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Comment by Zurrrrr | Hacker News Reader

Sure there are still cases where you can't switch, but the gap is ever closing and is already very very narrow. Proton covers most games, and WINE covers most windows software, and plenty of big software has native versions for multiple OSes.

I think if more people tried Rather than just assuming they would probably be pleasantly surprised.

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I think its' perfectly fine in many games. In others there is a performance penalty of several percent, a slower fix rate for OS specific bugs, or graphics drivers lagging several weeks or even months behind the Windows release specific for the game.

That seems to be very much the exception. In many other cases Linux gives significantly better performance and less issues.

Linux is very much a viable gaming platform these days, and Windows only has a minimal advantage in that area.

It's a lot better than it used to be, but it's still far from great. Especially with anything non-steam or anything that uses one of the newer Anticheats (which are basically rootkits).

Here's the top of the list of 2022 most sold PC games (US chart):

#1 Most sold 2022 (CoD MW2): Nope https://www.protondb.com/app/1938090

#2 Most sold 2022 (Elden ring): Sort of (Steam deck apparently great, Desktop less than pefect) https://www.protondb.com/app/1245620

#3 Most sold 2022 (Madden NFL 23): Barely. No online play and worse perf https://www.protondb.com/app/1760250

And so on and so forth. But if we give a little more time it could be better. So look at 2021 most sold PC games instead

#1 Most sold 2021 (Apex Legends): Yes. Fixed in 2022 with official anticheat support 3 years after release. https://www.protondb.com/app/1172470

#2 Most sold 2021 (BF 2042): Nope https://www.protondb.com/app/1517290

#3 Most sold 2021 (CS:GO): Works (Although some of the user reports look really painful). https://www.protondb.com/app/730

Looking at protondb the number of titles that get a "Platinum" rating meaning they work out great of the box without tweaking, is extremely low. (proton/steamdeck isn't the only way of running Linux games of course).

Right, but that's a very very tiny handful of titles. It's not surprising that the biggest AAA title games might have issues or DRM nonsense, but that's a small handful of games.

I disagree it's 'far from great', I'd say it's only slightly short of Windows support. There's a reason Steam thought it made sense to use it as a base after all.

As for CSGO I have better performance under Linux than I do on Windows, and many other users support the same.

By number of copies sold or hours played even just those six are a huge chunk of "PC gaming". Including say the top 15 of the last 3 years, you can pretty much call all the rest of PC gaming a long tail roundoff error in terms of copies sold or hours played. It doen't really matter if for these 45 titles there are 4500 titles that work perfectly on Linux.

Depends how you look at it. If 95% of games play fine on Linux, and if a significant percentage of those play better on Linux than they do on Windows, then it's clearly not as far behind as you are trying to argue it is.

I think all it comes down to is: how bad is bad? To me, if 9/10 work equally well and 1/10 doesn't work at all, then that's way worse than unacceptable. I.e. not even close to acceptable.

Others might shrug and say "hey 9/10 that's great, and if 3 of those run even better then I love it!"

Yup. I'm in the latter group I suppose, since I don't really want to deal with any title that has intrusive DRM or anti-cheat as it is. I do security research and they don't tend to like some of the stuff I have on my system as it is.

I do gaming livestreams from a Linux setup. Out of the last dozen of games that I played, most worked perfectly right out the box. One had a minor texture glitch on the start screen (though not in-game), one had rather bad (though playable) performance. The only issue that I've seen across multiple games is that they seem to get confused when screens are on different resolutions, but I can usually fix that by flipping between windowed and fullscreen.

So yeah, it's not all sunshine and butterflies, but "extremely low number of games that work out of the box" is not true in my experience.

(Important side-note: I don't play online multiplayer stuff, so the whole anti-cheat software topic does not apply to me.)

Yeah and I consider "PC gaming" to basically be "AAA multiplayer gaming" so you can see there are different niches here.

Protondb is not great way to get a summary across many titles. It's effectively closer to a bug tracker. If some people have an issue, you'll see it on protondb - it may not be a real issue or may be due to some weird old config though.

Few people think to visit it and report that a specific game works great for them.

I've never had any issues with CS:GO. It's native to Linux. Also, I get better performance in CS:GO on Linux than Windows.

Proton was not the experience I wanted on a steam deck. I had to dig way down into comments on proton.db to find the configs that would stop games from crashing or what not. It was getting to the point where I needed notes with links to configs and Reddit comments to get certain games working.

I sold my steam deck because I don’t have the time to play switch, desktop, and steam deck. Proton configs were one of the reasons I chose to sell the deck instead of the switch or desktop.

The proton configs worked and I was surprised they made a big difference. They made unplayable games playable. I’m just not trying to debug pleasure activities.

okay, this doesnt sound good. Now lets remember back to the era of incompatible rootkits where windows gamers were reinstalling windows weekly because they wanted to play different incompatible games. Of course some bought multiple harddrives and had several installations concurrent.

Which is worse? :)

> Now lets remember back to the era of incompatible rootkits where windows gamers were reinstalling windows weekly because they wanted to play different incompatible games.

I am guessing that there have been real issues with incompatible root kits, but there has never been an ‘era’ where it was a common thing for the average gamer to reinstall windows weekly because of incompatible rootkits.

The only thing close to that I can think of is places where poorly maintained rootkits were required for banking, could not be easily uninstalled and caused havoc. That’s a hellscape for sure but not quite the same thing.

there was

When? What release of Windows, and what games? I’ve been PC gaming and consuming video game media since before Win 3.1 at a level where it wouldn’t be under the radar if it was an ‘era’ where this was the regular thing to do. Are you absolutely sure this is unrelated to banking rootkits in certain countries/regions?

Probably the problem that persists in the modern day, because it remains relevant.

The other thing people could do is stop buying software that only works on Windows.

Usually, home users do not NEED whatever software only works on Windows. Usually, the example is some AAA game. No one needs a game; it's a luxury. So if some stupid game is "forcing" you to stay on Windows, that's your own fault and I have zero sympathy.

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