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Comment by anakaine | Hacker News Reader

We can assume, then, that linux will be a viable place for gaming in the near future.

Linux, since the inception of Proton is a viable place for gaming. Go ahead and try it out, I promise you will be pleasantly surprised ;)

Just to temper expectations, gaming on Linux is still not a plug and play type experience (although it is a LOT closer than it was 5 years ago).

Even games that have reasonable performance on Linux may require custom builds of Proton, winetrick startup modifications, etc. I love Proton and the work Valve has been doing, but I certainly feel the friction when gaming on Linux still.

Considering it's not native I would say it is still pretty impressive. And hopefully at the speed these developments are being made right now it is just a matter of time until we get that plug and play experience we are all hoping for ;)

I mean, we kinda already have plug and play, just mostly for older, popular games.

New issues always crop up whenever there's a new AAA title with the latest tech. It's inevitable.

Eh, I feel like I have a 50% chance of a game working in proton. Age of Empires II works, but has multiplayer issues (which, while it "works" in GloriusEggroll's 5.21 build, that's about all it is since I get frame stutter / 13 FPS which I do not see in single player). Warframe is another game which kinda works, but can have some visual/audio quirks (audio issue being listed as fixed in GE 5.21 proton as well but I haven't tested it yet). On the more positive side, Witcher III works well enough for me to consider it "no tinkering needed"...so there are definitely success stories out there. I just wouldn't expect the majority of titles to "just work" at this point in time.

All in all, I stand by what I said in that Proton is great, but expectations should be tempered since it definitely has some rough edges still.

It's beyond amazing technically, but unusable for a lot of (I'd like to say "most" but I don't want to argue) gamers, since DRMed games mostly won't work, that include most new games.

That's it.

Even the most aggressive DRM like Denuvo absolutely does work. You might be thinking of Anticheat, which tends to not work. So multiplayer is currently pretty limited, everything else tends to work.

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Proton-5... looks like it's a new thing, my bad then.

Two years ago, I deleted my Windows partition, because I never used it.

I'm the kind of person that has spent over 10,000 hours on video games... maybe 20k or more.

I don't think it's fair to deride Linux in this way. Thank Gaben for that.

I spend 99% of my time on Ubuntu, but still keep a stray Windows OS around for Dota/Warzone. This last year I've only clocked 4 hours granted... but It'd be nice to actually not care anymore.

It's really weird, one of the things as a kid I remember losing my main WIndows install being a big deal.. days or recovery. Now I just sit down at a Windows machine and it I don't care what's on it. I don't use windows for anything but the odd game.

Probably the orders of magnitude more internet bandwidth. My current internet connection is about 20,000 times faster than the one I had as a kid. And I'm only a little bit old.

Dota works perfectly on Linux. It's not even through proton. It always worked natively on Linux.

Dota works well on Linux nowadays. Better than on Windows even.

Funny how my most played games are WZ and Dota as well

I do use Mac instead of Linux for development but I did use Debian/Ubuntu as my main partition for a few years.

Dota works great on Linux and it's native.

That all depends upon a given person's definition of viable.

Personally, I have more games that I know what to do with. Most of them are Linux native and the vast majority of those that aren't Linux native work under Proton/Wine. Performance or stability is almost never a problem.

The few games that I have encountered problems with under Linux use a custom engine and I have heard that anti-cheat software tends to break compatibility. I periodically boot into Windows to play games that don't run under Linux. That does not happen often since it is an awful lot of trouble when there are many excellent options that do work under Linux.

I don't use it much, but I have heard from others that do that Proton is good and continually getting better. While things like drivers are still hard problems, distros like Ubuntu have made them easier for users that aren't super technical. Linux is a much better place for gaming than it was just a few years ago.

I have mixed feelings about the emulating-Windows approaches. They've let some people run some games, without running Windows, for whatever reason they want to do that, but...

Another way to look at it is that this has been going on for 20+ years, and it's kept relieving whatever pressure exists to get games then on Windows to be on something more open.

(Yes, I built a SteamOS box a few years ago, but that turned out to look mostly like a negotiation tactic, for Valve's continued coexistence with Microsoft. Maybe there will be another attempt someday, supported by Vulkan.)

Microsoft has fired the testing team that makes backwards compatibility so reliable. Having a separate open source implementation will be the only way to run many of those games 10 years from now.

They keep making revenue from the Windows workstation business even though they've clearly telegraphed that none of the stuff people are paying for and expecting to work will do so in a decade... it's ridiculous

Proton is based on WINE. WINE stands for WINE Is Not an Emulator. It's a compatibility layer, and why shouldn't Linux have a Windows compatibility layer? The more you can do on Linux, the better.

I am just using Linux for gaming these days with Stadia. I don't see any reason that cloud gaming won't become more popular in the near future, in which case Linux is perfectly fine for gaming

If you don't mind the 1000ms input lag.

I don't mind I guess because I've never noticed the input lag at all. Also as cloud gaming gets bigger the machines will be in more places and thus closer to the clients

It's probably OK if you play big games like RPGs with open worlds that tend to be already slow, but the input lag is just too high to play competitively - obviously most people don't but we should aim for better.

> ...the input lag is just too high to play competitively

Do you have any numbers to support that? I have seen your argument before, but I'm yet to see it quantified. I don't see how Stadia would be slower than any other games whose ground-truth 'state' lives on a server somewhere, which I think is the majority of games these days[1]; trusting the client to faithfully maintain state is a no-no because of cheating. If anything, I would expect Stadia servers' ping-times to be better than most.

I don't expect Stadia to work very well with Super Smash Bros were frame-perfect parries/combos are expected (at he highest level) - but for the rest of us who do not qualify for a spot on an e-sports team, it works well enough.

edit: So I went and looked for the numbers - PCGamer[2] says that Stadia is about 60-80ms slower than PC for Tomb Raider and Destiny 2 (eg. 63ms PC / 125ms Stadia @1080 Stadia gets worse at higher resolutions and on TVs, obviously)

1. The games I play, which are rather limited.

2. https://www.pcgamer.com/heres-how-stadias-input-lag-compares...

I don't have any data for a modern FPS, but Arma 3 used to have about 120ms of input lag - that's a little bit worse than what you've suggested, and it was almost unplayable.

Also, any jitter will be awful too.

As someone who plays on Linux, I'd bet it's safe to assume exactly that.

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