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Comment by surgical_fire | Hacker News Reader

I installed Mint here. RetroArch works like a charm. Steam games are surprisingly smooth thanks to Proton - some games require some minor tinkering to work, but I am amazed at how well it works.

I got even games from other stores that don't officially support Proton (such as GoG) to work with the help of Lutris.

If Windows for you is just a console, might be time to re-evaluate on that.

I don't even hate Windows btw. I was using 10 and it worked mostly fine to my tastes, especially with WSL. But Linux is just so much better in every way.

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I did Linux gaming for a bit. The main annoyance was getting all the sound settings to work with… I guess it must have been Skype at the time, or maybe Google Hangouts or something… so I could play multiplayer games with friends.

This would have been more than a decade ago, so I believe you if you say it is pretty good nowadays. Might check back. I know Discord runs OK on Linux.

For a long time I had Linux in Dual boot, cursing at how unfortunate it was that I couldn't really play games there. Even games that had Linux builds often had those as afterthoughts, with bugs not present in the main windows version.

Now I can just play the Windows version through Proton. I hope that if Linux gains traction Proton becomes unnecessary, but I'm happy that Proton came as far as it is. Honestly, to play old Windows games it is probably better than Windows.

A few games required some minor tinkering to work, but have been pretty smooth here. If you enjoy playing the latest AAA (that probably takes a while until it gets supported), I would say that you'd better stay on Windows. Otherwise, Linux is more than a viable alternative right now.

If I'm not mistaken, one of the reasons Proton is necessary is DirectX (Windows native & Proton) still does a better job of handling a lot of things than OpenGL (Linux native), so while you still see the same house (the game), the graphics foundation underneath is completely different. And say what you will about Microsoft (don't even get me staaaaaaarted), but DirectX is polished. It might even be their best product.

Industry has moved to dx12 and vulkan. With vulkan being native to win and Linux(and switch). In bigger engines you suport all of them, even opengl still. Some Indies might still use opengl due to it being simpler or for better support on the web or mobile.

With dx12 and vulkan its mostly up to what platforms do you want to support. As they do things quite similar. While you need vulkan for switch you need dx for Xbox. PS has its own API.

Tldr opengl is mostly irrelevant today for bigger titles and that's not what's blocking titles from supporting Linux.

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