Fortunately Valve publishes monthly hardware statistics so we can back claims with statistics. Linux comprises 2.89% of their surveyed share. Of that 28.31% are using Steam OS. Using the wayback machine we can check the statistics from last year. Checking the July 2024 results using the Wayback Machine shows Linux at 2.08% with Steam OS comprising 40.97% of that.
From that we can see that Linux is growing, while Steam OS is becoming less of a contributing factor to the Linux share.
I think if Valve would release SteamOS 3.0 for PC that would make a bigger dent in Windows. TurboTax just announced they will not support Windows 10 for the new version and that’s probably just the start for Win10 abandonment.
No but I think the point being made is that people that have been clinging to Win 10 as a refuge from the crapfest that Win 11 is are going to start running into significant problems soon. Increasingly you’re not going to be able to get software for Windows 10. A lot of people are opting to migrate to Linux rather than going from Win 10 to Win 11, and as the holdouts on 10 are increasingly corned some amount of them will make the same decision.
https://www.gamingonlinux.com/steam-tracker/ has some statistics from the Steam Survey. Somewhat interesting bit is that if you only take users who use English as the language in Steam, the Linux market share is 6.3%.
Proton existed long before the Steam Deck, and before that as DXVK.
This is a battle between closed proprietary OS and open source. Proton enables translating DirectX/Windows APIs not only to Vulkan/Linux x86, but even to ARM and BSD.
Proton is mostly Wine, not DXVK. Wine does the translation of Windows and some DirectX APIs. DXVK translates Direct3D to Vulkan. Proton pulls it all together with some game specific patches, integration with gamescope and other Steam specific integrations.
All of this being open source means it can also be compiled for ARM and BSD. Though to get x64 games to run on ARM you need an additional emulation layer like Box64.
Though rumor has it that Valve is already experimenting with x64 emulation for their Deckard project, which is likely to be their next VR headset.
First it’s debatable if Proton existed long before Steam Deck. I’m not sure the exact timeline but I think it was created as part of the Steam Box effort which wasn’t all that long ago. On the other hand though Wine which Proton is built on top of most certainly has existed for a very long time before either the Steam Deck or even Proton (I have fond memories of LAN gaming with it back when Diablo 2 was new).
Second Proton doesn’t enable ARM (at least by itself) so that claim is a little misleading. There is a project to realtime translate x86 instructions into ARM but that project (Box86) although it fulfills a similar role and could be used in conjunction with Proton isn’t actually Proton. Using Proton by itself will not enable you to play x86/Windows games on ARM.
Lastly Proton is kind of irrelevant to the whole Linux vs BSD thing. Technically what enables that is that both implement POSIX standards plus use mostly the same libraries, frameworks (like Vulkan), and applications. Yes running Proton on BSD will let you game on BSD but that isn’t really a result of Proton doing the work so much as it’s a side effect of the fact you can run Proton on BSD in the first place. Additionally while there are technical and philosophical reasons why the distinction between Linux and BSD is important, practically speaking they’re the same thing these days. OpenBSD isn’t that much more different from a Linux distro as one Linux distro is from another.
The Steam Deck came out in 2022, after ~4 years of Proton improving from masses of desktop/laptop users running everything possible through it on all kinds of hardware to (auto) generate bug and crash reports for Valve (and others), who then of course actually developed it up to… I think Proton was at either 7 or 8 when the Deck actually came out, now we are on 9, 10 will probably come out of beta and be official Steam default by the end of the year.
Also also, the ‘Steam Machine’ was really more of just a minimum spec requirement than a specific product, the idea was to try to get other manufacturers to take their own crack at the concept, got a small amount of buy in, but not much.
Ah cool, thanks for looking all that up. I knew Proton pre-dated Steam Deck, I just wasn’t sure exactly where in the timeline it fit between the original Steam Machine launch and the release of the Steam Deck.
It’s kind of a shame that Steam Machine failed, but in many ways it was a little too ahead of its time and its failure brought us to the Steam Deck which is a much more sensible approach.
Ultimately none of this would have existed without Wine and ironically the Microsoft app store (or whatever they’re calling it these days). The threat of MS getting a stranglehold on program distribution on Windows the way Apple does on OS X and iOS was enough to spur Valve into putting significant effort into making Linux a viable gaming platform, something we’re all benefitting from greatly.
People seem to be downplaying somewhat how significant an achievement this is for Linux. The thing is, for most programs you can find alternatives because the point isn’t the program it’s what you do with it. People don’t use Photoshop because they enjoy Photoshop, they do it because they want to create something, which means if you can create that same thing using a different program then you don’t need Photoshop. On the other hand games are an experience. The point is the game. Sure you can play a different game, but that’s not an Apples to Apples thing as the experience however similar isn’t the same. That means games are uniquely placed as a roadblock for migrating away from a platform, something consoles with their exclusive releases have known for a long time. Giving people the option to play the exact same game under Linux as they can under Windows is massive because there really isn’t any other way to solve that problem.
I think all your other info in the first comment, as well as this more recent one, is pretty much bang on accurate.
Getting gaming to work on linux is the path toward more mass adoption.
Linux has already been increasingly functional, capable, usable, and solid in many other ways, I’d argue superior in many ways… for a while, and gaming really is the last hurdle.
There are still some other hurdles. GIMP isn’t as good as Photoshop (at least that’s what the Photoshop-users keep telling me,) Kdenlive isn’t as good as Premiere, etc. There are still market segments where switching to Linux is unfeasible. However, gaming is a pretty big segment in itself, and it is becoming feasible for many of those users to switch to Linux (with the main exception being people who play games with kernel-level anticheat.)
This creates a snowball effect since as more people switch to Linux it creates incentive for software and hardware makers to provide Linux support, which will allow more people to switch to Linux, etc.
Gaming isn’t the last hurdle, but it’s a very important one.
Do you know what I did last week thanks to Proton? Installed EndeavourOS on my freshly purchased laptop, installed steam, and installed a bunch of Windows games. Then I played them. At no point did I wonder whether they would run.
Now, you may think being able to do that isn’t something that is going to get more people using desktop Linux (or that it hasn’t already done so), but as much as I’d love to agree with you, then we’d both be wrong.
I say this as someone who used to care about convincing other people to use Linux. (Before shifting into “you can lead a horse to water…” mode, and now I just don’t give a shit.)
However, what I gained from that experience is this: In twenty years of being Linux-only on my personal desktop, the number of times I have read the phrase, “I’d love to use Linux, except for [some statement about a game or games]” is astronomical.
Now, is Proton going to make desktop Linux the best choice for everyone? Clearly not, duh. But it is remarkably disingenuous to suggest that it’s not had a massive benefit to the Linux community and ecosystem as a whole, including, and dare I say especially, desktop Linux. It is flat out impossible to imagine that a substantial portion of current and future Linux users aren’t people for whom Proton solved what they considered to be a substantial barrier to usage.
In my experience, it’s not actually Proton specifically but more generally Wine along with DXVK and Vulkan itself.
I have as good a success rate with Windows games from GOG under Wine through Lutris (which also defaults to using DXVK and Vulkan plus has Wine configuration scripts for most GOG games, making their install fully automated and zero-configuration) as I have with Windows games from Steam under Proton.
If I understand it correctly, Proton is mainly a fork of Wine with Steam integration thrown in and changes to make sure it works with specific Steam games, so I don’t think the improvements are Proton specific, but rather more global than that (the use of Vulkan instead of OpenGL, DXVK allowing DirectX games run with Vulkan, Wine improvements).
Mind you, if improvements in Proton are flowing to those other projects and having a big impact, then credit were credit is due for Proton pulling up the whole ecosystem, otherwise Proton isn’t actually as crucial in improving Gaming on Linux as seems to be portrayed in so many posts here.
I can understand that if all people have used for gaming in Linux is Steam and never games from other digital sources - like GOG or even pirated games - via launchers like Heroic or Lutris, it might seem like Proton is the secret juice making gaming under Linux nowadays a vastly better experience than before, but in my experience in the last year of gaming in Linux, a good laucher using Wine + DXVK + Vulkan works just as well as Proton.
Proton developers are working on Wine code. Their patches go upstream. If you are using Wine, you have benefited (massively) from the sea change that has occurred (directly and indirectly) as a result of the development of Proton.
I remember the naysayers predicting that Gabe would never in a million years make the required investment because the state of Linux gaming was (in their assessment) that terrible.
And now we’re having argue about whether it actually did anything for us? In the comments about an article about how much it did for us?
That’s not an argument I’m having, I watched it happen.
I didn’t know one way or the other if Proton development ended up in Wine or not, much less if Steam was or not directly participating in Wine development, all I knew is that Proton was forked from Wine in the beginning.
Years ago I made the switch to Linux, then I wanted to play WOW again but it would not run on my Linux machines, so I started to dual boot. Then I began to wonder why I was keeping Linux installed.
Eventually I made the shift to macOS because I worked in theatre and needed it for specific Mac only programs. But I still have a Lenovo legion that I am getting ready to swap over to Linux (not that all of the games I currently play do not run on macOS or my steam deck).
If I was able to get WOW running on Linux years ago I likely never would have swapped back to windows. And I am currently trying to convince my son to install Linux on his pc running windows 10.
Strange, WOW should have been able to run. Maybe needed a command line switch to enable OpenGL for optimal performance. But back then Blizzard games had a great track record of Wine compatibility. I never had any problems with their games.
There was one instance of Linux WOW players being banned for cheating. But that was rectified in a matter of days.
Blizzard used a cheat detection system in wow that allowed their server to send arbitrary code for clients to run. The code failing to return an expected result was a sign that there was tampering going on. Emulating windows api to run on Linux is a form of tampering, though obviously not necessarily a sign of cheating. Guessing they used some code that didn’t work on Linux and banned everyone who failed before realizing that some failed due to Linux, and then were able to separate the Linux users from detected cheaters by how it failed (either that or they had to undo all bans from that round).
Though it does make me wonder if it meant they can’t/don’t detect cheaters on Linux. Probably not, because my guess is they start out by looking for any cheats they can find, install them on test machines, then work at detecting the differences between those test machines and ones without the cheat. So they’d know about Linux-based cheats, too. They might even be able to use timing-based attacks to detect kernel level ones, too.
This was 2006/2007 I think. Every article I read about it had a different solution and none worked fully.
I also remember when I asked for help on wow centric forums being crappy replies of “don’t use Linux” and when I would post on Linux centric spaces getting “don’t play wow” replies.
I played WOW under Linux since open beta of WOW 1.0 until the first expansion, after which I quit it. The performance probably wasn’t on bar with Windows, but besides some problems after some of the patches, the stability was rock solid even in 25-man raids.
I’ve tried switching to Linux on my home desktop several times over the last 3 decades, but because I always use that machine also for gaming it always had some Windows in a dual boot configuration and I always found myself not really booting Linux more than once in a while.
Since my last switch, maybe a year ago, even though Windows is still there in duat boot, I’ve only ever booted it once and that only to move some data files which were in the main windows partition over to a data partition I have in a seperated drive (were most of my data files already resided but a few were still elsewhere) so that I can cleanly share it between both OSes.
Whilst I know more than enough to muck around with Linux and Wine configuration (and for example had to do the latter to get a pirated version working of a game I have in Steam whose official version won’t run in Linux no matter what I do), it’s very seldom that I actually have to do it (and I don’t just use Steam with Proton but also Lutris with Wine for GOG games), whilst in my previous try maybe 5 years ago getting anything but DOS games to run under Linux was a major PITA.
There are the obvious options that can’t work due to the general mode anti cheat software, but over the past 1.5 years, I’ve only had a couple of steam games where I had to tweak something because it didn’t work out the gate. Every major title I’ve played worked first try.
I tried Linux a couple times over the bast 20+ years and it was still too raw for me. Now, it just works for me. I’m by no means a Linux guru but I am a computer smart guy. I setup a laptop with Mint for my brother who knows the bare minimum about computers, and he’s had no issues using it. The progress made over the past decade has been wildly positive.
The Bazzite console I built which is connected to my living room TV stands in contradiction. The Linux-driven gaming PC that’s sitting on my desk is confirmation.
Windows 11 and the forced obsolescence of hardware is leaving a sour aftertaste, and at this point a game maker essentially has to choose to not support Linux via Proton.
You might not be able to run Battlefield or CoD, but Marvel Rivals and Overwatch run particularly well, if not better on Linux.
And with Microsoft entering the handheld market, this is very much a question of Linux vs Windows for gaming.
If BSD had a the same software license as Linux then I would celebrate it running on PlayStation hardware as users would be more free. Instead PS consoles are locked-down, preventing you from running software you want to use unless daddy Sony says you can. It’s a battle between consumer rights, including software freedom.
deleted by creator
Fortunately Valve publishes monthly hardware statistics so we can back claims with statistics. Linux comprises 2.89% of their surveyed share. Of that 28.31% are using Steam OS. Using the wayback machine we can check the statistics from last year. Checking the July 2024 results using the Wayback Machine shows Linux at 2.08% with Steam OS comprising 40.97% of that.
From that we can see that Linux is growing, while Steam OS is becoming less of a contributing factor to the Linux share.
Someone citing actual facts on the internet?! Impossible!!
Sourced facts nonetheless
the deck is a gateway drug for linux
I think if Valve would release SteamOS 3.0 for PC that would make a bigger dent in Windows. TurboTax just announced they will not support Windows 10 for the new version and that’s probably just the start for Win10 abandonment.
does turbotax support linux?
They support web browsers
No but I think the point being made is that people that have been clinging to Win 10 as a refuge from the crapfest that Win 11 is are going to start running into significant problems soon. Increasingly you’re not going to be able to get software for Windows 10. A lot of people are opting to migrate to Linux rather than going from Win 10 to Win 11, and as the holdouts on 10 are increasingly corned some amount of them will make the same decision.
https://www.gamingonlinux.com/steam-tracker/ has some statistics from the Steam Survey. Somewhat interesting bit is that if you only take users who use English as the language in Steam, the Linux market share is 6.3%.
Proton existed long before the Steam Deck, and before that as DXVK.
This is a battle between closed proprietary OS and open source. Proton enables translating DirectX/Windows APIs not only to Vulkan/Linux x86, but even to ARM and BSD.
Proton is mostly Wine, not DXVK. Wine does the translation of Windows and some DirectX APIs. DXVK translates Direct3D to Vulkan. Proton pulls it all together with some game specific patches, integration with gamescope and other Steam specific integrations.
All of this being open source means it can also be compiled for ARM and BSD. Though to get x64 games to run on ARM you need an additional emulation layer like Box64.
Though rumor has it that Valve is already experimenting with x64 emulation for their Deckard project, which is likely to be their next VR headset.
Couple technical nitpicks.
First it’s debatable if Proton existed long before Steam Deck. I’m not sure the exact timeline but I think it was created as part of the Steam Box effort which wasn’t all that long ago. On the other hand though Wine which Proton is built on top of most certainly has existed for a very long time before either the Steam Deck or even Proton (I have fond memories of LAN gaming with it back when Diablo 2 was new).
Second Proton doesn’t enable ARM (at least by itself) so that claim is a little misleading. There is a project to realtime translate x86 instructions into ARM but that project (Box86) although it fulfills a similar role and could be used in conjunction with Proton isn’t actually Proton. Using Proton by itself will not enable you to play x86/Windows games on ARM.
Lastly Proton is kind of irrelevant to the whole Linux vs BSD thing. Technically what enables that is that both implement POSIX standards plus use mostly the same libraries, frameworks (like Vulkan), and applications. Yes running Proton on BSD will let you game on BSD but that isn’t really a result of Proton doing the work so much as it’s a side effect of the fact you can run Proton on BSD in the first place. Additionally while there are technical and philosophical reasons why the distinction between Linux and BSD is important, practically speaking they’re the same thing these days. OpenBSD isn’t that much more different from a Linux distro as one Linux distro is from another.
Proton definitely existed before the Steam Deck was released.
Proton had its initial release in 2018. I was using it on a linux desktop in 2019.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proton_(software)
The Steam Deck came out in 2022, after ~4 years of Proton improving from masses of desktop/laptop users running everything possible through it on all kinds of hardware to (auto) generate bug and crash reports for Valve (and others), who then of course actually developed it up to… I think Proton was at either 7 or 8 when the Deck actually came out, now we are on 9, 10 will probably come out of beta and be official Steam default by the end of the year.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_Deck
…
Also, Proton was not created as part of the Steam
BoxMachine, that was way earlier, back in 2015.https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_Machine_(computer)
Also also, the ‘Steam Machine’ was really more of just a minimum spec requirement than a specific product, the idea was to try to get other manufacturers to take their own crack at the concept, got a small amount of buy in, but not much.
Ah cool, thanks for looking all that up. I knew Proton pre-dated Steam Deck, I just wasn’t sure exactly where in the timeline it fit between the original Steam Machine launch and the release of the Steam Deck.
It’s kind of a shame that Steam Machine failed, but in many ways it was a little too ahead of its time and its failure brought us to the Steam Deck which is a much more sensible approach.
Ultimately none of this would have existed without Wine and ironically the Microsoft app store (or whatever they’re calling it these days). The threat of MS getting a stranglehold on program distribution on Windows the way Apple does on OS X and iOS was enough to spur Valve into putting significant effort into making Linux a viable gaming platform, something we’re all benefitting from greatly.
People seem to be downplaying somewhat how significant an achievement this is for Linux. The thing is, for most programs you can find alternatives because the point isn’t the program it’s what you do with it. People don’t use Photoshop because they enjoy Photoshop, they do it because they want to create something, which means if you can create that same thing using a different program then you don’t need Photoshop. On the other hand games are an experience. The point is the game. Sure you can play a different game, but that’s not an Apples to Apples thing as the experience however similar isn’t the same. That means games are uniquely placed as a roadblock for migrating away from a platform, something consoles with their exclusive releases have known for a long time. Giving people the option to play the exact same game under Linux as they can under Windows is massive because there really isn’t any other way to solve that problem.
No prob!
I think all your other info in the first comment, as well as this more recent one, is pretty much bang on accurate.
Getting gaming to work on linux is the path toward more mass adoption.
Linux has already been increasingly functional, capable, usable, and solid in many other ways, I’d argue superior in many ways… for a while, and gaming really is the last hurdle.
There are still some other hurdles. GIMP isn’t as good as Photoshop (at least that’s what the Photoshop-users keep telling me,) Kdenlive isn’t as good as Premiere, etc. There are still market segments where switching to Linux is unfeasible. However, gaming is a pretty big segment in itself, and it is becoming feasible for many of those users to switch to Linux (with the main exception being people who play games with kernel-level anticheat.)
This creates a snowball effect since as more people switch to Linux it creates incentive for software and hardware makers to provide Linux support, which will allow more people to switch to Linux, etc.
Gaming isn’t the last hurdle, but it’s a very important one.
Do you know what I did last week thanks to Proton? Installed EndeavourOS on my freshly purchased laptop, installed steam, and installed a bunch of Windows games. Then I played them. At no point did I wonder whether they would run.
Now, you may think being able to do that isn’t something that is going to get more people using desktop Linux (or that it hasn’t already done so), but as much as I’d love to agree with you, then we’d both be wrong.
I say this as someone who used to care about convincing other people to use Linux. (Before shifting into “you can lead a horse to water…” mode, and now I just don’t give a shit.)
However, what I gained from that experience is this: In twenty years of being Linux-only on my personal desktop, the number of times I have read the phrase, “I’d love to use Linux, except for [some statement about a game or games]” is astronomical.
Now, is Proton going to make desktop Linux the best choice for everyone? Clearly not, duh. But it is remarkably disingenuous to suggest that it’s not had a massive benefit to the Linux community and ecosystem as a whole, including, and dare I say especially, desktop Linux. It is flat out impossible to imagine that a substantial portion of current and future Linux users aren’t people for whom Proton solved what they considered to be a substantial barrier to usage.
In my experience, it’s not actually Proton specifically but more generally Wine along with DXVK and Vulkan itself.
I have as good a success rate with Windows games from GOG under Wine through Lutris (which also defaults to using DXVK and Vulkan plus has Wine configuration scripts for most GOG games, making their install fully automated and zero-configuration) as I have with Windows games from Steam under Proton.
If I understand it correctly, Proton is mainly a fork of Wine with Steam integration thrown in and changes to make sure it works with specific Steam games, so I don’t think the improvements are Proton specific, but rather more global than that (the use of Vulkan instead of OpenGL, DXVK allowing DirectX games run with Vulkan, Wine improvements).
Mind you, if improvements in Proton are flowing to those other projects and having a big impact, then credit were credit is due for Proton pulling up the whole ecosystem, otherwise Proton isn’t actually as crucial in improving Gaming on Linux as seems to be portrayed in so many posts here.
I can understand that if all people have used for gaming in Linux is Steam and never games from other digital sources - like GOG or even pirated games - via launchers like Heroic or Lutris, it might seem like Proton is the secret juice making gaming under Linux nowadays a vastly better experience than before, but in my experience in the last year of gaming in Linux, a good laucher using Wine + DXVK + Vulkan works just as well as Proton.
Proton developers are working on Wine code. Their patches go upstream. If you are using Wine, you have benefited (massively) from the sea change that has occurred (directly and indirectly) as a result of the development of Proton.
I remember the naysayers predicting that Gabe would never in a million years make the required investment because the state of Linux gaming was (in their assessment) that terrible.
And now we’re having argue about whether it actually did anything for us? In the comments about an article about how much it did for us?
That’s not an argument I’m having, I watched it happen.
Well, credit to Steam then.
I didn’t know one way or the other if Proton development ended up in Wine or not, much less if Steam was or not directly participating in Wine development, all I knew is that Proton was forked from Wine in the beginning.
This makes Linux desktop a viable option for millions of users where it wasn’t before. It’s absolutely a battle between Linux and Windows.
Years ago I made the switch to Linux, then I wanted to play WOW again but it would not run on my Linux machines, so I started to dual boot. Then I began to wonder why I was keeping Linux installed.
Eventually I made the shift to macOS because I worked in theatre and needed it for specific Mac only programs. But I still have a Lenovo legion that I am getting ready to swap over to Linux (not that all of the games I currently play do not run on macOS or my steam deck).
If I was able to get WOW running on Linux years ago I likely never would have swapped back to windows. And I am currently trying to convince my son to install Linux on his pc running windows 10.
Strange, WOW should have been able to run. Maybe needed a command line switch to enable OpenGL for optimal performance. But back then Blizzard games had a great track record of Wine compatibility. I never had any problems with their games.
There was one instance of Linux WOW players being banned for cheating. But that was rectified in a matter of days.
Blizzard used a cheat detection system in wow that allowed their server to send arbitrary code for clients to run. The code failing to return an expected result was a sign that there was tampering going on. Emulating windows api to run on Linux is a form of tampering, though obviously not necessarily a sign of cheating. Guessing they used some code that didn’t work on Linux and banned everyone who failed before realizing that some failed due to Linux, and then were able to separate the Linux users from detected cheaters by how it failed (either that or they had to undo all bans from that round).
Though it does make me wonder if it meant they can’t/don’t detect cheaters on Linux. Probably not, because my guess is they start out by looking for any cheats they can find, install them on test machines, then work at detecting the differences between those test machines and ones without the cheat. So they’d know about Linux-based cheats, too. They might even be able to use timing-based attacks to detect kernel level ones, too.
This was 2006/2007 I think. Every article I read about it had a different solution and none worked fully.
I also remember when I asked for help on wow centric forums being crappy replies of “don’t use Linux” and when I would post on Linux centric spaces getting “don’t play wow” replies.
Boo! I’ve added “help nocturne play wow on Linux” to my todo list when my time machine is done.
I played WOW under Linux since open beta of WOW 1.0 until the first expansion, after which I quit it. The performance probably wasn’t on bar with Windows, but besides some problems after some of the patches, the stability was rock solid even in 25-man raids.
I wish I had found you nearly 20 years ago to help me get it running.
I’ve tried switching to Linux on my home desktop several times over the last 3 decades, but because I always use that machine also for gaming it always had some Windows in a dual boot configuration and I always found myself not really booting Linux more than once in a while.
Since my last switch, maybe a year ago, even though Windows is still there in duat boot, I’ve only ever booted it once and that only to move some data files which were in the main windows partition over to a data partition I have in a seperated drive (were most of my data files already resided but a few were still elsewhere) so that I can cleanly share it between both OSes.
Whilst I know more than enough to muck around with Linux and Wine configuration (and for example had to do the latter to get a pirated version working of a game I have in Steam whose official version won’t run in Linux no matter what I do), it’s very seldom that I actually have to do it (and I don’t just use Steam with Proton but also Lutris with Wine for GOG games), whilst in my previous try maybe 5 years ago getting anything but DOS games to run under Linux was a major PITA.
There are the obvious options that can’t work due to the general mode anti cheat software, but over the past 1.5 years, I’ve only had a couple of steam games where I had to tweak something because it didn’t work out the gate. Every major title I’ve played worked first try.
I tried Linux a couple times over the bast 20+ years and it was still too raw for me. Now, it just works for me. I’m by no means a Linux guru but I am a computer smart guy. I setup a laptop with Mint for my brother who knows the bare minimum about computers, and he’s had no issues using it. The progress made over the past decade has been wildly positive.
The Bazzite console I built which is connected to my living room TV stands in contradiction. The Linux-driven gaming PC that’s sitting on my desk is confirmation.
Windows 11 and the forced obsolescence of hardware is leaving a sour aftertaste, and at this point a game maker essentially has to choose to not support Linux via Proton.
You might not be able to run Battlefield or CoD, but Marvel Rivals and Overwatch run particularly well, if not better on Linux.
And with Microsoft entering the handheld market, this is very much a question of Linux vs Windows for gaming.
I haven’t booted windows in like 6 months and I game on my desktop PC like 4 times a week.
Edit: also https://www.protondb.com/ distinguishes reports between steam deck and PC so you can see that people are using both there as well.
Obligatory Steam Deck runs Linux BTW.
If BSD had a the same software license as Linux then I would celebrate it running on PlayStation hardware as users would be more free. Instead PS consoles are locked-down, preventing you from running software you want to use unless daddy Sony says you can. It’s a battle between consumer rights, including software freedom.
Cry me a river…