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Comment by p1necone | Hacker News Reader

I made the switch more than a year ago and it's been basically problem free.

Almost all modern games work flawlessly through proton and I get better compatibility for really old stuff through lutris than I ever did on windows (I used to have to run a win 3.1/95/98 vm to play certain older games, now I just use lutris/wine).

The only stuff that doesn't work is multiplayer games with unsupported anticheat - it's always a crapshoot when something new and multiplayer launches. My backup plan for those if I really want to play them is to just get them on PS5.

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The unfortunate reality is that, depending on your personal preferences, "most modern games" require such a ring 0 anti-cheat. Any game that has a matchmaking mode with a competitive option requires a rootkit.

As an aside, I recently found Riot Games' Vanguard installed on my Linux ESP partition... after having installed the game on my windows partition. It rooted every OS it could find mounted. Incredible.

Modern games are not just shooting stuff in competitive mode.

There exist a gazillion of other games too, without anti-cheat.

GP said "depending on your personal preferences" and clearly didn't imply all "modern games" are competitive shooters.

Then depending on your personal preferences, all modern games are farming simulators.

How did you find out that you had a rootkit?

The other day I tried Midtown madness, something that has become a bit of an issue to run on Windows. It took less than a minute to install and booted first time via Wine. It is amazing seeing just how well it works and feels almost like a native binary.

When I was younger I also was like that.

As I got older, my interests in games decreased. That and also because I am too dumb to make wine work with games nowadays; it was easier in the 32bit era. :\

But the real problem is lack of time. There are so many things to do and so little time. Today's games are also not as interesting IMO. Most of them are just "who has the better 3D engine".

Games these days, just as before, are fantastic. Outer Wilds, Disco Elysium, Expedition 33, Baldur's Gate 3, Elden Ring(Nightreign), etc. And I've not even listed quite a few of my favorites cause they're not popular enough for most people to have heard of them.

Weird to say you don't game these days but also make blanket statements about games these days :p

Outer Wilds… man, what an experience.

If I could choose a single game to experience again, it would be Outer Wilds. I played it with my partner, streaming it over Discord, and it was a truly amazing ride, start to finish. Loved the DLC as well.

Hearing the theme still gets me emotional and very sentimental.

I should really play the DLC!

BG3 runs natively on Linux (sorta, the proton Linux runtime) now! Not sure Larion can do wrong at this point.

> And I've not even listed quite a few of my favorites cause they're not popular enough for most people to have heard of them.

And you choose then to NOT give those games you love more exposure and share them with the rest of the world?!

I'll start: windows version of Uplink game works great in proton, and if you install uplinkos mod on it, it's a super fun Hollywood-style hacking game: https://www.moddb.com/mods/uplink-os

Uplink's not really a 'game these days', though, it's been around for a while. Better examples may be Digimon Story Time Stranger or Le Mans Ultimate.

Heh, sorry. Someone else asked for a list so I made a short one, figured I'll send it here as well :) They range in obscurity, but I'd not rate any of them as "mainstream".

In no particular order and in no way an exhaustive list:

Lies of P.

Baba Is You.

Ender Lilies/Magnolia.

Rain World.

Pillars of Eternity 1/2.

Return of the Obra Dinn.

What Remains of Edith Finch.

the "We Were Here" series.

1000xResist (played this one just a month ago, what a game).

Katana Zero.

Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night.

Sayonara Wild hearts.

Fell Seal: Arbiter's Mark.

AER Memories of Old.

Thanks for sharing - I love bloodstained, such a good game!

Please tell me your more obscure favourites :)

Hmmmm, sure. I'm not sure if I'd label them "obscure", they've all got a couple 1000 reviews on Steam. But they're certainly not mainstream to the level of my previously listed games(, with Disco Elysium not really being mainstream either tbh, but people know of it to some degree).

In no particular order and in no way an exhaustive list:

Lies of P.

Baba Is You.

Ender Lilies/Magnolia.

Rain World.

Pillars of Eternity 1/2.

Return of the Obra Dinn.

What Remains of Edith Finch.

the "We Were Here" series.

1000xResist (played this one just a month ago, what a game).

Katana Zero.

Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night.

Sayonara Wild hearts.

Fell Seal: Arbiter's Mark.

AER Memories of Old.

If you liked Obra Dinn you should try out 'The Roottrees are Dead'. Very similar 'fill in the gaps via investigation' core gameplay loop, but I found it more engaging/less repetitive.

Oh I've got my sights on it alright. Looks really interesting but just not been in the mood for such a game as of late :)

For 90+ percent of Windows-only games I wanna play, the process for getting them to work on Linux is the following:

1. Hit the download button in Steam

2. Wait for it to download

3. Hit the play button

Granted, my taste in games doesn't include things like generic AAA first person military shooters, which are the ones which tend to be the most difficult to get to work due to stuff like anti cheat. But it sounds like your taste doesn't include those either,

and for me, the one (rather niche, I might add) game that didn't "just work" was working just fine after trying a different Proton version - which is literally as simple as opening the "Properties" page and using a drop-down menu.

There are a lot of indie or other types of games that escape this. I mostly play games with local multiplayer, so I'm hanging out with people and playing at the same time. Recently got into Brotato, which has no 3d engine at all lol

I am having 20 fps more in Linux with 4k screen when compared to 2k in Windows. Didn’t believe my old GPU could get better over time.

I find this hard to believe. Generally speaking, games run slightly slower on Linux (that's on Arch with latest Nvidia drivers). Usually, the difference isn't really noticeable, and several rigorous benchmark show that even though average FPS is single digits lower, the standard deviation is also smaller. This may be due to Nvidia not performing as well on Linux, the worst impact I have seen is on Helldivers 2 (at least 15 to 20% lower FPS).

If you have an older game which still uses dx9, dxvk can give a decent little performance boost - even if you're running on Windows. It's kind of magical that adding a translation layer is able to improve performance.

In more modern games using dx11/12, I've always noticed a small loss like you'd expect. I haven't properly benchmarked any but I suspect a game with native Vulkan support would do pretty similarly, and might come out on top due to CPU load.

> an older game which still uses dx9, dxvk can give a decent little performance boost

Old games already run at insane frame rates on modern hardware, so while it's impressive from a technical standpoint, the performance boost is largely irrelevant. Even with a small loss, Proton is completely worth it -- no more Windows spyware, activation/registration nags, cloud/AI bloatware.

There's no game that I want to play badly enough to put up with DRM on consoles or rootkits (anti-chest) and DRM (windows) on my computer

This has been my experience as well.

I don't play a ton of modern games, but my wife and I played through the HD remakes of Myst and Riven, released in 2021 and 2024 respectively. I didn't even look at the Proton compatibility before buying the games because for single-player stuff then Proton has gotten so good that I almost never have to worry about it. I don't really play multiplayer games (outside of the original Doom or Minecraft with a friend or my wife, both of which have native Linux clients), so there hasn't ever been an issue for me.

My gaming box is a NixOS JovianOS thing, and I even get very good results using the official Microsoft adapter for Xbox One controllers. I really feel no desire to go back to Windows at this point.

>JovianOS

Zero meaningful search results?

https://github.com/Jovian-Experiments/Jovian-NixOS

Meanwhile nothing epic will work on mint (at least I can’t get them working), there are frequently broken components of games (eg. phasmophobia mic won’t work), most multiplayer stuff with anti-cheat won’t work.

Whenever I see someone say “most modern games work flawlessly” I know they’re full of shit or just don’t do much gaming.

Don't get me wrong, I’m not going back to windows, but it’s not the panacea that people pretend it is. Often enough it doesn’t “just work” and you have to hunt down some additional command line args to get games to run.

It works fine under Arch and its derivatives. Everything aside from kernel anticheat games runs fine.

I've never tried Mint, the two distros I've definitely experienced the vast majority of steam games just working out of the box were Fedora (earlier) and OpenSUSE (currently). I'm not lying. Although it's probably also worth mentioning I have a fairly modern AMD GPU (6800xt) - ymmv on NVidia or older cards.

The majority of popular PvP shooters use anti-cheat which does not work on Proton, so "almost all modern games" seems like overselling it to me.

But the stuff that does work, works well. I play Helldivers 2 via Proton on Fedora, and i experience far fewer crashes and instances of weird behaviour than friends on Windows or Xbox.

ARC Raiders is currently all working perfectly for me. Such a blessing. I hope it stays this way.

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