heard the new update currently has it performing significantly better on Linux than in Windows.
Cool could this be an engine that would allow someone using DamnSmallLinux to get better frame rates?
Proton is not an engine, it's a compatibility layer and thus would decrease performance compared to native. However, sometimes it's still faster on Linux because it has less overhead.
King Torvalds would be so proud.
It hurts my soul to see windows simps say the only reason they won't transition to linux is because 'GaMes!' Like every game i've played with proton on linux mint has run perfectly smooth for years now, even before the deckening. If you're willing to be cucked by microsoft because one or two games you play is a competative shooty that uses a garbage anticheat (cough rainbow6siege cough) even though every other game in your library works just fine, you deserve what you get.
I'm that guy.
Unfortunately, Siege and MW2 are the only two games that a large segment of my friend group plays.
And also no alternative for Visual Studio (especially WPF and Xamarin)
Games and audio production. I'm the only one in my linux sysadmin group that still keeps a Windows SSD for booting games and for media creation, I'm also the only one who doesn't suddenly have games break because an update had conflicting library dependencies or something, or a mod broke the game. I also don't have to spend hours combing through debug logs to find out why the game and mods that worked for years suddenly crashes on launch. So instead I can sit there and game while they fix their linux games. We only really have a lan party once a year so Windows SSD + Steam and old game installers makes it thoughtless. Someone running linux for their games inevitably has had to sit out the lan party, or spends the whole time trying to get whatever game working, that for some reason only isn't working for them and works for everyone else.
Basically linux is quite good for gaming, enough that linux bros can feel assured in superiority, however in practice every time I've done a LAN with 10-20 linux sysadmins and we all try to use linux, it's never gone smoothly for everyone. I actually maintain my previous laptops as Windows machines for this case, just so we can help a linux gamer get in on the games when their games break.
The main challenge with linux compatibility, is the variety and inconsistency of linux systems, it's strength can be it's weakness. It used to be Windows GPU drivers that were the bane of gamers back in the 00s-early10s, now it's trying to coax a meaningful error log out of a game that just crashes for no apparent reason on linux out of the blue.
Games, music, photography are all still legitimate use cases.
I pretty much exclusively play anticheat games and have 0 interest in single player games. I’d quit gaming overall because I’m simply not interested in playing the type of games that end up working on Linux.
But as a person who uses both windows and linux, Windows is a super stable os if you do some powershell tweaks (for bloat, ads, updates) and you can also bring the best things from the linux world like package managers, stability etc.
Windows can run all games and i dont have to worry if a game is going to have proton problems.
It can run all the telemetry and jankyass untested updates, too
Windows can run all games
Tell that to some of the games I want to play. Splinter Cell - Blacklist, I'm looking at you.
