At the same time the small amount of games that don't support Linux also happen to be some of the biggest and most popular ones.
Good thing I don't play mtx/fomo games.
Oh noes, my lootboxes!
At the same time the small amount of games that don't support Linux also happen to be some of the biggest and most popular ones.
Minecraft? CS2? Dota 2?
Frankly the only game I haven't been able to play (besides a couple of old MMO private servers I couldn't get running) has been Fortnite, and there's frankly no reason it shouldn't run on Linux already, Epic just sucks
I'm honestly at a loss as to why they are so popular. I barely remember the last time I enjoyed a AAA game. The only notable exceptions would probably be Baldur’s Gate 3 and Dishonored, which both work. Personally I haven't run into any games that wouldn't work and as much as I'd love to dismiss those (fucking atrocious) games, I get your point about it preventing popular adoption. Sadly it's not something Linux can easily fix, as long as companies insist on using windows specific versions of anti cheat software (despite Linux versions of the same stuff existing) just so they can have kernel access to your machine.
Lots of people really enjoy competitive games. Competitive multi-player games attract the most cheaters, resulting in the strictest anti-cheat measures (which still barely work, honestly).
Linux gamer for 3+ years now. I rarely, rarely have any issues with anything at all, and most of those are solved by switching to Proton GE or Experimental. Most of the time I think stuff actually runs better than on Windows.
But to be clear, I don't really play anything multiplayer. The sole exceptions like Civ VI have worked perfectly fine, but my understanding is that a big reason these larger multiplayer games don't work is their anticheat.
Yep. For games, it is usually some crappy anticheat, for other applications (outside games) it is crappy licence managers. Or really, really inept programmers. Professionally inept programmers.
I'm about a year in. One interesting thing is that older games seem to work better with Proton than they do on Windows. For example, after installing Psychonauts on Windows I had to Google why it wouldn't load and try a few ini changes until I found what worked. On Linux, I just started it and it worked with no issues.
NVIDIA user or AMD for GPU?
AMD. That was an early switch I made since the nvidia experience on Linux sucks (at least compared to AMD). Minimally it's the difference between juggling poorly supported drivers and not dealing with drivers at all (since AMD's are in the kernel), but I've gathered that there are many compatibility issues as well.
Ah yes the bias of: “its works for me”….
But to be clear, I don't really play anything multiplayer.
I tried to avoid such bias by being clearer about what I play. I don't think it's biased to suggest single player games are more likely to work without issue.
Likewise, if you're on nvidia, you're more likely to have issues.
Did you have a different experience? Or none at all and just assumed it only works for some?
Been gaming on linux for the better part of last couple of decades, can agree its in a muhc better place now and its a rarety to find a title that doesn't work through proton. There are some but not a massive amount.
Kinda ironic but out of the ones that don't work for proton, sometimes they work via wine instead
And some games want an older version of Proton (like River City Girls), so it's not always intuitive what the fix might be, but there's several options to improve compatibility, these days.
Now that ntsync has been added to the upstream kernel for the next release, it will only get better.
better part of last couple of decades
You mean like the lock down period
Kinda ironic but out of the ones that don't work for proton, sometimes they work via wine instead
Kinda weird rather, because Proton is basically wine + a lot of profiled tweaks for the titles. With wine you usually have to manually figure out tweaks or use third party installers, like through Lutris, which often also are somewhat wacky.
Exactly but since it worked, i am not complaining 😅
Damn near anything good works under proton. Cyberpunk 2077 is basically flawless out of the box. No issues with a lot of other newer games.
Ironically some of the older ones like Fallout 3 need a little bit of hackery to get the radio working
Does the RTX and DLSS work in Cyberpunk 2077 on Linux?
As of a couple months ago, the ray tracing also works in Linux when on AMD.
I was able to get it working perfectly fine. It was dicey around a year ago and required some run flags. Now it runs perfectly fine (for me at least)
I don’t understand this infographic at all…
I think I got it.
The right side is showing what percentage of games can be played at each level. Platinum is flawless, and borked is... borked. The percentages below that show that 84% of games are super playable, 95% if you're willing to settle for silver.
The outside ring is the one that shows these percentages.
I'm still unsure of the center rings though.
The rings from top to bottom:
ProtonDB Medals (ProtonDB's appraisal: How does it play. You may need to tinker.)
ProtonDB Click Play (ProtonDB's new appraisal: How does it play without any tinkering)
Deck Verified
Chromebook Ready
Proton is like magic. I remember when gaming on Linux only worked for some rather old games. Now you can almost buy anything from Steam and expect it to work on Linux. What surprised me the most was that even Enderal, an excellent total conversion mod for Skyrim, just worked. The same goes for the newest Hitman. I expected that I have to do some tinkering, but no. You click play and that is it. I doubt that any of these games where ever tested on Linux by their developers. That they all work so well shows how good of a job the developers of Proton, DXVK, and Wine are doing.
What software do you use to organize Skyrim mods and profiles on Linux? Asking from absolute ignorance.
I don't know. I never was much into modded Skyrim. The last time I played Skyrim was around 2012. Enderal installs like any other Steam game and comes with its own launcher. I only played Enderal because it was recommended to me since I really liked Gothic II and story focused games. I now also highly recommend it. This mod is better than at least 90% of games released in the last 10 years.
I use MO2 with quirks. I'm trying to remember what all I did, but I think I renamed MO2 to SkyrimLauncher.exe so steam would open MO2. Then I would launch Skyrim (skse) from there!
The quirks were you couldn't install inside of MO2 because it wouldn't connect to Nexus. The other thing was if I was installing a lot of mods or doing a lot of interactions in MO2 it would get slower and slower. Restarting it fixed that.
All that said I put a ton of hours into a 500ish mod game without issues!
You don't want to count Silver as working well. Still incredible though.
Why? From my experience, many Silver games do work with minor tweaks. Some might have issues, but I wouldn't discount them all.
By definition Silver means some stuff is broken even with workarounds. Gold is where the performance and functionality works near perfectly after some workarounds. You're right, some Silver games do work fairly well, and the rating may or may not be accurate. But I wouldn't count most of them to the total of well supported games.
Out of everything i play, the only game holding me back is Destiny 2, which was explicitly refused support for.
Everything else works phenomenally well, and in some rare cases, performs a lot better.
The only struggle point is heavily modded games with tools that assume i’m doing this on windows, but times are changing too
Like The Elder Scrolls? I've been paying Oblivion for a while with a ton of mods using a mod manager and I don't know how to run this in Linux.
https://github.com/rockerbacon/modorganizer2-linux-installer Small caveat at the moment though is that Protontricks is borked and requires a more up to date version than what's on most repos and flathub. I used the pipx install for Protontricks and that one worked though, but I think the beta branch on Flathub has an updated version now as well, which hopefully goes stable soon. Nexus is also working on a new cross platform compatible mod manager now, but that's going to be far away.
For a lot of other games r2modman + Thunderstore are also working natively on Linux. Games like Stardew Valley have a native mod manager like Stardrop.
I was so surprised that I was able to get Genshin running on my steam deck through wine. I remember when the deck came out, everyone was saying that games that use anti cheat software wouldn't work on the deck. But both Genshin and Elden Ring work on the deck.
I think Genshin removed their anticheat after it was used by ransomware
Oh really? Then why does it still need permission to run on Windows? I thought that was due to the anticheat ?
that use anti cheat software wouldn't work on the deck
Not all anti cheat mechanisms are the same, but the worst ones are kernel-hooking ones for multiple reasons. Besides security, stability and privacy issues with them they also have compatibility issues with any OS they weren't built specifically for
Now that's great to know, I'm not on genshin anymore since they are very cheap with rewards, but I still love Star Rail and been playing ZZZ, was afraid of switching.
I have only tried Genshin, but it runs fairly well. The biggest issue I've had is major stuttering when I'm playing on battery. Plugged in, there's no stuttering. Not sure why.
ZZZ works on Linux. HSR is ... complex. If you want more info dm me.
72% platinum and gold, 86% plat, gold and silver. I'm honestly surprised that this isn't higher because almost everything I play just works (I do have a lot of random games in my account from humble bundles and such, so I don't even play a good amount of them).
Funny enough what I've been playing recently is Minecraft. Downloaded the Prism launcher, linked my account, installed the game and the BetterMC modpack which includes pretty heavy lighting shaders, get an easy 120fps with absolutely zero tinkering besides telling the game to use my systems OpenAL rather than the bundled one, as that was causing a crash. I do have a relatively beefy system so the performance isn't what I'm impressed by, moreso the fact that this was all up and running in 5 minutes.
A lot of reports on ProtonDB are ancient. I would say literally 99% of games work nowadays out of the box.
Ok, Minecraft is in Java though, cross-platform per default.
Yes of course this is a huge factor, but modding games in general tends to be a sticking point. The fact that I immediately had a heavily modded game up and running via a third party launcher with only one minor issue, which was fixed via a single checkbox, was just a really nice experience.
5 MINUTES to install and play a game? Including a bug fix? By a knowledgeable person?
That probably translates into an hour for me, if my googling gets lucky, or complete frustration more likely.
Damnit, I was hoping I could move to Linux, I've used it before, even had it dual-booting with Windows a couple of times, but I never got comfortable with it.
The OpenAL issue was actually pretty easy to diagnose and fix. The crash comes with a pretty detailed log indicating the game encountered an issue when OpenAL was trying to load. And, lo and behold, staring at me was a checkbox in Prism Launcher's options to "Use System OpenAL." I ticked it and haven't had a single issue since, my guess is that the launchers bundled version of OpenAL just didn't play nice with my system.
I've even manually added a few mods since installing, still no issues.
I do understand where you're coming from though, I personally enjoy tinkering and problem solving almost as much as actually using my computer. It's a learning experience for me and makes my computer really feel like my own at the end of the day. However I totally get that not being everyones cup of tea.
For me it's less positive, but still quite impressive!
Lot of indies and linux compatibility is high in my priorities.
Does this mean 58% of my games would just work and rest need tinkering or are broken?
From my experience, only "borked" are without hope. (Almost?) All of the silver games work on my deck, I can't remember the last one that didn't work. I've had one verified game that doesn't work at all, I believe square enix borked it with a patch (because they released the "hd"version and didn't want to support the previous one, aka they deliberately broke the working version)
The tier # system will lean towards negative results compared to Plat/Gold etc.
How do you generate this?
Just link your account at Protondb and go to the dashboard. https://www.protondb.com/dashboard
You just log in with your Steam Account to ProtonDB.
Thank you
I launched might and magic 9 on my steam deck and it fucking worked straight away. It's a 2002 game that was barely working even back then. I didn't have to do anything today get it to work. SHIT JUST WORKS
I'm not sure why, but playing Final Fantasy XIV worked better in Linux using Wine than it did on Windows. There's a joke about net code in the game such that all effects take a half second or so to register, so there's always a little lag for better or worse.
On Linux, somehow things just registered when they happened on screen. Took getting used to!
Borked is Destiny 2 and Wildstar (whose servers are permanently offline)
Destiny 2 is my only hangup at this point.
I miss Wildstar! I played at launch and loved it, But the bots and issues around launch caused my friends to stop playing after a month or two. I kept going for a while but eventually stopped as well. So much cool lore and world building in that game.
Too bad this apparently only counts Steam games. Lately, I've been trying to use GOG (because no DRM) whenever possible.
Just use Lutris or Heroic for that.
I've had really good luck with Bottles so far! A lot more luck than I had with Lutris which I always had problems with.
"why doesn't my recently released porn game work under proton" mfers when they realize they can't tell other people they're trying to play porn games on linux.
Seriously, just do it. Most folk don't give a fuck (I sure as hell don't). There's a game that isn't running on linux, and folk wanna help to get games runnin on linux. That's all there is to it, really. Are there going to be comments going "haha porn game" from immature folk? Ofc. But those can just be downvoted/ignored entirely, like... who cares? So really it's all up to whether ya want for folk to know that yer playin those or not, but like at the end of the day? Let's just be adults bout it, shall we?
i get it, but the pain with those is that they're going to be the 1% most of the time. renpy natively supports linux, so most VNs aren't a problem. Most modern game engines support building for linux. It's mostly just the tiny devs doing weird niche shit not building it properly cross platform, or building it for cross platform.
You also run into the problem of dealing with things at an incredibly small scale, which just make it more annoying. Both for the user and the dev, and anybody working on proton.
It's the development cycle thing of getting 80% of the way there takes 20% of the effort, and getting it 99% of the way there is the rest of it.
Although to be fair, the amount of shit proton just works on is actually staggeringly impressive. I've only found a handful of things it implodes itself on.
Which games are "borked"?
Usually games that require some shitty anti-cheat.
Games where the devs actively reject Linux support.
For my library of 390 games, only 2 are "Borked".
One is Magic: Duels, which was discontinued by WOTC back in 2019. It's still playable on Windows, but seeing as it was kind of a weird experiment they did that ultimately got replaced by Arena I can understand the lack of support there. Also it was free, and I got clean a few years ago, so I'm not salty.
The other of Flatout 3 (the car racing/destruction game, not to be confused with the similarly named Fallout 3). I remembered seeing ads and reviews for Flatout back in PSM when I was a kid. Never got to play it back then, but I grabbed the series bundle on sale at some point. Still haven't played any of them yet, but it appears the issue with Flatout 3 in particular is... It's a bad game. Just learned this now, but apparently it was made by a different developer than the first games and is, by review score, one of the worst games of all time. So there's probably not a whole lot of demand for it on Linux.
Fun stuff. Always neat to find a new way to look at the library.
Your average is lower than my impressive .8% borked.
Destiny 2 and Tarkov is my guess.
%1 Chromebook Ready😂😂
79% gold and platinum, 87% platinum gold and silver, I've definitely played a number of "not supported" (or too early access to be on proton db). Of 1405 games I'd say I'm set for life
The site is https://www.protondb.com/ if you want to check your own library.
Can you use that site to see which of your games fall into each category? I've got a few in the red bronze and silver, but it would be nice to see at a glance which of them it is.
Can you use that site to see which of your games fall into each category?
Yeah just go to https://www.protondb.com/profile and either enter your Steam Profile ID or connect your Steam account, then go to https://www.protondb.com/dashboard
Out of 73 games
Pretty good. Only two multiplayer games in the silver area that I might play once every 3-5 years. The rest I don't care about. But overall very good if one doesn't care about multiplayer games.
Maybe it's just my "golden touch", but like 70% of the games I've tried to play have had some kind of issue. I recently got a steam deck and I regularly have crashes where the whole deck just does a full restart. Usually while I'm already gaming for a while. On the deck most games do generally start though, which is better than my own PC. On my PC I tend to have to hack around a bit before it works. For now I'm still gaming on Windows because of this instability, but I will have to switch at some point due to Micro$oft's ever growing greed
What I don’t get is why some games (even newer ones) don’t work in newer versions of proton but do work in older versions of proton.
I’m talking games working in proton 7.x or 8.<low number> that don’t work in say proton 9 or proton 8.<higher number>.
I rarely seem to have any luck with newer versions let alone proton experimental.
🤷♂️
Some newer tweaks might interfere with older games, but in my personal experience it's very rare that a game does not work with the latest versions and I typically run experimental or the latest GE build.
Chromebook: *whomp-whoump*
18 months ago I tried to roll my own SteamBox. Games launched from Steam worked great. Everything launched from other launchers was mixed, but wouldn't launch from Steam...generally speaking. I switched back to Windows and removed the login because I wanted a console-like experience.
I wish Valve would launch an updated SteamOS.
Try pop os. It's been flawless for me. Lutris has gotten all the non steam stuff to work for me.
I've been on Pop for most of the time I've been gaming on Linux. Though I am currently switching to Arch for reasons, Pop has been great. Very easy, very stable across the board.
Tried it. It's been at least a year and a half, but if memory serves, I think I always had to login for startup. I wanted to be able to just turn on and have steam roll into it's startup screen like a console.
Tried 4 or 5 distros and each had an issue that kept me from that console like experience. Ironically, I was able to do that with w11.
You can configure your OS to boot directly into Steam Big Picture mode, then add lutris/heroic as non steam games.
I did that, except I couldn't get Lutris or Heroic to work. Also tried several distros and delving into repositories... several weeks and I just couped get it to work. Ironically, W11 does exactly what I wanted, even with uac.
More like 84%. Silver tier is probably way more unplayable than on Windows.
