Which I’m sure is much higher than windows games working on windows. Proton is awesome for old games.
The stereotype is of the haughty Linux user, but fuck me all I ever see in these discussions is Windows users being belittling assholes.
For me its 100% of games, but sure, havent tried all games that exist…
Typically the competitive multiplayer ones fail because of kernel-level anticheat.
Switching to linux had me cold turkey league of legends im a healthier happier person now.
the real cold turkey was Riot killing linux support last year. Seems like there wasn’t enough linux players at the time for them to walk back that decision.
100% of games worth playing work on Linux!
Oh, yeah? I have a super niche German adventure game from 2004 that I can’t get up and running. But then it also won’t work on at least Win7 and up (I tried). I can’t even get that running on an XP virtual machine. This game has become my nemesis.
See if you can trick Ross Scott into playing it. :) He has near infinite patience for forcing old games to run, and a skilled network to lean on.
What about an emulator like 86box or so? And which game is it?
I finally switched to Linux just a few days ago when upgrading my laptop’s SSD, and so far I have only opened minecraft to see how it runs - extremely smoothly, even though I could not figure out how to make use the Nvidia GPU. I’d say it runs noticeably better on Linux than it did on Windows.
The only games I’ve struggled with are those with codecs that are not distributed with Proton. Installing GE-Proton solved it.
99.99% of games on Linux unlocked.
GE-proton what add to proton? Beside codecs
From their readme:
Things it contains that Valve’s Proton does not:
- Additional media foundation patches for better video playback support
- AMD FSR patches added directly to fullscreen hack that can be toggled with WINE_FULLSCREEN_FSR=1
- FSR Fake resolution patch details here
- Nvidia CUDA support for PhysX and NVAPI
- Raw input mouse support
- ‘protonfixes’ system – this is an automated system that applies per-game fixes (such as winetricks, envvars, EAC workarounds, overrides, etc).
- Various upstream WINE patches backported
- Various wine-staging patches applied as they become needed
- NTSync enablement if the kernel supports it.
protonfixes is huge, all of those weird little things you had to do like changing dll versions or installing .net are just stored in a script that is automatically run when it detects what game you’re playing.
Also, GE-proton updates more frequently and those updates include current versions of the underlying programs (dxvk, wine, etc) so any fixes that are made in these underlying systems will be available in GE-proton very quickly.
Thanks for the additional infos!
Here is the protonfixes repo for reference: https://github.com/Open-Wine-Components/umu-protonfixes
Someone might want to ping that .ml user, since I’m instance banned from there, they won’t be able to see my answer
Playing Hogwarts legacy at the moment, but I also tested ETS 2 and the tenants.
The only game I am not able to make it work on Linux is “The Sims 4”. After installing it on Steam, when clicking on Play, it runs the EA app in the background and tries to start the game, but it doesn’t load. Any suggestion?
always check protonDB:
https://www.protondb.com/app/1222670
Looks like most people are using GloriousEggroll’s version of Proton (ProtonGE) and some are using launch options to disable the EA Launcher.
GE works on Wine at Red Hat and is thus very knowledgeable about windows translations and the stuff he changes about Valves Proton are often merged down the line, its like an unofficial beta release and I’ve had good a experience with Hus proton Versions.
That said, to actually get custom Proton Versions I use “ProtonUp-Qt”(available as flatpak): https://davidotek.github.io/protonup-qt/
Which downloads different Proton Versions and manages them for you. You can then set the default for all games in the steam settings, or on a game-by-game basis
Try the GE version of Proton, it’s usually more curring edge.
Mayb this can help: https://www.protondb.com/app/1222670

Linux people responses will be like: “ive never seen that, works fine on my machine. i’m curious tho what version of Wine, Proton are you using? …. oh? what’s your desktop environment? … oh KDE…? ah must be a Bazzite thing? i’ve never seen that before on Mint with GNOME on my Intel Graphics Card”
https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@SilbinaryWolf/115483449807384098
Skill issue
Really the thing that does not work for Linux gaming is when you have a high dpi display. So many games render the UI wrong.
I don’t know if they work correctly on Windows either.
What resolution is that?
4k?
Unfortunately those pesky live service games that have the most player counts are disproportionately represented in that 10%.
The correlation between people playing those games and not giving a fuck about digital privacy is probably huge.
They tend to require installing a rootkit on your own computer. I wouldn’t buy them even if they did support Linux.
you are a minority in this case
Good, but native would be better. At least they can’t kill Linux the way they did os/2
I’ll take compatible.
Most people game on windows. It’s monolithic nature also means that they will mostly encounter the same bugs.
Linux has a wider base of functionality. A bug might only show up on Debian, not Ubuntu.
End result, they spend 60% of their effort solving bugs, for 2% of their base. That’s not cost viable.
Compatibility means they just have to focus on 1 base of code. All we ask is that they don’t actively break the compatibility. This is far less effort, and a lot easier to sell to the bean counters.
Once Linux has a decent share, we can work on better universal standards. We likely need at least 10% to even get a chance there.
Ummmm sure?
I don’t want to start that extremely old flame war of native VS jit code but…
Proton is not an emulation, it is a translation to native code, and while it has some drawbacks (more memory usage, more time at start up to compile things) it can unlocks a lot of potential when the hw support new capabilities, this is the reason that some dx10 games run faster on Linux…
I might be wrong, but I don’t think proton is either? It’s running x86 instructions either way, wine just provides a way to load it from the windows executable and library formats, and together with proton they provide implementations of windows libraries for those executables to use.
As far as I know for the new Vulkans layers and dx12 implementation there is a “translation layer” from the old dx implementation to the most updated one. This is the main reason why old games runs faster on Proton than in w7 for the same hw. Even if they were designed for w7 specifically.
Last time I checked this was done during the booting of the game, but i have to admit this was time ago and it could have been changed.
I guess most of the process is just using a wrapper to translate the call to a Windows library to the equivalent call to a Linux library.
IBM killed OS/2, because they hate end users. IBM has a long history of making great end user products (awesome keyboards, great laptops, still good software) only to sell them to the highest bidder. All IBM execs can see are penguins with suitcases full of dollar bills. OS/2? End users loved it, but it didn’t run on mainframes. Killed. The Model M keyboard? End users loved it, but it was too durable, so it did not guarantee many sold units (because why would anyone buy a new Model M while the old one is still good?) -> rebranded as Unicomp and left to rot. (Typing this on a Unicomp PC122, but that’s a different story.) Thinkpads? Ah well, those are expensive. And they aren’t mainframes. Sold to the Chinese because ugh! End users! Lotus (SmartSuite, Notes)? Nice to have, but nope, too many end users. Ugh! End users!
To be fair, nobody loved Notes
“Perfect is the enemy of good.”
That 10%? The games everybody plays.
This may be the first time I haven’t fallen into the subset of “everybody.”
Everything I want to play runs using Linux/proton. It seems like the only things that have trouble are things I’d never consider even installing, let alone running.
I was watching a video about extraction shooters and it mentioned a F2P Chinese one. I wasn’t that interested in it, but I wanted to give it a try to see what it was doing differently. It didn’t run though, because almost all Chinese games have kernel-level AC. I figure it’s not a big loss. I own EfT, and I’ve got other extraction shooters to play, especially ARC Raiders now.
That was the last time, and the only time in a very long time, that a game I tried to play didn’t just work.
ARC Raiders is what I’d be playing even on Windows.
An extraction shooter where there is a common enemy creates a lot of spontaneous cooperation. People are still dangerous, but seeing a person isn’t a life or death situation like in EfT.
kernel-level AC
This sounds like they did you a solid by not working. I’ll have to look up this genre of shooter, though; not something I’ve heard of before. I tend to be too easily annoyed for anything that isn’t single-player or local co-op these days, although some part of me still remembers some MMOs though rose-colored nostalgia glasses.
You’re the exception
Most people play the same 3 FPS games that don’t run on Linux. They’re probably not the type of people that would use Linux but hey, some might
I guess I’m not everbody then. After writing this message I’ll go and play some Witcher 3.
Unfortunately the 10% that don’t include the biggest, most played games in the world.
This. Plus anti-cheat is still a removed on Linux.
Impressive, now tell me what % of the top 20 current concurrent players games run on linux.
Here you go:

Want more?

More?

MOAR?

And personally:

as far as i can tell this only accounts for games on steam, which means massive games like fortnite, valorant, league of legends and genshin impact are excluded. also for some reason apex legends is rated as silver on protondb despite very much not working on linux? so i guess at least one of the silvers in the top 10 chart should be downgraded to not working
So 60% for top 10?
What am I looking at? What are the colors?
Ok, I figured it out after visiting protondb.com
Yeah, sorry.
Medals are probably the best metric. Besides red for broken, they go
- bronze for barely playable with lots of tinkering
- silver for playable with tinkering
- gold for working great with some tinkering
- platinum for works out of the box with no tinkering
And above that “native”, which I think is not included in the charts. Even native games you can still opt to play through proton though. I had better performance playing Slay the Spire and Project Zomboid on older gfx with Proton than native for example.











