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Comment by 0xDEAFBEAD | Hacker News Reader

The problem with gaming on Linux I found is that a lot of games won't work. Even if it's advertised to work for Linux, it might not work on your distro, or it might not have controller support or audio. Sure you could try and troubleshoot, but I want to play a game, not work. What if you spend a few hours troubleshooting, you get the game working, and you find that it's not actually fun?

MacOS is the same btw.

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There is ProtonDB (Or WineDB) where you can check supposed working games (at least the emulated ones) and how well they work. Often if they don't work out of the box a fitting patch is posted there and reality is sometimes a older ProtonDB build works better.

However in my experience games just work these days in 9 of 10 cases. And if it doesn't it's the launcher and not the game in the far majority of cases, a issue only found with big shit studios.

> There is ProtonDB (Or WineDB) where you can check supposed working games (at least the emulated ones) and how well they work.

pcgamingwiki.com sometimes has issues and fixes for native games, but there don't seem to be many Linux users contributing.

I permanently deleted the Blizzard/Battle.net identity I'd had since D2:LoD after dealing with Blizzard Support over Diablo IV.

Hour long waits to get in, frequent crashes and logouts, no actual help or troubleshooting, and my refund was denied for "too much in-game time" within 48 hours of purchase (6 hours of troubleshooting and waiting, about an hour of uninterrupted play). This was on a native Windows install, by the way.

My point is that Linux is a great filter for companies with the worst behaviors. If it happens to be a coincidence that the games that tend not to work on Linux also belong to those companies, so much the better.

Also, if it's not in Wine's AppDB or ProtonDB, try using https://looking-glass.io/ with a Win10 IoT VM that's been "debloated". It's like having Windows as a Service.

Do be aware though that many modern games with anti cheat will not run in Windows VMs. It was the reason why I deleted my Windows VM last year.

I think this is happening less as the Steam Deck forces non-Linux-compatible games (and games rated as Linux-compatible but with outstanding problems) to fix any outstanding issues so they can work properly on the Deck. Lots of games in my Steam list have had updates over the past 6 months making them work on the Deck, and I assume (though haven't tested) that that will also impact their compatibility with non-Deck Linux boxes.

I found that even games with "Linux support" tended to work on some distros but not others.

I wonder if there's a guide to setting up Arch in a way that makes it work as much like the Deck as possible? I'm fairly indifferent to choice of distro, maybe it's worth choosing Arch just for game support.

Edit: I found this -- https://store.steampowered.com/steamos/buildyourown I guess they're using Debian rather than Arch

They used debian before the steam deck was released. They are definitely using arch now, at least for the deck.

That's super lame. I wish they made it so SteamOS behaved as much like the deck as possible, so compatibility work for the deck would also transfer to steam machines.

If anything it is taking away the worry of game studios to care about GNU/Linux, beyond ChromeOS/Android/Linux, Playstation/Swift POSIX inspired OSes, just let Valve do the work on Proton and call it a day.

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