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Comment by Zhyl | Hacker News Reader

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Zhyl

I still see people arguing against it in very much the same manner as the article outlines.

"Linux won't be viable for gaming until it has Anti-cheat"

EAC and Battleye announce Proton support

"Linux won't be viable for gaming until there are AAA titles working"

Apex Legends, Fall guys and a bunch of other titles get support

"Linux won't be viable for gaming until the Steam Deck can meet demand"

Valve increase production

"Linux won't be viable for gaming until I can run Fortnite, Destiny 2 and Xbox Game pass"

Well you have me there..

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I've had about 2 decades of experience hearing that gaming on Linux is here and being disappointed. I started hearing about Proton and how it was really doing it this time and I was skeptical as always, but I figured it was worth a shot based on who I was hearing it from. And I'll say that for me, Proton is it. Not only does it provide awesome compatibility, it's basically just a checkbox in Steam to enable. I'm sure you can still find issues; even Windows can't provide 100% compatibility with decades of games, but for me, it's arrived.

Agree, and I’m wondering - as a Steam Deck owner - when / how I can setup my own Linux / proton gaming desktop?

I mean you can do that now.

* Install the OS of your choice. I would recommend Nobara for minimal tweaking for games. PopOS is another popular choice

* Install steam and enable proton for all games in Settings

* If you want Steam desktop UI, you can opt into the Steam Beta, set Steam to load on boot with launch option '-gamepadui'

and voilà! You have yourself a Steam Deck gaming desktop!

That's an interesting path to using a Linux desktop, but it makes sense. I'm not sure if you're asking rhetorically, but I'd say that if you wanted a Linux gaming desktop, you'd just start with a normal gaming desktop (prebuilt or custom - you'll find endless guides on either). The thing about Linux/Open Source is that there are nearly endless distributions and politics around those, which is confusing, but I'm a fan of Pop!_OS for its simplicity - I suspect I could install it on my parents machines and they'd be OK, but it's also fine for my uses. The other option I'd consider is SteamOS so you could presumably just run the OS installed on the Deck on your dekstop for commonality, but I have zero experience with it as an OS, so it may be more complicated than that.

I'm using Pop!_OS with an AMD CPU/GPU system that's pretty far from what I'd call stout, but I'm able to play games like "No Man's Sky" or "Crysis" just fine. I've probably tested around a dozen games personally going back as far as "Total Annihilation" from 1997(?) which ran without issue.

I run steam on an oryx pro laptop (nvidia graphics, intel 8th gen) and pop OS (Ubuntu variant) It works remarkably well.

Proton works from the steam Gui so I don’t think there is any install except the steam software.

You're putting up a scarecrow... you're saying people said that linux was perfect for gaming, except for the fact that it doesn't have anti cheat? No way. If anything, people said: If Linux wants to take off, it needs to have anticheat, but a whole lot more too.

Friend, I've had each of the arguments stated above as absolute statements.

The format of the arguments aren't coherent or well thought through. It uses the quoted argument as a jumping off point before going into an anti-Linux rant, often citing the perception that the year of the Linux desktop has been "coming for 20 years" (or pick whatever number you want) or that the Linux community are toxic (which is ironic since most of the attacks are incredibly toxic).

I think it's laudable that you're giving these people the benefit of the doubt, but they absolutely do exist and their positions are always thin or in bad faith.

Heh. Except the anticheat solutions that don't work are basically rootkits.

   > "Linux won't be viable for gaming until I can run Fortnite, Destiny 2 and Xbox Game pass"
   > Well you have me there..

FYI MS Game Pass has worked on Linux for months now.

Fortnite and Destiny 2 are two games where the developers have both, for whatever reason, specifically gone on record to say they will ban players that attempt to play their games on Linux.

For what its worth, the Destiny 2 developers did create a feedback thread a few months back on Reddit for the purposes of seeing the level of interest in them supporting Linux/Steam Deck

Game Pass works on Linux? I can't find anything about that, seems unlikely. Unless you're talking about Xbox Cloud Gaming, which is not a replacement for games running on your system, especially for people with bad internet connections.

You can run a big chunk of Game Pass via xCloud https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/topic/xbox-cloud-gaming-...

Isn't that cloud streaming?

Yes

If Steam Deck was being sucessful by having game studios write Steam Deck games like they bother with Android, iOS, Switch and PlayStation, that would be inovative, emulating Windows and DirectX via a translation layer, not really,

It isn't going to be something I choose to run until there's a VR system that works for it that doesn't feel like it is alpha quality. Even Valve's own Index only kinda-sorta works with half of the features.

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