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Comment by maxrecursion | Hacker News Reader

Care to share what "Steam's more convenient method of running Windows games" is?

I love Linux, but gaming is the only thing keeping me going back to Linux as my main OS. I heard that Linux can play most steam games except Multiplayer online games due to the anti-cheat software not being designed for windows.

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It's completely behind the scenes now. If you have Steam on Linux, there's a setting you enable to allow the "Proton" compatibility layer (Valve's fork of Wine), and all Windows games appear in your library list. That's it. You install and run them like any native game, and aside from a bit longer start up the first time you launch a game, the experience is indistinguishable. I imagine a significant portion of Steam Deck owners have no idea they're not using Windows. I actually wish they would add some badge to a game entry so I can tell what's native, because it's hard to tell.

In some cases, even anti-cheat works. Games that use EasyAntiCheat (EAC) and the devs have enabled linux compatibility and you install the Proton EasyAntiCheat Runtime, you might be good to go. I'm not sure how common it is yet for all those requirements to be met though.

Look at steam deck compatibility as a reference point. The number of games that can run on Linux today is staggering. I tend to assume that games work rather than do not, and that assumption holds about 95% of the time.

https://www.protondb.com/

For those that use kagi search, you might want to add a custom bang for proton db. https://www.protondb.com/search?q=%s

Kagi uses the same bangs as duckduckgo (and more), so there should already be 4 different bangs for it

https://duckduckgo.com/bangs?q=protondb

Oh nice. Not sure how I missed those.

You hit the nail on the head. Games requiring DRM or anti-cheat probably won't run. Its something Valve has been working on, but its been slow going. Other than that, 99% of the games I've tried have just worked.

Some do

https://areweanticheatyet.com/

old news

> except Multiplayer online games

That's no longer the case. I'd say about now, there are more multiplayer games that you can play, as opposed to ones you can't play.

See: https://areweanticheatyet.com/ as reference, but it's not very up-to-date, so https://www.protondb.com/ would probably be a better reference.

You no longer have to install wine or manually configure games beyond what you would on Windows.

You simply install Steam, and Proton (kind of a fork of Wine) will be installed to provide compatibility for Windows games for you, in a transparent manner.

Proton has greatly increased the compatibility and performance of Windows games on Linux. In some cases, it's faster on Wine than on Windows (in part because some Windows APIs are stubbed on Wine).

Proton DB has the list of Steam games and user reports for how well they are supported under Proton.

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