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.
I remember using bare wine to play games before proton. You would have to go and find the exact libraries needed to run the game, install them one way or another, pray a bit, and maybe the game will run with acceptable fps. If it ran at all.
And these days its just plug and play. Dont remember the last time I had to install a game dependency with proton, from steam or otherwise.
Proton has better 32 bit compatibility than windows itself
I still remember having to use Ubuntu back in 2007.
To cut a long story short, I used to have a crappy Packard Bell PC that was weirdly partitioned (the main C:\ partition named Programs had 20GB and D:\ named Data had 120GB allocated.)
A (obviously now former) friend at school who thought he was hot-shit with PCs nagged and pressured me into acquiring a copy of Norton PartitionMagic and merging the two partitions. Completely totalled the Windows XP installation and because I didn't have any recovery media, I was forced to wipe everything and install Linux.
Gaming on Ubuntu back in 2007 was a nightmare. Only thing I managed to run that wasn't some shitty FOSS game that looked like it was made for the Net Yaroze was WoW, and even then actually installing the damn game was a nightmare where I had to resort to literally copying files from each install CD because actually running the installer from the CD itself resulted in failure by Disc 3. Every other game I tried to run through Wine either refused to boot at all, had bugs that would soft-lock my PC, or put out 0.01 frames per second due to lack of OpenGL support.
Linux has evolved by leaps and bounds but still has some way to go before you could use it as a gaming OS. Hopefully the Steam Deck encourages more developers to support Linux.
Of course, some devs have turned their back on Linux, such as post-Fortnite Epic Games.
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.
I agree with this meme 100%
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.
linux games, always reminds me of Tux Racer when I finally got X11 config right. https://www.google.com/search?q=tux+racer
AFAIK Doom runs natively
Absolutely! I play mainly two games. DayZ and Eve Online. Both run way faster on my Debian 12 rig compared to running on Windows 11.
Granted, it took a while to figure out how to self-sign the Nvidia driver (secure boot). But once that was sorted it was smooth sailing.
Not only it works very often but one can even check https://www.protondb.com before buying to make sure it does work. It also works for VR games. I recently tried a brand new game, supposedly "Windows only", and it worked without any tinkering. I then updated ProtonDB to clarify so that others could play too. It's simple I didn't boot on Windows to play for years now. I'm also traveling today and instead of bringing a laptop I bring my SteamDeck to play, to work I'll also bring a BT keyboard.
TL;DR: it works, even with VR, and ProtonDB can help to identify problems
I switched to Linux on my gaming PC about five or six years ago and tried a couple of different distros. Manjaro was the first one that worked really well for me, and I played through the original RAGE and Mass Effect using that setup, but for the last couple of years I've used POP!_OS, after Manjaro broke a couple of times. I'm never going back to Windows, mostly thanks to Proton. Even Elder Scrolls Online works really well using Proton.
Our last windows System bluescreened on us for good....
We' ve now setup our gaming rig with Garuda Linux and Proton and couldn't be happier!
Baldurs Gate 3 runs flawlessly on highest details. It. Is. Great.
And I honestly love valve for taking wine which is an impressive project on it's own and making it even better.
TWD (Total Windows Death)
I have to stick to windows only because of VR, once performance and UX improves I will nuke windows out of my PC but I still absolutely love linux, been hopping around distros like a madman almost 2 years ago until I settled on arch, couldn't leave the damn thing.
Okay I can definitely back up the second claim. World of Warships, a DirectX only game, runs and loads better on Linux with Proton. I tested both on SSD and HDD, and in both scenarios the game runs at a higher FPS and loads faster. I legitimately have no idea why.
I originally tested on HDD and guessed that ext4 was just much better with the IO speeds because NTFS would fragment like hell. But then it also was the same with an SSD and now I'm not sure.
I feel like the boss casually droping i'm gaming from linux and some people being like what how ?
Mfw Guild Wars 2 ran like absolute ass on my Windows computer, and then I installed proton and it was smooth like butter.
The only think keeping me from wiping Windows from my machine is Ubisoft anthicheat lol
It's an important milestone as it's the only effective way to make PC gaming available on operating systems other than Windows (i.e., reduce one of the Windows monopolies). Still, Linux gamers shouldn't take it too far. I'd advise everyone to still not support game studios which are openly hostile towards Linux gamers. This especially includes the ones who rely on client-side anticheat tools and then use those to block Linux gamers even though the game would run perfectly fine on Linux as well. Please do not support such games or studios (e.g.: Epic Games, EA, Bungie, Riot). Thanks to Proton, there is still a massive number of Windows games that can be played instead.
It hurts my soul to see windows simps say the only reason they won't transition to linux is because 'GaMes!' Like every game i've played with proton on linux mint has run perfectly smooth for years now, even before the deckening. If you're willing to be cucked by microsoft because one or two games you play is a competative shooty that uses a garbage anticheat (cough rainbow6siege cough) even though every other game in your library works just fine, you deserve what you get.
King Torvalds would be so proud.
But as a person who uses both windows and linux, Windows is a super stable os if you do some powershell tweaks (for bloat, ads, updates) and you can also bring the best things from the linux world like package managers, stability etc.
Windows can run all games and i dont have to worry if a game is going to have proton problems.
Faster than Windows? Is that based upon that one post with the single hardware configuration that used proton optimisations to basically calculate less in game? The one that can't be replicated because of missing info?
Gee, I wonder why calculating less improves performance.
Next you going to tell me lowering the render distance also improves fps...