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Comment by snicker7 | Hacker News Reader

With Proton, Steam is basically a Windows app launcher for Linux.

I've been playing games such as Spelunky 2, Hades and Divinity: Original Sin 2 on Arch Linux with Steam/Proton, and it works seamlessly without any issues. I have Windows still just in case for some games, but I haven't booted it for ages.

I do not even have windows and most games i buy simply work these days. I stopped looking at the support icons completely.

Exception: Bad Unity games. However these often do not work properly on windows either

Yes! But then I'm having issues with Phasmophobia where it launches the game but loses connection to steam and I can't play with friends.

I remember that I had some major problems with divinity on arch. Like I had to move around some files after every update, otherwise it wouldn't launch.

Has this been fixed?

Usually to find workarounds and general compatibility reports, check protondb.com.

Yeah, I’ve beaten Sekiro and run through a season of F1 2018 in Linux. I’ve also played through The Outer Worlds from the Epic store in Lutris with no problems.

It’s surprising that AAA games on Linux work better than ever these days even without native support.

It's crazy how well most AAA games work:

Jedi: Fallen order worked out of the box, no sound issue.

Mass Effect: Andromeda works flawlessly, perfect frame rate, surround sound worked perfectly. I just got one crash to desktop over the whole playthrough and I suspect it was due to something else (updated packages while running the game). Incidentally, the game is great, esp. compared to the negative review; I'm still shocked by the discrepancy.

Same for Witcher 3, GTA V, No Man's Sky ...

More recent games often still have issues. RDR2 is just getting playable, but it's getting fixed faster. There's also less and less annoyances: just a few months back alt-tabbing was very dodgy, now it's extremely robust. Also multi-monitor support seems to work perfectly nowadays. I had some issues with controllers but I haven't tried recently.

Cool. Can you run RDR2 under Linux?

Evidently, yes: https://www.protondb.com/app/1174180

online - no. offline, with issues (audio crackling, crashes). So "evidently" it's a poor experience, at best.

According to protondb, sort of:

https://www.protondb.com/app/1174180

Good word, "sort of". I would imagine if your car would "sort of" work would you be willing to drive it?

If I had to and there was no risk of injury. Much like how there’s no risk of injury here.

Yes? Aircon in my car hasn't worked in over a year, why would I stop driving it. And that's beside the fact that RDR2 is a form of entertainment, whereas for a lot of people driving is a necessity. It's pretty easy to find games that run well on Linux.

I keep having issues with the built in GPS in my car, and occasionally I’ll get a flash of an error message about the gearbox being in P while driving. One of the glow plugs is also alarming as being bad.

My windows machine has a bunch of “unknown hardware” listed in device manager. It’s a fresh windows 10 install of a dell xps laptop.

I’d say my car is doing better than my computer. At least Bluetooth works in my car.

Not only you can. It runs faster under Linux (if you have AMD GPU that is). https://flightlessmango.com/benchmarks/6RfJoH1N6IQ

Does it actually look the same though? I've tested many games under Linux and they ran faster because GPU drivers didn't support all the same Vulkan/OpenGL extensions and thus didn't actually render many effects.

Which then makes these FPS comparisons a bit unfair since the GPU is actually under a lesser load.

Theres youtube link on that page. https://youtu.be/6RfJoH1N6IQ you can compare yourself. Note that the game uses vulkan, thus it can render without any translation.

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