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Comment by fao_ | Hacker News Reader

> Zorin boasting about you being able to play "an enormous library of your favorite games" or boasting about the vast software library feels like asking for trouble. It won't be long before users run into rough edges.

Out of the top 1000 games on steam: https://www.protondb.com/dashboard

29 are "borked" (unplayable)

26 are "bronze" (issues playing like "might crash")

82 are "silver" ("runs with minor issues but is playable")

823 are "gold"/"platinum" (works perfectly with tweaks, and works perfectly ootb)

> TBH in the current environment I still think the best OS for "revive an old computer for a not very tech savvy person" is ChromeOS.

Only 52 games are listed as "certified" for proton on Chrome OS.

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Proton isn't Wine. The version of Wine that Zorin ships won't run games quite so well.

Installing Steam and running games through Steam will fix that, but it won't help with users downloading the Epic Game Store or GOG or the Rockstar Launcher.

Having helped a few users get acclimated with Linux, I've found that there are always a few rough edges around games. Zorin seems to hide them very well out of the box, though, much better than any of the other distros I've tried.

> Proton isn't Wine.

Proton _is_ Wine. Fixes in Proton get upstreamed into Wine, and Valve hires developers to work on Proton, Wine, and Mesa. Wine isn't in the dark ages anymore and is able to run the majority of things you throw at it confidently and capably.

> but it won't help with users downloading the Epic Game Store or GOG or the Rockstar Launcher.

That's... why we have Lutris? You literally cannot shake a stick without coming across those. Even just typing "epic games on linux" into google and being a dumbass that reads the AI overview, it will tell you that Heroic and Lutris exist: https://i.imgur.com/KBiw1cR.png

After that, you just click some buttons that are clearly marked and wait for things to install, and it just works: https://i.imgur.com/XUFJaUu.png

To be clear, I literally just did this because I wanted to try Fall Guys on my laptop with an aggressively underpowered graphics card. It took only minimal intervention from me (clicking "install" and "next", and then logging in to Epic).

It's not as seamless as hitting "Install" on Steam would be, but if you're able to mod games on Windows (i.e. "follow instructions") you're more than able to deal with the state of gaming on Linux in the present day, and in many ways it is somewhat easier than Windows with the way Linux handles software upgrades.

> Proton _is_ Wine

I think it's fairer to say Proton includes Wine, because it ships with software that is not part of Wine such as DXVK.

Ok yes, Proton is a distribution of Wine, incorporating fixes that then get upstreamed, and some other software that users typically want to pull down.

If you open up `winetricks` in a default installation, you can just select to install all of these extra components yourself -- including DXVK (Not that I'm suggesting that someone who is green-eared does that without a guide, but it is literally just clicking checkboxes and then "OK"), and Lutris is another kind of Wine distribution that manages your games and pulls down these extra libraries for you. Most people either add stuff as non-steam games (which handily keeps track of all of the games for you too), which lets you run it via Proton, or just uses Lutris (or Heroic I guess).

But like, even the default distribution of Wine is able to handle things very, very capably now and a lot of things that required tinkering JustWork(tm). I say that as someone who ran a single Arch Linux distribution for 7 years straight back in the mid-late 2010s

I find protondb misleading because GTA V is supposedly "Gold" except Online does not work at all because of anti-cheat. Same goes for many other popular multiplayer games.

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