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.
It feels like the trend is changing in that direction, but most games weren't released in the past year or so, and even those were designed and built not thinking Linux would be where it is now. We'll have to see how it evolves.
I agree that a lot of large publishers seem to be actively harming the experience to ensure Linux users can't use their service, for whatever reason. That needs to change. They need to be punished for this, ideally by helping people switch to Linux and making them realize they don't need those games if they don't care about them as a user.
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.
In fact, I was 100% Linux before Steam ported their client. In fact, I didn't even have a Steam account until they officially supported Linux. I used WINE and bought a bunch of games through Humble Bundle (back when they weren't an alternate Steam frontpage). These days, I play a lot more games because I have way more selection due to Valve's work on Proton.
So yeah, no tux, no bux. I don't particularly care if it's a native port or runs through Proton, it just needs to work w/ minimal effort.
Why? I never found a reason why that site would be useful. It seems to just re-word announcements and not provide anything more of use.
On top of that, the owner is a douche. He was a mod on [email protected] community until they learned that mod logs were public then deleted their account and complained on mastodon that it's stupid design that mod logs are public. [Screenshot]
I find it hard to trust in a person who takes in a role of responsibility and does not have any idea about the basics of the platform.
Yeah, on top of not having to deal with applications checking for updates when they're launched, and then manually installing them, not having to deal with drivers is amazing. Windows users talk about how easy the experience is with Windows, but they're just used to how shitty it is and haven't seen the alternative. I just occasionally update everything in my system when I think about it and it's good to go. No being forced to update and restart. No hassle. Just simple and quick and everything is up-to-date.
The awesome people who volunteer their time to bring you the free operating system that you're whining about would love to support your card, and in fact do so despite the best efforts of the vendor to be a complete ass and ignore their Linux customers.
GamePass on the cloud works, but MS has made a choice to not let it work on Linux. This is not an issue with Linux. It's an issue with MS and Windows. They choose to distribute the games using a proprietary encryption method, which harms the user's experience and makes it only work on Windows. You can't mod your games (unless the explicitly allow it and let you decrypt it) because "fuck you, this is ours." Fuck them. If they want my money they can make a better product that works where I want to be. You should hold yourself to that level too, not lick their boot and thank them for the privilege.
Yes to everything up to Xbox Game Pass (and whatever Gaming Cloud is), just pick a mainstream distro and you should be good, as long as your daughter isn't set on playing specific games w/ anti-cheat.