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Comment by yyyk | Hacker News Reader

It's the other way around.

There would be little incentive to port games to Linux without an existing gamer pool which can buy them, and there would be no gamer pool without an initial range of games...

The only practical way to break that vicious circle was the emulation option. Linux gamers play on emulation, but appreciate native ports and form the (initial) buyer pool for Linux games.

So Proton and co are the only reason there's any viable Linux gaming at all. Without Proton, every Linux gamer would have had a Windows install and play with that alone.

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> There would be little incentive to port games to Linux without an existing gamer pool which can buy them, and there would be no gamer pool without an initial range of games...

There isn't much of a gamer pool anyway. This may surprise you the number of people who like to play PC games and really care about Open Source I would wager isn't very many.

> So Proton and co are the only reason there's any viable Linux gaming at all. Without Proton, every Linux gamer would have had a Windows install and play with that alone.

Anyone I know who plays games and uses Linux Dual boots. Some people have spoken about some GPU pass-through nonsense with a VMWare which just seems like a faff.

It just easier to buy a drive, slap Windows on it and Steam and be done with it. Until it is easier and more reliable with my whole catalogue I will be sticking with Windows.

>There isn't much of a [Linux] gamer pool anyway. This may surprise you the number...

It doesn't surprise me at all. That number would have been zero without emulation like wine/Proton though.

> Anyone I know who plays games and uses Linux Dual boots.

As for myself, I don't play a lot, but a Linux version (native or emulated) plays a big role in deciding which games to buy when I do. It's not due to 'Open Source' reasons though.

Dual boot is too much of a mess for me, I have a separate Windows laptop which I barely use otherwise (it does have a few Windows-only games), it's a bit of an hassle too. I don't feel like booting it and discovering it needs to install 10000 updates. I have already had to reinstall Windows 10 once so I can run a game (the game didn't support the old Windows 10 build, and the in-place upgrade crashed). It's much easier when I can just take a break and run a game on the same Linux system I use regularly.

> Dual boot is too much of a mess for me, I have a separate Windows laptop which I barely use otherwise (it does have a few Windows-only games), it's a bit of an hassle too. I don't feel like booting it and discovering it needs to install 10000 updates. I have already had to reinstall Windows 10 once so I can run a game (the game didn't support the old Windows 10 build, and the in-place upgrade crashed). It's much easier when I can just take a break and run a game on the same Linux system I use regularly.

It is odd. I run Windows at work and the machine rarely gets rebooted. No problems what-so-ever. I run a Windows at home and in my Office (I do a lot of SQL SERVER and .NET dev), I rarely have crashes (once or twice a year). I work in a very large office with many other developers and the machines run fine for years on end.

Yet when someone is complaining about Windows on the internet and they like Linux it always has thousands of updates and they need to reinstall the whole OS to play one game. Odd how that comes about. I don't know quite how people manage it. Yet I use the same windows installation for half a decade with almost no problems. It almost sounds like it is operator error.

I run Windows at $WORK too, and it runs fine (there were minor issues which would probably have been worse on Linux). Also much of my work is with the MS stack, which is pretty fine too.

It's just I have little use for it at home, so I run and upgrade it rarely. It turns out upgrading from the nearly oldest Windows 10 build to the latest (at the time) crashed the upgrade process on my setup. This is hardly a regular process - I am sure 99% of people upgrade more regularly, and do not skip as many builds.

It's a cycle too, I guess. The less I use Windows the more upgrades the system accurres which makes me dread turning it on more....

> It doesn't surprise me at all. That number would have been zero without emulation like wine/Proton though.

No it wouldn't - there would still be people who like playing games and use Linux even if they couldn't play those games under Linux. Proton doesn't add anything to that.

These people would have had to make the effort to get another system - Windows or a console, at which point most of them would have little reason to bother with Linux gaming.

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