TL;DR; tried gaming on Linux again after not having done so for ~10 years and am absolutely blown away by how much improved it is
Today I decided to get some use out of an older/leftover PC that I had laying around after upgrading. My plan was to plug it into the TV in our lounge room so that my 5 year old can play some of the less demanding games she enjoys from my steam library (stuff like Slime Rancher 2).
Originally my plan was to install Windows on it only to discover I couldn’t do this due to TPM / secureboot requirements that the older hardware couldn’t handle, this was infuriating and felt like I couldn’t use my own machine which used to run Windows fine.
To understand where I’m coming from; I’ve been a Linux user on and off for more than a decade and in the past had been able to play some games using Wine but it was often fiddly or simply wouldn’t run the game well enough which is why I generally just dual boot Windows for gaming.
I decided to give Linux a try as I’d heard steam has made gaming on Linux much more approachable than it once was using a proton compatibility layer (which under the hood uses Wine but making it a bit easier to use).
After installing Ubuntu 23, Steam and then enabling the proton compatibility in Steam settings I am absolutely amazed at how easy it was to get most games working!. My daughter has been playing Slime Rancher 2 and it works really well and I’ve also tested a few other games such as Cult of the Lamb and Dredge and they also worked well. This is such a leap forward to how I remember the state of things back ~10 years ago when I last played games on Linux.
From recent developments it seems like gaming on Linux is really beginning to pick up momentum and I look forward to the day game publishers place great import on releasing native Linux ports but until then am super grateful for the work the good people at Wine have been doing as well as Proton and Steam for making it easier to use.
For real, the world of Linux gaming owes a lot to Valve and to Proton’s contributors. The last five years have taken gaming on Linux from a fiddly nightmare to, in many cases, performance as good as native. There has never been a better time to run Linux as your primary operating system.
I feel people are often not positive enough. I mean, in my experience, I think that in most cases, running games on Linux with Proton is as good as Windows. The exceptions are unsupported and not-enabled-for-Linux anti-cheat engines and some exceptions, like updates to certain non-Steam launchers breaking things.
With the success of Steam Deck it will only get better and better.
As a Linux user, the Steam Deck is an amazing system to work with. I kinda dropped off with gaming in the last few years and the SD really rekindled my desire to game both solo and doing cozy co-op with my partner.
Truly a game changer and I’m so happy it’s supporting Linux while doing it
All because some weeb wanted to play Nier: Automata.
2B’s bum has been a major contributor to Linux gaming.
Anti cheats one of the more stubborn hurdles left
Cheating is simply a losing arms race. Client side monitoring may be a deterrent for the lazy cheater but it won’t be enough to stop them. Only thing I see actually being viable is server-side machine learning to detect and monitor anomalies and suspicious behavior. (I don’t know much about this in actual practice and this is just some wild speculation)
I think realistically you need both client and server side checks.
If you were updating a password, server would need to check the password meets policy; you might as well check that client-side as well - provides immediate user feedback, but also keeps the load off the server for verifying invalid items. If user hacks their client to submit invalid stuff anyway, then it still doesn’t get through.
If it takes three frames minimum (assuming fixed 60fps) to select an item in a menu, then obviously anyone submitting a hundred menu items selections per second is a cheat who has hacked their client, and you can ban them. Client-side check keeps the load off the server, but server must verify. Also, you don’t want to instantly ban cheaters, because otherwise they’ll know what the limits are and push against them. Waiting for twenty minutes and then making it so that they can only connect to other known cheats strikes me as a suitably ironic hell; go have fun in there.
It’s honestly gotten to a point where I don’t even check ProtonDB anymore unless it’s a brand new game. Generally things just work.
Yeah - I’d narrow that down to brand new AAA game (likely to have Denuvo) or multiplayer, as some anticheats don’t work. Basically everything else now? Perfect.
I took the day off work to play Elden Ring when it first came out, and was gutted when it didn’t start on Linux. Glorious Eggroll had the fix up about three hours later, after which it’s been absolutely perfect.
