There's still room for improvement, but Linux gaming has come a long way in a short time.
There's still room for improvement, but Linux gaming has come a long way in a short time.
I remember when Proton launched it was like magic playing games like Doom and Nier Automata straight from the Linux Steam client with excellent performance. I do not miss the days of having the Windows version of Steam installed separately.
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Steam Deck is the main reason for this and reasonable WINE emulation of DirectX & other APIs.
I bet the experience outside of Steam Deck depends a lot on the dist, the graphics drivers & card and someone's personal knowledge & willingness to screw around making everything work. Drivers are the biggest issue by far - open source drivers tend to be more limited, while binary drivers tend to be quite fragile, e.g. breaking after a kernel update & requiring reinstallation.
It's easier than you think. You can just download an exe, point lutris/steam to it (ie, just paste the path into the gui), and run the game. I have yet to find a game that doesn't work. Troubleshooting is rare, and in my experience only involves changing proton versions. I have never had to mess with drivers, aside from initial installation when I installed the OS.
I bet the experience outside of Steam Deck depends a lot on the dist, graphics drivers and card and someone's personal knowledge/willingness to screw around making everything work
In my experience, it's been about the same. Then again, I also use an Arch based distro on my desktop, but I dunno, even when I distrohopped a lot and used other distros and hadn't replaced some of my specs, gaming wasn't a pain to setup or do in general unless it was something that specifically didn't work with Linux (maybe modding was hard at first, but once I found out what worked for me, I was golden).
open source drivers tend to be more limited, while binary drivers tend to be quite fragile
And thank you for telling everyone what GPU you are using. Most mainstream GPU manufacturers support open-source drivers(AMD, Intel) and for some of them open-source dricers are the only option(Intel).