This is a re-upload of an older YouTube video. You may or may not agree with my honest opinion, but we as Linux gamers have come a long way! Make sure to motivate me for more content by, at least, ...
If it were a “first-class citizen” there would be native Linux games and not rampant and intentional anti-cheat exclusions.
“First-class citizen” doesn’t refer to the quality of the experience, but how it’s treated in society. At this point it’s mostly something that devs and publishers tolerate, and occasionally offer minor consideration on behalf of a single device.
If it were a “first-class citizen” there would be native Linux games
This was my thought exactly. Proton’s emulation of a windows game doesn’t count as “first class experience”. It’s second class at best, but still better than literally nothing at all.
Proton and Wine are not emulators.
So while I take your point, I feel it’s important to distinguish the difference here where emulators have a lot of negative connotations.
It’s second class at best, but still better than literally nothing at all.
The native ports have frequently been terrible, both in performance and compatibility (missing graphical features etc). Proton is better than those ports, but worse than a native version using Vulkan and 100% of features supported correctly.
While I agree that proton on its own doesn’t make gaming on Linux a “first class experience”, it does sometimes perform better than the original native “first class” Windows OS that the game was originally intended to be played on. Which is just funny, but also shows all the work that has gone into proton.
Game devs need more Linux players before they make major industry wide changes, but proton makes those numbers have a chance of increasing by making the games playable on Linux.
Another reason why I wouldn’t call gaming on Linux a “first class experience” yet is controller and input driver issues. Which can be worked around like if I open a game I bought on gog through steam and use the steam input methods but I shouldn’t have to use steam to play a gog game with a controller.
Windows games running better with Wine than on Windows has been a thing for at least 20 years, Proton (which is a fork of Wine, people tend to forget) didn’t invent anything.
It’s mainly DXVK and vkd3d-proton that enable this (projects associated with Valve and Proton). It was usually only native OGL games that performed better on old-school Wine; the wined3d translation layer has been hit and miss historically.
That’s not to downplay the huge amount of work that has gone into Wine itself.
Yes, that first pragraph is (sadly?) my experience too. Almost every game that have native version was somehow worse than windows version with proton. Black mesa gave me all sorts of weird glitchy light effects, Pillars of Eternity only ran at 60 FPS and had half of the fonts unreadably blurry, the other game (forgot the name) lacked plenty of updates on linux, etc. And all these problems went away with proton. Is it sad? Yes. Do I care much? Not really as long as proton is hassle free.
Interesting, I haven’t had that experience much myself. It might be a bad port to Linux?
I wonder if there is a launch option that you could set that would help? It might also depend on your GPU and drivers. But to your point, it’s much less hassel to just tell steam to use proton and not have those issues.
It feels like the trend is changing in that direction, but most games weren’t released in the past year or so, and even those were designed and built not thinking Linux would be where it is now. We’ll have to see how it evolves.
I agree that a lot of large publishers seem to be actively harming the experience to ensure Linux users can’t use their service, for whatever reason. That needs to change. They need to be punished for this, ideally by helping people switch to Linux and making them realize they don’t need those games if they don’t care about them as a user.
There are native Linux games, but mostly from AA and indie publishers. So by that mark, it has been a first-class citizen since mid-2010s, after Steam started officially supporting Linux.
That said, I think that goalpost is a bit too far away. I consider it “first-class support” if major AAA devs offering official technical support to Linux users is more common than not, regardless of whether it’s packaged w/ Proton or directly as a Linux native binary. How they distribute it is up to them, as long as they actually support Linux users. We’re not there yet, but we’re a lot closer than we were even just 5 years ago.
They exist. How many of them do you see on the front page of the Steam store? Almost never. Games that people actually play are very rarely Linux native. If they were, Proton never would have been created.
All of the Paradox games, Civ, Pillars of Eternity, DoTA, Counterstrike. its a small fraction sure, but its not like no big games have native linux versions.
Most indie games seem to have native Linux support, so I guess whenever one of those hits the front page. For example, Slay the Spire and Darkest Dungeon have spent some time there, and they have native Linux support. There are plenty more examples as well.
And of these native ports, you’ll get better performance using proton because the port was done by a third party studio and ended support after a year.
If it were a “first-class citizen” there would be native Linux games and not rampant and intentional anti-cheat exclusions.
“First-class citizen” doesn’t refer to the quality of the experience, but how it’s treated in society. At this point it’s mostly something that devs and publishers tolerate, and occasionally offer minor consideration on behalf of a single device.
This was my thought exactly. Proton’s emulation of a windows game doesn’t count as “first class experience”. It’s second class at best, but still better than literally nothing at all.
Proton and Wine are not emulators. So while I take your point, I feel it’s important to distinguish the difference here where emulators have a lot of negative connotations.
The native ports have frequently been terrible, both in performance and compatibility (missing graphical features etc). Proton is better than those ports, but worse than a native version using Vulkan and 100% of features supported correctly.
While I agree that proton on its own doesn’t make gaming on Linux a “first class experience”, it does sometimes perform better than the original native “first class” Windows OS that the game was originally intended to be played on. Which is just funny, but also shows all the work that has gone into proton.
Game devs need more Linux players before they make major industry wide changes, but proton makes those numbers have a chance of increasing by making the games playable on Linux.
Another reason why I wouldn’t call gaming on Linux a “first class experience” yet is controller and input driver issues. Which can be worked around like if I open a game I bought on gog through steam and use the steam input methods but I shouldn’t have to use steam to play a gog game with a controller.
In nobara i literally turned on bluetooth, connected my ps4 controller and started playing. No steam inputs.
Windows games running better with Wine than on Windows has been a thing for at least 20 years, Proton (which is a fork of Wine, people tend to forget) didn’t invent anything.
It’s mainly DXVK and vkd3d-proton that enable this (projects associated with Valve and Proton). It was usually only native OGL games that performed better on old-school Wine; the wined3d translation layer has been hit and miss historically.
That’s not to downplay the huge amount of work that has gone into Wine itself.
Yes, that first pragraph is (sadly?) my experience too. Almost every game that have native version was somehow worse than windows version with proton. Black mesa gave me all sorts of weird glitchy light effects, Pillars of Eternity only ran at 60 FPS and had half of the fonts unreadably blurry, the other game (forgot the name) lacked plenty of updates on linux, etc. And all these problems went away with proton. Is it sad? Yes. Do I care much? Not really as long as proton is hassle free.
Interesting, I haven’t had that experience much myself. It might be a bad port to Linux?
I wonder if there is a launch option that you could set that would help? It might also depend on your GPU and drivers. But to your point, it’s much less hassel to just tell steam to use proton and not have those issues.
It feels like the trend is changing in that direction, but most games weren’t released in the past year or so, and even those were designed and built not thinking Linux would be where it is now. We’ll have to see how it evolves.
I agree that a lot of large publishers seem to be actively harming the experience to ensure Linux users can’t use their service, for whatever reason. That needs to change. They need to be punished for this, ideally by helping people switch to Linux and making them realize they don’t need those games if they don’t care about them as a user.
There are native Linux games, but mostly from AA and indie publishers. So by that mark, it has been a first-class citizen since mid-2010s, after Steam started officially supporting Linux.
That said, I think that goalpost is a bit too far away. I consider it “first-class support” if major AAA devs offering official technical support to Linux users is more common than not, regardless of whether it’s packaged w/ Proton or directly as a Linux native binary. How they distribute it is up to them, as long as they actually support Linux users. We’re not there yet, but we’re a lot closer than we were even just 5 years ago.
They exist. How many of them do you see on the front page of the Steam store? Almost never. Games that people actually play are very rarely Linux native. If they were, Proton never would have been created.
All of the Paradox games, Civ, Pillars of Eternity, DoTA, Counterstrike. its a small fraction sure, but its not like no big games have native linux versions.
I did say almost never
of the current top 30 on most played on steam 7 have a native Linux version, just shy of 1/4. I’d hardly call that almost never.
I didn’t say anything about “most played”.
Was your exact quote, I think showing 1/4 of the most played games on Steam are linux native shows that isnt the case.
Do you see the difference there?
You’re talking about seven games. Seven. 7. Do you know how many games there are?
Most indie games seem to have native Linux support, so I guess whenever one of those hits the front page. For example, Slay the Spire and Darkest Dungeon have spent some time there, and they have native Linux support. There are plenty more examples as well.
And of these native ports, you’ll get better performance using proton because the port was done by a third party studio and ended support after a year.
I’m refering to Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel btw.
Yes I’ve noticed that as well
Even if most games were native there would be still be a case for Proton for older games, and to approach 100% compatibility.
Sure, but it wouldn’t have been worth the effort. Guarantee Valve has dumped a looooot of money into it’s development.