I remember when Proton launched it was like magic playing games like Doom and Nier Automata straight from the Linux Steam client with excellent performance. I do not miss the days of having the Windows version of Steam installed separately.
In the time I have been a Linux gamer, it has gone from “here is a list of games that work in Linux” to “here is a list of games that do not work in Linux.” Which some dictionaries define as “progress.”
That’s a perfect way to put it. From constantly relying on ProtonDB to occasionally checking areweanticheatyet.com.
That’s crazy! When I was last trying to run Linux full time in ~2014, you had WINE and then a commercial version of WINE (not by the WINE devs, but because WINE is licensed the way it is and is open source…) that would run a few more things, but I don’t remember what it was called.
So glad to hear it’s progressing this quickly and far.
a commercial version of WINE
That would be CrossOver by CodeWeavers. They’re actually a huge contributor to upstream Wine and have worked with Valve (and I think Collabora?) several times over the past few years. I’m kind of tempted to buy a copy of CrossOver to support them even though I’d never use it, lol
I started out in 2014, and pretty much what I did was look to see if there was a Steam logo on the Steam store page to indicate Linux compatibility. With Proton in the last few years, I just don’t really worry about it. I will say my tastes have just about always lined up with the kinds of games, the kinds of studios, that are likely to publish for Linux, the nerd shit like Kerbal Space Program and Factorio. I don’t play Call of Fifa, Modern Fortnite or whatever.
In 2003, it was my dream to play FF7 in Linux. In 2019, my dream came true. Thanks Proton, Codeweavers, Wine, Valve, et al for helping me finally put down Sephiroth right.
There’ve been good PlayStation emulators in Linux since long before 2019.
Imagine a completely different OS running software made for your OS better than your actual OS could. This is Microsoft Windows
Anticheat is about to force this progress backwards years as publishers push drm
Publishers who do this make shit games anyway.
As someone who really wants to see desktop Linux grow, I try not to think like this because I know others care about these games…but goddammit if I don’t completely agree with you on the inside. I do not understand the obsession with these games products, they’re exclusively designed to keep you playing and paying for as long as possible to avoid fomo for digital garbage.
There are a tiny handful of non-live service games that still use anti-cheat, and most of those have already enabled support for Proton. Dragon Ball FighterZ is literally the only exception that I can think of, and even that’s playable offline IIRC.
Are we watching a “changing of the guard” where the studios that used to bring out the hits are dying, shedding their talent and new indie projects are blooming in the fallout? I remember Bioward being a fantastic studio during the Mass Effect (and prior) years. They’re a shell of their former selves now. I see this happening with Bethesda now too, although Starfield is not that bad. It’s just nowhere near as epic and fun as Skyrim was. Then you have studios like CDPR that seemed poised to take the crown with CP2077, and although it’s a great game, they certainly fumbled hard at launch. It’s an interesting time in the game industry.
Hey pro tip, if a game isn’t nearly as epic and fun as one that was released like 12 years ago, then its OK to call it a bad game. Cuz that’s certainly not good
Indie Devs haven’t even begun to fully leverage all the new tools offered by recent Blender / Unreal / Godot.
And AAA studios are too big to leverage them effectively.
I think we’re going to see continuing leaps forward in workflow and tools, allowing smaller teams to make whatever they want at any scale. We’re kind of already there honestly, it just about applying it all meaningfully.
I’ve recently picked up CP2077 again and let me tell you the experience is night and day. The gameplay is actually fun now and the story is also enjoyable since they got rid of the game breaking bugs. While the current version does not excuse the extremely subpar launch version I don’t think CD Projekt Red deserves a spot on your list.
A company that definitely fits your criteria is Blizzard. All the people I know that worked there quit and a lot of them told me about a huge brain drain that was happening which judging by what we know about the code of Diablo 4 sounds reasonable. At this point the company only exists because of nostalgia and even the gamer dads are getting more and more frustrated with them.
I still have faith in CDPR, they had one excellent game, one that they fucked up a bit and few relatively unknown but overall good games.
True I just moved my gaming PC to Linux and wow!! Almost all of my games run on Linux. Thank you for everyone working so hard.
This is the main reason, other than gog’s lack of support, for not going full Linux.
You can use a launcher like Heroic to play games you have on gog or epic.
And to say that there used to be a time when “Linux gaming” was an oxymoron as it at most meant SuperTuxKart or mindlessly watching glxgears.
Mindlessly watching glxgears is the greatest experience a GPU can render.
vulkangears
I know that the vulcan-tools package has vkcube in it. Someone did make vulkangears as an example, along with some other examples, but I don’t think its a published package in any distro repos so it’d need to be manually compiled to run it.
