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Comment by frostiness | Hacker News Reader

I don't even own a Steam Deck and I've been seeing the benefits just from its existence. Now, almost every game on Steam has a quick accessible rating that lets me know if it works fine on Linux. This has led to me being able to buy games confidently that I never would have otherwise. In addition, the effectiveness of Proton for running Windows games is baffling, and something I never could have expected when I first switched to Linux back in 2015.

Back when Steam Machines first came out, the expectation was that there would be a new push to get games working on Linux, which unfortunately didn't end up happening as strongly as expected. However, with how much of a success the Steam Deck was, it seems that the rush to get games ported to Linux actually is happening. I'm excited for the future.

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> almost every game on Steam has a quick accessible rating that lets me know if it works fine on Linux

Sure, it's more convenient that Valve runs Steam and can put the rating right there. But let's give WineHQ a bit of credit here. They have a database going back more than a decade now, telling you how games run on Linux.

The effects of Valve getting into Linux gaming are definitely noticeable. But the Wine team deserves a boatload of praise too. I was playing World of Warcraft back in 2007 and it was a flawless experience.

> rush to get games ported to Linux actually is happening

I'm not really sure about this. By having Proton/Wine at such a high quality, most devs are just going to target Windows. Because why bother? They will probably ensure their games run good under Wine and that's where it ends. Nowadays I'm totally okay with that. Lutris is great, Wine is actually easy to use. It's the best time to be a Linux gamer.

> let's give WineHQ a bit of credit here [..] But the Wine team deserves a boatload of praise too.

The Wine team deserves a ton of praise that IMO is often directed to Proton BUT WineHQ has always been a useless experience for me. It needs a massive cleanup since it contains data from ancient versions of Wine, there is barely enough information to figure out what is going on and the whole "bronze, silver, gold, etc" rating is completely subjective with people rating something "bronze" because a pixel is off in some application and something "gold" despite being unable to use some major functionality.

Sadly ProtonDB seems to be going the same way, the main saving grace right now is that it doesn't have all the baggage accumulated over decades (and it is focused on games - Wine still has to get all Win32 APIs for UIs, etc working for regular applications that Proton doesn't have to care beyond whatever little functionality is used for launchers) but still has the whole subjective thing (a favorite case of mine is Rage[0] which has lots of comment about broken textures etc with others saying that the game works fine - and it takes some searching to figure out that the people who are fine have Nvidia GPUs while the people with issues have AMD GPUs - while in a few cases, people recommend the game while at the same time mentioning the textures are broken!).

[0] https://www.protondb.com/app/9200

Huge pet peeve of mine on WineHQ + ProtonDB - number of people who say, "Works for me, I just had to use the BingoBangoPatch_v3". No indication at all of what BingoBangoPatch is, where I could get it, how to set it, etc. Too much shorthand allowed without providing real configuration guidance.

That's the value of Valve's official SD rating I assume. Basically a reliable but conservative Valve official rating plus an adventurous ProtonDB rating, you as a user have the freedom to choose your own risk level and time investing to tinker. To me this is best compromise one can hope for.

> But the Wine team deserves a boatload of praise too

About 2/3 of Wine commits are from CodeWeavers, so praising the Steam team (CodeWeavers) is praising the Wine team.

CodeWeavers isn't part of Steam is it? I thought they just collaborated with developers at Steam on Proton?

Yes, CodeWeavers are an independent company that has been developing Wine longer than Valve had any interest in Linux games. However AFAIU Valve does contract them to work on Wine/Proton now so a decent amount of their work is probably funded by Valve.

> But let's give WineHQ a bit of credit here. They have a database going back more than a decade now, telling you how games run on Linux.

But it so often was wrong :P I tried to use wine a lot between 2007 and 2010 and constantly ran into apps that were supposed to work no longer working, because regressions happened a lot. When you play a game on steam deck and exit it periodically asks you, "This game is marked Steam Deck Verified. Is that consistent with your experience?" and they really keep tabs on it.

But WineHQ also shows which Wine version it worked at so if you wanted to you could get that Wine version. And the same also applies to Proton, it's just hidden from you when you use Steam.

If you look at the list of top sellers, new arrivals, upcoming games, and games on sale, most if not all of them have native Linux support, which is something you absolutely could not have said just a few years ago. In my experience, at this point bad Linux ports are more of an issue than a lack of them.

I agree though honestly, if Proton works fine and the game runs under it, I'd much rather have that than a bad native Linux port. Plus, I have a lot more trust in Proton to keep things compatible than Windows.

> I'm not really sure about this. By having Proton/Wine at such a high quality, most devs are just going to target Windows

insert win32 is the only stable linux API blogpost

Winapi is the stable Linux ABI we’ve been waiting for the whole time. Windows binaries are more cross-distribution-portable than native builds.

The irony.

I think this is the more likely end state. Instead of builds targeting certain platforms, some amalgamation of windows APIs and perhaps vulcan or other special things sprinkled in will become a sort of standard. From there, Linux compatibility will be brought up to the same level as Windows and perhaps other platforms will follow suit. We've seen this pattern time and time again in software.

That's missing what ABI is and what features can/can't be accessed by the app. Otherwise we'd call nes ROMs an even more stable ABI accessible across all modern systems.

Yeah it is. But it isn't useful enough. (filesystem, resolution, network, performance)

Windows 10 hits EOL in 2025. I'm really hoping I can just completely convert my gaming PC to a Linux machine by that time, because Windows 11 started out rough and has become less appealing over time.

The Steam Deck is absolutely building that future, and I, too, am excited.

I just decommissioned my 2011 Windows 7 machine where I did most of my dev work and all of my casual computing such as web stuff and gaming. It ran all of the software I needed plus the Steam games I enjoyed. I had no technical reason to "upgrade" in all that time. In its place now is a kooky Linux machine.

The replacement started off as a toy turned experiment: a 12 core Gen 1 Threadripper with 64GB ECC and a Radeon Pro W5700. I wound up installed Void Linux Musl with XFCE mostly to see how useful a system-d/glibc free Linux machine can be. Turns out very useful if you install bloated Windows-style "applications" like Steam, Discord, Chrome, LibreOffice, etc using Flatpak. You can also setup a glibc chroot if need be but I have not ran into this need yet.

I can watch Hulu and other streaming services just fine in Chrome (haven't tried FF). I can play older AAA games you would never imagine running on Linux such as GTA5 and Skyrim with ZERO configuration other than checking "run this game using proton". However I have yet to get Crysis running :-( Anything I can't get running with Wine I can toss into a VM. And I can run lots of VM's :-)

And if you really miss Windows or want some familiarity back - XFCE + Chicago95 ;-)

Yup -- assuming you don't need malware like EAC installed to run online games you can have a surprisingly good game experience on desktop Linux nowadays.

Even weird distributions which I expected to be a miserable fight but nope. Just Flatpak it and all the dependency is inside and it just works. Couple that with out of the box AMD GPU support and it's painless. I expect that I could even run Steam on Alpine Linux. My only gripe is Flatpak'd programs like Steam need to be updated separately through Flatpak.

I also have a Nuc hooked to my bedroom TV running Debian and use a similar setup but no Steam (Its mostly a Chrome toaster).

It seems like Windows is alternating "shit" and "decent" versions.

- Vista: shit

- 7: decent

- 8: shit

- 10: decent

Skipping v9 broke the old "Even number releases bad, odd number releases good" rule of thumb, but the tick-tock (tick-clunk?) rhythm still seems to apply.

The rule that existed from Windows 7 all the way to Windows 8?

It's now like Star Trek movies.

While this sentiment is common, I've honestly never had this experience. Every Windows experience I've had post-Me has been a slow but steady improvement in stability.

I have Windows 10 for work and Windows 11 at home and I honestly forget that they are different OSes most of the time. I just do what I need to do on my machines and the OS stays out of the way.

Sure, I could say the right-click menu out-of-the-box is slightly more annoying now, and I've sure I could come up with a list of things like that for most releases at this point. UAC was a major shift, but I needed one.

But overall, there just aren't very memorable differences between the different OSes. Aside from the fact that BSOD occurrences have steadily decreased up until Windows 10 at which point they almost stopped entirely.

Agreed. I actually found Vista to be a massive improvement in stability. It changed how drivers were run in the kernel, so that a driver crashing often wouldn't result in a bluescreen. I had a ton of graphics card bluescreens on XP, and then virtually none with the same hardware after upgrading to Vista.

Windows 11 really isn't that bad, mostly because it's not really a significant change from Windows 10. The default menu layouts changed a little bit, but not in any way you couldn't recreate in Windows 10, nor did they really remove anything such that you can't make Windows 11 feel like Windows 10.

I suspect the driving reason for the version number increase was to make a clear indicator of the OS's support for scheduling the new wave of hybrid core CPUs, and they simply took the opportunity to clean up some miscellaneous small things that wouldn't have been appropriate to include in a minor version release, but wouldn't have warranted a major version release in of themselves, such as changes to adding things to the file-right-click menu.

... and completely replacing the start bar/UI manager with one that is both missing features that people care about and chock full of ads.

Vista had some launch bugs that were horrendous.

Beyond that it was a solid operating system and one of the better Windows releases.

Most people just had shit computers, combined with "group think" regarding it's quality.

Vista64 on a moderately good system with a proper amount of RAM was fantastic for it's time.

> Vista64 on a moderately good system with a proper amount of RAM was fantastic for it's time.

Well yeah, a big part of the problem with Vista was the enourmous increase in resource usage compared to XP, which many PCs sold with it were not ready for. That hardware now has enough brute force to make it work doesn't really mean it is not still needlessly inefficient.

3.1 great

95 ok

98se great

ME... Can't even describe how awful it was

XP great

Then your selection :-)

I've tried upgrading my gaming computer to windows 11 with a fresh install and upgrade both of them fail and I don't know why.

I have a steam deck and twice after playing a game its asked me how well it worked on the deck. So its great they're collecting that data.

When I used my linux laptop for gaming there is a good online database of compatibility:

https://www.protondb.com/

Even better, you can get the decky-loader and proton-badges plugin. It can show the protondb rating directly on the game mode ui. Allows you to know will a game(or a program) even run even it is not rated as steamdeck compatible yet.

> I don't even own a Steam Deck and I've been seeing the benefits just from its existence. Now, almost every game on Steam has a quick accessible rating that lets me know if it works fine on Linux.

WineDB did this for years, as does ProtonDB now. And both usually have tweaks and how-tos. But I'll concede its nice to see it in Steam itself.

>In addition, the effectiveness of Proton for running Windows games is baffling, and something I never could have expected when I first switched to Linux back in 2015.

Is it true that Windows games run better on Proton than on Windows?

Proton was around for years before the steam deck was announced. Linux gaming was already thriving

Wine was also quite capable before proton came about. Valve obviously did a lot for the linux gamers, that much is clear, but we must not forget the volunteers (and codeweavers) that worked tirelessly for years to get wine to that point. Wine is a tremendous achievement.

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