Steam Deck reports are here

(deleted my old comment, I actually have a question now ;))

Are there plans to make proton support anti-cheat engines? Part of me hopes yes, but another equal part hopes you don't.

Thank you for working on this! Maybe this is not your area of expertise, but I'm interested in the performance differences between native DirectX performance and going through Vulkan abstraction layers like DXVK. If you're a company designing GPUs that has a Vulkan driver already but would need significant time and effort developing DirectX drivers, is DXVK et. al. a viable alternative?

ProtonDB has been such an asset (thank you!), I'm often surprised Valve hasn't integrated it into the Linux steam client or at least included a link to the relevant entry. So... why haven't they?

Just wanted to say thank you. Been using ProtonDB extensively lately to find more titles which may be a great fit for my recent migration from Windows towards Linux. Hope I can contribute one day either with the list of games or in any way with the site.

Keep up the good work

Thanks for working on ProtonDB, it's such an invaluable resource. Here's their Patreon if anybody is interested in supporting the project: https://www.patreon.com/protondb

I assumed Valve would have acquired you by now!

What game is it? Always interested in checking out games by those who care to release Linux builds.

This is a minority situation but an important one for the exceptions. Under the shadow of the rise of Proton it's getting harder to surface that sometimes you want to force Steam to use the native version. Something something the turn tables.

I recently changed the report questions to allow specifying 'Native. No Proton' as an an answer to 'Which Proton do you use'. It's gotten a few grumbles ('this is a site for Proton') but I think it's worth doing for cases like yours. Given enough samples, the site will be able to highlight games that have a significant amount of users preferring native over Proton for some games and I think it'll be a curious enough set to warrant its own filter or highlight section.

Thanks for describing your case. I've linked to it in my todo notes to keep in mind.

Hm... Presumably this is a setting Valve can change on a per-game basis. Have they said anything?

One quick "just make it work" solution might be to ship Linux binaries with the Windows version, check if you're on wine, then execute the Linux binaries via an exec syscall[1]. I'd imagine the bulk of the game is going to be assets not code so that (maybe?) wouldn't make the game too much larger.

[1]https://gist.github.com/q3k/e5952111283ea59ee78a7699919a055b

At least for battery impact, wouldn't that also help laptop users?

Well in case there is some funkiness with games and the hardware.

Overall big fan of this, I would say the ProtonDB community is pretty solid about getting reports out.

I've read the Deck's 7 inch screen will make some games unplayable due to the game text size being designed for bigger monitors.

Anticheat software/DRM

Nvidia drivers.

Nothing. Been using arch (and ubuntu previously) exclusively for years. Recently finished darksouls 1 and 2. Been playing elden ring this week. The vast majority of games I want to play either just work or require a one time config change.

Amongst other reasons, lack of support for anti-cheat systems (like EAC and BattleEye) have stopped big-name games like Destiny 2, Fortnite and others from easily porting to Linux. The Steam Deck has started to change that, prompting the ecosystem to slowly come around.

Nothing, I'm using Linux for all of my gaming.

Anti cheat.

Games without anti cheat almost always work.

I use Linux for everything except unsupported gaming.

I am very impressed by what Proton brings to the table (even though it's just standing upon the shoulders of Wine, it brings a whole new level of convenience to something which used to be rather hacky), but I've still experienced a few issues when using it. For example, one game I tried (Wargroove) had pretty substantial input lag when using it (which makes using your mouse feel really bad) and I tried Elden Ring on Linux yesterday. I'm very impressed that it launched at all, but it detected tampering and wouldn't let me online, and the game appeared to perform noticeably worse than it does on the same hardware when playing on Windows.

With steam on Linux, I can happily play Bioshock Infinite, but not Bioshock 1 or 2. I can play The Witcher 2, but not The Witcher 1 or 3. I tend to play open-world RPGs, so one of my pet peeves is not being able to play any of the Elder Scrolls games on Linux. Without frequent crashes, I mean.

It’s a lot easier to just use Windows for gaming. It takes some amount of extra effort for many game types on Linux, including making sure you have all the pre requisite packages installed for wine and whatnot. Granted, that’s not hard, but it is extra effort to ensure everything will work.

But my personal gaming is dictated a lot by what my friends are playing, which means I prefer being ready to start a new game quickly without much hassle. And plenty of competitive multiplayer games are unsupported entirely on Linux.

I’m super excited for the future, but it just doesn’t fit my needs yet.

I daily drive Linux and attempt to game on it when I can.

The biggest obstacles (at least for Proton) keeping me from deleting my Windows partition:

- Online multiplayer games with anti-cheat (solved or soon to be solved by EAC + Proton integration)

- The fact that not every game "just works". I frequently run into games (most recently, Elden Ring) which don't even launch, and the error/bug reporting experience is terrible. I'm a relatively technical person, and yet even after going through the trouble to get logging set up and figure out what is even going on when the game doesn't launch, there is still often not a clear path to fixing my problem. Obviously some of this is just inherent in the combinatoric explosion of problematic cases you get from running a DX -> Vulkan compatibility shim for an OS with 100s of distros, but it's a big obstacle.

- I recently got a top of the line GPU, but before that the performance difference was occasionally enough that I would just switch to Windows for a game that otherwise worked OK on Linux.

Primarily just because I couldn't use my VR headset then (Quest 2). The volunteers behind ALVR are working on it.

However, when something like ALVR works on Linux and SteamOS 3.0 releases universally I I'll at least make a partition for it and try to use it as my primary gaming OS.

(Flex ahead) Not had very many gaming related problems with my Steam Deck, so I am hopeful for the universal release.

Nothing. Elden Ring is here, it's the new big thing, and I'm playing it on my Fedora box. The future is now. All of the games I play or want to play are running great, and I play a lot.

Truthfully, hacks might be needed, it's not grandma time yet for Linux gaming, but the hard part (Windows translation layer) is working really well.

Lack of HDMI 2.1 support in amdgpu to enable 4K @ 120hz on displays that don't have DisplayPort.

Whenever I ask online about linux gaming a lot of people say that they have better or equal performance on linux than on windows. My experience does not replicate that. My theory so far is that people that have better or equal performance on linux have powerful machines.

For instance, my GPU have low DRAM and it's on a laptop, I got a solid 60 fps Dark Souls III on Windows, whereas I face 50 ~ 30 fps on linux with micro stutters every now and then.

Besides that, my experience with Linux gaming is that it was absolutely not plug and play, it required me a lot of experimenting, changing proton versions, keeping myself up-to-date on the latest env variable to fix issues with my games, disabling composition on your DE, etc etc and etc.

I used to have fun tinkering with this stuff, nowadays I don't have the time/energy/will to educate myself on the latest tools to run a game, so I just keep a windows partition for gaming purposes.

WINE lacks support for FiveM and Space Station 13, which prevents a ton of multiplayer roleplaying servers from being played.

There was a post today discussing the Nvidea breach (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30550028) where people were discussing the Nvidea driving making their linux machines unbootable. That kind of thing, where a normal user would have trouble recovering from, that's a pretty big deal.

Still can't get my recent Thinkpad to use the NVIDIA graphics card.

One, relatively minor issue is that the discord client for Linux don't include sounds in the screen share, so playing with friends watching is worse.

The real reason is vendor lockin, aka no support by nvidia, amd or intel because they are part of the trusted computing initiatve. The last 20 years Intel, AMD have been planning to lock down our PC's and close the platform. PC's from 1970's to the mid 90's were "honest" cpu's, or general computers.

Newer CPU's post 2008, have the elements of hardware drm Microsoft, intel, amd and the game and content industries have been testing. To get rid of local file access.

See here on the patent 20 years ago, aka windows 10/11 are the implementations of research that had been going on for 20 years to get rid of honest file access:

https://www.theregister.com/2001/12/13/the_microsoft_secure_...

Basically when you open a file on a normal PC you get honest hex values (instructions) that made cracking copyprotection on software easy because you have access to the raw CPU instructions. It's hard to make eletronics that don't allow piracy because all a file is, is electric charges in memory, and the computer industry knows this. AKA electricity is not scarce so supply can always meet demand trivially. So they needed to come up with bullshit to justify breaking CPU circuits without killing performance (aka "Security or drm"), has a negative impact on performance and there's also the worry of bugs bricking your system if you do it wrong at the hardware level... this is why it's taken them 23+ years since the advent of trusted computing research that began in the mid 90's to finally get rid of honest executables.

When you compile a program in c, or any other programming language for 99% of computing history you'd get honest instructions in the resulting executable and files for the program. The computer industry wants to change this for their clients, the movie, game, and music industry. So they can enforce copyright at the hardware level. This is hard without breaking a computer, and they don't want a repeat of the pentium fdiv bug that caused a massive recall.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_FDIV_bug

That is why mirosoft and intel/amd have been very very careful their trusted computing research and testing with certain big enterprise companies and consoles. Consoles is where trusted computing experiments in order to prevent game piracy.

All this to prevent you form getting honest files.

To give you an example of what's been goin on for 23 years...

Ultima 9 was cancelled (but then later restarted), AKA EA was planning on making Ultima 11, 12, 13, as local applications (you get complete files on your computer) WITH multiplayer embedded in the EXE, but the success of UO, changed the entire direction of PC Gaming. They wanted to kill piracy, this is the attitude of the game industry:

https://www.theregister.com/2012/08/22/ubisoft_says_over_90_...

Basic computer science 101, two or more computers networked together become and behave as a single computer. AKA every program can be divided into two or more subprograms and run over a network, that means you lose control of your PC if you take up any client-server exe. AKA there is no program that can't be turned into a client-server app, why would you want all your applications dependent on a 2nd computer in microsoft or other companies office when there is no rational reason for this? Since that means you no longer own your pc.

We already had infinity multiplayer games in the 90's in quake 2, go listen here at John carmacks comment.

(somewhat paraphrasing) "No limit to the number of players inside a multiplayer world"

https://youtu.be/TfeSMaztDVc?t=96

So no ultima online, everquest, guild wars 1 ad wow are literally just RPG's with network multiplayer removed and dumped into a seperate exe file and sold back to the public as if it were some new type of game. It isn't, it's the same game with fraudulently coded network code. They wanted to kill us getting complete games with multiplayer that were infinitely copyable like quake 2.

That is why modern Unreal engine FPS games like Transformers fall of cybertron have their multiplayer "shut down" because the general public bought into the MMO scam that led to steam. Steam was valves attack on game ownership and undermining local binaries. Note as steam grew, they started allowing devs to force update games to tie them to steams backend, aka many games won't work without steam loading, all pre-steam games work just fine minus "mmo's" which were the first drm games.

So yes the general gaming public were scammed and lead to the stolen PC game apocalypse we've been suffering for the last 23+ years.

So we have an unreal engine game (Transformers FoC) (2014)

https://imgur.com/a/RxGQWdq

And we got UT2004 a game from 2004 that has more features then modern incarnations, how did we end up going backwards in time in PC gaming?

They want to kill honest binaries (aka, access to raw hex instructions of programs allowing them to be cracked). UWP games on windows 10 was a trial run of trusted computing tech where windows update disabled cracked exe's, that's why UWP games can only run on certain verisons of windows 10. Windows 11 is that on steroids, Microsoft is lying because they know the average person using windows is clueless and tech illiterate. They learned that in 1997 with ultima online, everquest in 99 and wow in 2004. Client-server software is the same as buying a program with missing files. It's literally a broken application.

This is who they are designing it for, big media companies:

https://www.theregister.com/2001/12/13/the_microsoft_secure_...

What is trusted computing?

TC provides for a monitoring and reporting component to be mounted in future PCs. The preferred implementation in the first phase of TC emphasised the role of a `Fritz' chip - a smartcard chip or dongle soldered to the motherboard. The current version has five components - the Fritz chip, a `curtained memory' feature in the CPU, a security kernel in the operating system (the `Nexus' in Microsoft language), a security kernel in each TC application (the `NCA' in Microsoft-speak) and a back-end infrastructure of online security servers maintained by hardware and software vendors to tie the whole thing together.

The initial version of TC had Fritz supervising the boot process, so that the PC ended up in a predictable state, with known hardware and software. The current version has Fritz as a passive monitoring component that stores the hash of the machine state on start-up. This hash is computed using details of the hardware (audio card, video card etc) and the software (O/S, drivers, etc). If the machine ends up in the approved state, Fritz will make available to the operating system the cryptographic keys needed to decrypt TC applications and data. If it ends up in the wrong state, the hash will be wrong and Fritz won't release the right key. The machine may still be able to run non-TC apps and access non-TC data, but protected material will be unavailable.

The operating system security kernel (the `Nexus') bridges the gap between the Fritz chip and the application security components (the `NCAs'). It checks that the hardware components are on the TCG approved list, that the software components have been signed, and that none of them has a serial number that has been revoked. If there are significant changes to the PC's configuration, the machine must go online to be re-certified: the operating system manages this. The result is a PC booted into a known state with an approved combination of hardware and software (whose licences have not expired). Finally, the Nexus works together with new `curtained memory' features in the CPU to stop any TC app from reading or writing another TC app's data. These new features are called `Lagrande Technology' (LT) for the Intel CPUs and `TrustZone' for the ARM.

Once the machine is in an approved state, with a TC app loaded and shielded from interference by any other software, Fritz will certify this to third parties. For example, he will do an authentication protocol with Disney to prove that his machine is a suitable recipient of `Snow White'. This will mean certifying that the PC is currently running an authorised application program - MediaPlayer, DisneyPlayer, whatever - with its NCA properly loaded and shielded by curtained memory against debuggers or other tools that could be used to rip the content. The Disney server then sends encrypted data, with a key that Fritz will use to unseal it. Fritz makes the key available only to the authorised application and only so long as the environment remains `trustworthy'. For this purpose, `trustworthy' is defined by the security policy downloaded from a server under the control of the application owner. This means that Disney can decide to release its premium content only to a media player whose author agrees to enforce certain conditions. These might include restrictions on what hardware and software you use, or where in the world you're located. They can involve payment: Disney might insist, for example, that the application collect a dollar every time you view the movie. The application itself can be rented too. The possibilities seem to be limited only by the marketers' imagination.

https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/tcpa-faq.html

Honestly Proton is catching up a lot and the compatibility is impressive but I've had my fair share of problems with it, e.g. on Ice Lake graphics it performed really badly for some simple games without running experimental branches, input was laggy on a few games, simply busted rendering, etc. This can be fixed with time, patches, experimental branches and bug reports, but if you want to play the latest stuff it's all a bit of a chore to some extent. So, more or less, the usual complaints you read about Linux and have been reading about for years, if you're a Linux fan. I think a lot of the old adage "post your specs" applies here; drivers and graphics cards alone will have a massive impact on compatibility, so it's hard to "guestimate" how valid some reports or issues really are without trying the game.

For some older titles though I've been relatively impressed by Proton and e.g. CrossOver. Like Shadow of the Tomb Raider or Witcher 3. You can't play simple 2D games released this year but a 5 year old AAA game can run mostly OK, stuff like that.

There is also a flip side to the billion knobs thing which is that Linux might actually be a reasonable route to run some older games in the future, e.g. games like Deus Ex HR had some fun mods but some of them eventually became incompatible with newer Windows versions. It's not a guarantee (some of these games/mods do insane things) but for some classes of games, things like patched proton/wine builds may be a valid way to preserve them more easily into the future.

Some games use proprietary microsoft video codecs for cutscenes that are not supported by linux libraries. Proton was patched recently so that it just shows a TV test card. Before that it just crashed.

Thanks for pointing this out. I'll have a look.

Aw geez I didn't even realize that was a concern! Really thought proton was an above board implementation. That would definitely be disappointing.

I don’t think Proton is Valves endgame for Linux gaming.

It is necessary to kick off SteamOS, but in I’d guess they are betting on capturing market share with their devices and OS, so that developers will put in the time to do Linux ports.

Proton is always a catch-up game and can’t seem to be the end-all solution.

It's more like GamePass won't run on Steam Deck.

That alone makes Steam Deck a non starter for me. Microsoft doesn't care about a tiny niche.

I'm planning to install Windows. It seems like you don't really lose anything doing so. If Linux can catch up someday, great! Until then, I just want a device that works.