Out of the top fifty games on Steam, 70% work on Linux

My big complaint is the number of titles that receive a Platinum rating on ProtonDB, in spite of technical issues. I have purchased more than one title with a Platinum rating that had significant issues running on my machine.

This is compounded that Steam/ProtonDB user reports typically have an abysmal level of detail to replicate a working configuration. Someone got it to run flawlessly, but there is so much wine configuration jargon that each time I need to dig into the issues, I waste time on something that otherwise would work on Windows. I would love if there was a 'share my Proton configuration' per game that could be made available to the community.

Do you have anything to back that up? In my personal experience Overwatch absolutely doesn't perform better on Linux. Haven't tried Borderlands, but in any case two games don't count as 'many'. Unless you mean all Borderlands games.

To expand a bit on some of the "tweaks" that must be endured....

To play War Thunder you must use the launcher to set it in a window at native screen resolution then start the game. Then you move the game to your desired monitor and Layer>Always on top, and Undecorate the window.

Boom. War Thunder works.

While many games work there are hundreds of annoyances, crashes and quirks that don't exist on Windows at all.

* alt-tabbing out of a game will often crash a lot of games, so you can't really use discord or similar team chat software properly without risking crashing out of the game. * If you have a multi-monitor system the game will frequently start on the wrong screen. Thanks to how mondern video drivers identify the monitors even switch the cables round might not work! * A lot of games will work fine at 1080p. At 4K you will see performance problems, also streaming to other people can be terrible. * Single player games that require high refresh rates and stable framerates like Doom Eternal will have variable performance for no reason what-so-ever and are rock solid on Windows (I had two game crashes in the past year and I play a lot of Doom Eternal). * Loads of older games that use the build engine or the KeX engine like Blood does not work properly with Proton. * Lots of indie games do not work at all. * Game streaming on discord will tank framerate on a lot of games in Linux, but it works flawlessly in Windows. * Some graphics setttings just don't take at all, it doesn't seem to error.

Everytime one of these articles get posted there are comments such as this where people say that it is flawless and it simply isn't true. Having a dual screen setup isn't a strange setup these days at all and using Discord is the choice of most PC gamers these days. I stream games to friends (some are disabled and can't play the games, others might want just to watch me play the game as I am good at these games).

I am quite proficient with Linux (I've been using it since 2002) and I cannot recommend it. Maybe it is good enough for you but you and many the people on this thread are giving a false impression of the solution. I have about 450 games in my steam library (I've had a steam account since Half life 2 was released) and about 50 in my GoG account and I've tried a fair few, everything from modern triple A titles to older games, so I have a good sample size for anyone claiming that is merely ancedotal.

As for GPU support, it's fine. I use an older GeForce card that works perfectly fine on Manjaro, and I haven't seen any driver issues so far (though I don't use Wayland, so ymmv). I've even been surprised by their control panel, which lets you easily enable G-sync on supported monitors, force compositing, micromanage your displays, adjust color calibration and more. I've heard the situation is much better on AMD cards, but I have yet to run into any issues with Nvidia.

Pretty good on AMD, still somewhat behind for Nvidia (Raytracing is being worked on, and DLSS is to come at some point). AMD is the preferred way to go for VR as well as they support reprojection on Linux, but Nvidia does not yet.

For me that was 2000.

Furthermore, 19 of those 50 games (38%) support Linux natively.

Software, hardware driver installation is so comfortable on Linux. Everything is a few commands away. Screenshots? I've never had trouble there.

You wrote Desktop Environment (capitalized). Linux isn't a Prepackaged End Product. You can get something like that from the popular distributions. I find Ubuntu plug and play, for example. That said, I usually assemble my own desktop environment, which is great for me, though I realise not everyone wants to put in the effort.

It'd be awesome if Valve could reward those who develop for Linux and properly support it, but it seems unlikely. At least Proton is improving regularly and is making it better in one way at least.

Proton is also essential for all of the games that already exist and that will never be ported to Linux. Any incentive to produce native ports for future games is not a replacement because (a) not every developer will take the bait, and (b) people will always still want to play old games.

Linux purists will always seem to argue against Proton on some philosophical ground but the idea that the ecosystem was in a better place before it just seems absurd. You can now quite often play your whole Steam library on Linux, pretty seamlessly. There is just no comparison to the situation a few years ago.

As a Linux gamer, what I want is to play all the games that I want to play. What I do not want is to waste my time with platform politics. 'Dealing with' the 'hacks on hacks' is already largely irrelevant, because mostly Proton just works.

https://support.steampowered.com/kb_article.php?ref=1055-ISJ...

And I am not sure what you meant by obtuse error messages? My steam clearly marks the games that don't run under Catalina (which as a few false positive actually -- since .NET game still runs despite being mark as not compatible).