Comment by keithnz | Hacker News Reader

Comment by keithnz | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Just a comment on Proton... I've recently shifted to linux (garuda ) as a native OS for gaming (still dual booting, but linux is my main OS now, I used to run linux VMs in windows). My experience with Proton is that only ~30% of my games work out of the box. Some games like dota2, and factorio are native linux and work MUCH better (faster/higher fps) in linux. A bunch of windows games work fine, other's semi work, and I have to spend a bunch of time investigating why I'm getting the issues I'm getting. Others just aren't really supported (it seems anti cheat software is a big blocker) or I just can figure out what is going wrong quick enough that I just abandon it. Overall, everything seems better in linux world, everything is really snappy. I'm hoping more game companies treat linux as a first class citizen as more people switch. It is definitely a great platform for gaming but really just needs game creators to ensure their games work, ideally native, but even just using Proton would be good.

It's very very rare for me that games don't work. It's almost all competitive games, where the game specifically does not allow anti-cheat.

There's very little fiddling around or configuring. 30% sounds god awful terrible; my success rate definitely >85%. In the rare case something doesn't work right away, https://www.protondb.com/ usually has advice in the top or second comment that works great.

I don't really think the windows vs Linux native debate is worth pursuing. Windows games run better than they do on Windows 4 times out of 5, and that's more than good enough.

Outside of games using anti cheat, for me the most common fix is to just select Proton Hotfix or Proton Experimental in the game's compatibility settings.

For some reason certain games default to specific older Proton versions. And then of course there are a bunch of older games with a native Linux port that is now unmaintained and stopped working at some point, but they still work just fine with Proton :)

Anticheat is indeed a huge blocker, and given how invasive shady kernel anticheat software is on Windows I kinda hope it stays that way

I think even Microsoft is getting ready to be done with kernel level anticheat. After crowdstrike they've been planning to kick everyone out of Ring0, making new user mode APIs. They're focused on EDRs right now but have publicly said eventually everyone is going to be kicked out of the kernel.

Isn't Garuda an arch distribution? It could be that (less common, so more issues). Running SteamOS likely has better chance of running games, but yeah the linux experience is not streamlined at times (but it is functional!)

SteamOS is also an Arch distribution, though I'm not sure how significant the changes are. AFAIK Lutris uses Ubuntu's libraries for better compatibility across distributions, maybe Steam does something similar.

kinda, SteamOS is an arch distribution but it's locked down by default (you can access stuff) and it's run by the company selling games on PC, so they make it work. On a normal arch distribution, you have to deal with installing dependencies yourself, so more of a pain.

What games don't work? I've never had a game I wanted to play but couldn't due to being on Linux.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com