Introducing a new version of Steam Play

Mr. Gabe & company putting their money where their mouths are[1]. I feel compelled to say: Valve rocks!

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rCGMiT0CQAI: "Linux and Open Source are the future of gaming"

A major reason I still maintain a Windows install (I dual boot with Mint) is:

A. I game. Lots of stuff supported on Linux now but not some of my most often played games.

B. I use Traktor for DJing and produce with Ableton. Low latency audio is not a good fit for virtualization or emulation.

Regardless, This is a huge step forward for me running Linux more than I already do and perhaps relegating Windows entirely to a VM (if I do even that)

If this continues to improve I can see Linux based gaming devices (and pc gaming in general) starting to take off and cut into console sales.

This is a very welcome development. One of the reasons I still have a dual-boot setup with Windows is gaming. Many of the games I play with my friends have no Linux support. I could use WINE for most of them, as far as I know, but it's too much effort for me to maintain that, when I can just boot into Windows and have the native experience without additional bugs that the compatibility layer may introduce.

Being able to install it with one click in Steam is a game-changer, especially with all the additional work Valve is putting into that ecosystem. I can live with a few "emulation" bugs (I know, I know, WINE is not an emulator) if it means I never have to switch into another OS, when the setup is this simple.

One of the first supported games is "Doki Doki Literature Club" which I actually streamed from my Windows PC to my laptop (which is only running Solus Linux) when I finally wanted to play it a couple of months ago. Guess I should've waited a little longer.

Another use case I've just been made aware of is downloading the Morrowind game files for use with OpenMW[1], which has Linux support but needs the original game files to function. Until now I had to either do that in WINE or copy the files over from Windows.

[1]http://openmw.org/en/

Any plans for macOS support?

While Wine and Proton work on macOS, there are no plans to support the new Steam Play functionality on macOS at the moment.

Sad. Deal breaker for me.

> Users playing through Steam Play experiencing Linux-specific issues should be directed to Steam for support

I wonder how they'll handle user reviews. Maybe performance won't be an issue, I know some games run even faster than on Windows, but bugs that you don't know are Proton specific could lead to bad reviews.

I like the movement of Valve toward open source, support of such a big company is what will make Linux gaming mainstream. After the Steam OS fiasco this is more than welcome. I hope in a few years it will be standard to have a Linux version of games.

a couple of the supported titles are pretty weird, but I'm at work now so maybe not so much.

Doom ultimate and Doom II use dosbox in windows. I hope they're using a linux version of dosbox instead of running dosbox on top of wine. That would be an emulator runnning on top of an api compatibility layer.

Quake has an open source release and an official linux release (although it's probably pretty hard to get that running on modern distro)