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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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?
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 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!
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).
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.
[+] [-] marcodiego|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] owaislone|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] revolvingocelot|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Agentlien|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] matheusmoreira|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] lumost|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] macNchz|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fastssd|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Philip-J-Fry|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yepthatsreality|4 years ago|reply
[0] https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2021/08/linux-has-finally-hit-...
[+] [-] tmpz22|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xeromal|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tester756|4 years ago|reply
I wonder how many people actually pay for Windows, since you don't have to activate it in order to use.
[+] [-] lpcvoid|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] queuebert|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kcb|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dogma1138|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Zababa|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] smoldesu|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] gundamdoubleO|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] notjustanymike|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] konart|4 years ago|reply
Not 100. And 1000$ is just a video card. Not a newest one too.
[+] [-] CitrusFruits|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] mt_|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] gremloni|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] swarnie|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] Causality1|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pjmlp|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aseipp|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] MeinBlutIstBlau|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] arepublicadoceu|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] rsav|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dpbriggs|4 years ago|reply
I've even noticed some games, like Valheim and Path of Exile, run better in Linux.
[0] https://www.protondb.com/
[+] [-] thioordc|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hakfoo|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] city41|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 6gvONxR4sf7o|4 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] marcodiego|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] devwastaken|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Thaxll|4 years ago|reply
- performance can be really bad
- lot of bugs that you don't have on windows
- the usual go tweak this cfg file and try this
Look at that for example, what they consider working "gold": https://www.protondb.com/app/275850
[+] [-] dkersten|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gtk40|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yepthatsreality|4 years ago|reply
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!
[+] [-] bluesign|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ribit|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ziml77|4 years ago|reply
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).
[+] [-] nohr|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pizza234|4 years ago|reply
There's a (very) long tail of games that surely receive less attention (by the Wine/Proton teams).
Additionally, a large part of the top ones has a native port, which smaller production companies/indie devs typically can't afford.
On the other hand, smaller games could be simpler to "not emulate" (:^)) due to them being simpler.
> they have committed to bringing all Steam titles to the Steam Deck running SteamOS
This is unrealistic.