To Windows people wondering:
JUST DO THE JUMP. Installing Bazzite only needs a 16GB flash drive and 15 minutes of time, and you’ll be SHOCKED how smooth everything goes compared to Windows bloat.
And you don’t even need to give up on Windows! You can keep it on dual boot until you realize you didn’t touched Windows even once over the last 6 months.
Developers should still try to optimize Linux performance with native Linux ports.
Problem is even when they do, they don’t maintain support. Borderlands 2 has a native port but it hasn’t been updated while the windows version had received new content and patches in the years since.
It’s still happening in some cases. Like Balder’s Gate 3 getting a recent Linux port, for example.
I am getting ready to switch and I play City of Heroes on Homecoming and wonder of anyone here has it running and what destro you are using. I ahve Mint on two laptops and they are running fine will all my other programs
Yes! I just installed the game through Lutris!
My wife plays it. She’s on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS (so I’d expect it to work on Mint too), installed it through Bottles, and it just worked. I’m on Kubuntu 25.10 and I’ve had it running but haven’t actually played it.
I was looking into this, it’s weird that it isn’t on ProtonDB
Future Linux Converts:
If you wonder “Will the game that I play work on Linux?”, there’s a website for that:
While it might not feel like the % of games working on Linux this is just the natural result of more games being added to ProtonDB
just did mine. bazzite loaded on my gaming rig, and still deciding on my server PC on what I wanna load on there but I’m in no rush really.
I cannot wait for GamersNexus to agree on a testing framework for Linux and then see how many games will run actually better on Linux than on Windows, either native or through Wine/Proton.
Didn’t they just announce this? Or are they still deciding on the “how” and not the “if”?
Games which run on Vulkan / OpenGL don’t have any GPU translation overhead, and some run straight-up better via Proton than they do on Windows. Doom 2016 does for me, for instance.
Of course, that game is so well optimised it’s the difference between 140 fps and 200+ fps, which is not terribly obvious, but even so.
Doom ran at 100+ fps at 4k on my 1070ti with graphics maxed out. It’s hard to tell what optimization allows it, but the game runs way better than anything else that looks at least as good.
It’s not one big optimization, it’s a product of Id actually having some of the best UE developers on the planet being able to tweak the engine to run like a beast. Each level is crafted from the ground up to allow for some sweeping optimizations revolving around actor loading and culling, and the game uses proper light baking to allow raytracing to handle marginal calculations instead of explicit path tracing every shadow. It’s a lot of little things that all take impressive amounts of skill and management to pull off effectively, a lot of this stuff is implemented poorly in other games and it shows.
I can’t wait to see their content on the fediverse. They made a video about getting away from big tech but don’t mirror their stuff here. I think it’s a damn shame.
They could even host their own instances.
That would be nice!
Not many because there’s still translation overhead - unless you have very good CPU, the results will be slightly worse.
You would think so, but Windows 11 is so bloated out so badly that I actually got much better performance on Linux for most games I play. I’ve only found 2 games so far that run better on Windows than via Proton on the same hardware.
Windows 11 24h2 update completely screwed all game performance for me so badly I had switch.
It actually happens more than you’d expect.
Sometimes you even get fewer bugs on Proton.
One of the best examples was the release of FF7 Remake - it had really bad stutter on release on Windows… but not on Proton.People even used DXVK (which is part of Proton) on Windows in an attempt to fix it.
I know it happens, but it’s rare. Other example is Nier:Automata after valve created super fast shader compiler for AMD cards - game is so unoptimized that saving CPU cycles on shades not only compensates for overhead but also exceeds windows performance.
Again it’s rare and relates to poorly coded games
Im not sure how they even would make a testing framework. Its not like windows, where you have the os as standard and then just swap parts to see.
Its so fragmented the amount of combinations is mind-boggling. I guess they choose the 3 most popular and just run a limited series of hardware tests?
Really the only factors in software are kernel and compatibility layer. Everything else is not a huge factor in Linux; this is mostly akin to saying “we need to test games with every different windows app running in the background”.
Of course for individual machines there will be external factors that users themselves need to consider (like don’t be doing Blender renders in the background lol) but there should be a huge difference between distros.
Perhaps custom desktop managers should be tested along with KDE and GNOME, but I’m honestly not sure much even those factor in.
Sharing a common kernel is probably why support is so vast, and then people are using the same Vulkan tools or Proton etc.
Strange headline. Isn’t it always at an all-time high since once you get something to run, that’s it?
Some games get patched to break compatibility, usually with anti-cheat. Apex Legends and Battlefield 1 are examples of that.
For every game that breaks compatibility due to anti-cheat there’s 100s more new games that don’t have it and probably run on Linux just fine. So on average, the compatibility always goes up.
I don’t even play Apex Legends and I’m still a bit butthurt to this day that they decided to add anti-cheat that broke Linux compatibility. They say it helped bring the amount of cheaters down though, but who can really tell besides those who collect the numbers - which is them.
Oh, I see. I don’t play anything like that, so I was oblivious to the issue. Thanks!
Fortunately those are a minority of games. Most games now are working with Wine/Proton out of the box. Multiplayer games are the only thing I ever look at compatibility lists for.
Unfortunately these minority of games are actually popular games. I think GTA 5 Online no longer works on Linux too. There was more popular games doing that.
Outlast trials is the latest game (to my knowledge) that added eac (due to a pretty useless pvp mode) and broke Linux compatibility
Not true; works fine on linux.
I guess they enabled Linux support then in eac because it didn’t work initially
The game is Steam Deck verified and the developer even noted that Steam Deck support for the new anti-cheat was tested before release. I played a few hours right after release and it worked fine, so not sure when “initially” is.
They mean by percentage, for one thing. And new games come out all the time.
No. The most played games on steam are multiplayer games that use some sort of anti cheat. Those anti cheats often break linux compatibility when the game or anticheat itself gets updated. So going by number of games you are mostly right, but going by player counts there are often massive setbacks that either dont get fixed at all or only very slowly. Apex Legends and The Finals are prime examples of this flip flopping between working and broken.
The most played games on steam are multiplayer games that use some sort of anti cheat.
However, lot of the most played Steam games are well supported and never have an issue with anti cheat whatsoever: https://steamdb.info/ such as Counter Strike 2 and Dota 2 (2 most played games). There are also lot of single player games as the most played games. Therefore this is a mixed bag.
Those anti cheats often break linux compatibility when the game or anticheat itself gets updated.
They not break often Linux compatibility when game or anticheat is updated. That’s false statement. There are games, when it happens. But that is not “often”. I play games with Anticheat on Linux and they do not break, such as Marvel Rivals and previously Overwatch and Splitgate too (besides Valves own games, but that is self explanatory). This never happened. So the “often” part is misleading here.
Make anti cheat work… That’s the real issue no?
There are Anti-Cheats that work just not one or two of the truly invasive ones. I’m able to play games like the Finals or Arc Raiders or CSGO or DOTA or World of Tanks or Insurgency or Battlebit without issue. I can’t play some multiplayer games owned by EA. It’s largely coming down to company lines based on what Anti-Cheat they’ve decided to go with.
It used to be not all games worked on Linux. Now it’s most games work and there’s a handful that don’t for one reason or the other (like Anti-Cheat).
And Vermintide 2, using EAC, just ticked the box to not being hostile towards Linux, and it just works now. Hated Denuvo works too. There’s now a minority of games that don’t play ball with penguins.
At what point does Microsoft start suing over patents?
What patents?
I don’t have a list. Just considering that MS patents EVERYTHING I have a tough time believing they don’t have patents over at least SOME DirectX things that Wine has created an implementation for, etc.
WINE doesn’t need to implement anything that DirectX does, it just needs to translate those calls into the equivalent Linux ones. Linux does all the actual work; and if Microsoft had a patent for “drawing pixels on a screen” they’d have shown that hand by now.
Sure, but patents cover methods and implementations. If Wine gets a cleanroom spec that says “when you put in these values, we need these pixels out” then they are free to write their own implementation not covered by the patent.
As far as I know, Microsoft has no patents related to linux and how it can run Windows games. Everything has been reimplemented from scratch on the linux side, there’s no shared IP or patented techniques being used.
They likely have patents on a number of things implemented in Wine/Proton. Clean-room implementation is also good, buy would cover copyright, not patent.
WINE stands for “WINE Is Not an Emulator”; they’re not reimplementing Microsoft libraries. No patents to violate.
That’s not how it works, but ok
I’m not sure if they really have standing for that.
But even if they did, Microsoft don’t have the guts because cracking down it would be akin to a direct attack on Valve and Steam. And at this point I think we can all agree that Microsoft needs Steam more than Valve needs Windows.
Right, they clearly don’t believe it has been worth the effort in the past. At a certain point I’ve always worried that they might.
deleted by creator
deleted by creator
That’s alright nutsack. It’s better to have posted and lost, than to never have posted at all. Or wait, is that about love?
i don’t remember what the post was but maybe it wasn’t funny after i read it twice
