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.
Unfortunately, the game I mainly play, apex legends, has started giving me all sorts of trouble this past year. I'm on PopOS so part of me wonders if it's related to their focus on cosmic (or maybe they aren't prioritizing fixing bugs?) But I also have no idea where the issue sits? Steam flat pack? Proton? Apex itself? PopOS? A weird config/setting on my machine?
But it actually highlights this point of this post because instead of playing apex I have played starfield with a single crash around launch.
Ive tried so many, but right now I am on Proton Experimental.
It's been working, hilariously, since I made my post.
It looks like the issue is with how it updates. The errors I get are all failed to load .pak. the fix usually requires me to validate the integrity of game files, where it inevitably finds some files that fails validation and redownloads them. The irritating thing is that that doesn't always work. Sometimes it just stays broken.
This last attempt at fixing it I validated(needed to download some failed files), completely exited steam, relaunched, new update, exited steam, relaunched, new update, exited steam, relaunch and finally it had no updates. I did one last validation and launched and its worked since then.
Edit: so it said there was an update after my last session. I updated. The next time I launched (5min ago) I got an error:
I did the "verify game files" and wouldn't ya know it. Failed to validate 2 files.