Hacker News Reader

Comment by paulryanrogers | Hacker News Reader

Some games. Sometimes. Depending on the game, Linux distro, library versions, hardware driver support, etc.

I can also bake my own bread. But I'm tired of all the tweaking and debugging at the end of the day.

In my experience these days, across several dozen games in my Steam library (admittedly largely omitting competitive multiplayer games other than CS), it has been most games, most of the time, on a basic Ubuntu install on hardware I chose mostly without checking for Linux compatibility. If you want to play video games without paying Microsoft for user-hostile systems, Linux has definitely become a genuine option in recent years.

I have a Windows 10 install on my machine that I have been thrilled to discover I’ve only needed a handful of times in three years (mostly to disable the rainbow vomit RGB that Linux doesn’t recognize).

Unfortunately, anti-cheat systems usually don't work well with proton so "competitive multiplayer games" are exactly the sort of games that you would be more likely to have problems with on Linux.

Most games. Most of the time. You make it sound like there's only a small subsection of games that can be played on Linux when that hasn't been true for some time now.

There definitely still exist games that have issues running on Linux, but they are few and far between now.

Quality versus quantity problem. The most popular games not made by Valve tend to not work at all, and a quick look at Proton DB shows of the top 100, only about 20% are in the "no issues" (platinum) category. Gold is "playable", and from experience, there is a lot of variability there. It includes problems that would lead to refunds and bad reviews on the original platform.

Gold is generally only minor issues. I can play most of the games in my library.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com