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.”
That’s a perfect way to put it. From constantly relying on ProtonDB to occasionally checking areweanticheatyet.com.
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.
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
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? 😆
Imagine a completely different OS running software made for your OS better than your actual OS could. This is Microsoft Windows
Not only OS - written using 3D APIs closed source available only for your OS.
And to say that there used to be a time when “Linux gaming” was an oxymoron as it at most meant SuperTuxKart or mindlessly watching
glxgears.Mindlessly watching glxgears is the greatest experience a GPU can render.
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.
This is the main reason, other than gog’s lack of support, for not going full Linux.
Windows too busy using those cpu cycles to gather your usage metrics for sale to third parties.
Anticheat is about to force this progress backwards years as publishers push drm
