This is a re-upload of an older YouTube video. You may or may not agree with my honest opinion, but we as Linux gamers have come a long way! Make sure to motivate me for more content by, at least, ...
If it were a “first-class citizen” there would be native Linux games and not rampant and intentional anti-cheat exclusions.
“First-class citizen” doesn’t refer to the quality of the experience, but how it’s treated in society. At this point it’s mostly something that devs and publishers tolerate, and occasionally offer minor consideration on behalf of a single device.
If it were a “first-class citizen” there would be native Linux games
This was my thought exactly. Proton’s emulation of a windows game doesn’t count as “first class experience”. It’s second class at best, but still better than literally nothing at all.
Proton and Wine are not emulators.
So while I take your point, I feel it’s important to distinguish the difference here where emulators have a lot of negative connotations.
It’s second class at best, but still better than literally nothing at all.
The native ports have frequently been terrible, both in performance and compatibility (missing graphical features etc). Proton is better than those ports, but worse than a native version using Vulkan and 100% of features supported correctly.
While I agree that proton on its own doesn’t make gaming on Linux a “first class experience”, it does sometimes perform better than the original native “first class” Windows OS that the game was originally intended to be played on. Which is just funny, but also shows all the work that has gone into proton.
Game devs need more Linux players before they make major industry wide changes, but proton makes those numbers have a chance of increasing by making the games playable on Linux.
Another reason why I wouldn’t call gaming on Linux a “first class experience” yet is controller and input driver issues. Which can be worked around like if I open a game I bought on gog through steam and use the steam input methods but I shouldn’t have to use steam to play a gog game with a controller.
Windows games running better with Wine than on Windows has been a thing for at least 20 years, Proton (which is a fork of Wine, people tend to forget) didn’t invent anything.
It’s mainly DXVK and vkd3d-proton that enable this (projects associated with Valve and Proton). It was usually only native OGL games that performed better on old-school Wine; the wined3d translation layer has been hit and miss historically.
That’s not to downplay the huge amount of work that has gone into Wine itself.
There are native Linux games, but mostly from AA and indie publishers. So by that mark, it has been a first-class citizen since mid-2010s, after Steam started officially supporting Linux.
That said, I think that goalpost is a bit too far away. I consider it “first-class support” if major AAA devs offering official technical support to Linux users is more common than not, regardless of whether it’s packaged w/ Proton or directly as a Linux native binary. How they distribute it is up to them, as long as they actually support Linux users. We’re not there yet, but we’re a lot closer than we were even just 5 years ago.
They exist. How many of them do you see on the front page of the Steam store? Almost never. Games that people actually play are very rarely Linux native. If they were, Proton never would have been created.
All of the Paradox games, Civ, Pillars of Eternity, DoTA, Counterstrike. its a small fraction sure, but its not like no big games have native linux versions.
If it were a “first-class citizen” there would be native Linux games and not rampant and intentional anti-cheat exclusions.
“First-class citizen” doesn’t refer to the quality of the experience, but how it’s treated in society. At this point it’s mostly something that devs and publishers tolerate, and occasionally offer minor consideration on behalf of a single device.
This was my thought exactly. Proton’s emulation of a windows game doesn’t count as “first class experience”. It’s second class at best, but still better than literally nothing at all.
Proton and Wine are not emulators. So while I take your point, I feel it’s important to distinguish the difference here where emulators have a lot of negative connotations.
The native ports have frequently been terrible, both in performance and compatibility (missing graphical features etc). Proton is better than those ports, but worse than a native version using Vulkan and 100% of features supported correctly.
While I agree that proton on its own doesn’t make gaming on Linux a “first class experience”, it does sometimes perform better than the original native “first class” Windows OS that the game was originally intended to be played on. Which is just funny, but also shows all the work that has gone into proton.
Game devs need more Linux players before they make major industry wide changes, but proton makes those numbers have a chance of increasing by making the games playable on Linux.
Another reason why I wouldn’t call gaming on Linux a “first class experience” yet is controller and input driver issues. Which can be worked around like if I open a game I bought on gog through steam and use the steam input methods but I shouldn’t have to use steam to play a gog game with a controller.
Windows games running better with Wine than on Windows has been a thing for at least 20 years, Proton (which is a fork of Wine, people tend to forget) didn’t invent anything.
It’s mainly DXVK and vkd3d-proton that enable this (projects associated with Valve and Proton). It was usually only native OGL games that performed better on old-school Wine; the wined3d translation layer has been hit and miss historically.
That’s not to downplay the huge amount of work that has gone into Wine itself.
There are native Linux games, but mostly from AA and indie publishers. So by that mark, it has been a first-class citizen since mid-2010s, after Steam started officially supporting Linux.
That said, I think that goalpost is a bit too far away. I consider it “first-class support” if major AAA devs offering official technical support to Linux users is more common than not, regardless of whether it’s packaged w/ Proton or directly as a Linux native binary. How they distribute it is up to them, as long as they actually support Linux users. We’re not there yet, but we’re a lot closer than we were even just 5 years ago.
They exist. How many of them do you see on the front page of the Steam store? Almost never. Games that people actually play are very rarely Linux native. If they were, Proton never would have been created.
All of the Paradox games, Civ, Pillars of Eternity, DoTA, Counterstrike. its a small fraction sure, but its not like no big games have native linux versions.
I did say almost never
of the current top 30 on most played on steam 7 have a native Linux version, just shy of 1/4. I’d hardly call that almost never.
I didn’t say anything about “most played”.
Was your exact quote, I think showing 1/4 of the most played games on Steam are linux native shows that isnt the case.
Do you see the difference there?
You’re talking about seven games. Seven. 7. Do you know how many games there are?