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.
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).
Finally did it a few days ago. Not only gaming (and emulation in general) is more fluid, but the sheer amount of customization available makes me never want to go back to Windows.
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.
The steam deck inspired me to finally ditch Windows for good. I have dealt with it for the past 15+ years professional and I grew so damn tired of it. Built myself a nice little gaming PC running pop is and I’m quite pleased!
Mac as a laptop, steamdeck for gaming. There is a Win 11 VM on my unraid server for the occasional poke at something but I can’t say I miss windows in any way…
Same on the laptop and Unraid server actually, lol. But I don’t run any VMs on it at all. Hardware is a bit old so I don’t know how much it could run effectively.
This week I decided to try dual booting with OpenSuse again and see how much I still need Windows for gaming. Turns out: not much. For VR. And maybe for Game Pass games if cloud gaming turns out to be crap and I cannot get a VM performant enough for games.
I also decided to dual boot Linux when I did a fresh Windows install this past weekend.
Because I hate myself I’m running Arch, but I was able to get Apex running well enough without too much fucking around. Problem is, I haven’t been able to get OBS capture to run nearly as well as I can on Windows. I record at 1440/90 with high bitrate, and I haven’t been able to get that working on Linux yet.
I really wanna jump full-on into Linux now and try living without windows, but sometimes I just need things to work without having to try 4 differently compiled versions of a program, and I don’t know if I can get all my games running (Halo Infinite is giving me issues, if anyone has proton tips).
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.
To be fair though, windows is doing everything in its power to push me towards dual booting again.
I just have separate PCs but similar situation, and I’ve been a linux sysadmin for over a decade. A lot of games work fine on linux, but when you get in to things like specialty peripherals and mods/addons things can get messy. Desktop running Windows Enterprise (with so much disabled) for audio production and games, laptop running debain for everything else, and all my servers are debian or raspberry pi devices.
I feel like a lot of people don’t know you can, or know how to, disable most of the shitty Windows features and addons. There’s all kinds of automated scripts for it like “Reclaim Windows” but you can basically turn a lot of this stuff off through powershell. Most people are running Windows like a user and not like an admin.
Yeah, windows is still the best (or at least the most compatible) for games, but all my servers use linux too. I played around with windows server a bit, but it’s no contest.
Thankfully, with WSL you can do a lot (but not all) of the stuff I love linux for.
I mean I even automated the backup of my windows PC with WSL, and it works great.
Thankfully both of those games are crossplay. Anything that requires anti cheat seems to have crossplay oddly enough so I just play those on my ps5 or Xbox series s. My Xbox is the only Windows based device I use. Haven’t touched Windows 11 in months.
Oof someones salty! Enjoy your next forced windows update and being constantly spied on. But hey, at least you can mindlessly install and play all teh games without being inconvenienced.
Games and audio production. I’m the only one in my linux sysadmin group that still keeps a Windows SSD for booting games and for media creation, I’m also the only one who doesn’t suddenly have games break because an update had conflicting library dependencies or something, or a mod broke the game. I also don’t have to spend hours combing through debug logs to find out why the game and mods that worked for years suddenly crashes on launch. So instead I can sit there and game while they fix their linux games. We only really have a lan party once a year so Windows SSD + Steam and old game installers makes it thoughtless. Someone running linux for their games inevitably has had to sit out the lan party, or spends the whole time trying to get whatever game working, that for some reason only isn’t working for them and works for everyone else.
Basically linux is quite good for gaming, enough that linux bros can feel assured in superiority, however in practice every time I’ve done a LAN with 10-20 linux sysadmins and we all try to use linux, it’s never gone smoothly for everyone. I actually maintain my previous laptops as Windows machines for this case, just so we can help a linux gamer get in on the games when their games break.
The main challenge with linux compatibility, is the variety and inconsistency of linux systems, it’s strength can be it’s weakness. It used to be Windows GPU drivers that were the bane of gamers back in the 00s-early10s, now it’s trying to coax a meaningful error log out of a game that just crashes for no apparent reason on linux out of the blue.
Games, music, photography are all still legitimate use cases.
I pretty much exclusively play anticheat games and have 0 interest in single player games. I’d quit gaming overall because I’m simply not interested in playing the type of games that end up working on Linux.
For some reason people really hate Google. Some may have valid reasons, some may not, some may just dislike their results. Most just hate Google because it’s the “cool” thing to do. Ignore the idiots and use what search engine you like.
If you’re serious about the Internet you’ll just ping icann and get the indexes directly, search the content, and use the results. You casuals might still use Google but I’ve built my own engine, and it literally only takes a few hours to get a search result.
Also, that person calls themselves royalty in training so if the issue is Google’s hegemony then I feel like there might be some cognitive dissonance.
If you hate google but still want to use it there are search engines that query google and scrape its data for you without google servers ever touching your connection. SearXNG instances are my favorite as they are open source, decentralized, has bangs like duckduckgo, is highly customizable, and self-hostable. paulgo.io is a good searxng instance for most queries, and if you really need google just put !!g in the query. Otherwise startpage.com scrapes google but they’re starting to go hard on the ads.
was 30 something about then invading a windows-centric IT dept. they feared linux as it replaced all their basic services. email, file servers, DB2 servers, online courseware…
I’ve gradually gone from being peeved at Proton for not being able to support certain brands of anti-cheat, to actively avoiding games with anti-cheat solutions that are fundamentally incompatible with Proton.
I had faced all sorts of issues with compatibility of files while using LibreOffice. And LibreOffice looks ugly. OnlyOffice doesn’t support doc/xls/ppt files afaik.
LibreOffice Writer follows Open Document Format, unlike MS Office Word. This is intentional by MS, because they have significant market share. So, any broken files is “because of LibreOffice”, even though the inverse is true.
So, I consider Office Word to be a dangerous and harmful product, and I’m glad that it isn’t available on Linux/Wine. It just isn’t good, and LibreOffice works for 99.9% of what people use that kind of software for.
True. Governments and respective institutions should however not. Some countries understand this. Other have had their ISO standard committees bought out by MS in more than shady circumstances. I remember when this was discussed in Norway. Everyone in the panel concluded to use ODF. They were ignored. They all resigned.
Honest question: if you’re not a Steam user, what does Proton do that wine doesn’t just as easily? I’ve played games in wine prefixes for years now, but haven’t bothered with Proton or PlayOnLinux or any of the other wine front ends. Are they worth it?
If you’re happy managing Wine prefixes, you aren’t missing out on much. Running a game on Steam with Proton is going to be about the same quality of experience compared to running a non-Steam game with Wine + DXVK + D3DVK. Proton is great because it’s already in Steam so everything “just works” if that’s where your games are, but Valve upstreams basically everything they do so everyone benefits.
Proton is essentially a fork of wine thats fine tuned by devs bankrolled by Valve/steam to optimize it to work for any and every game they can (so that it works with the Deck which is linux and relies on proton alot). AFAIK regular ol’ wine is more of a general emulator that in my exerience is hit or miss when it comes to getting games running. Proton almost always succeeds where regular wine fails especially if its a big bulky AAA game with multiplayer and stuff such as Elden Ring. Someone on github maintains builds of wine based off cutting edge proton experimental for Lutris. You can find it here
I think another point worth mentioning is that some anti-cheats allow proton, which is nice if you wanna play online with others in a competitive game.
I believe they do this by checking the hashes of a lot of the system32 type stuff, I’m not convinced it would just work in vanilla wine.
Steam is a dependency for official proton builds at least, but there are wine builds with the proton patches added in. Base wine will end up getting a lot of them too.
In the case that proton works, you install game via Linux steam and just play. Maybe override proton version and add launch arguments like dll overrides if needed for things like mods or nitpicky performance tuning.
Base wine will generally get the same improvements eventually. I use it via bottles for the odd windows program. I often need to use other custom wine builds for some of the more annoying programs. For games outside of steam, builds like wine-ge have all the relevant proton additions without the steam dependency.
Proton tends to work better because steam games are identified by an AppID and it has a list of tweaks/settings required for games that need them (protonfixes). If you install a game on steam and launch it, it just works, because it knows that you’re trying to run game X and it needs patches Y and Z. On wine it will probably work the same, but you’ll have to install winetricks or change settings yourself.
Wine builds for Lutris made by GloriousEggroll are based on proton and include most of the extra patches along with newest versions of things like VKD3D or DXVK. You just need to install redistributables by hand via winetricks.
It “just works” 95% of the time with no tweaks. That’s the benefit. Games in your library will install and run with zero intervention, just like on Windows and at times with better compatibility because the tweaks and dependencies are already configured. It’s nice not having to manage wine versions and prefixes.
If i’m correct proton adds a lot of gaming specific patches that increases game compatibility fixes in steam. Outside steam i’ve been using wine-ge which i find better than normal wine because it adds the proton patches and more which you can read about in the wine-ge-custom github.
Correction: Rust doesn’t run properly on Linux because the developers fear an uptick on cheaters caused by EAC being less invasive on Linux than on Windows.
For most games I’m sure you can find a way to do it. If you use protontricks you are able to run an exe under a proton prefix for a game (basically a virtual windows drive in a folder for the game) which I’ve had pretty decent luck with.
If you play games that support mod organizer 2, there is a sh install script somewhere for support in proton/steam that works well (I can find if you like), but the program does run pretty slow and is fairly buggy. Usable with patience. Upside is it can run MO2 for a given game direct from steam if configured correctly
My son does tmodloader via steam, but I think its native Linux. Works without issue.
I play WoW and run Trade Skill Master (in the same wine bottle prefix). I also run RaiderIO/WoW Up/CurseForge (Linux native).
I had issues with mods for The Forest and Sons of the Forest. Never got them working.
FF XIV DPS meter worked after a lot of tinkering. Had to go to a specific discord to get the info as the modders didn’t keep their READMEs in GitHub up to date. Wish that shit was searchable.
For terraria tmodloader works no issue, I think forge has a native client for WoW, and Minecraft is linux native anyway EDIT: I only ever modded terraria and minecraft so idk about any more
Same as far as I can tell. I installed model swap mods for several games, workshop mods for binding of isaac and terraria, and did other random things to games like tweak configs and shit. All of it worked fine. The biggest issues I had is installing random old games in my collection to my steam deck that weren’t on steam already, and even that I still managed to make it work.
It varies but generally if there is a will there is a way. Sometimes it just works, sometimes intervention required.
Typical things that may or may not be needed depending on game:
Windows packages and/or Dll overrides via launch arguments or winecfg/protontrick
Separate wine prefix with specific weird wine build to run mod managers or editors etc. with links to relevant directories in game prefix
Case insensitivity which can be set per directory on empty directories on ext4 (poorly made mods only usually)
Searching “[game name] mods [steam deck or linux]”
Regretting all of that to find that there is a Linux mod loader that works 100% but google stopped giving meaningful search results decades ago and the reddit trick doesn’t work as well post api-suicide.
Not only it works very often but one can even check 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
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