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Comment by hospitalJail | Hacker News Reader

No Linux support yet? I suppose I'll wait until the game is finished before I buy it.

Its nice companies give us such obvious indicators of quality.

I have over 100 hours of playtime on Linux by now, it runs well enough that official Linux support wouldn't really change anything.

I've played it exclusively on the Steam Deck, which runs Arch Linux + Proton (Valve's compatibility layer that anyone can run).

If you’re as keen on Linux as you seem to be, then Proton is your friend. We may never see native builds, but already developers are putting way more effort into making sure the Deck (meaning Linux) experience is good.

Here’s a video of the head of Larian Studios talking about how they’re viewing the Steam Deck - https://youtu.be/kzfEkSGa45k

> This is an ambitious device. We love it. We’re going to do everything we can to support it. We’re going to make sure that every single game, Baldur’s Gate III included, is going to play really smoothly on the Steam Deck.

Valve have made adding Linux support easy and desirable (because of the market share of the Deck). And developers are responding. Don’t miss out because you want “native builds”.

I've only played it on Linux. Basically, you can assume any Windows game sold on Steam works on Linux. It's not always true, but it's true often enough that I don't normally check protondb anymore.

Most companies don't ship native Linux builds, it's easier to make sure it works well under Proton. Linux is approximately 2% of Steam users, Deck included.

It does work quite well under Proton, and runs on the Steam Deck.

"Runs perfectly after tweaks": https://www.protondb.com/app/1086940

I'll just wait until the game is finished before I buy it.

I don't like paying to be a beta tester and programmer. That is my day job.

My guess is it'll never have an official Linux release. Besides, proton is so good at this point that it will usually outshine a cheap Linux port. In fact, due to the lack of backwards compatibility in Linux land, the Windows edition of a game will typically keep working longer on Linux than the native port. It's a really strange situation.

The game is finished.

They're still releasing patches, so this is an exaggeration. It's very playable, though.

I don't understand which part of releasing patches would not imply it's finished? The campaign is whole, the story is done, the classes are there. There's nothing missing.

For what it's worth I was experiencing crashes on Patch 5. No crashes on the recently released Patch 6 and the performance is better as well. As a Steam Deck gamer, I appreciated Larian adding FSR support as well. It's not an exaggeration to say that people who start playing now are getting a substantially smoother experience than those who played on Day 1.

The game launched yesterday on Xbox and those folks are going to have a blast. :)

They haven't stopped working on it, so it's not finished. That's what the word "finished" means.

It's a very odd definition in the world of software though, even games. Hope they're not holding their breath for World of Warcraft or Factorio to be finished. God forbid they need an operating system. I guess OS/2 would make the cut :-)

What does "Finished" mean to you?

BG3 was "finished" on release. If it never saw a single update after that, I'd have been happy with it anyway. What they're doing is providing excellent ongoing support to an already solid product.

I play BG3 on my steamdeck, so it does work on Linux.

I've run this on Linux from launch day.

No official support, but Steam make it work.

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