In short, Proton is making pretty good progress and anyone can check their own Steam library with ProtonDB, to see how many of the titles they care about are likely to work.
Out of the popular mainstream games, around a half will work on Linux, whereas in the case of my Steam library (mostly indie titles) that figure is closer to 75%. This is no doubt thanks to shipping games now being simple in most of the popular game engines out there (like Unity, Unreal and even Godot). However, some games have the occasional bug, whereas others just straight up refuse to launch.
Also many users don't use things like AMD Software, but I personally didn't really find a good alternative for it on Linux, to limit my GPUs power usage and alter the fan curve, CoreCtrl coming close but not quite being a viable replacement: https://gitlab.com/corectrl/corectrl
Back to games, there will be issues with either really old niche titles that you might want to play, or many of the modern games that have multiplayer components (and anti-cheat systems), or sometimes even two games from the same publisher/developer might have one of them be available on Linux but not the other (e.g. War Thunder works but Enlisted doesn't).
In short, Linux is definitely getting better and might already be sufficient as a desktop daily driver even for the folks who want to do some gaming, but isn't a 1:1 replacement and some things just won't work for a variety of reasons. That said, claiming that "The Year of the Linux Desktop" might eventually come no longer feels delusional - it might just be 5-20 years until we get there for regular folks.
This probably wouldn't have happened without Valve's involvement, as well as all of the people who work on Wine and other software like that.
WSL is nothing new, the only thing it brings to the table is that we don't need to install VMWare or Virtual Box.
I don't dual boot since 2005.
with Microsoft's declining focus on compatibility, the time is coming where the majority of Windows games now run best on something that isn't Windows
(not to mention the lack of ads, spyware, general lack of stability and forced reboots)
and share the result of that freely with the world
Those 2% market shared are filled with games that are developed on Windows, targeting Windows.
Meaning those game studios will keep giving Microsoft money, and letting Valve do the needful to work on their platform.
this is a stopgap measure to bootstrap demand for the platform
because these days the target platform isn't Windows
it's the game development kits sold as a service, like Unity and Unreal Engine
both of which are now supported natively
> Meaning those game studios will keep giving Microsoft money
now you've lost me
(it's also bizarre that you pop up in every single "Windows bad" post right on cue to defend Microsoft's honour)
(edit: ah, found your linkedin, so you're an MS employee, I guess that explains it then)
Microsoft is a company, there is no such thing as honour for business, only money and profits.
Same applies to dumb quotes like "do no evil" and similar.
You're right, Windows isn't the main target platform for AAA game studios, Playstation, XBox, Switch, iOS and Android are the ones briging big bags of money home.
Linux has completed 90% of the work, but the last 10% (usability) is a long way away.
Yeah, that's the thing. It often feels GUIs on linux are meshed together from at least 7 different styles and paradigms and too often they are indeed made like this.
So in Ubuntu for example I sometimes had to click left to close a window and sometimes right.
What laypersons want, is one single way to do things, that works. But you just won't get far, without the terminal. That is, things do run pretty much out of the box if you are lucky - until they don't. And then good luck trying to fix it without the terminal. I can parse and usually fix cryptic error messages and logs, but my father (who is a trained engineer, but no english speaker nor programmer) cannot. Unless of course there is a driver issue. I seldom can fix them and I encountered too many over the years.
In either case, I am lucky that linux exists and I am now off to try out EndeavourOS ..
Flip through stuff on the control panel and you'll get the same mash of code heaved forward from the 90s. It's a bad look, and I've always been so confused why Microsoft doesn't do anything about it. Seems like a great pet project for some nth level middle manager to get sweet bonuses for.
Unfortunately these days even that keeps getting changed. Part of the reason I'm happier on FreeBSD.
The FPS in the top 100 currently most popular games on Steam[0] and their status [1]:
#01 CS:GO - native
#04 PUBG - anticheat
#05 CoD MW2 - anticheat
#06 Apex - Works (it has anticheat that works on Linux)
#07 TF2 - native
#09 Rust - Works
#12 Destiny 2 - anticheat
#21 Rainbow 6 - anticheat
#22 DayZ - Works (it has anticheat that works on Linux)
#26 Warframe - Works
#69 Payday2 - Works
#78 Arma 3 - Works (it has anticheat that works on Linux)
#79 CS:S - Native
Broken: 4/13
Non-steam or outside top-100:
OW2 - Linux is second class and not actively supported - but Blizzard have unblocked Linux support when issues were reported
Battlefield (all?) - Works
CoD (before MW2) - Works
Gundam Evolution - anticheat
Battlefield 2042 is on Steam but not supported, though I'm not sure if that's the anti-cheat solution or Proton.
Unless Linux is braindead easy to use without frustrations, it won't happen. Gamers pay more for lesser ease of access increases.
Switching to Linux brings with it a whole new swath of problems and fixes Windows problems so not only are users seeing new issues, their workarounds now have to be worked around because whatever was wrong in Windows works in Linux. Add to that the fact that most Linux users are power users and instructions therefore lean towards that, and you’ve got a problem that also seems insurmountable to solve.
It’s the classic boiling frog dilemma. Windows has just had decades of heating water to get to where we are.
This is reinforced by most major apps which eventually become cross-platform starting out treating Linux as a 3rd class citizen. For games, Discord and Parsec come to mind, where the former took years, and the latter still doesn't allow hosting from Linux. Nothing about this reinforces the idea of Linux being easier to use. It's the opposite: it reinforces the mentality that Linux is still two decades behind, regardless what the reality may be.
How many complaints form when YouTube pushes a minor UI or UX change? Now multiply that by a few magnitudes of order. That is the problem we're dealing with, and no amount of chastising or belittling Windows users will change that (in fact, it does the opposite). Did people forget how Apple managed to get a foothold in the market despite their ludicrous prices and dev-unfriendly practices?
The only people who use Linux are the tech oriented crowd, including gamers, who naturally tend to be more tech oriented than most. This is still a very small fraction of the world though. And this isn't changing unless a healthy fraction of devices and PCs come with Linux preinstalled. Even then a lot of people will complain and ask for Windows (or whatever) the very next day after purchasing their device.
Not in my observation. They get something pre-installed, they click on things they know. I am always amazed by the fact that most don' t have the smallest mental image of how it works.