[frostiness]

I don't even own a Steam Deck and I've been seeing the benefits just from its existence. Now, almost every game on Steam has a quick accessible rating that lets me know if it works fine on Linux. This has led to me being able to buy games confidently that I never would have otherwise. In addition, the effectiveness of Proton for running Windows games is baffling, and something I never could have expected when I first switched to Linux back in 2015.

Back when Steam Machines first came out, the expectation was that there would be a new push to get games working on Linux, which unfortunately didn't end up happening as strongly as expected. However, with how much of a success the Steam Deck was, it seems that the rush to get games ported to Linux actually is happening. I'm excited for the future.

[deckard1]

> almost every game on Steam has a quick accessible rating that lets me know if it works fine on Linux

Sure, it's more convenient that Valve runs Steam and can put the rating right there. But let's give WineHQ a bit of credit here. They have a database going back more than a decade now, telling you how games run on Linux.

The effects of Valve getting into Linux gaming are definitely noticeable. But the Wine team deserves a boatload of praise too. I was playing World of Warcraft back in 2007 and it was a flawless experience.

> rush to get games ported to Linux actually is happening

I'm not really sure about this. By having Proton/Wine at such a high quality, most devs are just going to target Windows. Because why bother? They will probably ensure their games run good under Wine and that's where it ends. Nowadays I'm totally okay with that. Lutris is great, Wine is actually easy to use. It's the best time to be a Linux gamer.

[badsectoracula]

> let's give WineHQ a bit of credit here [..] But the Wine team deserves a boatload of praise too.

The Wine team deserves a ton of praise that IMO is often directed to Proton BUT WineHQ has always been a useless experience for me. It needs a massive cleanup since it contains data from ancient versions of Wine, there is barely enough information to figure out what is going on and the whole "bronze, silver, gold, etc" rating is completely subjective with people rating something "bronze" because a pixel is off in some application and something "gold" despite being unable to use some major functionality.

Sadly ProtonDB seems to be going the same way, the main saving grace right now is that it doesn't have all the baggage accumulated over decades (and it is focused on games - Wine still has to get all Win32 APIs for UIs, etc working for regular applications that Proton doesn't have to care beyond whatever little functionality is used for launchers) but still has the whole subjective thing (a favorite case of mine is Rage[0] which has lots of comment about broken textures etc with others saying that the game works fine - and it takes some searching to figure out that the people who are fine have Nvidia GPUs while the people with issues have AMD GPUs - while in a few cases, people recommend the game while at the same time mentioning the textures are broken!).

[0] https://www.protondb.com/app/9200

[tomnipotent]

> But the Wine team deserves a boatload of praise too

About 2/3 of Wine commits are from CodeWeavers, so praising the Steam team (CodeWeavers) is praising the Wine team.

[dataangel]

> But let's give WineHQ a bit of credit here. They have a database going back more than a decade now, telling you how games run on Linux.

But it so often was wrong :P I tried to use wine a lot between 2007 and 2010 and constantly ran into apps that were supposed to work no longer working, because regressions happened a lot. When you play a game on steam deck and exit it periodically asks you, "This game is marked Steam Deck Verified. Is that consistent with your experience?" and they really keep tabs on it.

[frostiness]

If you look at the list of top sellers, new arrivals, upcoming games, and games on sale, most if not all of them have native Linux support, which is something you absolutely could not have said just a few years ago. In my experience, at this point bad Linux ports are more of an issue than a lack of them.

I agree though honestly, if Proton works fine and the game runs under it, I'd much rather have that than a bad native Linux port. Plus, I have a lot more trust in Proton to keep things compatible than Windows.

[kaba0]

> I'm not really sure about this. By having Proton/Wine at such a high quality, most devs are just going to target Windows

insert win32 is the only stable linux API blogpost

[baq]

Winapi is the stable Linux ABI we’ve been waiting for the whole time. Windows binaries are more cross-distribution-portable than native builds.

The irony.

[deelowe]

I think this is the more likely end state. Instead of builds targeting certain platforms, some amalgamation of windows APIs and perhaps vulcan or other special things sprinkled in will become a sort of standard. From there, Linux compatibility will be brought up to the same level as Windows and perhaps other platforms will follow suit. We've seen this pattern time and time again in software.

[viraptor]

That's missing what ABI is and what features can/can't be accessed by the app. Otherwise we'd call nes ROMs an even more stable ABI accessible across all modern systems.

[DanHulton]

Windows 10 hits EOL in 2025. I'm really hoping I can just completely convert my gaming PC to a Linux machine by that time, because Windows 11 started out rough and has become less appealing over time.

The Steam Deck is absolutely building that future, and I, too, am excited.

[MisterTea]

I just decommissioned my 2011 Windows 7 machine where I did most of my dev work and all of my casual computing such as web stuff and gaming. It ran all of the software I needed plus the Steam games I enjoyed. I had no technical reason to "upgrade" in all that time. In its place now is a kooky Linux machine.

The replacement started off as a toy turned experiment: a 12 core Gen 1 Threadripper with 64GB ECC and a Radeon Pro W5700. I wound up installed Void Linux Musl with XFCE mostly to see how useful a system-d/glibc free Linux machine can be. Turns out very useful if you install bloated Windows-style "applications" like Steam, Discord, Chrome, LibreOffice, etc using Flatpak. You can also setup a glibc chroot if need be but I have not ran into this need yet.

I can watch Hulu and other streaming services just fine in Chrome (haven't tried FF). I can play older AAA games you would never imagine running on Linux such as GTA5 and Skyrim with ZERO configuration other than checking "run this game using proton". However I have yet to get Crysis running :-( Anything I can't get running with Wine I can toss into a VM. And I can run lots of VM's :-)

And if you really miss Windows or want some familiarity back - XFCE + Chicago95 ;-)

[eloisant]

It seems like Windows is alternating "shit" and "decent" versions.

- Vista: shit

- 7: decent

- 8: shit

- 10: decent

[brian_herman]

I've tried upgrading my gaming computer to windows 11 with a fresh install and upgrade both of them fail and I don't know why.

[acomjean]

I have a steam deck and twice after playing a game its asked me how well it worked on the deck. So its great they're collecting that data.

When I used my linux laptop for gaming there is a good online database of compatibility:

https://www.protondb.com/

[mmis1000]

Even better, you can get the decky-loader and proton-badges plugin. It can show the protondb rating directly on the game mode ui. Allows you to know will a game(or a program) even run even it is not rated as steamdeck compatible yet.

[red-iron-pine]

> I don't even own a Steam Deck and I've been seeing the benefits just from its existence. Now, almost every game on Steam has a quick accessible rating that lets me know if it works fine on Linux.

WineDB did this for years, as does ProtonDB now. And both usually have tweaks and how-tos. But I'll concede its nice to see it in Steam itself.

[TMWNN]

>In addition, the effectiveness of Proton for running Windows games is baffling, and something I never could have expected when I first switched to Linux back in 2015.

Is it true that Windows games run better on Proton than on Windows?

[12345hn6789]

Proton was around for years before the steam deck was announced. Linux gaming was already thriving

[delusional]

Wine was also quite capable before proton came about. Valve obviously did a lot for the linux gamers, that much is clear, but we must not forget the volunteers (and codeweavers) that worked tirelessly for years to get wine to that point. Wine is a tremendous achievement.