The day this number reaches 100% will be on of those before/after moments. Considering the only problem with remaining 8 titles not running is DRM/anti-cheat, it is possible that we'll see this day arrive.
I usually make fun of "linux on the desktop" prophets by saying "Yes, 90% is great but problem is that everybody uses a different 90%". But 100% of the 50 most popular games is a different thing. It is a level of compatibility that you may not even achieve on windows depending on your hardware. Of course, performance and a few bugs will exist, but compatibility will be good enough for almost everybody.
I wonder if this coupled with steam deck will finally make supporting linux sustainable. I mean, a point where supporting is so cheap and the number of users is big enough that it becomes profitable to do so. If that happens, most excuses to not support linux will finally vanish away.
> Considering the only problem with remaining 8 titles not running is DRM/anti-cheat, it is possible that we'll see this day arrive.
Valve has confirmed they are working with Epic (and another vendor) to support EAC on at least Steam OS if not every distro but I'd imagine Steam itself would contain everything that'd be needed to run EAC. So if you can run Steam on your favourite distro, I think EAC should work as well.
It won't stop anyone who has the skill to author cheats themselves (i.e. someone with basic reversing and programming experience) but it does do a good job of detecting and banning players who are using widely distributed "commercial" cheats.
I look at EAC as being very analogous to a virus scanner, very easy to bypass if you know what you're doing, but good at catching the common and soon-to-be common threats. It also puts up enough roadblocks to make some novice attempts at cheating inconvenient at least.
Source: I deal with all the anti-cheat stuff (including EAC) on a semi-popular multi-player game. I can verify that it does make a very tangible difference to our player base in terms of the number of cheaters they are exposed to on a per match or per session basis.
EAC is actually pretty terrible against commercial cheats, it's only use is against free cheats pretty much. If you're willing to pay, you'll find many for EAC games.
Many major titles are using EAC currently, Fortnite, Apex Legends, PUBG, etc. There's a pretty large market for cheats in any of those titles. Just dropping "<game> aimbot" or "<game> cheats" into google is likely to turn up a multitude of commercial cheat developers, many of which are legitimate and will bypass the current anti-cheat.
Generally the legitimate commercial cheat developers offer status pages detailing any of their cheats that are currently detected and offer additional tools to do things like bypass hardware ID detection if you did get banned in the past.
Maybe I'm clueless but as I understand it some of these shooters (e.g. PUBG) are games that you pay for. If one of these commercial cheats gets detected by EAC isn't the result a permaban of your paid for account? And then you have to buy the game again and make a new one, if that's possible at all? Seems like that would be a serious deterrent, although obviously it won't stop everyone. (Encountering a cheater once out of every ten matches is probably acceptable. Encountering one in every other match probably isn't.)
If you are into cheating, new licenses are just a cost of business. Even a new, full price AAA game is about the cost of a round of golf. Furthermore, with free to play and microtransactions/ongoing ways to get revenue from players, there's a growing incentive to either give the game away (Fortnite et all) or offer the game at a fairly low price (eg rainbow 6 siege, can be had for as little as $5).
If you are willing to pay for a cheat then rebuying the game every few months when there is a ban wave is not that much effort. Especially if you buy it from some shady CD-Key reseller.
Do these anti cheat systems detect popular products of popular dev tools to create cheats typically? Or is the cheat world way beyond that phase and everyone just codes to the native OS APIs directly, making that hard to detect?
Is there still cheating in console players? Maybe with jail broken devices? Do these companies really have to think about cheating with consoles? Do you think the eventual future of these kind of games is some sort of locked down console-like system, which is what apple seems to slowly be going to with their hardware?
My warframe account was banned a while ago for having cheat engine running in the background. I was using cheat engine with total war, a single player series and never hooked it into warframe. So some systems at least just looks for running processes to create cheat tools.
In EU phone verification should basicaly prevent cheating as phone:person has almost 1:1 correspondence, so once you ban (or shadowban) there's not easy way to bypass.
No anti-cheat will ever completely stop cheaters. There are plenty of cheat tools that are basically impossible to prevent. The question is whether EAC is good enough? I don't know, I play very little multiplayer these days.
In the end, games need to be built better by sending the least information needed to clients, ie. zero-trust. This is a big part of things like CS:GO, Valorant, and RTS games like starcraft/League/Dota since they can implement a 'fog of war' and only network information if their client actually needs it[0].
The only cheats that still plague Dota are scripts that perform tasks automatically, such as disabling an opponent as soon as they're visible (beyond human ability), and those are taken care of by heuristics[1] and a community-voting-based 'overwatch' system in CS:GO and Dota 2[2].
The problem with zero trust and only sending what the player can actually see is lag. For example, sure, you could eliminate wall hacks by only sending positions of players that you have line of sight of, but that essentially eliminates any client-side movement prediction or other lag compensation and means you have to send each frames data quickly enough. This may work for some games that are less lag sensitive and as internet speeds improve, but its not currently a solution for most players.
Also most fps games use the sound of a player to indicate generally where a player is. You'd need the player xyz on the client regardless of line of sight of they are in aural proximity.
>games need to be built better by sending the least information needed to clients, ie. zero-trust
That isn't possible in real world for every type of competitive gameplay; trade-offs need to be made. Even games you list are not "zero trust" - things like looking direction are left to the client because of the latency.
Moreover, it's not enough. What's also needed is a hardware chain of trust for input devices. On-device cryptographic signing of mouse events would be sufficient and would guarantee that input comes from a fair play-compliant device.
SGX is a super-privileged, encrypted, and isolated enclave in the main CPU memory that can be used for anything. Signed mouse input is much more benign. But sure, I see your point - this is DRM, and it can be used to control the access to your own mouse, even outside of online gaming.
Still, it's the most logical step, and it would probably happen in several years, after Microsoft started demanding TPM 2.0. Valorant already requires TPM to be enabled on Windows 11 to run.
By the way, A4Tech has on-device DRM for more than a decade, they are using it to stop people pirating their software. Which is, ironically, designed for cheating.
> SGX is a super-privileged, encrypted, and isolated enclave in the main CPU memory that can be used for anything.
My position is s/"a super-privileged, encrypted, and isolated enclave in the main CPU memory that can be used for anything"/"a failed experiment in computer pseudoscience".
And the nightmare scenario I imagine is a more lubricated path to framing political dissidents by forging attestations that they were searching for child abuse imagery or some similar scenario.
Heuristics are great in theory but if they could be used reliably then you wouldn't need an overwatch system. Also the overwatch system depends on people being accurate judges of whether people are cheating which we know from pro players going undetected for so long (KQLY) and from pro players being accused for so long and being clean (flusha) that they are not.
On Steam Deck they will be using signed Proton builds to make EAC work. Which means you wont be able to use EAC on just any Linux distro unless you use the same signed builds.
What will a signed proton build do when a cheater can run as root or load a kernel module? I suspect they'll go much further and demand secure boot with vendor keys (no custom keys) and a locked down kernel.
Yes. You will likely need to be running a signed Steam install plus a signed version of the game. I’m 100% confident that it will be figured out in a repo like the aur, but it may be some work for Ubuntu folks and whatnot.
Archlinux steam user here: Steam auto-updates and Steam's default Proton install is pulled down by Steam and stored within it's paths.
Mostly this would affect anything that needs an unsupported build of Proton to work properly. Which is mostly lots of games that use the insane plethora of media presentation layers every big company has added to Windows over the decades.
From what I've seen of games on Twitch, EAC style games tend to not rely on FMV and are generally 'all live' so there shouldn't be many problems.
Check the chart again - ARK is native. If you run it in proton (many mods have issues with the linux-native version of the game, so many people do run it in proton), then you can't join battleye-enabled servers.
>I wonder if this coupled with steam deck will finally make supporting linux sustainable
I'd settle for devs trying to make games whose win32 api calls are within the bounds of that which Proton can handle. Why bother natively supporting Linux when you can architect something that'll run in Windows and Proton? Elsewhere in the thread I saw comments about how most indie stuff Just Works even now; I wonder if that's the subset of indie stuff that's, like, fairly paint-by-numbers projects in Unreal or Unity that aren't doing anything really unusual and thus are handily translated by Proton.
As a game developer who used to run Linux exclusively it's really frustrating to work full time on games knowing they don't work on Linux just because of DRM.
> Considering the only problem with remaining 8 titles not running is DRM/anti-cheat
This is going to be a huge problem. These corporations are going to be installing borderline malware into our computers. People will be forced to accept it if they want to play the games they paid money for. Invasive proprietary kernel modules designed to monitor your activities isn't something we should be supporting.
> There's no way I'm installing kernel-level proprietary monitoring software.
Yeah, me neither. It's gonna suck if they start requiring it on Linux though. I hope smarter people than me will find workarounds that allow us to pretend their shitty modules are running.
Just in case anyone is wondering why this is a big deal:
Cheaters aren't a strong enough reason to ship malware to users to monitor them. This sort of thing ought to be unacceptable.
This is 100% on the games industry. They engaged in an arms race with cheaters and now their ineffective solutions are worse than the problem they're attempting to solve.
Who decides that though? I would bet the vast majority of players would be very happy to be monitored if it meant less cheaters. Look at Valorant, that anti cheat is way beyond what HN would deem acceptable and the game is very popular.
We do. We used to have choice. Online games back then had the option to search for servers with no requirements for any of this bullshit. Now we're lucky if we even get dedicated servers.
> I would bet the vast majority of players would be very happy to be monitored if it meant less cheaters.
Honest players letting themselves be monitored does nothing to help matters. Cheaters will work around the system and evade monitoring.
> Valorant
> they scan all of the software that has loaded up on the individual’s computer
> Vanguard operates from system start-up, constantly operating on your PC unless you forcefully close it or uninstall it from your computer.
> Vanguard also operates a Kernel level driver, which has access to the entire computer system
And now it requires TPM and secure boot. It's disgusting really. It's like all that stuff RMS warned us about is becoming reality. All for what, a video game? No video game is worth this.
From what I'm reading it's not just me either. People are concerned about the kernel module:
> Can people trust a piece of software that has so much access?
> it appeared as if they were just brushing off anyone’s concerns about it
> The concerns people had weren’t exclusively from people scared of Riot Games or their parent company Tencent from performing “spying” operations on a computer and harvesting endless amounts of personal data.
> A noted subsection was worried that if the Vanguard kernel component was compromised, it could be accessed by people with less pure intentions than Riot Games simply wishing to prevent cheating in their title.
This has happened before with capcom.sys, it was literally a backdoor into the kernel that any user space program could use to execute functions in ring zero:
Play with trusted friends instead. Modding the game in these circumstances can even be fun. The online gaming model where you play with internet randoms is broken.
Haha, go tell that to the esport community :) honestly I feel like your comment is out of touch. You're basically telling me: don't play competitive games or games online with strangers. Some people actually enjoy these things believe it or not.
His reply does make sense. In the age of self hosted game servers you could ping an admin on irc/xfire and have him decide if someone is following you through walls etc etc. Sure he couldn't possibly catch every player being smart about aimbots but it was a remarkably good system because unlike now, there was a human element in all stages of the conversation.
If you were wrongly accused you could just move over to a different server with little downtime instead of pleading customer support for weeks that Process Explorer is NOT a game hacking tool.
Minimal anticheat, human support from your friendly neighbourhood admin is all you need.
> pleading customer support for weeks that Process Explorer is NOT a game hacking tool
Yeah, it's such a humiliating experience. They'll never believe whatever you say anyway, your only option is to sue them. One person actually did that in my country. Can't imagine it ever happening in corporation-friendly USA.
Pay hard earned money for a game only to get banned when their idiotic systems flag our software developer tools as cheats. Looks like you have a debugger running, citizen. We permaban people for that here. What's that? A virtual machine? You naughty user.
It wouldn't work these days though, cheats are much more subtle and harder to detect by eye now. If the player just shoots the head of every opponent on screen then a human being involved doesn't always help, they won't be able to distinguish between a great player and a cheat sometimes.
You act like you can have your cake and eat it too. The alternative is: No one buys the game (except a small segment of the population who are privacy-conscious enough to accept that the lobbies will be full of cheaters), and the game company declines to update the game on Linux, since no one is buying it anyway.
I have previously. I'm currently not seriously involved in a competitive game. Actual serious gaming competitions (the kind with prize money) take place under circumstances where cheating is immediately obvious and gets you disqualified in a public setting. I believe the "understanding" gap is on your end; ranking the integrity of systems above the integrity of gaming is a common sense stance before you realize you don't need to compromise one for the other.
At this point it's not a matter of game compatibility, it's a matter of anti-cheat. As I've spoken about many times before, Linux has a kernel module problem. Anti-cheat wants a closed-source kernel module that hooks into everything. Linux wants to disallow access to internal kernel state unless your module solemnly swears it's GPL.
Valve has said that they're working on this problem, but the workarounds one can undertake are pretty grim, and I doubt other companies (Blizzard, Ubisoft, Sony, EA, etc.) are all going to go down that sketchy rabbithole.
I'm not so sure. Steam is nice but what about other online stores like the Microsoft Store? I'm worried that Microsoft will push more integration to break compatibility on Linux.
With Epic having their own store, Apple, Google, Sony, Nintendo and the Microsoft budgets, the key question is how many game studio is Valve able to afford buying.
I’m very curious if we’ll start seeing a move off of windows for gaming rigs with this. The 100 dollar premium for windows takes a big bite out of a 1000 dollar gaming rig.
I built a pretty beefy workstation last year, mostly for software dev but with a high end GPU so I could check out new games. I installed Ubuntu and Windows 10 on it from the start and figured I’d boot into Windows to play games, but so far basically everything I’ve wanted to play has run fine on Linux. I haven’t booted into Windows in months.
Similar story for me. I installed Ubuntu a few years ago to try out proton, fully expecting to boot most of the time into Windows, and I could count on one hand the number of times I have used Windows in the past year.
I'm about a month into Linux Mint, and the only game I have trouble with is Eve. I replaced all OS on all of my machines except one, my Blue Iris workstation. Blue Iris doesn't run well on Wine.
You are not required to pay the windows license fee. You can simply download an ISO off of Microsoft's website and use it, you only get a watermark in the corner.
Fun fact: that watermark is created by explorer.exe, and if you're not running explorer.exe it doesn't show up. I had a box that went through one too many hardware changes and Windows decided that it wasn't on the same machine. I didn't bother contacting support for months because I had set the Windows "shell" to be steam.exe in Big Picture mode, and so I rarely got bothered by it.
Last time I tried that, it would not install any updates for Windows. Not sure if I was doing something wrong, but without updates this is not a good long-term solution...
Would you mind linking to this ISO and the T&Cs? I've only ever used their ISOs for VMs -- which are how I use Windows, occasionally and rarely -- and they have pretty harsh conditions like timeoutes, etc.
It works as described. One caveat: the website won't let you download an ISO if your browser's user-agent is set to Windows, instead it'll prompt you to use the Win10 media creation tool. But you can download the ISO if accessing from Linux/macOS/Android/etc., or by using a user-agent changer browser extension on Windows.
I did this before in the past with a key off of eBay (no indication made by the seller that the key was not legit other than the suspiciously low price) and everything was fine until it came time to reformat and start fresh roughly a year later - at that point the key no longer worked and the seller vanished from eBay!
Microsoft and Google show you ads regardless of if you pay or not.
Seriously even my alarm clock app that I pay a monthly fee for tried to ask nicely if it was ok that they tracked me across web sites after Apple started enforcing their new rules.
---------
And: If anyone has a good alarm clock app for iPhone that makes sure I'm out of bed before it turns off, and that is a one time payment or a reasonable fee or even open source I'm all ears.
You're doing that either way, just like you're going to see ads regardless of whether you paid $$$ for a Windows license, pirated a key or just life with the water-mark and other limits of an unlicensed Windows.
You don't have to download windows from torrents. Just dowload it from Microsoft. You can get rid of the watermark by "registering" it with a fake registration server. No need to download and run anything. Just copy few simple lines found with google into admin console.
You are getting fully functional version with this. With updates and everything.
I try to avoid Windows (it makes git and compiles slow, just doesn't cut it in the ux department after being spoiled with KDE and Elementary and they double dip by shoving ads in my face even after I've bought the Professional license) but so far I pay.
Just as I'd like others to pay me if/when I release paid software.
That said, especially after Microsoft started double dipping Professional licenses they cannot complain if ordinary users don't see the point any longer.
My primary and only justification for using windows is games (the 30% from the article).
I do real work with Linux.
But again, I've purchased windows hundreds of times, many of those being forced "purchases" due to smoky-back-of-room deals with OEMs. Frankly, MS exhausted all of my goodwill ages ago, and I've yet to see a real change in those underlying tactics.
MS has "sold" a fair bunch of licenses that have gone unused.
I'll keep buying licenses if I use it - and keep telling people that Linux has been usable for ordinary people the last decade, is faster, more exciting and collect less data about you and your family.
PS: MS employees here, your company really had the chance to be the serious choice but after getting ads on Professional licensed machines I just don't believe the marketing anymore.
Windows costs like £5 max. All you need is an OEM key. Yeah, you might need a new one if you change enough components but it ain't gonna break the bank once every few years.
To add, if you succumb to using a Microsoft account for your main Windows account, it seems you can swap out hardware a lot more without losing your license (although I imagine you can't swap out hardware and reinstall at the same time). I've had this one key since 2015 with many upgrades, including motherboard+cpu swaps, hard drive swaps, and a few reinstalls, and haven't lost the license.
With some trickery you only need the MS account for setup. You can also transfer the key to a completely new system.
With a bit more time to prune services/apps and set up something like simplewall to block everything else, you have a pretty decent setup. Sure, it's not FOSS, but neither is Steam or any of those games.
Looking at my personal selection of long-tail games, about 1/3 work perfectly on Linux, another 1/3 don't work at all, and the last 1/3 have various levels of yak-shaving tweaking settings before they run well. That last 1/3 is why I went back to Windows years ago.
I understand that, it's why I went down my list of games to check the current state. A lot seem to work very well now, some are completely broken due to anticheat systems, and many still have discussion of tweaks and versions to coax them into running decently.
Seems like singleplayer games mostly work very well.
This has already been happening and the numbers have been going up for years now. [0] 100% compatibility not required as most gamers don’t play 100% of games.
OEMs buy licenses in bulk they do not pay $100 a pop and it doesn’t get passed onto the user as a full $100 add on. Similarly if you’re building it yourself you can buy for significantly less from a reseller, many of which are wholly legitimate.
Companies are not buying machines this way, but through resellers with drastically different pricing models (even CDNow). Outside of Office 365, I have never paid more than 50-75% MSRP for a Microsoft product using a corp reseller account, including SQL Server licenses.
This is a thread about the cost of gaming computers, on an article about Steam games on Linux.
I don't think business-targeted sales are particularly in-scope. And even if they are, that only makes it worse, as it implies they're getting an even more significant profit margin.
I don't know how you tell or care why a seller is legitimate, but it's very easy to find working windows 10 pro keys for a few dollars on http://www.allkeyshop.com/.
> I don't know how you tell or care why a seller is legitimate
Because illegitimate keys can be banned (and the hardware using them can be blacklisted) if they are found to be stolen or acquired in some other way that Microsoft does not like.
It's also a huge liability of you're doing any professional work with unlicensed and/or potentially illegal software licenses.
If you know anyone who has ever worked at microsoft they can get you a copy with a MASSIVE discount. Living in Seattle I just buy all my microsoft products through friends.
Elite controller was $99, and I laughed when it was on sale for like $150 last week as a best ever deal.
If you only need a single copy you are best suited buying from Microsoft directly.
If you need multiple copies you can work with a VAR (Value Added Reseller) to get better pricing.
CDW.com is the big name in VAR's but they have enormous turnover in staff. I try to build relationships with smaller VAR's. I like these guys: https://greenbeetech.com/ it's a small company with two guys running it who have decades of VAR experience (former CDW people).
Navigating the process of compliantly licensing Microsoft as you scale up is quite a job. Having a good partner to help your organization stay compliant is very valuable.
I'm just comfortable with Windows and I have no reason to move off of it until the transition to linux is so seamless that I barely have to do anything.
After trying to install and debug countless wifi/gpu drivers on debian distros during my university years, I jumped to the same boat as you and just continued using Windows. I pretty much gave up on linux desktop. However, last week (it has been 6 years after my graduation) after seeing many articles on Microsoft, Windows 11 and Manjaro Linux, I decided to give Manjaro a test from bootable usb drive on my new HP touch screen laptop. Everything works without opening terminal once! This is seamless enough for me.
Same. I use linux for work but windows for gaming. The linux gaming experience is 90% the way there, but that 10% of the time where you have to scour forums, bug reports, install custom versions of mesa to work with your gpu, etc… is not worth the effort.
I will probably give linux gaming another try in a few years but if it doesn’t “just work” I’m going back to windows for gaming.
I bought a Windows 10 key from eBay once for about five dollars, it didn't work so I called Microsoft support and they activated my copy for free, I don't think they care that much.
Nvidia just requires installing one extra package... It hasn't been an issue for a while now.
The nvidia driver actually works very well... The amdgpu driver wprks well but still has issues with suspend/hibernate. I'd say they are about the same IMO.
Except for Wayland, and KDE stuttering. I have an AMD and an Nvidia PC, both running Manjaro. AMD is really much less problematic than Nvidia for Linux.
No, I mean specifically things like Optimus on dual GPU laptops. Also, even if the distros do in fact either install automatically or provide a method to install it, there is simply no need to even do this on an AMD system. And then there's the matter of AMDGPU being complete open source, while Nvidia's offering is not. And don't even start on Nvidia's slow pace to properly support Wayland.
Despite n number of games working Proton/Wine is still not ideal. The performance and frame pacing especially on graphically intensive games is significantly worse than Windows.
Depends on the game. Gems like Doom 2016 and Doom Eternal runs absolutely phenomenal. Valve's own games, including Alyx, also run as good as they do on win.
Sure, there were a few problems with Cyberpunk 2077 but they were resolved relatively quickly, given that the game has its own host of problems.
I have two almost identical high end machines running Ubuntu and Mankato. The first is more stable, the latter is simply better for gaming :/
Work and work well are two different things and most importantly the question is what’s in those 72% because you have like 1% of Steam games which have like 80% of the player base at any given moment and a lot of AAA titles and popular multiplayer games don’t work on Linux or can even get you banned if you play them due to anticheat issues.
Also if you bought Windows 7 so far you could’ve updated it upto 11 without paying anything extra if you leveraged the update Windows that Microsoft offered.
Out of the top 10, 6 are “No Go” and technically 7 if you count the fact that the player count for GTA V is based on GTA Online which still constantly issues bans when running on Linux due to anti cheat mishaps.
This list also overlooks other very popular games that aren’t on Steam like Call of Duty Warzone and Fortnite…
> This list also overlooks other very popular games that aren’t on Steam
Well yes, it is, as the title makes pretty clear, the top 50 games on Steam. That said, non-Steam games can work just fine with Proton, wrappers like Lutris make this only a couple clicks more than Steam.
Fortnite is limited by EAC: https://lutris.net/games/fortnite/, and I'm not very familiar with Warzone but I suspect it's a similar situation.
Non native multiplayer games are quite often a no go, which was my gripe with putting GTA V on the list since the concurrent player base is nearly all due to GTAO and if you run it on Linux through proton you risk a ban.
Most work quite well in my experience. I have run into small issues, like videos not playing, and sometimes games do not run at launch and take some time to patch, but all in all gaming on Linux has been a surprisingly good product experience.
My only issue is that multiplayer still won’t work e.g. for games that use EasyAnticheat or other software that doesn’t have native support for Linux or you’ll get banned or kicked the latter of which happened to me in a few titles over the past 2-3 years.
Basically unless they have a native version or a developer which officially endorses proton MP is often out of the question because it either won’t work/ban risk or the game doesn’t have client anti cheat detection which means in many cases it would be ripe with cheaters.
If you buy a laptop here it's ~100€ cheaper without an OS or Linux on it, so even if you want to use Windows you should buy the cheaper version and get a 5€ OEM key or the like. An additional benefit to that: less HW vendor crap installed.
At least that was the case with the Lenovo laptops I personally and also the company I work for (Linux shop) bought.
I think what you are being charged is a form of retail markup, by lenovo. They are paying $10-$15 max for that license. It wouldn't make sense on their cheaper laptops where they do not give you the option of linux or no OS, otherwise the laptop would lose money.
AFAIK the PC market is low margin, and the only place they really get margin is from all the crap ware they 'offer' and stuff like margins on windows licenses and such.
I think microsoft has realized the real price for windows is $10 too, which is why they are adding all the adware crap in it. Otherwise it's not tenable as a business for them, even if they are a selling a huge volume of it.
>Otherwise it's not tenable as a business for them, even if they are a selling a huge volume of it.
I'm sure that is where we are heading in the long term. I used to spend a lot of money on software for my business, now the majority of what I use is free. I can't see Microsoft being able to escape that forever.
It's hard to say for sure... if you're interested in more competitive, trendy shooters, then you're out of luck. Rainbow Six Siege and Fortnite are both perpetually broken, which makes it a pretty hard sell to the up-and-coming audience of younger nerds.
On the other hand, the games it does work with are nearly flawless. I play Overwatch, Splitgate, and Battlefield online pretty regularly without issue, and single-player titles like The Sims, Rimworld and Noita function out-of-the-box. With more and more games "just working" on the platform, I think in 2 or 3 years it will be particularly competitive with Windows 11. Today though? It's a bit of a mixed bag.
I built my own rig and bought Windows directly from Microsoft, under no circumstance am I going to risk my security by rummaging around in shady places for something as critical as an operating system.
I’d also go out on a small limb and bet that most gaming rigs are at least partially OEM. I have the knowledge to put together my own gaming/dev workstation - but I’d rather just get a prebuilt that isn’t going to become a timesuck of crappy boot times then swap some components.
I would 100% move to Linux if I was guaranteed the conviniences of windows, but that seems unlikely. When I'm in the mood for gaming, the last thing I want to deal with is technical issues. Windows has some, but they're bearable. Not sure if I can tolerate any more though.
Yeah me too. What keeps me on windows for my desktop is a couple of pro image library software packages and games. $15 is well worth my time to not deal with the unreliability of linux.
I could use a mac, but they don't have justifiable storage costs and external storage is annoying, costs more and is less reliable than internal storage, and macs don't do games well anyway and I just built a new mini-ITX sized PC. Apple is also going down a path in computing I don't like, so I don't know if they are that viable too...
Sad to say, but Linux just isn't a good experience for gaming yet. Even if games work, there's usually caveats (like needing to be run through some sort of emulation) and they almost always run faster and in a more stable manner than Windows.
Most people I know are more than happy to pay that premium compared to the hassle of dealing with Linux. Also, a lot of those savvy enough to use Linux will just crack Windows or get a key at a discount through a reseller.
In Steam you just click the play button and it launches the game under Proton.
It’s very rare to have issues if the game is rated Platinum in protondb and sometimes a setting in the Steam GUI needs to be changed if it’s gold or silver.
All in all I find it significantly less annoying than dealing with Windows’ ads and forced updates.
The user experience is pretty smooth from a high-level perspective but there are often performance issues from the emulation. Not a huge issue in many situations but not flawless either.
While it's not conventional emulation, my understanding is that the DirectX 9-11 support isn't very far removed from how shader recompilation works in modern console emulators (RPCS3, Xenia, Cemu, Yuzu, etc.). Steam now even distributes shader archives among Proton users so that they can be translated in advance instead of on-the-fly, which is something that Cemu users had been doing among themselves for a while.
The question then becomes if extra 100$ worth of hardware balances out these issues. For 500$ machines it clearly does, but I don’t know about the 1000$ price point.
Alright, emulation was the wrong word to use. Still, the performance on Proton is noticeably worse compared to playing on Windows on the same hardware, at least for a decent chunk of games. I'll generally get similar FPS with a lot more GPU/CPU usage or overall lower FPS.
> Sad to say, but Linux just isn't a good experience for gaming yet. Even if games work, there's usually caveats (like needing to be run through some sort of emulation) and they almost always run faster and in a more stable manner than Windows.
This is an outdated take, from my perspective, as someone who is an avid gamer and who is running only Linux at home currently. While no doubt it's easy to find problem games, the point of the very article this thread linked is that it's come such a long way that the majority of the top titles in terms of hours played on Steam now work in Proton.
There's been a few examples where people have compared the performance across games and found it's basically tied in the majority of games but occasionally there will be an outlier that plays better on Windows. Less often, there will be an outlier that plays better on Linux.[1]
If Valve sorts out the Anti-Cheat stuff, the number of games that don't actually run (and run well) on Linux could drop to near zero.
Proton isn't really emulation; a better way to think of it is that it's a compatiblity layer, much the same way DirectX, Vulkan, et. al, are compatiblity layers.
> Most people I know are more than happy to pay that premium compared to the hassle of dealing with Linux.
This part is more likely for far more users. However, it misses the point entirely. For a great number of years, as a gamer, I had to keep around a Windows system in order to partake in my hobby. That's not really the case anymore.
For me, when I've tried old valve native games on a 2018 macbook pro 15" with a GPU on macOS, I still get these stutters in input and other small things that happen that I don't get on even 10 year old gaming PCs today that were mid-tier back then. Those stutters and such make the game frustrating and I perform worse during key moments, which makes me go back to my gaming PC.
I can see how something would be rated 'platinum' for linux still be unacceptable in those ways. If your playing a single player game I can see how it's ok, but not for twitchy multiplayer games like MOBAs or FPSs.
Due to macOS not supporting Vulkan and other stuff required for Proton, it's been on the backburner for support from Valve for a while. Portal 2 can't even run on macOS anymore since it is 32-bit only. Most games work how they would on Windows when running under Proton vs a native port, you should try it on a Linux machine when you have time.
This on a post of using steam on linux. Proton is "emulation" for some of the listed but it's pretty good emulation. It requires no savvy, open steam and play.
So you cannot imagine a world, say 5-10 years from now, where 100% of games work on Linux, where PC game enthusiasts choose a cheaper and equally capable OS?
You can get a key for 5-10$ and the Windows 10 crack KMSpico is one of the most downloaded torrents. Cheaper doesn't work as a value proposition, it has to be better than Windows for people to change in large numbers and get used to a new OS.
On the other hand, knowing gamers, I'm pretty sure many would change if games on Linux were 2% faster... (higher fps)
Have you tried Proton? It works great, and Valve is bringing quality first-party hardware this time around by every indication.
I don't think Linux will replace Windows for gaming any time soon, but Linux gaming has a very real value proposition in a way it didn't just a few years ago.
I mean, if you're just curious if literally anyone will do it, sure. Because you can (due to selection bias of Hacker News) find plenty of people here willing to say so.
My prediction is twofold. First, that there's very, very little chance this will any have measurable impact on the overall proportion of Steam/PC gamers who use Windows. Solutions like Steam Deck will be the most popular venue for Proton, but this will actually sell the best with people who will keep using Windows. Why wouldn't it? As someone who games a lot, the only reason I would want one is to have my already existing library on the go. It essentially solves that "I wish this was on Switch" problem, especially for indie games. But I don't think of my Switch as a replacement for my PC, either. From this POV, it's fine if some things don't work (I'm no Warzone/Apex/League addict) or the mobile performance constrains things a little, because the accessibility and my game library is overall enough to offset some of those issues.
But actual Windows gamers who use Windows exclusively, and are going to suddenly see the Steam Deck or Proton and be like, "Wow, now I'm going to use Linux, and move over my whole game library since it's obviously so great", who aren't already software engineering/SRE/existing Linux users? Practically non-existent, or so little in number to be non-existent, I'd predict. They don't even really pay for the Windows license as another comment pointed out, the OEMs do and this subsidizes the product (along with mass volume) even further. This is related to my original point: the reason your question is even getting responses in the positive isn't because there's some massive contingency of Windows gamers looking to throw away their install. It's because you're asking on Hacker News.
>I’m very curious if we’ll start seeing a move off of windows for gaming rigs with this
Not even in the slightest. Linux marketshare is still insignificant to even Chromebooks. This is just the echo chamber that is HN that thinks Linux is bigger than it is. Remove all CS majors in the world and I'd wager the amount of people who've touched Linux is less than .01%
Edit: I love how HN downvotes because someone gives them a reality check on their beloved Linux. I will give $1000 to anyone who is willing to give their parent who doesn't know jack about computers Linux and tell them "figure it out." None of them will be able to do it.
Unlike Android, Chrome OS is actually a full fledged desktop GNU/Linux distribution. It's Gentoo-based (used to be Ubuntu) and runs desktop Linux apps.
Though even outside of that you'd be surprised where people have unknowingly used Linux. ATMs, Point-Of-Sale, Infotainment (Planes/Cars), public transit, arcades, etc. I'd estimate that a majority of people have had some interaction with a Linux-based system.
> I will give $1000 to anyone who is willing to give their parent who doesn't know jack about computers Linux and tell them "figure it out." None of them will be able to do it.
One of my grandparents runs Ubuntu and they're able to handle their email and documents just fine. Arguably better than the others who run macOS/Windows. You can find plenty of similar anecdotes online; if all you need is a browser and possibly basic word processing it's not all that different.
It's not Gentoo based. It just uses portage as a package manager in dev mode. ChromeOS has it's own rendering system separate from X and Wayland entirely.
> I will give $1000 to anyone who is willing to give their parent who doesn't know jack about computers Linux and tell them "figure it out." None of them will be able to do it.
This is what I call the "Granma case". Considering the uses case is very well defined and the possibility of using exotic hardware and services and basically never needing to install any software; this is the situation where linux shines the brightest. My mom has being using linux having 0 idea what it was and needed 0 assistance to browse the web, access social networks, see photographs and videos and listen to music. That's all she does and any modern linux is much better than windows for this specific use case. No need to care about anti-virus, degrading performance, malware, advertisements... it is perfect for that.
Yeah honestly 99% of what most casual user do on a computer is in the browser, and Linux does that just fine. And it's way less noisy in terms of random notifications, upgrade spam etc. so it is not a bad choice for unsophisticated users.
Also things don't randomly move around so much between upgrades like they do on commercial OS's.
> Remove all CS majors in the world and I'd wager the amount of people who've touched Linux is less than .01%
Android. I'd say a huge percentage of computing device users have Linux in their pocket and quite literally touch linux on regular basis.
> I will give $1000 to anyone who is willing to give their parent who doesn't know jack about computers Linux and tell them "figure it out." None of them will be able to do it.
I've done this, 10 years ago with my aging Mom and Dad and it worked well. Stock Kubuntu works closely enough to Windows, Chrome and Firefox are identical, the built in photo manager and video players just worked, and it put an end to malware and viruses. Please donate the $1000 to a local food bank, please. I do not what the check.
Two weeks ago, my son and I re-purposed a three year old cryptocoin mining desktop into a gaming machine. We loaded it up with Kubuntu and Steam and ... well, I thought I'd have to install Windows. No problems. Proton lived up to the hype.
> Remove all CS majors in the world and I'd wager the amount of people who've touched Linux is less than .01%
I'm not part of the group that downvoted you, but why would the only people touching Linux be CS majors? I'm not a CS major and I think most people I know that voluntarily use Linux on a daily basis isn't neither.
I'm saying this because most people who use or are aware of Linux happen to be CS majors. You pull any random business major and they barely understand Excel. You eliminate all college majors and the average person that uses Linux has already plummeted. Regular every day computer uses want cheap and easy. Linux is cheap but not very easy, especially if you have no clue what your doing. Sure you can go into a forum on what to do, but what person that knows nothing of computers and doesn't intend on going into the field will bother with learning this stuff? Even myself I find it tedious and I know what I'm doing or can at least learn it pretty easily.
> I'm saying this because most people who use or are aware of Linux happen to be CS majors.
Android is a Linux distribution it is the #1 phone OS (73% market share this year). ChromeOS is a Linux distribution and is the leading OS by market share in K-12 schools. Both are cheap and easy. In ChromeOS's case, they are easier for both administrators to manage and users. I'm also sure the students using Chromebooks have not completed their CS degrees yet, but one can hope.
And yet zero of Android and ChromeOS games come into GNU/Linux.
Linux community likes to pat themselves on the back thanks to Android and ChromeOS using the Linux kernel, yet they are oblivious to the fact that Linux syscalls aren't part of the official stable API, only certain ChromeOS models do run Linux (a yet another guest OS, WSL style), and then what GNU/Linux gets are Electron apps.
people mentioning android have forgotten that android hides many parts of linux. and manufacturers make sure your device hardware works well with the operating system.
other have mentioned relatives who are using linux on desktop. that they are doing limited activities such as browsing and emails. that's fair but the story of how they discovered linux would be the most interesting one.
which brings me to op's cs majors point. so many things have changed that we should not dismiss the claim but think about it.
do happenstances of the past still present themselves to people today. i discovered linux through a pc magazine back in the late 90s. pc magazines back then offered young people like myself at the time a way to try new things on the computer. and i did try everything.
What? My mom has been using linux for 5 years and I don't think she even knows what windows or linux is.
She calls her computer "the memory" or "that box".
>I will give $1000 to anyone who is willing to give their parent who doesn't know jack about computers Linux and tell them "figure it out." None of them will be able to do it.
My father is tech illiterate enough that he manually searches and navigates to the unemployment website each week rather than figure out bookmarks.
He's been on an Ubuntu laptop a friend gave him since late last year. I kept expecting to have to walk him through it, but it hasn't happened yet.
I used to work in a small computer shop and there were some (presumably) 60-70 year olds who I wouldn't consider to be computer literate in the least running Ubuntu and even other distros. There were at least a couple people who refused to use any other OS including Windows. One such customer always referred to their beloved Ubuntu as "Ukabuntu" for some reason.
I did do the same with my father-in-law, about ten years ago. I installed Ubuntu on his laptop and he used it for work (photo editing, writing articles, etc.) without any complaints until he got a new one from work a few years later.
I honestly don't think giving my parent who didn't know jack about computers Windows and telling them to figure it out would be a necessarily pleasant alternative either.
How about we show some compassion and take time to help people around things, especially when they are people we care about and things we care about as well?
Exactly, that is why applications that don't want to break with each OS update don't touch those APIs, making them irrelevant for application developers.
Also, contrary to Windows, since Android 7, applications that link to undocumented APIs get terminated as security measure.
Ask the termux guys how much fun they are having by refusing to acknowledge the fact that they have to use JNI and not Linux syscalls for their stuff.
Sure it has, because it doesn't matter if it is open source or not, if it is a stable API described on the NDK documentation it is not allowed.
Something that termux guys are having some issues to swallow, regarless of Linux being the kernel, it is not allowed to do what they want, wrapping Java APIs via JNI is the only allowed way.
1) Proton labels like platinum, means how much effort you need to put for the game to run on linux. It says nothing about how well it will run. So “work on Linux” means basically that it works on Linux. It says nothing about performance. For instance I had a game labeled platinum run without effort on Arch with 50fps with constant drops to 30 ~ 25fps whereas on windows it runs at a constant 60fps with rare drops to 55/50. (Yeah, I’ve tried all variations of proton, kernel, disabled composition etc)
2) In my experience people that says that they see no difference in performance between linux and windows they usually have a powerful gpu, not a medium or low end one. So if you hear on the internet people claiming that the performance is about the same, it’s highly dependent on the game and/or your system specs.
That is mostly true. But getting games to run seamlessly is the biggest hurdle. Once you get there, there are various ways you can optimize for performance, and translation layers like DXVK and VKD3D are really close to Windows performance these days on modern GPUs. There are numerous benchs on youtube when you can see that for yourself.
Not that I care much about internet points but I'm trying to understand why this is being so heavily downvoted as every reply I got is either agreeing or kind of agreeing with me.
This is not a criticism for Proton, I find that getting this performance on an emulated environment is nothing short than a miracle looking from 5~10 years ago.
My only intention was to set expectation accordingly for new users. And I stand by everything I've said. My hope is that in 5 years this comment will be completely outdated and new users can have compatibility and performance on par with windows, even on bad hardware.
I'm guessing the downvotes are from Valve/Steam fanboys who don't like any criticism of their favorite company; I see it all the time on social media sites. Valve have said that they will have every Steam game running under Proton by the end of the year, so pointing out that it's misleading statement at best will draw the ire of people who worship Lord Gaben.
What is interesting to me about the performance differences, is that, yes, on my underpowered hardware Rocket League runs better on Windows, but not so much better that I bother rebooting from Linux when I want to play.
If a game is "good enough" on Linux, I think that is good enough for a lot of folks...
It's really amazing how well you can play on Linux now that Proton came out. There's only a handful of games that I need to boot into Windows for. On Linux most games work just as well as in Windows. ~10 years ago playing on Wine was a pain.
I've mostly switched over and it's been a fantastic experience. I use ProtonDB [0] to gauge whether a game will work and there's usually some small tips and tricks to make sure the game will run fine. It's nothing more than copying a run command into Steam.
I've even noticed some games, like Valheim and Path of Exile, run better in Linux.
I never play AAA games with anti-cheat, so it doesn't bother me much, but this is still exciting.
>The developer or Rust has already confirmed that on his devkit EAC was working as expected on the Steam Deck with SteamOS – while it will apparently require some modifications from the devs themselves to make it work (not as seamless as Proton itself).
SteamDeck, even if it doesn't break any sale records should still be enough to prove the viability of a gaming console PC that doesn't need Windows.
You and me are in the same boat. I don’t like multiplayer games and most AAA games aren’t my cup of tea so out of the ~20 games I really play all of them work great!
> "The biggest problem is anti cheat software. As soon as they figure that out it’ll get a lot higher!"
Doesn't "figure it out" likely mean rather invasive and user hostile kernel module(s) to prevent cheating? Because the alternative is that Linux becomes the preferred OS for cheaters and the game makers redouble their efforts to detect it; Valve's interests in promoting Linux are not necessarily aligned with studios' interests in promoting a cheater free experience.
Call me an optimist, but "figure that out" could mean game developers stepping up and fixing their games to be more intrinsically robust to cheating. It seems kind of nuts to me that so much development effort has been poured into invasive software that invades the kernel, scans memory, reads the list of running processes, etc. rather than the (admittedly also hard) problem of designing games such that cheat software doesn't work as well.
Reminds me of a company I worked for as a junior dev, not gaming related, where our bread and butter application was hopelessly full of crash bugs, to the point where you couldn't even run it for more than an hour or so continuously without it crashing. Instead of investing in the effort needed to fix the crashers, they instructed me to create a separate "launcher" application that stays resident, waiting for the application to crash, and then re-launching it saving as much state as possible. It felt bonkers to me but I guess it made sense to somebody.
I was wondering if memfd_secret [1] could be a part of a solution to this problem. Sounds like it. Of course, it'd require a recent kernel version, which is an obstacle.
Given that Steam OS is going to be (already is?) built on top of Arch Linux, and supposing that most Steam games that are "Linux compatible" are going to be targeting that as a base platform, this might not be as big of an obstacle as you think (provided Steam plans to keep the OS up to date).
memfd_secret won't help. It only protects memory from being accidentally leaked by the kernel due to an unknown bug. The cheater could easily recompile their kernel to make memfd_secret do nothing.
You're right in a general sense, but it's a bit deeper -- and shallower -- than that. Battlefield 4, for instance, runs some kind of server-side thing (FairFight) and wants ye olde hoary PunkBuster running on the client.
Obviously, the installer tries to install and start PB then errors out quite spectacularly, as one might imagine such a program to do in a wine prefix, but then you can just download the PB executable and run it in the wine prefix post-install no problem. Origin plays surprisingly nicely, too, though it generates a total of six windows that you can't close during play or it freaks out. There is some additional fuckery required; Wine's networking needs a bit of massaging to allow BF4 to advertise its ping to multiplayer servers, and you'll get kicked if you've got a ping of "-". [0]
Thing is, though, Proton is Wine-and-allied-trades. In the fullness of time I suspect new BF4 players won't have to jump through these hoops as Proton generally, and its script for BF4 specifically, gets updated. And others are already racing ahead, too, borrowing from and providing for Valve's fork of it. GloriousEggroll, recommended for BF4 [1], is the most robust varietal currently.
Multiplayer in a general sense is going to be a little bit more difficult to enable than merely waiting for updates, IMO. I'm not savvy enough to properly understand the arguments, but I've read that the translation layers for graphics, DXVK et al, could easily be repurposed by clever enough end-users to eg wallhack by making textures transparent, etc
As sibling comments point out, resistance on the part of the devs (or publishers?) to simply enable the Linux support that already exists is probably the biggest hurdle.
To my knowledge, most major anti-cheat has both native Linux and Wine compatibility modes (like EAC), but most studios disable Linux support altogether. One of Valve's mission statements with the Steam Deck was to use it to leverage vendors into adding Linux support for their games (e.g. See, it runs fine! All you have to do is enable Linux support to get on our platform, we'll handle the rest.)
Cheat software is a problem, too. CheatEngine with game scripts works only under Windows. Clever use of it can vastly improve gaming experience on some games.
not exactly, I ve played some games (last time was the metro 2033) under wine and cheat engine (under wine too) worked.
Also there is (linux) Gameconqueror/scanmem that work with wine games as well (you need to target the game's ".exe" process).
Gameconqueror works, but it is far inferior to cheatengine, especially with preset mem locations for various games (there is a ton of them on fearless revolution forum).
But CE never worked for me on Linux, quitting immediately. Maybe I'll give in another try when I have a chance to play.
I know what you mean, I had the same issues at the past with different distos/wine versions (I am on Fedora now). Also make sure you use the same WINEPREFIX for both the game/cheat-engine. It's a mixed bag anyway :(
100%. Cheat Engine is an excellent tool for working around old odd mechanics that don't quite work right or were balanced against gamer expectations from an era that was very different from today. Or just as a tool for bypassing game design decisions that you happen to disagree with.
Sometimes you get games that have a fully feature dev console and you can do it all in-game, but that's sadly much rarer these days.
I mostly used it in Rome: Total War to keep enemy settlements population high. With Huge army sizes, computer players quickly deplete their manpool and can't field a decent army, leaving you with no opposition once you survive the first onlsaught. So I locked in their cities pops to the max.
Or I do it to fight boring grinding, because at my age I don't have time for such meaningless activities
I wish virtualization was a bit less awkward for GPU-intensive stuff.
A VM with a stripped-bare Windows 10 install is likely to be more compatible with weird anti-cheat and DRM than anything Wine-based. Unless they intentionally add sniffing for it.
But VM with a GPU is a nightmare: for nVidia cards at least, you need two cards (one for the Linux desktop and one to feed into the VM), and there's a lot of explicit feature-limitation gotchas beyond that to market-segment people into buying Quadro cards instead.
I'm not opposed to the concept of having a Windows install (especially if it's something like a VM that you can readily manage and keep in a known state) but dual-booting is annoying-- gaming isn't spontaneous anymore.
TBH, I wonder if eventually you'll see a Microsoft product specifically sold as "Windows Runtime for Virtual Machines" -- better to sell a cut-down version with just enough bits to support popular games for $50 than to lose the sale entirely.
Intel's GVT-g, the equivalent feature on Intel GPUs, is not supported yet on the latest generations, last I checked. Plus Intel GPUs are quite underpowered and not really suitable for high-performance GPU computing and gaming and whatnot.
AMD GPUs are restricted (through VBIOS according to what I've heard) to prevent SR-IOV caps from being enabled. So you need to buy an actual enterprise GPU for that. Also… if you buy an enterprise GPU for this SR-IOV functionality and it's relatively new, good luck finding the drivers (and the card itself).
Anyway, my point is that I can't "just" buy a GPU from some manufacturer that doesn't restrict my usage of it, since a high-performance GPU with that ownership tag attached does not exist.
> A VM with a stripped-bare Windows 10 install is likely to be more compatible with weird anti-cheat and DRM than anything Wine-based. Unless they intentionally add sniffing for it.
Performance under Wine would be far better than virtualizing the entire OS, and most anti-cheat systems do prevent playing in a VM as their virtual device drivers are a ripe target for abuse.
Performance might be better, but compatibility is likely to be worse.
In that regard, I'm worried that emulation-based compatibility is much more likely to be an ad-hoc crowd-sourced thing-- how many titles work fine for the first 1-5-10-15 hours, then you hit that one time it uses an unsupported API call? If I rely on some crowd-sourced database that says "platinum compatibility", what's my recourse then?
I guess I'm picturing my experience with FF7 on Windows back in the early 2000s, where it played fine until the middle of the 2nd or 3rd disc and then had a showstopping crash; soured my experience on it for years until I got the late-2010s rerelease which could make it to completion.
One thing I really like about Proton is with smaller indie games, they almost always work perfectly. When I tell a developer their new game works flawlessly on Linux they are usually grateful that the question of whether to port or not to Linux gets answered for them in a positive way.
I recently tried ubuntu again for my desktop. I’ve seen so many posts here about how things have improved. It couldn’t register my wireless card and all the directions I found said to run CLI commands that required internet access to fix the fact that I couldn’t access the internet…
It seems like Ubuntu is still having the same issues I remember over a decade ago. I booted back into windows and it #JustWorked. I get the chicken and egg problem involved, but god damn, how is this still the problem?
You can be sure that it will cost you time even though it didn't cost any money. If you need the card, attach a CAT5 cable and run the command. If you have unsupported hardware, get supported hardware. It really comes down to how badly you want your freedom.
It’s just that drivers have always been a particular problem with linux, but IMO ubuntu has a very bad track record, because they want to provide it “out-of-the-box” windows style, but this approach gives users very little recourse when things fail.
Other distros have way better driver management, even if it needs some minor poking around.
They do "work" to varying levels, but the performance is not as good. There's also a lack of standard tools for GPU settings like MSI afterburner. There's other tools that accomplish some of the same things, but I feel the environment would be better if valve or some company would be offering those tools.
I actually tried No Man's Sky on linux few days ago and I had no real performance issues. Everything ran fine on ultra with a 21:9 1440p monitor and a 2080.
I do agree that the performances are no the same than on Windows (15-20% less FPS on average).
I don't know about the official proton for No Man's Sky, but I used the Glorious Eggroll's fork[0].
Meh, I recently thought I try that and bought Battlefield 1 on sale and tried it on my Debian 11 box. Once it started to download that Origin stuff I thought "that won't work" but it just did perfectly for me, no tuning needed.
Some even work better, e.g., >10 years ago I had a very crappy ADSL connection and in Counterstrike I got latencies of >150 ms with quite some jitter to >250 ms under Windows and even got kicked off from some servers for that :(
cue to WINE and running it under Linux (IIRC I was using openSUSE then) and I got 80 to 90 ms stable on the same servers, I think that was the time I decided for myself that I'll never go back again, and so I dropped my dual-boot setup in favor of Linux only.
ProtonDB often does have comments listing workarounds, configuration tweaks, known issues, and things/patches to install to achieve the best results. In that sense it reads very much like PC Gaming Wiki, which lists all the same things for Windows games.
With the except of games that don't even pretend to work, all of my games perform well. My computer is rather good though. I also play Overwatch through Lutris and that plays just as well as it ever did on Windows.
I play No Mans Sky at 1440p on my 1050ti. Framerate hovers around the upper 90s, I frankly couldn't be happier. I also didn't need to tweak anything to get it running, which was not the case on Windows at all...
I only have a linux laptop these days (and even before that, had a Macbook for work, haven't had Windows in a long time) and I've noticed that I can play more and more without Proton. Proton is also pretty good these days, but I'm on wayland (sway) and Proton seems to have problems running on xwayland, so if I want to play them, I have to switch to X, which is usually too much effort (have to close my dev tools etc). But like I said, more and more games have Linux-native versions now! I hope that with the new Valve hardware coming out, more developers will add first-class Linux support.
Granted my favorite video game is an updated version of something over 20 years old (AOE2DE), but I use Proton for a Windows-only game all the time and it works like a charm. I've done some other small games with friends and everything on Steam has worked either natively or with Proton. It's quite impressive.
Too much “doesn’t perform well or is buggy” or “not 100%” criticism. While the critics are not wrong those critiques don’t apply to every single piece of software. It also shouldn’t stop people from partitioning a hard drive and giving it a try either.
Easiest way to accomplish trying out a Linux install and testing out games is to move your Steam library to a separate hard drive. This allows you to boot up any OS distribution and Steam will handle downloading any files you may need for these games on Linux. If you don’t like it or it’s not compatible enough, no harm or foul, boot back into Windows.
You will probably find that most games work very well. Don’t let criticism dissuade you!
> While the critics are not wrong those critiques don’t apply to every single piece of software.
Conversely, many games are less broken on Linux than they are on Windows. Since Wine lets you emulate a virtual desktop, you can circumvent the dreaded "alt-tab" crash that plagued Bethesda games since Morrowind, and even enjoy games like Diablo 2 in their maxed-out glory without disabling your other monitors.
Four, it looks like. But of the games in the top ten that work on Linux, only one (GTA V) is not from Valve. Definitely seems like the year of Linux gaming on the desktop has not yet arrived, although we're closer than we used to be. Great work by Valve to get us this far.
Also worth noting that a number of actual top ten games are not on Steam. Valorant, league of legends, warzone, escape from tarkov, and Fortnite all are not available on that platform. (Some of these may not be top ten -- it's hard to know because we don't have solid numbers, but they are all in the top 20 of twitch viewership.)
I'm guessing the rest, being primarily multiplayer games, are blocked by some anti-cheat/DRM scheme. Hopefully Valve can work out some compromise to get those working on Wine/Proton.
Believe it or not, League of Legends actually works pretty well on Linux (I run it through Lutris). It takes a while for the launcher to initially load on startup, and the launcher is a bit of a slow/laggy mess, but from what I hear from my Windows friends the latter at least is just a general LoL launcher problem more than a Linux problem. Once you actually load into a game it runs completely flawlessly, with great performance.
Maybe my comment was unclear. I said "all but one of them" and by "them" I meant, "the ones that work on Linux." The "but one" is referring to GTA, which you correctly observe is not a Valve game, as I did also in my comment. I edited to clarify.
I dint think it’s as much of a victory for Linux as people make it to be. These games run on Linux not because the developers make them Linux compatible, but because Proton makes Linux compatible with Windows APIs. This essentially makes Windows the primary active environment with Linux foresee playing the catch up game. Why would anyone bother to make a native Linux game when they can just focus on Windows and let the API emulators figure out the rest? It’s not a win, it’s an admission of defeat, albeit a pragmatic one.
Does anyone know of any tests that compare click-to-screen and click-to-speaker latencies in Linux to Windows? Mostly asking because I've heard that the audio systems on Linux aren't great. Would be nice to actually put numbers to that.
Also, do things that inject overlays work under Proton? I occasionally use RTSS to monitor frame times and whatnot, and in FFXIV I use a combat log parser that adds an overlay for DPS meters. And while not critical, I like having reshade available (though that's more than just an overlay).
Pipewire (which is being released in mainstream distros since this summer) has mostly/entirely fixed these issues. On my particular end (Arch, for gaming) it's 100% perfect with no latency
Edit: Pipewire is a new system AND a "drop-in" replacement for any of PulseAudio/Alsa/JACK (just add whichever package you want and it will replace that particular audio stack with Pipewire's replacement)
I can't really speak to the first part of your message, since I've never really tested anything like that, but at least anecdotally I've never really noticed any additional click latency in Linux compared to Windows.
For the second -- FFXIV works flawlessly _once you get it set up_, but there's a couple tweaks to deal with to get there -- the launcher in particular (the default/"modern" launcher doesn't play nice). Games with separate launchers in general seem to have more issues/be more finicky in Proton. I don't personally use ACT, so I don't know if there's any real issues with setting it up, but I know others on Linux who do so it's at least possible. For your reshade concerns, GShade[1] comes with a linux install script that I've had no issues with.
I was impressed to find out even some mmos work, like Final Fantasy 14. There's some janky side loading you can do, but there's even a custom launcher that loads faster than the stock one, and runs Linux! I'm always super impressed when gaming communities fix their own issues like this.
My experience has been that EAC is a problem at the top of the list, and there's an enormous middle of the list where things just work, and a very long tail of older games which don't really work at all. (Once everything became unity, the problem got easier, I think...)
I have a strange feeling about this tech.
Doesn't this help cement Windows as The Standard for gaming?
Feels like we're giving up and accepting our fate.
You mean as opposed to the last 20 years where it wasn't the standard? That ship has sailed. If Linux wants to stay relevant to end users (particularly gamers), it needs to be accessible. Proton makes gaming on Linux accessible, regardless of what the Linux purists may prefer.
I'd be using Linux full-time if I knew all the games I played would work on Linux. They don't, so I end up using Windows way more than I'd like. Proton is the only way out of that.
Perhaps for now, but if Proton raises the Linux gaming market share, companies in the future may be more likely to invest resources into native clients.
I've been using Linux on my desktop gaming PC and Windows on my living room gaming PC for the last year.
The big thing that is still missing from Linux gaming is HDR support. It's somewhat janky but otherwise works fine on Windows, and the Auto HDR on Windows 11 is pretty great. Hoping Linux gets there soon.
How much of this is native support instead of windows compatibility layers? Don't get me wrong, it's great either way, but it's very telling of the motivations of the developers and how much they prioritize Linux.
Hopefully they also start porting older games - I had to install wine and lots of other packages only to play VTMB and Morrowind on my machine, and I lost an hour at least managing and setting everything up.
Another Option to play games on Linux is Geforce Now. I try to avoid Nvidia products, but with this service you can play some games 'on' Linux which are not supported natively or via Proton/Wine.
What sucks is that only 4 of the top 10 work. Once Steam and the anti-cheat folks figure out how to get that stuff working, we're really going to be in business. It's not like PUBG relies on DirectX 12 ray-tracing APIs or something exotic.
Now if a fresh Mint install on a common 5-year-old laptop could be set up out of the box with a working swap (8gb ram is not enough) and working power management (staying on until battery dies is not an option) as well as working suspend and hibernate, perhaps we could some day declare the year of the Linux desktop.
Now if a fresh macOS install on a common 5-year-old laptop could be set up out of the box with a working swap (8gb ram is not enough) and working power management (staying on until battery dies is not an option) as well as working suspend and hibernate, perhaps we could some day declare the year of the Mac desktop.
Now if a fresh Windows 11 install on a common 5-year-old laptop could be set up out of the box with perpetual updates (Skylake CPUs aren't new enough) and working power management (microsoft deleted my acpi tables =C) as well as working suspend and hibernate, perhaps we could some day declare the year of the Windows desktop.
I'm afraid you've already moved the goalposts, yourself! Let me help you put them back:
> a common 5-year-old laptop
doesn't mean 'a 5-year-old Mac laptop'.
The point isn't about macOS, but the proposed standard. It's this: if working on whatever random piece of hardware you happen to have lying around is a requirement for being a viable desktop operating system, macOS is not a viable desktop operating system... but of course, macOS is not only viable as a desktop OS but quite successful in its niche. So this tells us that the proposed standard is no standard at all— running without any tweaks or compromises on random hardware which was not designed, marketed, or sold as compatible is not necessary for a desktop OS to viable or a reasonable choice or whatever.
(And as a sibling poster to you points out, in the case of older hardware, it's a test that Windows may sometimes fail as well, if for entirely different reasons.)
Yeah, ThinkPads exist, thanks, but I'm replying to the guy who's saying that Linux on laptops generally sucks, and it does. Of course you can chase down specific hardware that works; that was true when the problem was "wifi on Linux generally sucks", too.
My understanding of the situation is that manufacturers tend to work really hard with Microsoft on graceful power management code, and until that effort is replicated on Linux (lol), one has to chase down specific hardware, because otherwise it generally sucks.
No experience yet on power management, but even as a noob on Linux, and someone who didn't install an OS since Windows XP, I got Ubuntu running within 2 hours on my X1E Gen2 today. Pretty straight forward, and all functions work. I didn't try fingerprint scanner and dual GPUs. The first already was a nuisance under Windows and the latter deactivated from day one of ownership to get multiple displays properly running. Even Steam and most of my games are running just fine.
That being said, he nVidia GPU managed to suck the battery in 2-3 hours depending on the game being payed under Windows as well, everything around 4 hours on normal working is fine.
Installing software under Linux / Ubuntu is, well, strange. But solvable. And I really do like the old-school, non-cloud feeling of Linux way better than Windows 10 and One Drive.
> And [Valve] have committed to bringing all Steam titles to the Steam Deck running SteamOS[.]
By launch time? As an on-and-off Linux gamer who is a huge fan of Valve's Linux work, this is worrying. How can they possibly deliver on this? If they promise this and it's not there at launch time, that could doom the Steam Deck even if it's very good.
What are they going to do, start kicking titles off Steam if they don't have Linux ports? Something like that seems like the only way to meet that guarantee. That seems insane, but maybe if Proton is in really good shape they can get away with saying something like
> Hey, you have one year to add Steam Deck support to your game. Initial testing indicates that Proton will get you 80% of the way there already, but we're here to help you finish the last 20% if you reach out any time in the next 10 months.
But idk, that seems like a huge gamble and it's the only way I can picture them making good on that promise.
I usually make fun of "linux on the desktop" prophets by saying "Yes, 90% is great but problem is that everybody uses a different 90%". But 100% of the 50 most popular games is a different thing. It is a level of compatibility that you may not even achieve on windows depending on your hardware. Of course, performance and a few bugs will exist, but compatibility will be good enough for almost everybody.
I wonder if this coupled with steam deck will finally make supporting linux sustainable. I mean, a point where supporting is so cheap and the number of users is big enough that it becomes profitable to do so. If that happens, most excuses to not support linux will finally vanish away.