Comment by flanbiscuit | Hacker News Reader

Comment by flanbiscuit | Hacker News Reader

I might be the target audience for this. I have a steam account for years but I barely touch it. I don't feel like building a PC, and games for MacOS were limited last time I checked. I've been happy playing my Switch and PS4.

My first thought when I saw this was that it better be able to connect to an external screen, and it does! An added bonus would be if I could hook up external controllers to it as well.

I've heard of Valve's Proton[1] but not sure how stable it is and if it can support any Windows game on their platform. If so, then that would be pretty amazing to have access to some Windows-only games without building a PC.

I'm definitely interested but I'm in no rush. I'd rather upgrade to a PS5 first but I'm gonna keep my eye on this. If the reviews in the long term are good maybe I'll get the 2nd generation of it.

Wonder if they'll release a Oculus-Quest-like all-in-one VR system next.

1. https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton

Proton is absolutely incredible. It doesn't support all games, but what it does support work fantastically well. It's a great 80/20 solution for your games library.

You still need to have Windows for a couple bleeding edge must play AAA games and a few slackers that haven't been ported over, but there's a wealth of wonderful games that run great on Linux now. More than enough to last a lifetime.

Proton is the reason I might say goodbye to windows for good after the Windows 11 mandatory account announcement. It's only going to get better too. It's seriously one of the biggest deals for making the Linux desktop more viable for most people.

I'm not here to dish out undue praise, but Proton really is incredible. Unless a game has intrusive anti-cheat or DRM, you can expect most Windows titles to "just work" these on Linux these days. Valve has put a tremendous amount of work into this project, it's almost hard to describe.

It’s really long-term planning. Valve gets shut for not following through on game projects these days, but building Proton and preparing Linux for gaming will yield 10x to 1000x the returns on making a game…

Let’s not forget they were the single most important player in the whole VR Revolution. Oculus took the huge improvements that were made inside valve in VR and took the team to FB. But pretty much all the major breakthroughs were done at Valve, not oculus.

Here is the community created ProtonDB: https://www.protondb.com/

You can check how well titles are supported, or if you need tweaks to make it work.

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