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Comment by kristofferg | Hacker News Reader

What’s stopping you from switching to Linux now?

A couple things. Anti-cheat software. I don’t really play competitive game but for some reason Helldivers 2 has anti-cheat (I guess it is the live-service model).

Nebulous and ill-founded concern that my PC (2018 era) might suffer a little from the not-emulation-but-sorta-emulation layer of Proton. I haven’t researched this, though.

Mostly it is just bearable at the moment, and I think I’m probably about a year or so out from wanting to upgrade anyway, so I might just do it all at once.

On games without anti-cheat, proton performs 5-8% better than windows 10

I think you would be suprised how solid linux gaming is by now. I play Helldivers 2 with my son - One windows machine, one Ubuntu. No issues with anti-cheat so far. Only issue, with linux gaming, at the moment is some MS published games with wonky networking code (like AoE4). I see no performance dip at all on proton vs win-native.

I probably would be! I tried it seriously with AAA games around 10 years ago. I keep a copy of Steam/proton on my Linux laptop, it does seem pretty good, but it is a thin-and-light so I’ve only been playing simple games on it. I assumed the AAA stuff was pickier

When I used Proton Glorious Eggroll for a while, it played my entire steam library better than windows.

Also, pop os makes nvidia drivers automatic.

Games that just don't work, particularly ones with anti cheat

Imagine someone having a workflow for 20 years on an OS. This isn't like just IDE+browser. Wine/VM is spotty still. Also not having to fight with each piece of uncommon hardware.

Fair points. Although Windows changed a lot the last 20 years. The hardware issue i can confirm - only reason my desktop workstation is still on windows.

Games with anti-cheat, Adobe apps, a few apps for work that only run on Windows

Age of Empires 2 does not work well on Linux.

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