Steam Top 50 Games: Over 70% now work on Linux
boilingsteam.com
boilingsteam.com
I usually make fun of "linux on the desktop" prophets by saying "Yes, 90% is great but problem is that everybody uses a different 90%". But 100% of the 50 most popular games is a different thing. It is a level of compatibility that you may not even achieve on windows depending on your hardware. Of course, performance and a few bugs will exist, but compatibility will be good enough for almost everybody.
I wonder if this coupled with steam deck will finally make supporting linux sustainable. I mean, a point where supporting is so cheap and the number of users is big enough that it becomes profitable to do so. If that happens, most excuses to not support linux will finally vanish away.
Valve has confirmed they are working with Epic (and another vendor) to support EAC on at least Steam OS if not every distro but I'd imagine Steam itself would contain everything that'd be needed to run EAC. So if you can run Steam on your favourite distro, I think EAC should work as well.
Mostly this would affect anything that needs an unsupported build of Proton to work properly. Which is mostly lots of games that use the insane plethora of media presentation layers every big company has added to Windows over the decades.
From what I've seen of games on Twitch, EAC style games tend to not rely on FMV and are generally 'all live' so there shouldn't be many problems.
The only cheats that still plague Dota are scripts that perform tasks automatically, such as disabling an opponent as soon as they're visible (beyond human ability), and those are taken care of by heuristics[1] and a community-voting-based 'overwatch' system in CS:GO and Dota 2[2].
0: https://technology.riotgames.com/news/demolishing-wallhacks-...
That isn't possible in real world for every type of competitive gameplay; trade-offs need to be made. Even games you list are not "zero trust" - things like looking direction are left to the client because of the latency.
Moreover, it's not enough. What's also needed is a hardware chain of trust for input devices. On-device cryptographic signing of mouse events would be sufficient and would guarantee that input comes from a fair play-compliant device.
SGX for human inputs. What can go wrong?
Still, it's the most logical step, and it would probably happen in several years, after Microsoft started demanding TPM 2.0. Valorant already requires TPM to be enabled on Windows 11 to run.
By the way, A4Tech has on-device DRM for more than a decade, they are using it to stop people pirating their software. Which is, ironically, designed for cheating.
My position is s/"a super-privileged, encrypted, and isolated enclave in the main CPU memory that can be used for anything"/"a failed experiment in computer pseudoscience".
And the nightmare scenario I imagine is a more lubricated path to framing political dissidents by forging attestations that they were searching for child abuse imagery or some similar scenario.
I look at EAC as being very analogous to a virus scanner, very easy to bypass if you know what you're doing, but good at catching the common and soon-to-be common threats. It also puts up enough roadblocks to make some novice attempts at cheating inconvenient at least.
Source: I deal with all the anti-cheat stuff (including EAC) on a semi-popular multi-player game. I can verify that it does make a very tangible difference to our player base in terms of the number of cheaters they are exposed to on a per match or per session basis.
Generally the legitimate commercial cheat developers offer status pages detailing any of their cheats that are currently detected and offer additional tools to do things like bypass hardware ID detection if you did get banned in the past.
Maybe I'm clueless but as I understand it some of these shooters (e.g. PUBG) are games that you pay for. If one of these commercial cheats gets detected by EAC isn't the result a permaban of your paid for account? And then you have to buy the game again and make a new one, if that's possible at all? Seems like that would be a serious deterrent, although obviously it won't stop everyone. (Encountering a cheater once out of every ten matches is probably acceptable. Encountering one in every other match probably isn't.)
So yes, that's a deterrent but not for those willing to pay a price equal to the game for monthly access.
Is there still cheating in console players? Maybe with jail broken devices? Do these companies really have to think about cheating with consoles? Do you think the eventual future of these kind of games is some sort of locked down console-like system, which is what apple seems to slowly be going to with their hardware?
Fortnite, Rust, and Fallguys being the most obvious.
There's people selling subscription cheats with money back guarantees against detection.
What is kind of strange is that Ark: Survival is running on Linux and also has BattlEye..
I'd settle for devs trying to make games whose win32 api calls are within the bounds of that which Proton can handle. Why bother natively supporting Linux when you can architect something that'll run in Windows and Proton? Elsewhere in the thread I saw comments about how most indie stuff Just Works even now; I wonder if that's the subset of indie stuff that's, like, fairly paint-by-numbers projects in Unreal or Unity that aren't doing anything really unusual and thus are handily translated by Proton.
This is going to be a huge problem. These corporations are going to be installing borderline malware into our computers. People will be forced to accept it if they want to play the games they paid money for. Invasive proprietary kernel modules designed to monitor your activities isn't something we should be supporting.
Yeah, me neither. It's gonna suck if they start requiring it on Linux though. I hope smarter people than me will find workarounds that allow us to pretend their shitty modules are running.
Just in case anyone is wondering why this is a big deal:
https://www.theregister.com/2016/09/23/capcom_street_fighter...
This is 100% on the games industry. They engaged in an arms race with cheaters and now their ineffective solutions are worse than the problem they're attempting to solve.
We do. We used to have choice. Online games back then had the option to search for servers with no requirements for any of this bullshit. Now we're lucky if we even get dedicated servers.
> I would bet the vast majority of players would be very happy to be monitored if it meant less cheaters.
Honest players letting themselves be monitored does nothing to help matters. Cheaters will work around the system and evade monitoring.
> Valorant
> they scan all of the software that has loaded up on the individual’s computer
> Vanguard operates from system start-up, constantly operating on your PC unless you forcefully close it or uninstall it from your computer.
> Vanguard also operates a Kernel level driver, which has access to the entire computer system
And now it requires TPM and secure boot. It's disgusting really. It's like all that stuff RMS warned us about is becoming reality. All for what, a video game? No video game is worth this.
From what I'm reading it's not just me either. People are concerned about the kernel module:
> Can people trust a piece of software that has so much access?
> it appeared as if they were just brushing off anyone’s concerns about it
> The concerns people had weren’t exclusively from people scared of Riot Games or their parent company Tencent from performing “spying” operations on a computer and harvesting endless amounts of personal data.
> A noted subsection was worried that if the Vanguard kernel component was compromised, it could be accessed by people with less pure intentions than Riot Games simply wishing to prevent cheating in their title.
This has happened before with capcom.sys, it was literally a backdoor into the kernel that any user space program could use to execute functions in ring zero:
https://www.theregister.com/2016/09/23/capcom_street_fighter...
The games industry cannot be trusted to write kernel code! They need to stay in user space where they belong. If that means more cheaters so be it.
If you were wrongly accused you could just move over to a different server with little downtime instead of pleading customer support for weeks that Process Explorer is NOT a game hacking tool.
Minimal anticheat, human support from your friendly neighbourhood admin is all you need.
Yeah, it's such a humiliating experience. They'll never believe whatever you say anyway, your only option is to sue them. One person actually did that in my country. Can't imagine it ever happening in corporation-friendly USA.
Pay hard earned money for a game only to get banned when their idiotic systems flag our software developer tools as cheats. Looks like you have a debugger running, citizen. We permaban people for that here. What's that? A virtual machine? You naughty user.
It makes me want to cheat out of spite.
That's exactly what I'm saying.
> Some people actually enjoy these things believe it or not.
Those people will just have to live with cheaters as well as game company malware that doesn't actually work.
It's simple. The only way to prevent cheating is for the game company to own your machine. They can't. Not on PC where we have software freedom.
Oh well, end of the argument then :)
Valve has said that they're working on this problem, but the workarounds one can undertake are pretty grim, and I doubt other companies (Blizzard, Ubisoft, Sony, EA, etc.) are all going to go down that sketchy rabbithole.
Not even in the slightest. Linux marketshare is still insignificant to even Chromebooks. This is just the echo chamber that is HN that thinks Linux is bigger than it is. Remove all CS majors in the world and I'd wager the amount of people who've touched Linux is less than .01%
Edit: I love how HN downvotes because someone gives them a reality check on their beloved Linux. I will give $1000 to anyone who is willing to give their parent who doesn't know jack about computers Linux and tell them "figure it out." None of them will be able to do it.
I'm not part of the group that downvoted you, but why would the only people touching Linux be CS majors? I'm not a CS major and I think most people I know that voluntarily use Linux on a daily basis isn't neither.
As someone who taught in an accounting school where awareness of Linux was higher than you state, I can tell you this is false.
Give it up already, face the fact that Linux is more popular and well-known than you want it to be, for whichever reason.
Android is a Linux distribution it is the #1 phone OS (73% market share this year). ChromeOS is a Linux distribution and is the leading OS by market share in K-12 schools. Both are cheap and easy. In ChromeOS's case, they are easier for both administrators to manage and users. I'm also sure the students using Chromebooks have not completed their CS degrees yet, but one can hope.
Linux community likes to pat themselves on the back thanks to Android and ChromeOS using the Linux kernel, yet they are oblivious to the fact that Linux syscalls aren't part of the official stable API, only certain ChromeOS models do run Linux (a yet another guest OS, WSL style), and then what GNU/Linux gets are Electron apps.
I'm not sure you could pull any random Linux user and have them truly understand Excel either.
As a Linux user who did not major in business, I bet your odds with Linux users would be markedly worse than with business majors on this one, hahaha
the NT native kernel API is also undocumented
Also, contrary to Windows, since Android 7, applications that link to undocumented APIs get terminated as security measure.
Ask the termux guys how much fun they are having by refusing to acknowledge the fact that they have to use JNI and not Linux syscalls for their stuff.
"undocumented" has nothing to do with it
there is a sandbox, syscalls are checked by seccomp and those not explicitly permitted will result in termination of the application
it doesn't care where the syscall comes from, be that libc, golang style, or calling svc #0 yourself
additionally: the kernel is open source... there are no "undocumented" syscalls
this also has nothing to do with the original point
Something that termux guys are having some issues to swallow, regarless of Linux being the kernel, it is not allowed to do what they want, wrapping Java APIs via JNI is the only allowed way.
Though even outside of that you'd be surprised where people have unknowingly used Linux. ATMs, Point-Of-Sale, Infotainment (Planes/Cars), public transit, arcades, etc. I'd estimate that a majority of people have had some interaction with a Linux-based system.
> I will give $1000 to anyone who is willing to give their parent who doesn't know jack about computers Linux and tell them "figure it out." None of them will be able to do it.
One of my grandparents runs Ubuntu and they're able to handle their email and documents just fine. Arguably better than the others who run macOS/Windows. You can find plenty of similar anecdotes online; if all you need is a browser and possibly basic word processing it's not all that different.
Android. I'd say a huge percentage of computing device users have Linux in their pocket and quite literally touch linux on regular basis.
> I will give $1000 to anyone who is willing to give their parent who doesn't know jack about computers Linux and tell them "figure it out." None of them will be able to do it.
I've done this, 10 years ago with my aging Mom and Dad and it worked well. Stock Kubuntu works closely enough to Windows, Chrome and Firefox are identical, the built in photo manager and video players just worked, and it put an end to malware and viruses. Please donate the $1000 to a local food bank, please. I do not what the check.
Two weeks ago, my son and I re-purposed a three year old cryptocoin mining desktop into a gaming machine. We loaded it up with Kubuntu and Steam and ... well, I thought I'd have to install Windows. No problems. Proton lived up to the hype.
This is what I call the "Granma case". Considering the uses case is very well defined and the possibility of using exotic hardware and services and basically never needing to install any software; this is the situation where linux shines the brightest. My mom has being using linux having 0 idea what it was and needed 0 assistance to browse the web, access social networks, see photographs and videos and listen to music. That's all she does and any modern linux is much better than windows for this specific use case. No need to care about anti-virus, degrading performance, malware, advertisements... it is perfect for that.
Also things don't randomly move around so much between upgrades like they do on commercial OS's.
people mentioning android have forgotten that android hides many parts of linux. and manufacturers make sure your device hardware works well with the operating system.
other have mentioned relatives who are using linux on desktop. that they are doing limited activities such as browsing and emails. that's fair but the story of how they discovered linux would be the most interesting one.
which brings me to op's cs majors point. so many things have changed that we should not dismiss the claim but think about it.
do happenstances of the past still present themselves to people today. i discovered linux through a pc magazine back in the late 90s. pc magazines back then offered young people like myself at the time a way to try new things on the computer. and i did try everything.
what is the equivalent of that nowadays?
My father is tech illiterate enough that he manually searches and navigates to the unemployment website each week rather than figure out bookmarks.
He's been on an Ubuntu laptop a friend gave him since late last year. I kept expecting to have to walk him through it, but it hasn't happened yet.
How about we show some compassion and take time to help people around things, especially when they are people we care about and things we care about as well?
On the other hand, knowing gamers, I'm pretty sure many would change if games on Linux were 2% faster... (higher fps)
since i never play a game for that long, it works out great.
Microsoft and Google show you ads regardless of if you pay or not.
Seriously even my alarm clock app that I pay a monthly fee for tried to ask nicely if it was ok that they tracked me across web sites after Apple started enforcing their new rules.
---------
And: If anyone has a good alarm clock app for iPhone that makes sure I'm out of bed before it turns off, and that is a one time payment or a reasonable fee or even open source I'm all ears.
It works as described. One caveat: the website won't let you download an ISO if your browser's user-agent is set to Windows, instead it'll prompt you to use the Win10 media creation tool. But you can download the ISO if accessing from Linux/macOS/Android/etc., or by using a user-agent changer browser extension on Windows.
I consider my companies 1000+ server/desktop licences payment enough tbh.
I have no qualms about a pirated windows install. None. At. All.
Just as I'd like others to pay me if/when I release paid software.
That said, especially after Microsoft started double dipping Professional licenses they cannot complain if ordinary users don't see the point any longer.
I do real work with Linux.
But again, I've purchased windows hundreds of times, many of those being forced "purchases" due to smoky-back-of-room deals with OEMs. Frankly, MS exhausted all of my goodwill ages ago, and I've yet to see a real change in those underlying tactics.
MS has "sold" a fair bunch of licenses that have gone unused.
I'll keep buying licenses if I use it - and keep telling people that Linux has been usable for ordinary people the last decade, is faster, more exciting and collect less data about you and your family.
PS: MS employees here, your company really had the chance to be the serious choice but after getting ads on Professional licensed machines I just don't believe the marketing anymore.
Disable Windows Defender on your source folders (or just altogether to see the difference). Someday MS will figure out a good balance with all this.
It is something about the file system or io subsystem I think.
You are getting fully functional version with this. With updates and everything.
Should upgrade free to Windows 11 too.
I wonder how many people actually pay for Windows, since you don't have to activate it in order to use.
Haven't had to pay for a Windows key in years ^^
Most people I know are more than happy to pay that premium compared to the hassle of dealing with Linux. Also, a lot of those savvy enough to use Linux will just crack Windows or get a key at a discount through a reseller.
It’s very rare to have issues if the game is rated Platinum in protondb and sometimes a setting in the Steam GUI needs to be changed if it’s gold or silver.
All in all I find it significantly less annoying than dealing with Windows’ ads and forced updates.
Performance can still be an issue, mostly because the Nvidia graphics drivers are performing worse on Linux vs on Windows.
For example, it would mean every graphics card driver that supports opengl is an emulation of opengl.
This is an outdated take, from my perspective, as someone who is an avid gamer and who is running only Linux at home currently. While no doubt it's easy to find problem games, the point of the very article this thread linked is that it's come such a long way that the majority of the top titles in terms of hours played on Steam now work in Proton.
There's been a few examples where people have compared the performance across games and found it's basically tied in the majority of games but occasionally there will be an outlier that plays better on Windows. Less often, there will be an outlier that plays better on Linux.[1]
If Valve sorts out the Anti-Cheat stuff, the number of games that don't actually run (and run well) on Linux could drop to near zero.
Proton isn't really emulation; a better way to think of it is that it's a compatiblity layer, much the same way DirectX, Vulkan, et. al, are compatiblity layers.
> Most people I know are more than happy to pay that premium compared to the hassle of dealing with Linux.
This part is more likely for far more users. However, it misses the point entirely. For a great number of years, as a gamer, I had to keep around a Windows system in order to partake in my hobby. That's not really the case anymore.
I can see how something would be rated 'platinum' for linux still be unacceptable in those ways. If your playing a single player game I can see how it's ok, but not for twitchy multiplayer games like MOBAs or FPSs.
Due to macOS not supporting Vulkan and other stuff required for Proton, it's been on the backburner for support from Valve for a while. Portal 2 can't even run on macOS anymore since it is 32-bit only. Most games work how they would on Windows when running under Proton vs a native port, you should try it on a Linux machine when you have time.
You should give it a go (even on the same hardware) on Linux.
On the other hand, the games it does work with are nearly flawless. I play Overwatch, Splitgate, and Battlefield online pretty regularly without issue, and single-player titles like The Sims, Rimworld and Noita function out-of-the-box. With more and more games "just working" on the platform, I think in 2 or 3 years it will be particularly competitive with Windows 11. Today though? It's a bit of a mixed bag.
I don't think Linux will replace Windows for gaming any time soon, but Linux gaming has a very real value proposition in a way it didn't just a few years ago.
https://www.howtogeek.com/688970/what-was-ibms-os2-and-why-d...
/usr/Programs (x86)/del
My prediction is twofold. First, that there's very, very little chance this will any have measurable impact on the overall proportion of Steam/PC gamers who use Windows. Solutions like Steam Deck will be the most popular venue for Proton, but this will actually sell the best with people who will keep using Windows. Why wouldn't it? As someone who games a lot, the only reason I would want one is to have my already existing library on the go. It essentially solves that "I wish this was on Switch" problem, especially for indie games. But I don't think of my Switch as a replacement for my PC, either. From this POV, it's fine if some things don't work (I'm no Warzone/Apex/League addict) or the mobile performance constrains things a little, because the accessibility and my game library is overall enough to offset some of those issues.
But actual Windows gamers who use Windows exclusively, and are going to suddenly see the Steam Deck or Proton and be like, "Wow, now I'm going to use Linux, and move over my whole game library since it's obviously so great", who aren't already software engineering/SRE/existing Linux users? Practically non-existent, or so little in number to be non-existent, I'd predict. They don't even really pay for the Windows license as another comment pointed out, the OEMs do and this subsidizes the product (along with mass volume) even further. This is related to my original point: the reason your question is even getting responses in the positive isn't because there's some massive contingency of Windows gamers looking to throw away their install. It's because you're asking on Hacker News.
> Similarly if you’re building it yourself you can buy for significantly less from a reseller, many of which are wholly legitimate.
The horses mouth charges $140+, which is significantly more than the $100 that was about.
If you need multiple copies you can work with a VAR (Value Added Reseller) to get better pricing.
CDW.com is the big name in VAR's but they have enormous turnover in staff. I try to build relationships with smaller VAR's. I like these guys: https://greenbeetech.com/ it's a small company with two guys running it who have decades of VAR experience (former CDW people).
Navigating the process of compliantly licensing Microsoft as you scale up is quite a job. Having a good partner to help your organization stay compliant is very valuable.
Because illegitimate keys can be banned (and the hardware using them can be blacklisted) if they are found to be stolen or acquired in some other way that Microsoft does not like.
It's also a huge liability of you're doing any professional work with unlicensed and/or potentially illegal software licenses.
> It's also a huge liability of you're doing any professional work with unlicensed and/or potentially illegal software licenses.
is it really? at worst it's copyright infringement
Elite controller was $99, and I laughed when it was on sale for like $150 last week as a best ever deal.
Oh, wait the discount also applies to former employees?
Edit: yes if you are part of the alumni network. It has a fee but it is good value. TIL.
Which is less than the $140 that Microsoft charges for Win 10 Home, but it's still substantial: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/store/b/windows
Really, why wouldn't they? If you can't get it cheaper, they have no reason to sell it cheaper. Easy profit.
I don't think business-targeted sales are particularly in-scope. And even if they are, that only makes it worse, as it implies they're getting an even more significant profit margin.
At least that was the case with the Lenovo laptops I personally and also the company I work for (Linux shop) bought.
AFAIK the PC market is low margin, and the only place they really get margin is from all the crap ware they 'offer' and stuff like margins on windows licenses and such.
I think microsoft has realized the real price for windows is $10 too, which is why they are adding all the adware crap in it. Otherwise it's not tenable as a business for them, even if they are a selling a huge volume of it.
I'm sure that is where we are heading in the long term. I used to spend a lot of money on software for my business, now the majority of what I use is free. I can't see Microsoft being able to escape that forever.
Also if you bought Windows 7 so far you could’ve updated it upto 11 without paying anything extra if you leveraged the update Windows that Microsoft offered.
This list also overlooks other very popular games that aren’t on Steam like Call of Duty Warzone and Fortnite…
Well yes, it is, as the title makes pretty clear, the top 50 games on Steam. That said, non-Steam games can work just fine with Proton, wrappers like Lutris make this only a couple clicks more than Steam.
Fortnite is limited by EAC: https://lutris.net/games/fortnite/, and I'm not very familiar with Warzone but I suspect it's a similar situation.
Basically unless they have a native version or a developer which officially endorses proton MP is often out of the question because it either won’t work/ban risk or the game doesn’t have client anti cheat detection which means in many cases it would be ripe with cheaters.
I will probably give linux gaming another try in a few years but if it doesn’t “just work” I’m going back to windows for gaming.
The nvidia driver actually works very well... The amdgpu driver wprks well but still has issues with suspend/hibernate. I'd say they are about the same IMO.
Good luck with older cards, ignored by the open source driver.
:)
With a bit more time to prune services/apps and set up something like simplewall to block everything else, you have a pretty decent setup. Sure, it's not FOSS, but neither is Steam or any of those games.
Looking at my personal selection of long-tail games, about 1/3 work perfectly on Linux, another 1/3 don't work at all, and the last 1/3 have various levels of yak-shaving tweaking settings before they run well. That last 1/3 is why I went back to Windows years ago.
Seems like singleplayer games mostly work very well.
I could use a mac, but they don't have justifiable storage costs and external storage is annoying, costs more and is less reliable than internal storage, and macs don't do games well anyway and I just built a new mini-ITX sized PC. Apple is also going down a path in computing I don't like, so I don't know if they are that viable too...
[0] https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2021/08/linux-has-finally-hit-...
Not 100. And 1000$ is just a video card. Not a newest one too.
Sure, there were a few problems with Cyberpunk 2077 but they were resolved relatively quickly, given that the game has its own host of problems.
I have two almost identical high end machines running Ubuntu and Mankato. The first is more stable, the latter is simply better for gaming :/
1) Proton labels like platinum, means how much effort you need to put for the game to run on linux. It says nothing about how well it will run. So “work on Linux” means basically that it works on Linux. It says nothing about performance. For instance I had a game labeled platinum run without effort on Arch with 50fps with constant drops to 30 ~ 25fps whereas on windows it runs at a constant 60fps with rare drops to 55/50. (Yeah, I’ve tried all variations of proton, kernel, disabled composition etc)
2) In my experience people that says that they see no difference in performance between linux and windows they usually have a powerful gpu, not a medium or low end one. So if you hear on the internet people claiming that the performance is about the same, it’s highly dependent on the game and/or your system specs.
If a game is "good enough" on Linux, I think that is good enough for a lot of folks...
This is not a criticism for Proton, I find that getting this performance on an emulated environment is nothing short than a miracle looking from 5~10 years ago.
My only intention was to set expectation accordingly for new users. And I stand by everything I've said. My hope is that in 5 years this comment will be completely outdated and new users can have compatibility and performance on par with windows, even on bad hardware.
I've even noticed some games, like Valheim and Path of Exile, run better in Linux.
>The developer or Rust has already confirmed that on his devkit EAC was working as expected on the Steam Deck with SteamOS – while it will apparently require some modifications from the devs themselves to make it work (not as seamless as Proton itself).
SteamDeck, even if it doesn't break any sale records should still be enough to prove the viability of a gaming console PC that doesn't need Windows.
But CE never worked for me on Linux, quitting immediately. Maybe I'll give in another try when I have a chance to play.
Sometimes you get games that have a fully feature dev console and you can do it all in-game, but that's sadly much rarer these days.
Or I do it to fight boring grinding, because at my age I don't have time for such meaningless activities
Obviously, the installer tries to install and start PB then errors out quite spectacularly, as one might imagine such a program to do in a wine prefix, but then you can just download the PB executable and run it in the wine prefix post-install no problem. Origin plays surprisingly nicely, too, though it generates a total of six windows that you can't close during play or it freaks out. There is some additional fuckery required; Wine's networking needs a bit of massaging to allow BF4 to advertise its ping to multiplayer servers, and you'll get kicked if you've got a ping of "-". [0]
Thing is, though, Proton is Wine-and-allied-trades. In the fullness of time I suspect new BF4 players won't have to jump through these hoops as Proton generally, and its script for BF4 specifically, gets updated. And others are already racing ahead, too, borrowing from and providing for Valve's fork of it. GloriousEggroll, recommended for BF4 [1], is the most robust varietal currently.
Multiplayer in a general sense is going to be a little bit more difficult to enable than merely waiting for updates, IMO. I'm not savvy enough to properly understand the arguments, but I've read that the translation layers for graphics, DXVK et al, could easily be repurposed by clever enough end-users to eg wallhack by making textures transparent, etc
As sibling comments point out, resistance on the part of the devs (or publishers?) to simply enable the Linux support that already exists is probably the biggest hurdle.
Doesn't "figure it out" likely mean rather invasive and user hostile kernel module(s) to prevent cheating? Because the alternative is that Linux becomes the preferred OS for cheaters and the game makers redouble their efforts to detect it; Valve's interests in promoting Linux are not necessarily aligned with studios' interests in promoting a cheater free experience.
Reminds me of a company I worked for as a junior dev, not gaming related, where our bread and butter application was hopelessly full of crash bugs, to the point where you couldn't even run it for more than an hour or so continuously without it crashing. Instead of investing in the effort needed to fix the crashers, they instructed me to create a separate "launcher" application that stays resident, waiting for the application to crash, and then re-launching it saving as much state as possible. It felt bonkers to me but I guess it made sense to somebody.
A VM with a stripped-bare Windows 10 install is likely to be more compatible with weird anti-cheat and DRM than anything Wine-based. Unless they intentionally add sniffing for it.
But VM with a GPU is a nightmare: for nVidia cards at least, you need two cards (one for the Linux desktop and one to feed into the VM), and there's a lot of explicit feature-limitation gotchas beyond that to market-segment people into buying Quadro cards instead.
I'm not opposed to the concept of having a Windows install (especially if it's something like a VM that you can readily manage and keep in a known state) but dual-booting is annoying-- gaming isn't spontaneous anymore.
TBH, I wonder if eventually you'll see a Microsoft product specifically sold as "Windows Runtime for Virtual Machines" -- better to sell a cut-down version with just enough bits to support popular games for $50 than to lose the sale entirely.
AMD GPUs are restricted (through VBIOS according to what I've heard) to prevent SR-IOV caps from being enabled. So you need to buy an actual enterprise GPU for that. Also… if you buy an enterprise GPU for this SR-IOV functionality and it's relatively new, good luck finding the drivers (and the card itself).
Anyway, my point is that I can't "just" buy a GPU from some manufacturer that doesn't restrict my usage of it, since a high-performance GPU with that ownership tag attached does not exist.
Performance under Wine would be far better than virtualizing the entire OS, and most anti-cheat systems do prevent playing in a VM as their virtual device drivers are a ripe target for abuse.
In that regard, I'm worried that emulation-based compatibility is much more likely to be an ad-hoc crowd-sourced thing-- how many titles work fine for the first 1-5-10-15 hours, then you hit that one time it uses an unsupported API call? If I rely on some crowd-sourced database that says "platinum compatibility", what's my recourse then?
I guess I'm picturing my experience with FF7 on Windows back in the early 2000s, where it played fine until the middle of the 2nd or 3rd disc and then had a showstopping crash; soured my experience on it for years until I got the late-2010s rerelease which could make it to completion.
It seems like Ubuntu is still having the same issues I remember over a decade ago. I booted back into windows and it #JustWorked. I get the chicken and egg problem involved, but god damn, how is this still the problem?
Other distros have way better driver management, even if it needs some minor poking around.
It’s heavily hardware dependent, thus users like yourself reads about improvements (which is true) but then crash on networks or nvidia “walls”.
If your usage differs a bit (hidpi, mixed DPIs displays, nvidia optimus, etc) you’re in for a hell of a experience.
Bad luck on your part mostly. Of the handful of brands for wireless adapters most work. You keep getting one that is poorly supported like Broadcom.
Some vendors just refuse to support Linux.
Some of the vendors just not interested in cooperation and do not provide drivers or specs for their devices to linux developers.
So if you’re interested in linux, check hardware compatibility before buying things like wifi card.
> Among the 10 games that are considered borked:
>
> Most of them do not work because of EAC (8)
> 2 of them because of another DRM/anti-cheat system
- performance can be really bad
- lot of bugs that you don't have on windows
- the usual go tweak this cfg file and try this
Look at that for example, what they consider working "gold": https://www.protondb.com/app/275850
I do agree that the performances are no the same than on Windows (15-20% less FPS on average).
I don't know about the official proton for No Man's Sky, but I used the Glorious Eggroll's fork[0].
Some even work better, e.g., >10 years ago I had a very crappy ADSL connection and in Counterstrike I got latencies of >150 ms with quite some jitter to >250 ms under Windows and even got kicked off from some servers for that :(
cue to WINE and running it under Linux (IIRC I was using openSUSE then) and I got 80 to 90 ms stable on the same servers, I think that was the time I decided for myself that I'll never go back again, and so I dropped my dual-boot setup in favor of Linux only.
Easiest way to accomplish trying out a Linux install and testing out games is to move your Steam library to a separate hard drive. This allows you to boot up any OS distribution and Steam will handle downloading any files you may need for these games on Linux. If you don’t like it or it’s not compatible enough, no harm or foul, boot back into Windows.
You will probably find that most games work very well. Don’t let criticism dissuade you!
Conversely, many games are less broken on Linux than they are on Windows. Since Wine lets you emulate a virtual desktop, you can circumvent the dreaded "alt-tab" crash that plagued Bethesda games since Morrowind, and even enjoy games like Diablo 2 in their maxed-out glory without disabling your other monitors.
Also worth noting that a number of actual top ten games are not on Steam. Valorant, league of legends, warzone, escape from tarkov, and Fortnite all are not available on that platform. (Some of these may not be top ten -- it's hard to know because we don't have solid numbers, but they are all in the top 20 of twitch viewership.)
I'm guessing the rest, being primarily multiplayer games, are blocked by some anti-cheat/DRM scheme. Hopefully Valve can work out some compromise to get those working on Wine/Proton.
Also, do things that inject overlays work under Proton? I occasionally use RTSS to monitor frame times and whatnot, and in FFXIV I use a combat log parser that adds an overlay for DPS meters. And while not critical, I like having reshade available (though that's more than just an overlay).
Edit: Pipewire is a new system AND a "drop-in" replacement for any of PulseAudio/Alsa/JACK (just add whichever package you want and it will replace that particular audio stack with Pipewire's replacement)
For the second -- FFXIV works flawlessly _once you get it set up_, but there's a couple tweaks to deal with to get there -- the launcher in particular (the default/"modern" launcher doesn't play nice). Games with separate launchers in general seem to have more issues/be more finicky in Proton. I don't personally use ACT, so I don't know if there's any real issues with setting it up, but I know others on Linux who do so it's at least possible. For your reshade concerns, GShade[1] comes with a linux install script that I've had no issues with.
[1]: https://gposers.com/
There's a (very) long tail of games that surely receive less attention (by the Wine/Proton teams).
Additionally, a large part of the top ones has a native port, which smaller production companies/indie devs typically can't afford.
On the other hand, smaller games could be simpler to "not emulate" (:^)) due to them being simpler.
> they have committed to bringing all Steam titles to the Steam Deck running SteamOS
This is unrealistic.
I'd be using Linux full-time if I knew all the games I played would work on Linux. They don't, so I end up using Windows way more than I'd like. Proton is the only way out of that.
The big thing that is still missing from Linux gaming is HDR support. It's somewhat janky but otherwise works fine on Windows, and the Auto HDR on Windows 11 is pretty great. Hoping Linux gets there soon.
Just recently played Titanfall 2 and Battlefield 1. Both worked almost flawlessly (one to two crashes each).
Once you figure you how to get most Unity games working on Linux , you cover most games. Even if you don’t want to export a native binary .
I’m very excited for Steam Deck !
My first Linux experience was on a garbage-picked laptop I got for free because it had broken power management on Windows
I think in its case, the hardware was somehow damaged and Linux just fell back to APM instead of ACPI, so the technical details are different
but there's something nostalgic and funny to me about the prospect that this kind of thing could become a pattern :)
> a common 5-year-old laptop
doesn't mean 'a 5-year-old Mac laptop'.
The point isn't about macOS, but the proposed standard. It's this: if working on whatever random piece of hardware you happen to have lying around is a requirement for being a viable desktop operating system, macOS is not a viable desktop operating system... but of course, macOS is not only viable as a desktop OS but quite successful in its niche. So this tells us that the proposed standard is no standard at all— running without any tweaks or compromises on random hardware which was not designed, marketed, or sold as compatible is not necessary for a desktop OS to viable or a reasonable choice or whatever.
(And as a sibling poster to you points out, in the case of older hardware, it's a test that Windows may sometimes fail as well, if for entirely different reasons.)
It will likely be many years before the year of the Linux laptop.
My understanding of the situation is that manufacturers tend to work really hard with Microsoft on graceful power management code, and until that effort is replicated on Linux (lol), one has to chase down specific hardware, because otherwise it generally sucks.
That being said, he nVidia GPU managed to suck the battery in 2-3 hours depending on the game being payed under Windows as well, everything around 4 hours on normal working is fine.
Installing software under Linux / Ubuntu is, well, strange. But solvable. And I really do like the old-school, non-cloud feeling of Linux way better than Windows 10 and One Drive.
By launch time? As an on-and-off Linux gamer who is a huge fan of Valve's Linux work, this is worrying. How can they possibly deliver on this? If they promise this and it's not there at launch time, that could doom the Steam Deck even if it's very good.
What are they going to do, start kicking titles off Steam if they don't have Linux ports? Something like that seems like the only way to meet that guarantee. That seems insane, but maybe if Proton is in really good shape they can get away with saying something like
> Hey, you have one year to add Steam Deck support to your game. Initial testing indicates that Proton will get you 80% of the way there already, but we're here to help you finish the last 20% if you reach out any time in the next 10 months.
But idk, that seems like a huge gamble and it's the only way I can picture them making good on that promise.