Hacker News Reader

IMO the rise of handhelds like the Steam Deck has a decent chance of pushing big publishers to consider releasing for Linux/Proton. These handhelds fit the niche between smart phone and console gamers [1] that might have some potential growth left in it. Even the availability of Windows first handhelds was not as bad for Linux gaming as SteamOS and other gaming handheld focused Linux distros have been ported to them.

On the other hand the anti cheat side has been really ratcheting up with newer releases requiring Win 11 and Secure Boot. I somewhat hope and fear we might get a blessed version of SteamOS for the Deck that is heavily locked down and has kernel/hypervisor level anti cheat functions added to it. Essentially allowing for a boot mode similar to current consoles. While it goes against the open spirit of SteamOS, it might serve as an argument to invest a bit more into the Linux side, potentially improving the ecosystem as a whole.

Or all of it might be the usual "year of the Linux desktop" pipe dream.

[1] leaving out the Switch which is heavily focused on Nintendo IP and has comparatively weak hardware

I have a Steam Deck and run Linux on all my machines and I am a pretty big Gamer. Typically I have no problems.

Same, but I mostly play indie, older and/or singleplayer games. I now often don't even check ProtonDB when buying games, it has gotten that good. Anything AAA, multiplayer and new tends to cause problems due to anti cheats though.

Proton already runs the vast majority of games just fine. Gamers should categorically refuse rootkits and give the cold shoulder to studios that release games that require them. Anyone with a bit of maturity can do that, and nowadays there are thousands of other games to choose from.

> Gamers should categorically refuse rootkits and give the cold shoulder to studios that release games that require them. Anyone with a bit of maturity can do that, and nowadays there are thousands of other games to choose from.

the problem is, the wide masses still keep buying the latest AAA game thanks to literally sometimes hundreds of millions of euros worth of marketing (GTA V already had 150 M$ marketing budget well over a decade ago), and the free-to-play "whale hunter" games are even worse.

With ye olde purchased online games, like UT2004, you'd think twice before cheating, otherwise you'd get your serial number banned (sometimes not just on one server, but on an entire fleet of servers run by the same op) and you'd have to buy a new license. That alone put a base floor on cheater costs.

In contrast, Fortnite or other f2p games? These are overrun by cheaters, there is no cost attached at all, so it's obvious that the only solution is to ratchet up the anti-cheat measures.

All hail capitalism and the quest for f2p developers to lure in the 1-5% of utter whales that actually bring in the money.

> MacOS is not an attainable gaming support platform in general, as the people who are interested in the AAA games are going to need a Pro series

The M5's GPU cores are expected to pick up the same 40% performance boost we just saw in the newly released iPhones.

AAA games written for the M4 already work just fine, the extra performance is needed when you are also emulating other graphics APIs and CPU instruction sets to run Windows games.

Windows on ARM has the same issues, but Prism isn't as good at x86 emulation.

Attainable isn't about benchmarks and performance, it's ecosystem such as supported kernel hooks for AAA games to invest the time in maintaining their anti-cheats and other parts of the game-as-a-service platform.

It's also about the market accessibility and penetration. When the base level MBA at it's lowest RAM settings is reliably running AAA games is when you might see more interest in the platform from those studios because much like the iOS market, people running Mac tend to be more readily monetized, especially through things like in-game cosmetics.

The cheapest base M4 Mac Mini has 16 Gigs of RAM and plays AAA games written for Mac today.

The performance boost is needed when you are running Windows games under emulation.

Emulation overhead is also an issue for Proton on Linux or Windows on ARM.

> Emulation overhead is also an issue for Proton on Linux

Nope because Proton is based on WINE, which stands for Wine Is Not An Emulator. Windows executables on Linux are running natively at full speed like any other Linux program.

Wine implements the Windows ABI and is just here to answer the system calls those executables are making.

In fact, most Windows games are running faster under Linux.

I remember running warcraft 3 under Wine in a Lan party.

At one point, during a Dota match, every single Windows machine crashed. And my Linux machine was the only one left in the server.

So not only does it run faster but it's more stable too.

Back in 2005 or so I was playing WoW under Wine, and surprisingly it was faster on my crappy PC at that time, because it used less RAM!

Sorry, but DirectX games don't work on top of the Vulkan graphics API used by Linux without an emulation layer provided by the Proton fork of Wine.

Wine may not be an emulator, but Proton includes a completely necessary translation layer if you intend to play DirectX games on Linux.

On Mac, Apple provides an open source emulation layer, D3DMetal, to translate from DirectX to Metal which is used by Wine.

DXVK, VKD3D, D3DMetal, etc. are translation layers. You're implying they're far more heavyweight than they actually are. The real reason Windows games don't run as well on Macs is that they're usually built for x86_64 instead of ARM.

As someone who has used both Windows and Linux to game on the same x86_64 device, the performance hit with Proton is pretty much negligible (and sometimes games actually run faster on Linux).

> DXVK, VKD3D, D3DMetal, etc. are translation layers.

Rosetta is a translation layer that only operates the first time you run a given x86 app on Mac, and creates an ARM translation that is written to disk and used in the future.

Does that mean it has no overhead?

There is more substantial overhead translating to a different instruction set than in converting API calls to another API. Looking at basic benchmarks should be enough to demonstrate this. IIRC it's like 80% of the performance or something when using Rosetta as compared to native.

Also, Rosetta is more like a transpiler, since it basically recompiles the binary, whereas the others are literally layers that basically take calls in one API and translate them to another. They're pretty much the same thing as ANGLE.

> There is more substantial overhead translating to a different instruction set than in converting API calls to another API.

It's a one time only cost, since Rosetta only runs the first time you launch an app and the translation is written to disk to be used in the future.

That means there is no ongoing cost by your logic, and Proton translating an API call every time it is used is worse.

I'm talking about the overhead post-translation for Rosetta. Translating optimized code from one architecture to another is difficult, which is why there is a performance hit.

That's not emulation, it compiles shaders to vulkan. DXVK commonly has a slight performance advantage over DX12 on Windows for some hardware.

> That's not emulation, it compiles shaders to vulkan.

D3DMetal compiles shades into Metal.

So it doesn't introduce overhead?

Not very much at runtime. The main problem with metal is that it's not really compatible with DX12 or vulkan. DX12 and Vulkan are very similar, metal is not. I'm sure the conversion isn't as 1-1 and you lose some performance by doing stuff esoterically.

You should probably read up on the subject.

> Low level Graphics APIs such as Vulkan, DirectX, Metal, and WebGPU, are converging to a model similar to the way GPUs are currently built.

https://alain.xyz/blog/comparison-of-modern-graphics-apis

Proton is not some magic software that is immune to taking a performance hit when you translate from one API to another.

Proton is not an emulator. Games running on Proton typically have slightly better GPU performance than native DX. It's mostly a compiler.

It's sort of like saying that C++ is inherently a performance hit over C because you have to do more translation. Well, no, the translation happens ahead of time, and the result of the translation might be better suited to run on the hardware. For example, C++ has semantics that allow optimizations that are impossible in C. Rust ALSO has semantics that allow optimizations that are impossible in C.

But, I'm being sloppy here. Proton is many tools, and DXVK is just one of them, WINE is another.

But, of the modern graphics APIs, Metal is the most unique. And it does have good reason - the M series chips do have some unique GPU hardware that allows them to do certain things faster.

It's just that those things aren't generally useful or automatic, WE have to set it up. But we can't do that if we use automatic translation.

You have no idea what you're talking about and it's honestly kinda precious.

>The cheapest base M4 Mac Mini has 16 Gigs of RAM and plays AAA games written for Mac today.

The frame rates are quite low on the base M4. Cyberpunk 2077 test: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gID9S2hwJpU

I think you need an M4 Pro or a Max for a good gaming experience with AAA games.

The gaming is the only reason that keeps me buying computer with windows

Regarding this article here, when you said about competitive gaming, I imagined a competition of that sort. I wonder how does a windows installation look in a big gaming competition that many players attend. It's never "BYOD" rather they get the windows preinstalled onto great gaming PC.

Do the players need to login to their Microsoft account? And Download their cloud cotents to someone else's computer? Or maybe there is a loophole for gaming contests that allow installation without cloud login?

If you have to play games, just have a separate Windows computer for that, and do everything else on a Linux box.

I agree, but I'm not sure that's acceptable to the general population

Fine, but the general population will have to accept whatever fate Microsoft has in mind for them.

Edit: I'd guess a lot of them just follow whatever instructions they are given, and create the online account. If Microsoft thought there was a chance of serious rebellion, they wouldn't be doing it.

Dual boot seems like a more obvious recommendation? Or better still, play games on linux, except those that require kernel AC?

If you can make it work, sure, but somebody will probably complain that it's too hard for the general population.

I find it annoying not to be able to run things at the same time. I've used dual boot many years ago but ran into the issue that one thing required one OS, another thing another OS. Kept having to close things down and reboot, reboot reboot. Nah, thanks. I'll use Linux with an offline Windows XP VM for Age of Empires and call it a day. One day, maybe I'll use a Windows 10 VM without Microsoft account to run modern software if the need arises

Some forms of kernel anticheat make dual booting harder, too. I can’t play valorant since that version of Vanguard requires secure boot, which doesn’t seem to work with my dual boot setup unless I invest more time fiddling than I care to. Easier just not to play that game.

It's really easy for people who work in tech, or tech adjacent to recommend this, but in my experience, getting anyone to try nearly anything on Linux is very rough. Friends who wanted to "take control of privacy in their life" never made it beyond a week of trying to use a Linux distribution.

We have decades of training in the consumer market for very simple install patterns using UIs, and minimal messing with configurations. The people in gaming who overclock and tweak their settings are a huge minority in gaming. Those people are the ones most likely to be able to grok switching to Linux, but when they get there and find that most of their favorite apps don't work like they are used to, they go back to Windows or Mac.

My hypothesis is that for Linux Gaming to truly take off, you'll need a true desktop (not steamdeck which i use weekly) that makes it a handful of "clicks" to get whatever they want installed working. That means you'll need a commercially backed OS where developers maintain all the things needed to support near infinite peripheral connections for a variety of use cases, clear anti-cheat interfaces, and likely clear DRM hooks as well.

For myself personally the moment I stopped tweaking linux endlessly was when I installed the universalblue images (bazzite/aurora/bluefin). They made upgrading / using software so painless by providing sane defaults that I no longer feel the need to time my upgrades after the bugs have been patched out, or look up random commands to fix something. They are reliable enough that I feel comfortable recommending / installing them for family members, something which I would not have done before.

> Friends who wanted to "take control of privacy in their life" never made it beyond a week of trying to use a Linux distribution.

I wonder why. Something like Linux Mint isn't materially different from Windows in terms of UI. Any peripheral sold as "Linux compatible" that you plug in will just work, and Steams allows to play practically any game that does not require an invasive rootkit (aka kernel-level anticheat).

I think a good first step would be to start using common FOSS programs such as Firefox, Thunderbird, VLC, LibreOffice on Windows during a transition period.

People probably feel less in control in an unfamiliar environment even if the superficial functionality is similar. I suspect this might be a greater factor for those who are somewhat tech-savvy and used to knowing their way around their computer to some degree. Once you go a bit beyond launching apps and using their UIs, the differences become apparent, bringing about a sense of unfamiliarity and a loss of a sense of control and competence.

People for whom the computer is just an appliance with limited applications (and who recognise their relationship to the computer as such) might even be better able to switch, provided that everything is set up for them. My elderly parents used a Linux box I set up for them for years at some point.

These types of games are only a small part of gaming, I use a macbook for my main machine and I play games on my console. The majority of gaming has nothing to do with buying skins and we should all be rejecting this nonsense anyway.