I never got Proton working on my main distro (Debian), so I probably fall into this category. I did use Wine, but Wine is a lot harder to set up, and never ran games as well as Proton did.
Here is my major gaming history, since I started on Linux in 2007. Yes, I really could focus on a single game for years back then.
- 2007: Starcraft, in Wine
- 2007: Nethack, native
- 2011: Morrowind and Oblivion in Wine
- 2012: Minecraft, native
- 2014: sgt-puzzles, native
- 2016: Steam, got hundreds of native Linux games.
- 2017: Briefly got Steam and Path of Exile working inside a Wine instance.
- 2022: Steam deck, with the specific purpose of being able to run Proton on it.
- 2023: New Ubuntu installation, and Proton finally worked on my PC.
Today, I still prefer native Linux games. I mostly only use Proton when peer pressure for a multiplayer game required it. But I never use Wine any more.
Kids these days don’t even know about TuxRacer?
WoW runs well under Wine without much trouble.
It was, if you were born in the 21st century.
Everybody? That thing with coloured bubbles? The network thing with all the OSs? The thing where you had to guess the position of things with lasers in a grid, all the breakout clones, innumerable tetris, doom (or was that in Irix?). Also there were lots of games if you installed the games packages. Like Mille Bornes (or whatever it was called in English) or hangman, or many other crowd pleasers.
Some of those games sound like Simon Tatham’s Portable Puzzle Collection
Available for Linux, Windows, web browser (javascript or java applet), Android, IOS, and… uh, Palm OS apparently.
The thing with coloured bubbles could be several things here. The network thing is probably net or netslide. The thing with the lasers and the grid is probably blackbox
Take me back to the Irix days, remind me what the 3D racing game was called, the cars were all round and there were five? rails you could hop between. The background was space, maybe?
There was another game, a first-person shooter where TVs with hair screamed at you.
TVs with hair screamed at you.
I can’t decide whether those were my teenage years or just bad dreams. Or maybe both.
