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.
In the time I have been a Linux gamer, it has gone from “here is a list of games that work in Linux” to “here is a list of games that do not work in Linux.” Which some dictionaries define as “progress.”
In 2003, it was my dream to play FF7 in Linux. In 2019, my dream came true. Thanks Proton, Codeweavers, Wine, Valve, et al for helping me finally put down Sephiroth right.
That’s crazy! When I was last trying to run Linux full time in ~2014, you had WINE and then a commercial version of WINE (not by the WINE devs, but because WINE is licensed the way it is and is open source…) that would run a few more things, but I don’t remember what it was called.
So glad to hear it’s progressing this quickly and far.
I started out in 2014, and pretty much what I did was look to see if there was a Steam logo on the Steam store page to indicate Linux compatibility. With Proton in the last few years, I just don’t really worry about it. I will say my tastes have just about always lined up with the kinds of games, the kinds of studios, that are likely to publish for Linux, the nerd shit like Kerbal Space Program and Factorio. I don’t play Call of Fifa, Modern Fortnite or whatever.
What about Red Theft Autoredemption, or Overwatch of Legends? 😆
a commercial version of WINE
That would be CrossOver by CodeWeavers. They’re actually a huge contributor to upstream Wine and have worked with Valve (and I think Collabora?) several times over the past few years. I’m kind of tempted to buy a copy of CrossOver to support them even though I’d never use it, lol
That’s a perfect way to put it. From constantly relying on ProtonDB to occasionally checking areweanticheatyet.com.
Oh I’d never even heard of that second site haha.
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.
This is the way.
I’ve played MPO games only a few times, but I’ve never understood rhe anticheats…
Anticheat is about to force this progress backwards years as publishers push drm
deleted by creator
Publishers who do this make shit games anyway.
As someone who really wants to see desktop Linux grow, I try not to think like this because I know others care about these games…but goddammit if I don’t completely agree with you on the inside. I do not understand the obsession with these
gamesproducts, they’re exclusively designed to keep you playing and paying for as long as possible to avoid fomo for digital garbage.There are a tiny handful of non-live service games that still use anti-cheat, and most of those have already enabled support for Proton. Dragon Ball FighterZ is literally the only exception that I can think of, and even that’s playable offline IIRC.
Are we watching a “changing of the guard” where the studios that used to bring out the hits are dying, shedding their talent and new indie projects are blooming in the fallout? I remember Bioward being a fantastic studio during the Mass Effect (and prior) years. They’re a shell of their former selves now. I see this happening with Bethesda now too, although Starfield is not that bad. It’s just nowhere near as epic and fun as Skyrim was. Then you have studios like CDPR that seemed poised to take the crown with CP2077, and although it’s a great game, they certainly fumbled hard at launch. It’s an interesting time in the game industry.
Hey pro tip, if a game isn’t nearly as epic and fun as one that was released like 12 years ago, then its OK to call it a bad game. Cuz that’s certainly not good
To be honest, I think if I were to go back and try Skyrim now, I’d probably feel pretty similarly about it as to how I do about Starfield. I still enjoy gaming, but it doesn’t enthrall me quite the same as it used to. Part of adulthood I suppose.
Try playing Yakuza
I would say the same, but only because the standards of current Gen games has definitely gone up since then. There just weren’t games like Elden Ring and TotK around when Skyrim was released
I still have faith in CDPR, they had one excellent game, one that they fucked up a bit and few relatively unknown but overall good games.
You know, I really do too. I actually had a lot of fun with CP2077 when it came out, but had to quit on the last 1/3 of the game because of a permanent sound glitch. I am very excited to jump back in.
Actually most anticheat now also supports Linux with Proton
True I just moved my gaming PC to Linux and wow!! Almost all of my games run on Linux. Thank you for everyone working so hard.
Also thank Valve and buy a Valve game.
This is the main reason, other than gog’s lack of support, for not going full Linux.
You can use a launcher like Heroic to play games you have on gog or epic.
I buy mostly GOG games (like 90%) and with Heroic it’s quite easy.
Not only it works very often but one can even check https://www.protondb.com before buying to make sure it does work. It also works for VR games. I recently tried a brand new game, supposedly “Windows only”, and it worked without any tinkering. I then updated ProtonDB to clarify so that others could play too. It’s simple I didn’t boot on Windows to play for years now. I’m also traveling today and instead of bringing a laptop I bring my SteamDeck to play, to work I’ll also bring a BT keyboard.
TL;DR: it works, even with VR, and ProtonDB can help to identify problems
How is mod support on linux for games? Does it work as usual via Proton?
Stardew Valley and Minecraft modder reporting in with no issues. In general, anything Steam is moddable without issues.
Minecraft is cross platform and has been perfect with modding on Linux for a long time.
It would be weird for a mod to break compatibility of a game unless it’s a DLL hack
Anything that’s steam workshop should just work for the most part.
There’s also steam tinker launcher which you can use as a shim between steam and your proton in order to hook modloaders like modorganizer for Skyrim.
Anything that’s “drag and drop” should also work seamlessly.
Worst case scenario you can add your mod organizer as a non-steam game and browse to your game folder in the mod tool.
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.
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
I think forge has a native client for WoW
Did you mean World of Warcraft?
+1 for everything you mentioned - I’ll add Stardew Valley. Flawless mod support with SMAPI on Linux. I do love my mods.
I was able to add a couple of mods that I created myself to Rimworld just fine.
Cyberpunk 2077 mods work great from Nexus Mods. World of Warcraft mods work great from Curseforge.
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
bottleprefix). 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.
So, it’s a mixed bag in my experience…
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.
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.
Unfortunately Easy Anti Cheat doesn’t agree with your allegations.
At least they offer a Linux version
I have no issues playing games with Easy Anti Cheat or Battleye.
Can you demonstrate this claim? Which games and what setting adjustments did you make?
Halo MCC, BattleBit, and Apex Legends all work from my library without any tweaks.
No tweaks, just install the runtimes for the anticheats first in Steam
Ark, and no adjustments made.
Rust doesn’t run properly on Linux because of EAC
But that’s a choice made by Garry Newman, not a limitation of the platform
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.
I didn’t know they did anything about cheaters.
Rust doesn’t run properly on Linux because of EAC
Nope. Rust on servers with EAC enabled doesn’t work, because Face Punch refuses to support Linux.
I currently play on a server (without EAC) with a group of friends. They all use Windows and I run Linux. It plays as smooth as butter.
Yes, you are correct, but EAC continues to be a problem on Linux.
It’s not EAC that’s the problem.
what do you mean rust has run on linux for like ever and how does EAC have anything to do with a programming language
I switched to Linux on my gaming PC about five or six years ago and tried a couple of different distros. Manjaro was the first one that worked really well for me, and I played through the original RAGE and Mass Effect using that setup, but for the last couple of years I’ve used POP!_OS, after Manjaro broke a couple of times. I’m never going back to Windows, mostly thanks to Proton. Even Elder Scrolls Online works really well using Proton.
I have to stick to windows only because of VR, once performance and UX improves I will nuke windows out of my PC but I still absolutely love linux, been hopping around distros like a madman almost 2 years ago until I settled on arch, couldn’t leave the damn thing.
I remember using bare wine to play games before proton. You would have to go and find the exact libraries needed to run the game, install them one way or another, pray a bit, and maybe the game will run with acceptable fps. If it ran at all.
And these days its just plug and play. Dont remember the last time I had to install a game dependency with proton, from steam or otherwise.
Freaky to read your account. I switched to ubuntu desktop like 3 weeks ago, bought a gpu, installed steam (ok, I had to reinstall from apr since snap didn’t work well), 2 days ago I installed cyberpunk and it runs at 80 fps mostly high-ultra settings without one crash so far, no special boot parameters. (I had to edit the exe today so it wouldn’t force controller config though)
It’s insane how far linux has come in the last 5 yrs. I hope it goes on like this. In opposition to amd, linux actually is our friend. :)
In this case, you need to take my comment more literally.
AMD does a lot better than nvidia but amd still makes a lot of business decisions that are not consumer friendly. For example pricing their gpus a lot higher than they used to instead of more competitive to nvidia.
They do good but in opposition to open source, it is still a company and therefore not our „friend“. Open source in contrast is made by us, therefore undeniably more our friend.
It was a figure of speech, not meaning to dump on amd.
I was wondering that too. As far as I know, when it comes to Linux, AMD and Intel are the way to go. Nvidia are the ones who generally tend to suck on linux (although I never had problems with my nvidia gpu, its pretty old tho)
most shit was literally click and play
I still remember installing the sims 3 on wine. This was before proton, before the sims 4. I started by looking the game up on winehq - the results were not promising. The rating was not exactly garbage, but still runs with problems. Some brave soul had come up with installation instructions though.
So I try to install the game using those instructions. Took me about 40 minutes of installing things like ms c++ runtimes. Then when I tried to run the game? Crash. Doesn’t work. So I went back to WineHQ and found another instruction (luckily there were multiple ppl that made the game work)
After following it for another hour, the game still didnt work. After googling the error for some time im pretty sure I just downloaded some random dll that was missing from runtimes and put it with the game. Voila, the game ran! Laggy, but playable. Took only about 3 hours of research and tinkering.
Today? I’m pretty sure I can just download the game and it will run, just like that, no config required.
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.
Valve literally went “you know what fuck the profits we need off Windows” and they did what nobody else has done before.
What profits did Valve say that to exactly? They were shipping a device that didn’t have an existing OS that worked for it. I know companies have been shipping handheld PCs since the 90s but they never took off because the experience of Windows on a mobile device sucks, full stop.
I’m very happy they did this and it will help lots of things, but it’s about as altruistic as Apple making WebKit open source. A massive boon to the community that did help everyone, but the goal wasn’t altruism. It was to create a software solution where one didn’t exist to improve a for-profit device.
Plus, not having to pay Microsoft for OEM Windows licenses helps too.
You are looking too short term. Valve has been very concerned about Microsoft for a long time (maybe a decade now?). They have traditionally been dependent on the Windows platform while Microsoft has a competing built-in store and the Xbox product line. This means that they are dependent on one of their biggest competitors. If Microsoft wasn’t concerned about anti-competitive legal action they probably would have smited them already.
Especially with macOS dying for gaming and iOS having no third-party stores they have made multiple pushes into Linux as a platform where they don’t depend on Microsoft. While the Steam Deck has been very successful, they have already blown money of failed attempts in the past and running Windows on the Steam Deck would likely not be a huge cost (bulk licenses are cheap and they are spending a lot of money on Linux development).
So whether or not they are making more or less money in the short term doesn’t appear to be Valve’s motivation. Their primary motivation is to unlock themselves from Microsoft, whether or not that is best for profits right now.
I agree but I don’t think that contradicts anything I said. This is definitely a long term plan to end up with a gaming focused OS that people can use instead of Windows to reduce their reliance on MIcrosoft. It’s definitely a long term decision.
However in the short term, a Steam Deck with Windows would have been far less exciting. Developing WebKit also was clearly a plan for a much better web landscape too and cost far more than Safari ever generated until it was in iOS.
I only take issue with this being cast as some altruistic act, which it isn’t. It’s just one of those situations where the goals of the community and the company align, because the company is very focused on delivering a good user experience above all else. This is a great move for everyone involved and Valve deserves praise for that. But that’s no reason to be naive to how this greatly benefits them.
Imagine how much else humanity could do if they said that. Even just once more, fuck the profits, let’s give people a 4 day work week with 6 hours per day.
Okay I can definitely back up the second claim. World of Warships, a DirectX only game, runs and loads better on Linux with Proton. I tested both on SSD and HDD, and in both scenarios the game runs at a higher FPS and loads faster. I legitimately have no idea why.
I originally tested on HDD and guessed that ext4 was just much better with the IO speeds because NTFS would fragment like hell. But then it also was the same with an SSD and now I’m not sure.
Seems like CPU-intensive game, so it makes sense.
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.
All in all, very pleasing experience.
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).
