With Proton and Steam Play, many Windows games now work on Linux | Hacker News Reader

With Proton and Steam Play, many Windows games now work on Linux

protondb.com

938 pointsOJFord544 comments

Another Linux gamer. I seriously don't miss windows anymore.

At this point I'm not worried about compatibility, but rather shitty game companies banning you the second they figure out you're playing on linux.

This is especially an issue in PvE heavy games that have only small PvP elements. Looking at you Destiny 2.

I really wish companies stopped their draconian policies about Linux gaming. Or at the very least just restricted PvP game play when Linux was detected. Heck I'd manually go in and press a button certifying that I'm a Linux player and I understand that I won't have access to every portion of the game if that's what they need me to do.

But these limitations have also pushed me to explore more indie, or small publishing games that are multi-player. Shout out to Northgard and Deep Rock Galactic (even though it doesn't support Linux natively) for making an awesome cooperative experience that I can have with my friends on Linux.

Also, for developers making games out there. PLEASE test your game with the steam runtime OS thing, not with Ubuntu or a specific distro. The steam runtime is open source and can easily be bootstrspped for any game, even outside of steam. It also ensures optimal compatibility with every distro out there.

I was seriously considering adding Linux support for my game, that already has turn-based multiplayer, and this thread was the last thing I needed to convince myself it could work.

Performance may be an issue. I wonder if people would be ok with electron games sold on steam running on linux...

One of the games I run the infrastructure from had an issue with Proton. It caused issues with the multiplayer parts of the game.

We were forced to disable support for Proton a few months ago. We posted a bug in the Proton GitHub repo and got a great response from the Devs. The issue was resolved in the very next patch and we were able to enable Proton support again.

Other than that issue our players very rarely come to us with Proton specific issues.

Normally electron apps bother me on linux because they don't use my carefully selected GTK/QT/Openbox theming like most native apps do (whereas on windows I don't care because I don't have the ability to make anything look how I want).

But I expect games to be fullscreen and have their own bespoke UI look and feel anyway, so it's not really an issue with them.

Not sure if you've seen crosscode, but they released on steam and other platforms with impactjs and they're doing very well. (Not quite electron, but still html tech) If it runs well, who cares about the tech :-) People seem to complain about electron in tools and background apps. If it's the main/fullscreen app, it shouldn't be a problem.

Linux gamer here. I spend a lot of money on the steam store.

Get ready for 2% of your player base to make 50% of the support requests.

you will have the same bad performance of electron on Windows, Linux and OSX.

Thank you! At the very least please try to make it work with proton :)

Go for it. Others already do that use Electron. Shapez.io is one such title and it's open source too so you can get some pointers if needed from it.

very weird to have this as my most upvoted post, but eh. If there is a time to shill out, it's now:

A game inspired by Nuzlocke Challenges + Slay the Spire

discord: http://discord.gg/u64Mg4X

twitter: https://twitter.com/_ldd

mailing list: tiny.cc/dxx5tz

If it can run in Electron, why not just make it a PWA?

Discord and spotify are both electron on Linux, so I would imagine it would work.

Performance is not an issue.

We always appreciate the effort.

Forgive my ignorance, but why do game servers ban Linux players in pvp games? Fear of some sort of modding only available on Linux?

Modern anticheats are basically kernel rootkits which go even to the point of trying to checksum your drivers and inspect how they work. They're basically as invasive as they get.

They obviously can't hook into Linux kernel so they react by just banning the player.

Modern anti-cheat platforms can be pretty invasive and tie very closely into the operating system - ie, if designed for Windows, they often simply won't work at all through some other layer like Proton/Wine.

This is interpreted by many game companies as an attempt to cheat, rather than simply an unsupported use case.

It’s basically an anti-cheat “feature”. The assumption is that if you’re running a windows game on Linux you’re probably cheating.

Not just about anti-cheat software.

Typically people who write bots will host them on linux servers, so it's easy to blanket ban linux as a whole, that will catch most bots.

Also, some multiplayer games's servers trust their game client's inputs - if that game client suddenly runs on a system that has full control over the game (like linux and the kind of tech savvy people that knows how to use linux to it's fullest), it makes it harder for them to trust that the 1000 players online are not exploiting the game by manipulating network requests right before it goes over the wire.

This is a compromise that devs have to make when integrating network code with their game: if you click the mouse, does it immediately update the server in a synchronous fashion and introduce latency but having guaranteed consistency of your world (while the game state lives on the server and the client is "dumb") OR do you make the game client smart and hold some portion (or whole) of the game world on the client and just send small updates to the server. In the last case there will be less latency but you have an occasional glitch when packets drop and it is more susceptible to attack, since more work is done locally (Path of Exile have/use to have this setting and you could choose which way you want the game to talk to the server - depending on your connection - I think it's automatic now, haven't played in a while). Why do I mention this? I'd argue it's easier to attack this compromise from a linux box or a compromised linux game client - so again, game devs just outright ban linux since that is the path of least resistance.

Another thing with multiplayer: some games, esp older ones, have to have some minimum fps to keep the game world consistent for all connected players. So between fps and network latency and the mitigations/compromises that the devs have to make here, the code becomes realllly messy/complex and can easily turn into a blackbox - a blackbox that maybe only work on Windows, or a windows specific gfx stack or network stack to guarantee the minimum conditions to make multiplayer playable. I mention this because there are quite a few differences in the network and gfx stacks between Windows and linux, add on top of that different windowing systems and compositors (X11, Wayland etc).. the devs will spend triple the amount of work to get their game stable on both platforms. And again, easiest path is to just ban linux since it is harder to guarantee that the game client behaves in a specific way. This is a hard pill to swallow but its true.

And this is why something like Proton exists: it is better in this case to emulate a Windows environment than it is for each game dev to write 2 implementations for their network/gfx stack in their game, and then hope that the two game clients have similar performance/behaviour traits that keeps the game stable (never mind safe against exploits).

Luckily for us things are getting better, esp in the indie space and in some single player games. Some game engines has also made it waaay easier to build to linux so that has become a non-issue at this point. I'd argue the main stumbling block is in the game clients as described above - the compromise between a stable game world in multiplayer games and possible exploits that can originate from linux hosts.

Anyone else have thoughts on this or want to correct me, please raise it. These are just off the top of my head, I'm not a game dev.

edit: another silly thing that differs between Windows & Linux: font rendering. Your gfx might work fine and when you start rendering text you realize you need to rebuild some portion of your gfx stack, which then maybe breaks on linux... so easier to skip linux then you know your text renders correctly.

I think their policies have more to do with support costs than anything else. As much as I love playing on Linux and wine, you have to admit there are more technical issues with Linux. People who have low tolerance for glitches and problem solving to get their games working would be up in arms. The last example is Hyper Light Drifter. No matter which forum, the latest threads include several about Linux specific problems. And that's a game with native support.

Another game I played recently - an ancient puzzle game "Riven" - seemed to have bad looking problems. I bought it from GOG because I didn't notice it only officially supports Windows and Mac. Very near the end of the installation, you have to click through a couple of errors that say the game didn't install properly (it did well enough). When launching the game, you get a nasty error if you run Riven.exe instead of Launcher_Riven.exe . During the actual gameplay, there is only one rare crash every few hundred attempts at brute forcing one particular puzzle.

Seems to me like there should be something like a "Docker for games" which uses container tech to create a lightweight, predictable execution environment for video games.

I suppose that's kind of what Proton does, although it focuses on emulating a Windows environment in particular.

I went the opposite way and got rid of Linux for windows wsl2. I have the random issue but otherwise things run pretty well.

Did the same. Was just not worth the risk of waiting until an issue gets fixed. Or if it even gets fixed. I mean even in GTA 5 working perfectly, the overlay always had an issue of a missing mouse pointer.

Also Microsoft Store bought games do not work on Linux.

Well and in the end i just want to play my games. And if i want to start modding, don't get me started on the hoops you have to jump through just to get a modded Skyrim with everything installed how you like it.

I have mixed feelings about wsl because support requests from wsl users are usually due to issues in wsl itself. I guess that's how windows developers feel about linux.

How does Stadia strike you as an alternative? It works on anything (AFAIK) that runs Chrome.

Not op, but I think the biggest miss in cloud gaming is no one developing cloud first multiplayer games.

Currently in any kind of client-server multiplayer game out there you face n+1 game states (n is the number of players) and a lot of the art is in how to reconcile these. The n+1 is due to most games implementing some degree of client autonomy (e.g. in movement), and the reality of network round trips from each client causing everyone to be slightly out of sync. A concrete example of how this affects players is the experience of being shot after narrowly escaping behind cover in an FPS.

Cloud gaming substitutes reconciling these n+1 simulations with some input latency for each player. I think this could produce some qualitatively better experiences for certain games. In particular, Fall Guys is a recent game that I think would play better as a cloud first experience.

The interaction between players in Fall Guys is grabbing other players who are near to you. Due to the network latency many players have the experience of being grabbed by folks nowhere near them. A cloud first version of the game would eliminate this problem that simply can’t be solved otherwise.

PC gaming is like the last bastion of quasi-mainstream general compute at home, so I seriously hope it doesn't go away.

Not OP but anything that mentions Chrome is an instant loud no for me these days if I can avoid it somehow.

Just like MS 15 years ago.

Cloud gaming is just not really good enough for me for fast paced games.

I've tried GeForce Now, Stadia, and Shadow. So far GFN is my favorite and Shadow is my least favorite but tbf I'm not in the proper region for Shadow.

Stadia is really sensitive to lag. In my urban home, with a reliable high-speed broadband connection, it works pretty well when physically connected by Ethernet, but the stuttering is intolerable on wifi.

I tried GeForce Now with a high speed internet connection (Comcast) with Counter-Strike and I found the game to be unplayable from the lag. I double checked my speed test and router settings, it should’ve been fine.

Ultimately I believe these services represent the future of gaming, but without net neutrality or alternative ISPs it’s going to be awhile before that future is realized.

Not OP.

I can't wait to see Google dump Stadia.

If a game dev team thinks they can stop people from gaining an unfair advantage from just preventing people from running Linux they are morons. Even if you were in Windows you have to do is setup an inverse Linux VM to operate on the local host network in which case it would essentially be a daemon. Even with cigwin and a few other tools, you can use strace to inject system calls and override values right into the PID of the game

I'm kind of worried we've peaked on Linux compatibility however. We've seen some of the big franchises that supported it in Valve's initial push (Hitman, Football Manager being the two I'm aware of) back away from it in future iterations and Valve themselves now have Epic as a more immediate threat than the Windows store.

It doesn't even matter whether someone is cheating. All that matters is whether they're ruining the game. You don't need a rootkit to determine that.

Would you ban tower rushers in starcraft/warcraft2/warcraft3?

> restricted PvP game play when Linux was detected

WTF? Why?

What distro do you use?

PopOS

While I do share your frustration on linux gaming I thought to give sound to the opposing side who simply had this coming oit of a risk analysis.

TL;DR - it's indeed much easier to cheat on linux

After decades of fighting wars with crackers/reversers and all anti-debug/anti-cheat methods proven unusable against russian teenagers, AAA companies reached out to microsoft to get their undocumented binary "drivers" into the system which you cannot inspect from userspace.

With linux coming into the party, even if with the amazing work by Wine you do manage to get the desired anti-debug behaviour on the emulated userspace app, linux people can make arbitrary hooks on their kernels.

So instead of risking major reddit shitstorms over that 1% players that can cause 3% profit loss, it's better to ditch that 1%

I don't even know where the start with this.

First off, undocumented binaries, and inspecting kernel drivers from user-space is absolutely no barrier to RE/Cracking/Cheating on any platform. I'm pretty sure 50%+ of the people on this site can put arbitrary hooks on the windows kernel, given some motivation, and importantly, when they actually control the hardware they own.

From what I know (not an expert) the state of the art in DRM for games is Denuvo which uses undocumented idiosyncratic CPU instructions, that the activation server has a database of and sprinkles some magic patch to activate the game for that CPU, ie, nothing to do with OS. Anything else AAA is cracked pretty much immediately.

Whatever about the technical details, we can do risk analysis on a lot of things. We can do risk analysis on whether a kid is likely to commit serious violence to other people later in life and lock them up, or otherwise exclude them from society in anticipation of that, but we don't.

Some things are important, some things are not. Personally I rate open computing hardware a lot higher than some game company's 2% profit, and imo any company employing the tactics described in the GP should be rightly called out on it, and they should just make better solutions to the (very small) problem of people cheating in online games.

In a competitive game don't let clients dictate what the server does. Although I understand there is a performance issue. But clients should not be trusted.

> This is especially an issue in PvE heavy games that have only small PvP elements. Looking at you Destiny 2.

About half of Destiny’s active playerbase PvPs. In content drought times, it’s pretty much what keeps the game alive. So yeah, simply false.

I don't know why you're up in arms about this, but it's clearly not false. Almost all of the games content is PvE based. The PvP mode is very small in scope compared to everything else that's available.

Right. But I don't care for PvP. I've never wanted to play PvP.

I enjoy the raids and the cooperative strikes with friends.

Even if it's what keeps the game alive, they have one less active player because I don't have the ability to play with my friends.

But you could play destiny as PvE game if you want

Gaming on Linux has been so fucking good. I switched from Windows to Linux a month ago and literally haven’t found a game I can’t play. Even Red Dead Redemption 2, Hades, Fallen Jedi, Ghostrunner...

Oh the really icing on the cake is just how easy it all is. You literally just install the Windows version and things “just work.” Its amazing.

I’ve said this a lot of times now but it’s pretty amazing to write code and play games on the same machine. Truly, I don’t think I’ll ever have a bare metal install of Windows again. I don’t even have a VM with it right now even.

Agreed, however after months of being "Linux only" (Manjaro KDE + Proton), just this weekend I broke and installed a Windows as a dual-boot option.

90% of games with Proton "just work" like you said. It is amazing.

But then there's that one game that doesn't work, or works but with half the fps... for me, it was Death Stranding. It runs at 60+ fps at 1440p on Windows, but runs at half that on Proton, with horrible artifacts/frametime on Linux + Proton (even the community mod "GloriousEggroll" Proton version).

If CyberPunk is any good, I'm going to buy it and want the best experience... for now, that probably means Windows, unless by some miracle it works on Proton with no issues.

For me it was Fallout 4, the voice sounds don’t work on Ubuntu and it was a shame because I’m dying for that Elder Scrolls itch. After a decade and a half I’m just not using Windows, though, so I messaged Steam and they refunded me within an hour. That and Mass Effect are the only two games I’ve ran into trouble with which is a definite improvement over just five years ago.

If you're privileged enough you could buy another GPU, pass it through to a Windows VM, install looking-glass to pass display output over a shared memory buffer, barrier for mouse sharing and bam, you have Windows in a window in your Linux machine running close to bare metal performance. (It does eat memory bandwidth linearly with refresh rate though).

This won’t get passed anti cheats though.

I've heard of noone so far getting banned for playing in a VM. The anticheats can install their kernel modules as they want, and the lookingglass capture is using the direct X capture API, so nothing weird there. A SHMEM device is nothing out of the ordinary either.

I mean sure they could detect that you're running in a VM, but I'm yet to hear about any cheats where you edit the memory of a VM, so until that's a thing i safe.

There are companies like shadow.tech that builds their entire business around this implementation, so one can only hope it stays this way.

Personal experience: Playing both Overwatch and Counter Strike without any issue (VAC enabled servers)

It will if you configure it correctly.

I would think that Cyberpunk 2077 would have good Proton compatibility on day one. It runs on Stadia, which uses Vulkan.

There's been no word of Vulkan support in the public Windows build though, as far as we know it only uses DirectX 12

Cyberpunk only uses DirectX12 on Windows.

> If CyberPunk is any good, I'm going to buy it and want the best experience...

from past experience with CDPR games, you should really wait a good year for all the patches to happen. TW3 was only really playable, like, two years after release

After playing many Bethesda titles I think I can handle CDPR bugs. Skyrim and Fall out are about the buggiest games I’ve played and I never played on launch. Still fun to play.

Once Cyberpunk gets unlocked I might change my mind but for now I’m hopeful.

This is true for nearly all AAA games now. They're buggy garbage when they come out.

I remember watching the DXVK developer work on Witcher 3 support. Progress was lightning fast and then, suddenly, Proton appeared. Even VR games work!

Thank you, Valve. You guys are my low key hero's.

I've been playing Witcher 3 on Pop!_OS 20.04 recently using Steam/Proton. There's a few edges that occasionally popped up. For example, the wireless keyboard I was using would freeze the game when I tried to change the volume, but that's not an issue with the wired one I have. Overall, the experience over a couple hundred hours (oh, quarantine) of play has been overwhelmingly positive. I don't have a Windows machine, so if it can't be played using Proton, I can't play it. Valve are also my low-key heroes.

I recently ordered a Valve Index + gaming PC. How's the VR support on Linux looking like? I'd rather not install Windows if I have to.

I own a Valve index and have eben running it exclusively on a linux gaming PC for the last couple months. There are problems. The VR games themselves are generally good. Games generally "just work" but some of the other VR bits and pieces are troublesome. Each time I play I have to bounce around menus to enable sound through the headset. And very few media players work in linux (codex issues). Skybox VR works, but not on the latest version of proton. I still haven't figured out how to watch youtube in VR.

I would still recommend VR gaming under linux for all the same reasons I would recommend linux over windows generally, but not to a casual gamer expecting a seamless experience.

You usually have the sound using HDMI/Display port output ? I suggest enabling simultaneous sound output.

It works, but still beta quality. Steam still crashes every time I start SteamVR (restarting Steam afterwards works though). There is no official way to play VR videos. Half-Life: Alyx has enough bugs that Valve still does not advertise that it supports Linux on the store page. SteamVR and Half-Life: Alyx have both not been getting many updates on Linux. Maybe I'm wrong and there are fixes coming up but honestly it feels kind of like whoever at Valve got VR running on Linux lost interest.

Is there a Linux version of Half Life Alyx without Proton?

It works somewhat, but the more advanced VR features like async reprojection or motion smoothing don't work, and there's a definite performance hit. The FPS drop for general gaming is less noticeable, but it's really important for VR.

Through proton, it's fantastic. The native Linux stuff is hit or miss unfortunately.

Agreed. Watching Philip pump out release after release, and getting to test and see the daily progress was a game in itself. Whatever Valve paid (pay?) him wasn't enough.

Yeah it's so good that I haven't bothered to boot Windows in months. The odd game doesn't work (Horizon, Zero Dawn for example) but it's so convenient to use Linux for everything I would rather just not play the game than to have to boot into Windows.

Linux is just such a more quiet and less pushy experience, I find it relaxing.

I've not tried it myself, but I think Horizon:Zero Dawn was mentioned as explicitly fixed by Valve in the latest Proton runtime.

Lots of the crashes are fixed but it still needs performance work. Not quite playable but seems to be improving regularly.

Good to hear...was thinking this last week about making the leap just from all the good news from Proton.

Now that Davinci Resolve works well on Linux I don't see why not to make the shift.

I haven't been able to get any game that requires Origin or UPlay to work.

I can't even get either of those to install via steam. I can install them via, e.g., Lutris or PlayOnLinux, but then steam doesn't see the clients.

Otherwise, yeah, I used to run a GPU passthrough to a Win guest for a few games. Now I don't even do that. Gaming on Linux is quite good. Mostly good enough, anyway.

I've probably spent 100 hours trying to get Uplay to work on Linux. It's a nightmare and I would recommend just not purchasing Ubisoft games at all. Even if you get it to work, their games seemingly have more problems with wine/proton than most, and multiplayer has never worked at all (again, due to Uplay).

Nearly every other game I've tried has worked great with proton though! Even multiplayer games (through steam) tend to work very well.

Rdr2? Fuck, I'm in. I built a PC that i couldn't get windows running on due to some stupid uefi or something, i can't figure it out so it's sitting in the corner and I'm using a PlayStation now. I'll try putting Linux on it so i can use them games i bought but couldn't use because software is a fucking drm nightmare these days.

Okay, while I'd definitely suggest just saying "fuck off to windows" 100% at this point... I mean it plays RDR2?! That was the moment I said "holy shit, I'm never going back" haha.

Anyway to the point... If you do ever really need to install Windows from a USB stick the only fucking thing I swear always works is using Rufus:

https://rufus.ie/

Last time I had to like bootstrap a Windows install without an existing one; I could not get anything to fucking make the usb drive bootable using MacOS or Linux at the time (I could be an idiot though). Eventually, I created a Windows VM, passed the thumb drive over to it, and used Rufus... worked immediately no fuckery to be had. Has worked every time since...

Fucking fuck FUCK! Oh and by the way which distro do you use?

Can you explain that "UEFI thing"? There was a listing on ebay recently where the guy was selling his i7 8700+mobo+ram combo way under price because he said he couldn't run windows at all, only linux. It seemed so weird but google was not helping too much. What happened that you "bricked" it or was it factory setting?

Perhaps he was trying to install Windows 10 using a USB stick.

The various software for that builds the image for either legacy BIOS or UEFI, and they're not interchangeable. Rufus, for example, lets you specify the mode.

Alternatively, if you can't install it in UEFI mode, you can switch to legacy BIOS/CSM mode in your machine's BIOS (or vice versa).

It gets worse - some Win10 ISOs themselves are made for either UEFI (most common) or legacy BIOS, and they can't be set up the other way.

You can clone or run Win10 legacy BIOS/CSM installations on other machines/drives (useful if you plan on swapping/upgrading), while UEFI will only run on the specific motherboard/CPU you installed it on.

I've also noticed Win10 in UEFI mode can BSOD with no chance of recovery when undervolting too much and causing it to freeze/BSOD. Something must be getting corrupted, and it won't run again, ever. Legacy mode works fine.

> Perhaps he was trying to install Windows 10 using a USB stick

I was, yes, but even switching to legacy didn't help at all. I spent weeks trying to get it working, I looked at everything I could and tried every combination of settings (I had a grid).

It was settings. I had a combo of AMD ryzen 2, nvme drive, windows 10, and couldn't for the life of me get windows to discover the drive and install, whether using uefi or bios. I haven't ever dealt with Windows without it just working, so I was unprepared, and my Googling did nothing. I'm not a dumb guy, but I determined with this combo of hardware it was impossible for me to get Windows installed. Combine that with a new kid, and I decided just to get a Playstation 4 (this was months ago) and not have to mess with anything.

Not OP but I had a terrible experience installing Windows 10 on my machine. UEFI boot, NVME root disk. Windows would boot the installer, but would refuse to install. Disabling UEFI would cause it to install but there were issues so I had to bite the bullet and keep trying UEFI.

I had to install linux(because Windows recovery is terrible and can't do much), fiddle around with pre-creating a partition table on the format it wanted, and then eventually got it to work. Don't ask me how, I spent hours trying every combination under the sun. Windows error messages are very cryptic and not at all helpful.

FWIW I’m having trouble installing Windows on my AMD B450 system where Linux also runs fine. It locks up during the boot process after the first reboot.

I have the same MOBO. Does it lock up entirely, or just gets stuck in that screen with the spinning white thing? If the latter, it just takes a really long time.

What do you install it from and what software do you use to build the installation image?

My issue usually has been with random indie games just refusing to work. Like Party Animals, which either refused to launch for me or my friends or had horrible performance. Among Us as well.

Also any multiplayer competitive games that use anti-cheats are impossible to play. Valorant, for example.

IMO it is well worth it to maintain a dualboot for windows games.

Agree. It’s odd that among us causes problems since there’s not a lot there and it works on android.

Most recent frustration for me was Firefighter Simulator. Ended up trying out a VMware product and playing it through a VM. Wasn’t great.

Which GPU do you use? I haven't been up to date on the state of drivers, specially for newer cards. Historically for me AMD has been better.

I've used both an AMD RX580 (90% of the gaming so far) and just got a 3090. Both of the graphics cards have had no issue, but I also didn't even hesitate to mash the "install proprietary drivers" option to a yes.

Even switching graphics cards was painless... Like it was easier than I could have hoped for. Download drivers, mark weird driver.run file as executable and ./driver.run my way to victory.

My motherboard is being a pain in the ass or I'd let you know how the GPU passthrough was working with the RX580 feeding the host... ugh that's tonight's adventure.

I'm to the point where I'll buy a game even if it isn't supported (yet) because I assume it will be eventually. They really have been doing a great job.

All of my computers are windows-free now.

Wait, what do you mean you can just install a windows version on linux? Were talking about a windows only game correct?

Yes. In steam you just hit "install" et voila! It installs. Using Lutris you can install games from Origin or the Epic Games store the same way... just download and hit install.

I honestly didn't think I was gonna get to play Fallen Jedi with ease since I bought it on Origin (regrets) but turns out I was wrong. Was easy as hell just like everything else on Linux :)

Trying to play anything through that requires the Origin client fails for me at trying to install OriginThinClient or something. Lutris install of Origin was fine though.

Mostly everything else works pretty easily.

That is insane. I'm going to have to try that. One of my colleagues is a linux nerd and he'd probably freak if I told him that.

That's what proton does. Runs windows .exe games on Linux.

Adding some context: in Steam on Linux, you can right click on a Windows game you've installed and in the properties, you can select various alternative runtimes for the game. If you select a compatible Proton runtime, then you are able to launch the Windows game on Linux and it usually works.

I don't have modern hardware but I'm easily able to play things like Mass Effect with Proton with no serious issues on an older graphics card (Radeon 7790). I'm not so confident that brand new titles would just work (even if I had a modern gfx card), but people tend to have good success overall. It's really good.

In case it's not clear, Proton is a Valve fork of the Wine project. The one problem I've run into is if I don't have the right dependencies installed. I didn't play any games for a long time, then went back and started playing some again, and through several `apt update` runs something had gotten out of whack; Proton is Wine, so you can still get into difficult "what does this error even mean" situations.

The only issues I've seen are with some games with third party libraries. Project Winter has been working on Linux for several months now, after some impressive efforts between the devs and the Linux fanbase.

That's so good to know. No wine etc needed?

Proton is Wine.

Escape from Tarkov

Something else that works super nice for gaming on Linux: GPU passthrough (gaming on a VM that has direct access to the GPU).

I've been doing this since 2017. Back then I had built my first desktop computer powered by ryzen 1700 + 2 GPUs.

Creating this setup had some challenges, but after the initial hurdle everything has been working perfectly (I imagine things must be easier nowadays).

Created a windows 10 VM, assigned 4 of my 8 cores, 16 GB of RAM (got 64 on the host) and a GTX 1070. This setup is enough to play pretty much any AAA game with max settings on full HD.

Besides having every game working perfectly, I get another nice side effect: sandboxing. No games (mostly proprietary software) have access to my personal/work files.

I thoroughly agree, Linux KVM and GPU passthrough is amazing.

I was disappointed with USB for guests though, I found it impossible to restore my iPhone via iTunes on a Windows VM, because the USB device wouldn't automatically bind to the VM. Which is something even VirtualBox can do well. But maybe the tech has progressed, or there's a better solution to that issue now.

I "solved" that issue by getting a pcie usb card and passing that through.

This is the best way to connect VR headsets as well.

True, though you'd have to do some research on usb controllers that are supported. I had to do that for my Rift s.

I can't speak for Apple products, but passing USB devices with libvirt/qemu worked nicely so far for me (devices attach/detach automatically when the VM is powered on/off).

My main experience is with a Logitech g933 headset, which requires windows-only software to control certain parts of the device.

Do you run two gpus? Or can you handoff to the VM when it boots and back when you shut down? Mind sharing your libvirt xml or qemu script? I've been meaning to give this a try!

The host GPU is a Radeon rx460, the GTX 1070 is only used by the VM (when the VM is running). Here are the most significant configuration files involved in my setup: https://gist.github.com/tarruda/2ea928b90cdecb6f77c2f9ca65ba...

Note that modprobe configuration is important, as it assigns stub drivers to the GTX that allows it to be handed on demand to the VM.

Note that this is made for a debian 10 system (kernel 4.19), other distributions might have different requirements.

As for running the GTX 1070 on the host when the VM is not running, I'm not sure if it is possible.

Man, look at all that config. And this is considered a success story?

On Windows it's (1) install steam (2) play. To develop with my headless freebsd dev machine, it's just (1) install ssh (2) install x11 client (3) open term.

90% of that is just making a virtual machine, the equivalent would be acquiring/assembling your dev machine.

That big XML file is just how libvirt represents a VM. If you create a VM using libvirt GUI, most of the XML is generated.

I made some tweaks based on level1 forums information, but most of that is auto generated by a GUI.

Depending on your motherboard you might need two GPUs. In my case I use Proxmox and control VMs through is web GUI.

do you do anything special to sandbox the games?

I've been wanting to try out linux gaming and this makes it more interesting.

I've also been thinking about videoconferencing/etc on linux running in the same manner.

I am using Windows VM with GPU passthrough too. If you want it out of the box (well, kinda) I would recommend Proxmox. Proxmox is amazing hypervisor OS. Otherwise you need to study tricky things a lot: QEMU, Kernel configuration for VFIO.

Also you may need hardware, especially motherboard that supports VFIO groups well.

Fortunatly there are quite big communities like Reddit in this topic. Just google "VFIO"

Thank you for the pointers. I run proxmox right now, but mostly containers and it's a headless server. I've never thought about running it as a desktop system, which sounds intriguing!

With passthrough you could harness the power of the gpu for a plex vm/container on proxmox to help with transcoding.

Nothing special except what comes by default on debian 10 qemu setup, which I think has SELinux or AppArmor profiles enabled. I had to disable seccomp sandbox because it was causing random host freezes (might have been fixed on newest debian updates though).

Maybe it is not perfect sandbox for running malicious code, but surely it is enough to make games and anti cheat systems think they are running on a real computer.

It's seriously astonishing how much progress has been made in the past few years regarding gaming on Linux. When I first made the jump to using Linux as a daily driver circa 2016, I had to keep a Windows partition to be able to play any game in the Steam library that wasn't native on Linux. With steady improvements to Wine and Valve's release of Proton however, I can play most games out of the box or with a minimal amount of tweaking.

However, the games industry is still largely hostile to gaming on Linux. I've always had the best experiences with indie games or FOSS projects, and the only trouble I've had is with newly released AAA titles. I wouldn't even bother with newer multiplayer-only games or MMOs, as anti-cheat on Linux is a pretty reliable way to be falsely detected and instantly banned (not to mention requiring kernel-level access, which is utterly ridiculous).

>not to mention requiring kernel-level access, which is utterly ridiculous

Not a troll question: how do you detect cheats run at the kernel level without kernel-level access?

If you answer is "I don't want a game to have kernel level-access even if it means some cheats can't be detected", I respect that, but can you accept that others can make a different decision and not be "utterly ridiculous"?

I think the point here is that "Others" (i.e. My non-programmer friends who play Valorant, for example) don't know what a kernel is. I wouldn't have an issue installing something like Vanguard to play Tournaments but having a single point of failure like that (and totally unverified?) just to play casual is not good.

The bomber will always get through. I think the only way forward is by using a weaker anti-cheat combined with an ML and player-based (Like in CSGO) system to find cheaters. If cheaters get through, but they have to play within the bounds of what could be reasonably could be expected of a regular player, it doesn't really matter.

Push comes to shove you could make a fully visual triggerbot that doesn't even draw power from the machine (i.e. HDMI->Magic->MouseInput)

People do this. But the latency can be bad and your fake mouse can also be detected. Inputs from two mice would look pretty suspicious

I only play two games at the moment and neither of them are viable on Linux. Call of Duty Black Ops Cold War is a non-starter even with Proton. Assetto Corsa Competizione will work, but not with my Thrustmaster wheel.

Both of these are deal breakers on their own, but the real deal breaker is the uncertainty that comes with running Linux as a gamer. For example Cyberpunk 2077 comes out this week. Will it work? I have no idea. With my Windows machine I don't even need to check - of course it will.

Both of the latest COD games have absolutely enormous stability issues on their supported platforms. Infinity Ward (and possibly Treyarch to a lesser extent) seem to be only just in control of their games - rampant size on disk, instability, etc. When the game works it's rather good, but it really seems like COD's time out of the spotlight hasn't kept its developers sharp.

Cyberpunk is DRM free so it should be OK on launch and only a matter of time if it's not.

BOCW was in development hell and the developer was switched very last minute (with only a year until release IIRC).

Of course it was going to be a mess. They had to recycle and hack-and-slash assets to pull something together to meet the ambitious release date.

According to rumor, Sledgehammer Games was essentially unable to produce the game and has been demoted to a second tier support studio as a result.

In fairness, Call of Duty Black Ops Cold War crashes constantly for me on Windows. It's not a polished game on any platform.

I agree though, the uncertainty is definitely an issue. Maybe if enough games start to get played on linux, this will be the push that's needed for game devs to start supporting games on linux (even if that means it's through wine).

The game may be unpolished and unstable but I can still boot it up and play it with my friends, which is more than I can say about Linux gamers.

It is not that Linux is not a viable gaming platform. It is just developers not publishing games for Linux.

Why? because:

1. Windows comes preinstalled on many computers.

2. People do not install Linux because they cannot play games on it.

3. Game developers won't publish on Linux because there are not enough users.

Is 3 the real problem, or is it 2? 2 is the real problem. If everyone committed to use Linux, game developers would follow immediately.

If you use Windows only for gaming then just buy a console, it is cheaper.

"If you use Windows only for gaming then just buy a console, it is cheaper."

It's cheaper to spend money on a console, controllers, games, and a yearly online subscription than to use my existing pc? I find that hard to believe. Especially with games routinely going on sale and overall costing less on pc. Even on my Switch, games are more expensive on average.

I game as much as I can on linux (debian bullseye) but dualbooting to windows for specific games is rather easy. Unrelated, but I would not recommend debian for gaming purposes. Steam didn't even start correctly due to some static dependencies until about a month ago.

> It is not that Linux is not a viable gaming platform. It is just developers not publishing games for Linux.

As a user this makes it a non-viable platform.

Cyberpunk, like any other single player title is much more likely to work than games like COD, Apex or Fortnite. Most multiplayer games use some additional components like the EAC that explicitly is made to not run on Wine AFAIK. IIRC, EAC did work on Wine until Epic games patched it so it wouldn't anymore.

Every anti-cheat is hit or miss with Wine depending on the methods they use. Even Valve's own VAC continues to have issues with Proton: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/issues/3225

Like VAC, EAC does have a native Linux version, but that does require a native Linux port of games.

>With my Windows machine I don't even need to check - of course it will.

Anecdote: I've bought games at launch that failed to boot. I've bought many games that required fiddling with settings (locales, drivers, etc.) to get them working. Linux is a more extreme afterthought but PC is also rarely a first-class citizen.

It will probably run it, but better be prepared for a bumpy/glitchy experience: https://www.pcgamer.com/how-buggy-is-cyberpunk-2077-really/

its just part of being a simracer i think. doubt any of the big games; iracing, ac, rf2, will ever get proper multimonitor/peripheral driver support linux

ACC uses Unreal Engine so they really should.

rf2's tyre model is almost awe-inspiring for a game, the game itself is not, sadly.

I switched back from Pop!_OS about a month ago, after nearly a year of using it exclusively.

My previous laptop broke, so I got a new one. Of course I immediately created a Pop! partition and started installing stuff. I tried Doom Eternal... and it was running extremely slow for what you'd expect from a RTX 2080. Surely enough, I switched to my Windows 10 partition and the game ran smooth like butter over there. I spent some time looking at the issue but couldn't figure it out.

I decided to love back to Windows for the time being, enjoy the laptop and try again later on.

Thats interesting. I am running on a GTX 1650, so not what you would consider a real powerful card but it will run at just above 100fps at 1080p with everything maxed out. But that is with some frame stalls when it comes to, what I assume, shader compilation/texture load-transcoding.

I am interested to see were the bottleneck could be.

I was thinking either thermal or power throttling. That's the biggest hurdle for high-end graphics cards on laptops.

This mirrors my experience. Proton gives frequent issues including both crashes and slow downs.

But it's worth a try. Some games run well enough for me that I don't bother booting into windows to play them.

I'm a bit skeptical of all the positivity here.

Heck if I can't edit mouse acceleration with ease, how hard is it going to be to watch Netflix? Do I need to downgrade chromium to 30.4 just to install some plugin incompatible with the v32 chromium?

These are real issues that you'd expect Ubuntu to have working from defaults.

I'm not asking for every porn website to work, but all FAANG websites to work.

This line is getting really boring, especially on HN, which should be at least a bit more tech savvy than the regular forum.

I got a laptop. Removed it from the box. Installed Ubuntu, tweaked the dock drivers a bit. Everything works as it would on a Windows machine and no I don't need to downgrade Chrome to have Netflix, Spotify, Facebook, HBO or whatever work. Zero, zero compatibility issues and I can't be the only one since millions of people use Linux daily.

Netflix not playing in Chromium is a Chromium problem, not a Linux problem. Don't blame Linux for Chrome and Netflix making the web a proprietary DRM shithole.

If you want Netflix in Linux it's as simple as installing the official Google Chrome browser.

> Heck if I can't edit mouse acceleration with ease

Not sure if this is you, but those of our community who are really into the objective sensory aspects are not a terribly good sell for Linux right now IMO. Usually they're looking to rep their OS to other people, whatever that OS ends up being, so rather than build on its strengths, they look for a specific set of strengths to which they're already attuned over time spent with other OSes. Ergonomics and sensory aesthetics are big preferences of this group. Good refresh rates, overall feeling of smoothness, little wastes of their time eliminated, etc.

Mouse acceleration is IMO a good pointer to this kind of sensibility. Unfortunately if that's really important to you (not that you can / can't tweak it, but the _way_ in which you need to do some perceived extra work to configure it) it's important to know that it may be best to build on and adapt to Linux's other strengths, or try it on the side in something less important, or stay with what you already like.

Other phrases like "people should expect" or "things like X should just work" are also good clues here. Nothing wrong with that, but Linux brings really huge subjective strengths to the table (a deeper connection to what do _you_ need or want, starting closer to bare hardware, vs. what do _people_ need or want, starting closer to end user experience) unless you are doing specific types of work where Linux is already a known dominant solution for groups of people.

I agree with you on the mouse acceleration part. Linux distributions are bad in some aspects, and mouse acceleration is one of them.

About the Netflix part, I don't think that's Linux's fault.

Netflix works, at least in Firefox.

> Heck if I can't edit mouse acceleration with ease

Mouse/trackpad/trackpoint configuration can be one of the most painful things to do on Linux. Netflix and friends are easy (unless you want HD sometimes >.>)

Something's off but I chalk it up to beefy config and some specific games. None of my games run on my laptop (hd 520 igpu) I can play games like the witness on windows, hl2, the cave, the talos principle, portal 2, dead cells, etc. and none runs easily on Linux. Except Dott and kentucky route zero.

Unity actually exports Linux binaries so most developers could do Linux natively.

The issue ends up being support cost vs sales.

If 1% of your fan base runs Ubuntu, but they're 50% of your big reports, it's cheaper to not worry about them.

It's also not as trivial as just flipping to "Linux" in a combo box and re-exporting. Getting the game to run well requires work, from writing additional platform dependent code, through fixing issues caused by changing the graphics backend (unless you use OpenGL on Windows, which you probably don't) to a lot of additional QA needed to make sure your Linux build still runs after the latest changes.

I'm a solo game developer (working on [1] right now) and while I get many more requests for a native Linux version than I expected, I'm still reluctant to invest the necessary development time. It's ironic, but the very fact that Proton is so solid makes it even less likely that a Linux build will exist, since I'm fairly certain people will be able to play Slipways under Proton with hardly any issues if they want to.

[1]: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1264280/Slipways

For your game did you open an LLC to publish it.

I'm debating doing that now, but it comes off as a ton of work where I don't particularly think I'll make money .

Admittedly I think it’s not a ton of work with there being things like Stripe Atlas (I think there are others as well) that automate a lot of it: https://stripe.com/atlas

You still have to legally file taxes for the LLC and stuff. Feels a bit silly if I'm ultimately not planing on making money

> Unity actually exports Linux binaries so most developers could do Linux natively.

It'd be great if it was that easy, last time (been over a year to be fair) we tried we had weird unexplainable shader errors and graphics glitches, windows build via proton works fine

Sadly not worth the dev time to investigate that more thouroughly at the moment

The bugs are probably still there on the Windows version but those users are less accustomed to filling bug reports.

Or Unity Linux is less stable ?

Like if y'all really want I can upload the Linux build and make it clear it's not going to work as well. I can't support every single distro after all

If you do decide to support Linux, keep in mind you don't have to support every distro. As long as you support Ubuntu it'll probably be good enough for most people. I say this as someone who doesn't use Ubuntu, because I run Steam (and games) in an ubuntu:20.04 docker container precisely because of how many games and direct-from-manufacturer software equates "supported on Linux" with "supported on Ubuntu".

(I don't have any problems, and I get the benefit of compatibility, not cluttering my host OS with 32-bit libraries, and controlling what information the software can access from my system - no worry about it stealing my browser cookies, for example. The only problem is I have to use the Proton runtimes instead of the new "Steam Linux Runtime", because the latter requires cgroups and thus would need a privileged container, but it's very rare to find games that don't work with Proton - recent examples I came across being Chip's Challenge and Hardspace:Shipbreaker.)

I honestly think that some game developers should seriously consider cutting off their games feet and open sourcing them. Nothing interesting e.g. just the parts that do the slow stuff that talks to the OS.

Especially in very niche games with small teams, there is 0 IP in the boring parts of the game. If your code isn't too much of a clusterfuck, I will happily try and fix the bug myself and make a PR.

That and I firmly believe that open source is by far the most efficient way to ensure a reasonable code quality.

Isn't the Steam Linux Runtime supposed to handle the distro support problem? Or are there issues with that too? I was under the impression that Valve had essentially solved the distro support issue for Linux games distributed on Steam.

I think that's better than nothing at all. But I'd make it absurdly clear, all tickets regarding Linux will be selectively completed at my [devs] whim.

Yeah I would imagine Unity Linux gets a lot less attention within Unity than the Windows version.

Which means higher quality bug reports, e.g. logs.

Gaming on steam works on Centos/RHEL as well as Ubuntu too. While most folks would not think of Centos as a desktop OS, we end up using it for our dev workstations as it matches up nicely with production servers. Christmas time last year, ended up having a bunch of vacation time to burn through and set out on a quest to get a game running on my work rig.

The planets aligned with Centos 8, Steam, and AMD drivers somewhere around late January. Things went from crazy difficult to just working.

Over the Spring/Summer/Fall I've seen significant progress on what worked on Windows vs Proton vs native Linux. A significant chunk of my Steam library now plays on my primary box. When the day comes where I actually get my hands on a new CPU/video card... those will actually go into my workstation.

Thanks for this! I was wondering if it would work on CentOS. I had Ubuntu on my personal computer because I had Ubuntu in my mind as the easy one for personal use, but I was working with Cent on another desktop and was actually surprised how much I liked the desktop experience on Cent.

https://negativo17.org/steam/

Are the packages I used on my Centos 8 box. Looks like I had the rpm fusion packages (free and non free) and EPEL libraries. Hardest part for me was getting the video card working. Perhaps went down the rabbit hole of getting the AMD proprietary drivers in place - which was really rough early on. Not sure folks even use those now.

sudo dnf config-manager --add-repo=https://negativo17.org/repos/fedora-steam.repo sudo dnf -y install steam kernel-modules-extra

I've been using Linux as my main (and, really, only) personal OS since Windows 7 went EOL.

I have an HTC Vive. There are many VR games that don't work at all even with Proton. There are many games that do work though.

The only game that doesn't work that I truly miss is Planetside 2.

But your typical big name games do work, even ones that aren't on Steam. Doom, Factorio, Kerbal Space Program, EVE Online -- these all work wonderfully. Space Engineers works "okay" -- it has an issue where the process threads will linger in the background even after you exit.

Blizzard's Battle.net games also work great -- you just have to start it with Lutris and do some magic to enable Vulkan. WoW and Diablo III work beautifully.

If I have one complaint about Steam is that clicking the blue button to tell Steam to kill a game doesn't work. Space Engineers and World of Warships both have to be manually killed sometimes and it would be real nice if Steam would do it so I don't have to open a terminal and find the relevant Wine garbage to do it myself.

As many folks said, VR on linux is niche within a niche.

My biggest pain is that video drivers really suck when it comes to VR. On windows you have stuff like async reprojection, on linux you have frequent lags and fps spikes, and nvidia does not seem to be interested enough to fix this.

Awesome to hear! May I ask how you've gotten Space Engineers to work?

Space Engineers doesn't work out-of-the-box on Linux. But you can right-click on it in the list in Steam and check the box that says "Force the use of a specific Steam Play compatibility tool". Then select a version of compatibility tools from the list and see if it starts up. For me, it started fine with 4.11-13.

There's also a room in Keen Software House's Discord which is dedicated for unofficial Linux help. Sometimes a patch will break the game in an unexpected way. For example I remember a patch early this year that made it so that the version check would crash the game on Linux (something to do with KSH's HTTPS certificate) and the easiest solution was to just null-route the patch server address in iptables or blacklist the domain in pihole until a later patch fixed the problem.

You might know already, but https://www.protondb.com/ has user reports for Proton games, the reports often include tweaks if a game doesn't work without tweaking.

Yeah, I've checked there already, but the steps just didn't seem to work for me (it's a .NET/Mono app). Maybe it's just my specific system configuration or something ...

Ctrl+Alt+ESC and click the window of the game

No. That does different things in different desktop window managers.

In KDE it changes the cursor to a kill-cursor.

In Cinnamon it kills and restarts the GPU renderer.

Neither cleanly expresses what I want to do: kill a process which doesn't have a window but is owned by one which does.

Funnily enough, one of my most played games on Linux is Age of Empires 2: Definitive Edition, a Microsoft game. No rendering/frame issues and got the multiplayer working (manual steps needed [0]). Less and less reasons to boot on Windows!

[0] https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/issues/3189#issuecom...

Everything works without any fuss if you use Glorious Eggroll fork of Proton. I've played 100s of hours of AOE2 DE this year on Linux. Before it took manual steps, but I recently switched to a new distro, used GE, and needed nothing more: https://github.com/GloriousEggroll/proton-ge-custom

I've been playing Halo Master Chief Collection on Debian in Steam. It is amazing that gaming on Linux has come this far. RDR2 and Skyrim run better, faster, and at higher graphics quality and framerates than on Windows 10.

What resolution? I've been very annoyed it's unplayable for me at all but the lowest resolution, despite it being a 2D game and I having 32 gig ram.

3840x1440. I'm running it on an AMD 3900X, 32GB of RAM and a GTX 1070 on Ubuntu 20.04.

Shiiiit. I would to do 3840 x 2160, after getting used to that with HD edition.

So I finally got the NVidia Intel switchover thing working, but it didn't help at all. I have a GTX 950M which is quite a bit worse/older if https://gpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Nvidia-GTX-950M-vs-Nvi... is to be trusted. Maybe GPU matters more than I thought, and mine is just too old and crummy? But I thought I read it was still software rendered.

For what it's worth, I don't think I had to do that for ubuntu on steam to get it to work back in April.

as i understand it the big roadblock for multiplayer AAA titles is anticheat, and dont see anyway that changes until linux eats into the MS marketshare (but it should.. linux is a joy!)

I have an anti-cheat startup, and Linux support is a big priority for us. The segmentation problem on Linux is a real challenge for us. It’s likely we will only ever be able to support the big distros, and we also are exploring using TPM remote attestation. Both of these things take away user freedom to tinker with their systems, an ability Linux enthusiasts enjoy. But with this freedom implicitly comes with the freedom to cheat in online video games. I’m happy to hear thoughts on this.

> and we also are exploring using TPM remote attestation

I can already tell this is very likely not going to work fully, or even work for a sizeable chunk of Linux installations out there. Many platforms don't have TPMs, or have TPMs from unknown CAs. Or firmware that you're not aware of. Or even worse, people might just be running a Linux distribution that you don't know about. Or a patched kernel. Or a bootloader that doesn't measure the next stage into TPM. Not to mention, even the most popular distributions allow you to do anything with root access, things that you just won't be able to measure, but that might allow people to cheat.

TPMs really only make sense for _very_ controlled environments if you want to prevent hardware tampering at this level. The diversity of Linux distributions (and PCs in general) truly works against you here.

how would you stop someone sticking in a dodgy PCI card (disguised as an innocent one) that can read the entire machine's memory using DMA?

I’m not going to go into specifics but there are several software methods to both detect and prevent these sorts of attacks, since DMA requires cooperation from the host CPU. There are several anticheats in production today that employ these techniques with great success.

Require video card PCIe passthrough and host the game on KVM? Take something like firecracker or some runt kernel, don't do a full system vm, just enough to run the game and anti-cheat?

I guess I don’t understand what the goal of that would be, since the kvm host still must be trusted.

Why would Linux be a priority with you when actually no one use that platform at scale where anticheat matters?

For the same reason that I have decided to have our CI build and test on ARMv8, even though hardly any (PC) games are on that architecture. I try to be forward thinking, even if it may be a longshot. Apple's M1 may just bring an era of even further segmentation of desktop platforms. I want to be prepared for that.

I work in AAA studios and I worked on online anti cheat, you won't be able to sell your anti cheat if you advertise it as working on Linux, studios don't want there game running on Linux / virtualization because of cheating.

> Both of these things take away user freedom to tinker with their systems, an ability Linux enthusiasts enjoy.

I just want to play video games and I use linux - in order to play multiplayer video games I need anticheat and this means giving that up.

I would also argue that other than a minority of vocal users no one wakes up in the morning looking forward to tinker with their system, we just sometimes have to, doesn't mean we like it.

Yes, this is the big problem. Indie games usually run just fine in wine and don't do anything too advanced and just work out of the box; your biggest problem is probably going to be them installing stuff into weird places or directly onto C:\gamename.

The rootkit, driver signing enforcement, driver ACLing of anything it doesn't like, vulnerable drivers, all forms of emulation detection, failing any of those = permanent ban is a whole other problem.

Anticheats are anti-consumer; They restrict what you can do on your own machine. It's better not to have these games.

They also make some games actually playable, which is a shame.

Ultimately anti-cheat within the application itself, I find, should be considered acceptable whereas Riot's Vanguard/rootkit solution is an ugly hack. Valve seem to be showing it's possible via both automation (ML) and community judgement to make achieve results - the aim needs to ensure all players look "normal", not stop all cheats (the latter aim is impossible).

I mean good luck getting rid of the biggest games around then. The majority of the top 10 games on Steam are multiplayer games with anti-cheat systems in place. Even outside of Steam, Riot and Blizzard have games with huge player bases and they all use anti-cheat systems.

Ahh yes I will surely miss COD and FIFA /s

My bigger concern would be a permanent ban on an indie game.

I still prefer anticheat to having a multiplayer game ruined by players that move at 10x normal speed and dual-wield fully automatic, infinite-ammo sniper rifles rigged to never miss.

Uh, no its not fun to play a multiplayer game full of cheaters

The problem with anti cheat is that those are literally rootkits.

yup. i wonder if there's room for a different paradigm in the Linux community that works via some alternative like reporting or karma instead of spyware

Getting just EAC (Easy Anti-Cheat) to work on Linux would immediately make so many titles work flawlessly. Too many games are literally unable to run on Linux/Wine because EAC won't let them. For example, Apex Legends.

Can confirm it can run crysis, though the video files are laggy.

Also runs vrchat, this is on a 960M mobile chip on ubuntu 18.04.

I couldn't get ubuntu 20 to have proper vsync for the main desktop so I downgraded to 18. The nvidia drivers were causing problems, such as the main desktop not having vsync and not enabling vsync settings even if set manually, until an ubuntu system update automatically pushed update 455 to me and fixed everything. A number of nvidia tutorials or suggestions online are entirely out of date.

Can you use Proton for games you've purchased on GOG? I've been funneling more (not all) of my purchases to the DRM-free store front lately.

Yup. Check out Lutris - you don't need Steam to get the benefits of Proton (and you don't need a specifically Proton Wine build for most games).

GOG is sadly not at all linux friendly. Not a surprise, given the owner.

You can look into lutris or GameHub and get the games to work via that.

GOG doesn't have to be Linux friendly if we're talking about Proton since the entire purpose of Proton is to be a Windows compatibility layer.

Though GOG is Linux friendly, there are tons of games with Linux versions on it. The only thing you miss on Linux with GOG is GOG Galaxy but at least personally even though i use Windows i do not care much about Galaxy and instead i just download the games from the website (which notifies you if there are any updates).

Afaik GOG even release patches for some games so they work in Wine.

(Which however didn't help me on an older Mac, as Wine gaming seems to be sensitive to hardware and drivers.)

Apparently, yes, though I've never tried it: https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/k2kyjt/is_it_...

The itch.io Linux client will use your existing install of Wine to launch Windows games. If GOG ever ported Galaxy to Linux, they could do the same thing. Just have the user install Wine from the distro repos.

Those of you praising Proton, what distro and what gpu are you using? Are the days of nVidia bad, AMD good for driver support over?

Nvidia has always had great Linux drivers, the main problem with them being that they are dkim based so every now and then things get a bit screwey when upgrading your kernel. Thankfully this doesn't happen nearly as often as it used to.

While I can't speak first hand for AMD as I've not owned an AMD/ATI card in decades I do know that AMD and Valve have dedicated Linux driver deveopers directly contributing them to the kernel and have heard nothing but good things (taken with a grain of salt because fanboys will fanboy).

actually AMD drivers are open source and works better that NVIDA proprietary blob.

I'm using ubuntu 20.04 and it's working great. I actually use it to play the game remotely from my linux desktop on my mbp via steam link. The desktop is currently using integrated graphic so I can only play indie games at the moment. I'm still waiting for my new gpu to arrive so I can't test any of the AAA game.

Funny thing is I sometimes use steam remote play to access my linux desktop since it's faster and has very little lag compared to VNC. I simply add nautilus to steam game library so I can launch it remotely via steam link, then press "super/⌘" key to access the desktop.

You may be interested in https://www.gamingonlinux.com/index.php?module=statistics&vi... — AMD is on the rise (40% vs 56% NVIDIA), Arch based on the rise (39% vs 39% Ubuntu based), Pop!_OS among Ubuntu based, though I do not think there would be much difference among distributions.

I am not gamer anymore. I've had NVIDIA GPU, binary drivers were not pleasant experience, so bad that I've switched to Intel GPU. Today open source AMD GPU driver is a clear path forward, and it would improve with each release.

Have used both manjaro and ubuntu. Have used an nvidia gtx 770 and an amd apu on ryzen 4700. I'd say I've had a few issues with both, majority of problems can be resolved with a days worth of tinkering. Glad to have done that, have been casually gaming on mah linux for over 5 years.

Gentoo w/ nvidia driver; only driver problems in 2019-2020 I've had are "sometimes I need to wait to upgrade the kernel because the driver doesn't support it yet."

Ubuntu 18.04 with GTX1070. Used the drivers that came with the OS and I might go play some Hellblade in a moment

Arch, nvidia 980ti, using the proprietary driver. I have had a really good time with it.

Ubuntu 20.04 LTS with an RTX 2070 Super GPU.

NixOS with amdgpu. Works really well.

Hmm, I'd like to see a macOS version of this..... with x86 translation via Rosetta2 !! :D

disclaimer: yes I know I'm asking for a free version of Crossover. Though not entirely "free" since I've already paid quite a bit of money to Valve over the years for games that no longer work on macOS Catalina. (And also for Steam Link hardware.)

Note that Codeweavers (the developers behind WINE and a good chunk of Proton) have 13 full time developers working on Proton right now: https://boilingsteam.com/podcast-with-james-ramey-full-trans...

Is it just me or is that page unavailable? Couldn't find the episode elsewhere neither.

You cna check it again now, it's fixed :)

I really need Steam to add a "Might work in Linux, worth your time to try, but not guaranteed" icon along with the usuals. Because there's a bunch of stuff I'd like to play but I refuse to purchase if I'd have to fire up another machine for it.

If you’ve owned a Steam game for less than two weeks and played for less than two hours, you can get a refund without hassle: https://store.steampowered.com/steam_refunds

It's not linked from the store, but Protondb is exactly what you're looking for. Also, Steam refunds make is rather risk free.

Get Blizzard games (WoW especially) to work perfectly all the time with minimal effort, and I'm down to switch for good. I tried VFIO (lots of effort), and it worked great for Blizzard games, but showed massive frame loss in games like Jedi: Fallen Order.

I got Flight Simulator working on linux... this is a dream come true. Thanks Proton/Steam :)

Apparently Falcon BMS works on Proton too - for those unfamiliar it's an extremely detailed (study-) sim of the F-16, combined with a dynamic campaign in which the quality of your virtual piloting affects the surrounding war rather than just missions like DCS.

As soon as DCS actually knows what threads are we're in business.

What's astounding is that the base game -- Falcon 4.0 -- was released in 1998. I vaguely remember struggling to play it back then, being very proud to get a hit in a BVR engagement. I suppose 20 years later I've got the hardware to enable all the graphical bells and whistles (flaps and ailerons?).

Holy cow, I use a Mac, Linux, PlayStation and Switch, literally all the major platforms FS2020 does not run on. I was this ->-<- close to getting an Xbox (when it's out) or a Windows machine just for that.

What version? FS2020? or FSX?

FS2020 of course :) multi-player and ATC voices are not working yet, but everything else seems to be fine!

Real pending question is will Cyberpunk work on linux?

Sort of an extension of this: does Google Stadia availability imply an official build for linux? Are they under some kind of exclusivity agreement with regards to a linux version?

Not necessarily; technically there is a Linux build being developed, but it being used on Stadia doesn't necessarily mean it will be released to others.

Just Dance 2020/2021 is a good example of this: the PC version was discontinued in 2017, but 2020 and 2021 were also released on Stadia -- without an accompanying PC build.

I think it's mostly that CDProjekt and GOG got called out by the Linux community for pulling support of the Witcher 3, and some other things. The CEO had a bit of a tantrum about it and now won't support Linux.

The difference with an official linux build vs Stadia using linux is the fact that they (currently) have only one hardware configuration to worry about.

Cyberpunk is a DX12-only title, isn't DX12 under Proton still relatively immature?

Death Stranding was another recent DX12 release and it looks like Proton struggles with it

I really don't see the issue with dual booting. I work and do most of my personal stuff in Linux, but when I want to play videogames I just reboot my machine and open Windows. It's less effort even than going to my living room and booting my PS4.

I wonder if they've looked into to doing the same on Mac. Just ship some Wine like shim.

Proton initially had some Mac support via MoltenVK, but they never managed to get it runs stable enough, and all mentions of it have been removed from the repo 2 years ago.

https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/commit/a84120449d817...

I’m wondering the same thing, wine works well on the Mac, and Porting Kit and Play On Mac are basically volunteer efforts at the same thing (custom versions of Wine for playing games) and work pretty well for slightly older games.

I re-played Fallout 3 and New Vegas this year using Porting Kit but had to dual boot into Windows to play 4.

Anti-cheat apps like BattleEye still prevent a lot of games from being worthwhile on Linux.

This is true. I've just pivoted to not playing games with restrictive anti-cheat. It's not ideal, but it's only a small handful of games and I've got plenty of other stuff to play, and the stuff I do play runs flawlessly. Well worth it to me to never have to worry about Windows nonsense ever again.

Recent convert to Linux gaming here. A small tip to any other potential new linux gamers - if you encounter painful input lag, check that Vsync is turned off! For some odd reason, Vsync on Linux feels much much much worse to me than on Windows.

This (vsync off) also fixes UI flickering for me, in case anyone has that. Factorio in particular but probably other games as well.

Seems like this gets posted every couple of weeks on HN. And I got duped into this.

The caveat with this is that many games don’t work in multiplayer due to incompatible anti-chest software. Seems to have a pretty good track record in stand alone gaming though.

> incompatible anti-chest software

That explains so much.

anti-cheat. Damned autocorrect :-)

I play coh2 via Proton https://s.natalian.org/2020-12-08/coh2-proton.png on Archlinux via `flatpak run com.valvesoftware.Steam`

It works! My only complaint is that if I Alt+Tab to another dwm view, I can't seem to get back into the game. No idea where the window is. Not sure where to get help with the matter.

Filed a bug about my issue here: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/issues/4443

I didn't know AOE was working on Linux, saves me the headache of setting up Windows. https://www.protondb.com/app/221380

I was shocked how well even tripple A games work out of the box when I installed Metro Exodus recently. I get 60fps+ on 4k at max settings on my 1080TI on Manjaro Gnome. Here is a screenshot: https://twitter.com/m5blum/status/1312878889711079426

I still keep Windows around as a dual boot option for games that don't work well with Proton though, but I barely need to use it.

I tried installing Steam on Linux Mint but it fails to load. What's the point of all this work if you can't even get Steam to load on the most popular distro of all time?

Proton is the best. Heavy user here - there's very little it can't play and it basically made me wipe my Windows partition as it was no longer needed.

I wouldn't mind dual-booting but I strongly prefer having independent physical devices for each OS. The way that the bootloaders can try to clobber one another can result in frustrating breakage.

Unfortunately my MSI board's BIOS doesn't seem have support for enable/disable the SATA or NVMe controller. I'd gladly take a recommendation of a micro-ITX board that does. This kind of thing doesn't make the spec sheet.

You can do it with 2 disks. You just need to unplug the Linux disk while installing windows. If you then make Linux the primary boot disk in bios, grub re-maps the drives so when booting Windows, it thinks it is the primary drive and never re-writes the Linux boot loader. I did that for years without issue.

Joining my voice to the choir: Proton works pretty dang well.

I've made Skyrim, Fallout, GTA 5, etc. work (or kind of work) under WINE and Proton is so much easier and cleaner. On top of the Linux native games, like those from Paradox, I've got no reason to use Windows outside of my work laptop -- I do AD admin stuff occasionally so a Win10 box is useful there...

But solid 10/10, would recommend Proton.

I've been using Mint for a while (as a beginner) and for the most part I love it. I can't get fallout 4 to work for some reason. GTA and RDR2 won't work cause of the rockstar software. I have gotten Borderlands 2 and Saints Row IV to work. I would probably completely switch over if I could also get my plex server to work, but right now I can't...

Unfortunately, for many of the online games that have logins, Steam forces you to create a new login, since they track commissions based on the accounts created inside Steam.

For Linux users, this if you want to use Steam, you have to start from scratch. I'd rather stick with Wine/Lutris, even if it is buggier.

You can use Proton even if you're not using Steam.

I installed Pop!_OS last month and Proton has seriously moved most of my non-AAA gaming time off Windows. Indie titles and 2D games run flawlessly at it.

I never thought Linux gaming has improved so much. Heck, Steam has more available titles in Linux than in my Mac.

There goes Windows. Intel is probably gone too, if the Apple M1 chip eventually gets some serious competition from other cool ARM chips. And Linux get something similar to Apple's rosetta to emulate the Intel instruction set.

Anticheat seems to be the biggest problem. Most games I play are multiplayer and most of them do not work on Linux. The only exception is Dota 2, which is in Steam.

Like at the moment, I need to play Genshin Impact, but it does not work.

It would be neat to see a game's proton rating displayed in Steam's client UI. You could just glance at your entire library and kind of feel out how comfortable you are jumping to Linux.

Sadly many games better played on windows. Yes you got 10%-20% fps boost but the screen tearing is absolutely terrible, and it's no secret Nvidia has better driver support on Windows.

I can’t wait until we can play desktop games on ARM. Sony and Microsoft should seriously look into this, Apple could come out with their own console if they nail 3D.

In a sense the iOS devices and Apple TVs paired with a controller (Xbox, Playstation 4) are already fairly close to an Apple video game console

Recently noticed that Overlord 2 actually loads dramatically faster on Linux with Proton than on Windows (inter level loads). Wonder what is up with that?

Completely threw my M$ install away this summer and haven't looked back. The last puzzle in the Linux on the Desktop just slid into place.

Many AAA anti-cheats don't work in linux :(

in case some dont know:

proton is a config shim around wine and dxvk (both foss).

wine is a 27year old project that does the bulk of the work.

credit where credit is due.

Gaming on linux would mean me throwing away windows forever.. I really hope it keeps on moving in this direction

With Proton and SoftMaker Office I have no reasons to have a Windows installation anymore.

But that is not the case for everyone.

>macOS/iOS development absolutely requires a mac.

Or a VM.

Out of curiosity is there any possibility that the new Microsoft Flight Simulator could ever run on Linux?

dxvk was a massive success for DX11 games on Linux. Now vkd3d-proton is a major effort to make DX12 games playable.

Thanks to all developers who are involved in these and other projects like Wine, Proton, Mesa, radv/aco and etc. which make gaming on Linux great these days.

Has anybody had much experience with unreal engine in Linux? How is performance?

The only thing missing is anti-cheat. I don’t know if it will ever happen.

Windows backward compatibility and gaming might not keep it in the game if arm and m1 start to get really big traction. The performance advantage is there.

Arm may be too late for the ps5 gen but is there any question that ps6 gen won't be an arm SOC?

And I wonder if apple will launch m1 as a gaming console.

How does the Unity editor itself run on wine these days? Is it stable?

I just installed Ubuntu 20.10 on a new machine. Is anyone else actually able to run Steam in this environment (or 20.04)? I can't get it to work - even after running

sudo apt-get install libnvidia-gl-390:i386

Is it free software?

This is really the nail in the coffin for Linux-native game ports. It's really, really hard to justify expending the effort

> This is really the nail in the coffin for Linux-native game ports. It's really, really hard to justify expending the effort

If things work flawlessly, do we care?

If companies want to support Linux out of the box, they don't have to expend resources creating multiple builds and need only to focus on testing a single build. Even a token amount of testing from a single QA engineer (does it run?) would go a _long way_ into ensuring we can run things on Linux.

From lurking in wine-dev, games that work but have a few issues progress much faster than ones that don't even boot up (or they do but don't actually work).

It's a bit unfortunate that the Win32 api is being used as a lingua franca, but I'll take it.

Maybe in the short term, but if it means a bigger part of the steam userbase is running games on Linux, it will become economically justified for more developers to work on first-party titles.

I've been hearing that line for close to two decades. I don't think Valve even supports their old GoldSrc games that they ported to run on Linux way back.

When companies find that their games are already working on Linux, they may be able to justify spending a little extra effort on testing and fixing a couple of bugs here and there. Then over time it may become an officially supported configuration, and they may do Linux-specific optimizations or features. It's a stepping stone. Embrace, extend, extinguish in reverse!

I would imagine a large part is segmentation. You can’t even guarantee that X is installed on the system. This is a hard problem since most games are proprietary.

Edit: commenters make good counterpoints

I mean for games you are allowed to have dependencies. If you require X or XWayland I don’t think you’ll find anyone complaining.

This is really not an issue, Steam has a standard runtime for instance, and bundling dependencies is always possible.

I don’t really mind. Having one translation layer for everything instead of two versions of every app probably reduces the overall amount of work.

Weirdly, on an older-ish Mac I'm having lots of trouble making 90s games work in Wine—basically, out of a dozen games only ‘Grand Prix Legends’ runs, since it kept being patched by the community for the past twenty years. Judging by the app db, Wine has some special relationship with Linux and Nvidia. Mac and Intel, not so much—I can have desktop software and not much else. Otherwise I'm stuck with PS1 emulation.

I have craving for SWAT 2 and I must satisfy it, even if it means installing Windows 98 on the NAS.

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