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Comment by dmitriid | Hacker News Reader

What Steam did for Linux is very similar to what Ubuntu did for Linux: made the actual work to make sure there's something for non-nerds to use.

No one cared about the "non-nerd" until these two came along. Because sure "you can alway select <one of thousands distributions> and <build/compile/config your own stuff>", but this doesn't scale.

Even if this started as a way to keep being relevant in the world of competing OS-level stores and shenanigans (IIRC Steam for Linux started shortly after Windows Store was announced), the achievement is still nothing short of miracle: there are actually games you can play on Linux now.

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I think this downplays some of the work Valve/Steam has done for Linux, especially recently.

For a long time, playing games on Linux wasn't a "nerd" thing, it was a "nobody" thing. Getting AAA games to run on Linux was a pipe dream.

Valve has put in the work (and in some cases, hired the people putting in the work) to get us to today, where most games work with decent performance (the major exception being anti-cheat, but Valve is slowly working on those as well).

> I think this downplays some of the work Valve/Steam has done for Linux

Quoting myself: "the achievement is still nothing short of miracle" ;)

Most people probably don’t realise that Valve has actual kernel devs. I bought a Logitech racing wheel a while ago and force feedback wasn’t working. After some research I found a mailing list where someone with a valve email has submitted a patch that fixed it.

I play Counterstrike GO, and it was the thing holding me back from abandoning windows.

I (use to) play daily so there was no point ever booting up into linux.

As soon as linux support came out, I started playing under it immediately, and quickly realised that there was no point booting up into windows anymore.

This tbh. I got Elder Scrolls Oblivion running the other day on Pop!_OS and I have been absolutely eating up the nostalgia. In 2016 I tried getting it running with plain old WINE and for some reason people were missing their heads and speech options were missing. On Proton it works perfectly, and I haven't noticed any glitches(that are out of the ordinary for a Bethesda title anyway)

Did you do any modding or use a list?

Thats probably the reason, or at least part of it. On Windows I heavily modded it with tons of new items and sidequests, so that might have interfered with how it ran on Linux. However, I never installed any visual mods because I was playing the game on a toaster of a Windows PC and didn't want to risk lag. Its 7 years after the fact so its too late to troubleshoot, but I think it was probably a combination of the game not knowing what to do without my mods and WINE being weird.

My installation was also bit weird because I was new to Linux and didn't understand how things were supposed to work. I installed the Windows version of Steam through Play on Linux and installed everything through that client, rather than running individual games through POL. Then again, the installation option wasn't even available for the game on the Linux client so at the time I felt that the weird setup was the only way to play it

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