Proton has been an incredible game-changer for Linux
it’s been a game changer for gaming in general. the fact that enough gamers are switching to Linux to boost its market share higher than it’s ever been before is going to change gaming in ways we’re only beginning to see. I mean, Valve is planning a console launch, and who knows what other consoles we’ll see in the coming years. maybe some crowdfunded ones that actually take off. and all this attention from gamers is going to mean some of them start switching to Linux for their everyday tasks, which could end up having an affect on computing in general.
but the best part about it is that it might very well break up the monopoly microsoft has on computing, which is good for the users because it will mean we’ll have more options, and that’s never a bad thing.
It’s been 12 years since Gaben committed to Linux publicly and honestly. It’s impressive to see that Valve has remained committed all this time and become a stellar contributor to the Linux ecosystem.
They could have forked and kept their toys to themselves but instead they’ve continuously pushed their hard work upstream for every Linux distro to benefit from.
My behemoth of a gaming rig is to be switched over to Linux in the coming weeks, bringing my use of Windows to an end after 30+ years (my gaming rig is the only system I still have Windows on).
I’ve been using Linux since 2002 and if you told my younger self it would be the ex-Microsoft people behind Half-Life that would kill Windows, I’d have laughed you into oblivion. And yet here we are.
Did you ever get into Cedega back then?
No I didn’t. I think the public source was a nightmare to build and get working (never tried, friends did though) and I wasn’t going to pay for it when the Wine project was publicly annoyed by the proprietary forks not contributing upstream (didn’t Wine relicense because of Cedega?).
I payed for CrossOver over the years as they had Office working pretty well and as much as I use FOSS office suites for personal use, inevitably someone sends me something that wouldn’t open and I’d have to use MS Office.
My biggest gripe with using Linux for gaming over the years was drivers and needing to switch between them since some would be good for compositors (typically the FOSS ones), others for gaming (typically the proprietary blob ones). Then there was the regular breakages etc.
I wish I had switched to Arch sooner as I’ve had so few issues with that distro given the core packages are so minimal; there’s less opinionated cruft that other distros have. It’s much easier to tailor Arch to your needs.
Naturally, my gaming rig will be running Arch (all my servers bar one run it too - absurdly stable for a rolling release).
I don’t know about the upstream stuff but to get certain games running you had to contact them to make the game work for you, nothing like Proton today. I did support them for about a year or so as I wanted to encourage more gaming compatibility.
I never ran Arch, but did run a gauntlet of distros like RHEL5, Fedora, Fedora Core, Mandrake, Mandriva, Debian, Ubuntu, and prolly a few more I’ve forgotten. At the time, yeah, video drivers were a mess for gaming, most of the time the drivers did install for both ATI and Nvidia on my machines but they were never bleeding edge so they had a lot of time to get well working instruction sets, Nvidia is still a pain(cause the smart people can’t fix the issues Nvidia won’t) and thats the vid card I have atm 4070ti super, shoulda gone AMD instead. My only issue with linux now is the VR part of it(thankfully Proton are still working on it and there is a better desktop access program that actually lets you control the desktop), the games do not run as well as under windows so I will most likely have to retain a windows partition for the games that do not work well under linux(all of the flat games I have installed work as well as under windows and if I don’t look at the task bar I forget which os I am using), but all that glorious storage will be moving under linux by end of 10.
Yeah I’ve run the gauntlet of distros too (including setting up distcc across several boxes so I could run Gentoo everywhere (which is far too much of my life I can never get back).
Arch is the best of Gentoo/Slack with the ease of Ubuntu/Debian.
Also sounds like I need to buy a new card as I’m nvidia too right now.
I like that Valve on its own is tipping the scale on Linux adoption.
It’s fantastic, and I love that Steam Deck has enough use that Windows “anti cheat” malware is becoming less of a requirement.
Installing rooted software from sketchy 3rd party vendors being a prerequisite to run games is beyond stupid.
Gaming was always one of the main excuses for average person to avoid Linux.
Not that gaming was not possible before Proton, but it’s finally zero effort (mostly, it’s not like Windows gaming is without issues either).
It’s still a pretty solid excuse for many - but once you make the switch and stick to games that actually run on Linux, it kind of starts running on its own as recent numbers show.
stick to games that actually run on Linux
these days, that’s practically everything. last game I tried that didn’t work was Rust, and that was a few years ago. these days, I don’t even check ProtonDB to see if a game works, I just assume it does.
Sure, but mostly if you play games with incredibly invasive anti-cheats… which I wouldn’t want to install on Windows too anyway.
