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Comment by dudeinhawaii | Hacker News Reader

Proton was instrumental in my move from Windows to Linux. With over 400 games in my back catalog, I didn't want to lose thousands of dollars not to mention thousands of hours on games which I enjoy.

Thus far, 92% of games have ran flawlessly for me on Fedora (4 failures in the last 50). The main issues have been related to games that have kernel mode drivers for copy protection or other exotic types of anti-cheat. Perhaps most amazing (to me anyway) is the fact that mods and workshop items work perfectly. In most cases, I could pop open a saved game and continue on Linux, custom mods included.

Performance-wise, I haven't noticed a difference but I generally run very modern hardware which works better with the DirectX to Vulcan implementation. I also swapped to an AMD chip/gpu when moving to Linux and I think that removed the headaches that people often have with Nvidia drivers. Overall, it's been fantastic.

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At risk of picking nits, 4 failures in 50 would be 92% :)

Haha, just spotted that myself, thanks :)

Do you mind giving us the name of those 4 games failing on proton?

I would rather have the names of the 46 games that did work!

If you're curious, ProtonDB is the place to check if the game you're interested in is supported (and how well).

You can also just browse and see what is supported. Here is the list sorted by the highest user ratings: https://www.protondb.com/explore?sort=userScore

Sometimes though a game wont work on a specific system or hardware configuration, even though ProtonDB states it works well. Had such a case recently and tried all the fixes people suggested. Might have been some new patch or so introducing more issues or might have been my hardware setup. No idea.

Some notable Linux gaming failures for me:

Roblox. Kids really wanted me on this but I've never been able to get it to work. Technically not on Steam/Proton, but a notable failure.

Eador: It runs but the graphics are completely garbled.

Anything VR: No luck at all getting QuestLink working on Linux.

Several games don't like later versions of Proton and I have to force them on older versions. This isn't a huge problem except that it it an annoying amount of fiddling to figure out which version is working.

Grapejuice [1] works excellent for me with Roblox, simply launch games from browser just like windows. Super easy to install if you are on Arch [2] as well.

[1]: https://gitlab.com/brinkervii/grapejuice

[2]: https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/grapejuice

One more vote for Grapejuice. There's even a Flatpak now, so it couldn't be easier to install. This is what allowed me to move my whole house to Linux. My kids wouldn't tolerate giving up the game the play more than any other, but Grapejuice makes Roblox seem Linux native.

Only issue I've had (and this may only be with Flatpak, not sure), is that bouncing quickly from one game to another several times can leave Roblox instances running in the background, eventually eating up too many resources and causing havoc. I got around this by creating a little executable script with `flatpak kill net.brinkervii.grapejuice` in it that the kids double click before starting a new game.

There's a popular online video game that I wouldn't name that seems to be turning a blind eye on Linux users stripping out the anticheat to run the game through Proton, which is very nice of them.

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