Which I’m sure is much higher than windows games working on windows. Proton is awesome for old games.
The stereotype is of the haughty Linux user, but fuck me all I ever see in these discussions is Windows users being belittling assholes.
For me its 100% of games, but sure, havent tried all games that exist…
Typically the competitive multiplayer ones fail because of kernel-level anticheat.
Switching to linux had me cold turkey league of legends im a healthier happier person now.
the real cold turkey was Riot killing linux support last year. Seems like there wasn’t enough linux players at the time for them to walk back that decision.
I finally switched to Linux just a few days ago when upgrading my laptop’s SSD, and so far I have only opened minecraft to see how it runs - extremely smoothly, even though I could not figure out how to make use the Nvidia GPU. I’d say it runs noticeably better on Linux than it did on Windows.
Playing Hogwarts legacy at the moment, but I also tested ETS 2 and the tenants.
The only game I am not able to make it work on Linux is “The Sims 4”. After installing it on Steam, when clicking on Play, it runs the EA app in the background and tries to start the game, but it doesn’t load. Any suggestion?
Try the GE version of Proton, it’s usually more curring edge.
Mayb this can help: https://www.protondb.com/app/1222670
100% of games worth playing work on Linux!
The only games I’ve struggled with are those with codecs that are not distributed with Proton. Installing GE-Proton solved it.
99.99% of games on Linux unlocked.
GE-proton what add to proton? Beside codecs
From their readme:
Things it contains that Valve’s Proton does not:
- Additional media foundation patches for better video playback support
- AMD FSR patches added directly to fullscreen hack that can be toggled with WINE_FULLSCREEN_FSR=1
- FSR Fake resolution patch details here
- Nvidia CUDA support for PhysX and NVAPI
- Raw input mouse support
- ‘protonfixes’ system – this is an automated system that applies per-game fixes (such as winetricks, envvars, EAC workarounds, overrides, etc).
- Various upstream WINE patches backported
- Various wine-staging patches applied as they become needed
- NTSync enablement if the kernel supports it.
protonfixes is huge, all of those weird little things you had to do like changing dll versions or installing .net are just stored in a script that is automatically run when it detects what game you’re playing.
Also, GE-proton updates more frequently and those updates include current versions of the underlying programs (dxvk, wine, etc) so any fixes that are made in these underlying systems will be available in GE-proton very quickly.

Linux people responses will be like: “ive never seen that, works fine on my machine. i’m curious tho what version of Wine, Proton are you using? …. oh? what’s your desktop environment? … oh KDE…? ah must be a Bazzite thing? i’ve never seen that before on Mint with GNOME on my Intel Graphics Card”
https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@SilbinaryWolf/115483449807384098
Really the thing that does not work for Linux gaming is when you have a high dpi display. So many games render the UI wrong.
I don’t know if they work correctly on Windows either.
Unfortunately those pesky live service games that have the most player counts are disproportionately represented in that 10%.
The correlation between people playing those games and not giving a fuck about digital privacy is probably huge.
They tend to require installing a rootkit on your own computer. I wouldn’t buy them even if they did support Linux.
you are a minority in this case
Good, but native would be better. At least they can’t kill Linux the way they did os/2
I’ll take compatible.
Most people game on windows. It’s monolithic nature also means that they will mostly encounter the same bugs.
Linux has a wider base of functionality. A bug might only show up on Debian, not Ubuntu.
End result, they spend 60% of their effort solving bugs, for 2% of their base. That’s not cost viable.
Compatibility means they just have to focus on 1 base of code. All we ask is that they don’t actively break the compatibility. This is far less effort, and a lot easier to sell to the bean counters.
Once Linux has a decent share, we can work on better universal standards. We likely need at least 10% to even get a chance there.
Ummmm sure?
I don’t want to start that extremely old flame war of native VS jit code but…
Proton is not an emulation, it is a translation to native code, and while it has some drawbacks (more memory usage, more time at start up to compile things) it can unlocks a lot of potential when the hw support new capabilities, this is the reason that some dx10 games run faster on Linux…
I might be wrong, but I don’t think proton is either? It’s running x86 instructions either way, wine just provides a way to load it from the windows executable and library formats, and together with proton they provide implementations of windows libraries for those executables to use.
I guess most of the process is just using a wrapper to translate the call to a Windows library to the equivalent call to a Linux library.
“Perfect is the enemy of good.”
That 10%? The games everybody plays.
I guess I’m not everbody then. After writing this message I’ll go and play some Witcher 3.
This may be the first time I haven’t fallen into the subset of “everybody.”
Everything I want to play runs using Linux/proton. It seems like the only things that have trouble are things I’d never consider even installing, let alone running.
I was watching a video about extraction shooters and it mentioned a F2P Chinese one. I wasn’t that interested in it, but I wanted to give it a try to see what it was doing differently. It didn’t run though, because almost all Chinese games have kernel-level AC. I figure it’s not a big loss. I own EfT, and I’ve got other extraction shooters to play, especially ARC Raiders now.
That was the last time, and the only time in a very long time, that a game I tried to play didn’t just work.
ARC Raiders is what I’d be playing even on Windows.
An extraction shooter where there is a common enemy creates a lot of spontaneous cooperation. People are still dangerous, but seeing a person isn’t a life or death situation like in EfT.
kernel-level AC
This sounds like they did you a solid by not working. I’ll have to look up this genre of shooter, though; not something I’ve heard of before. I tend to be too easily annoyed for anything that isn’t single-player or local co-op these days, although some part of me still remembers some MMOs though rose-colored nostalgia glasses.
You’re the exception
Most people play the same 3 FPS games that don’t run on Linux. They’re probably not the type of people that would use Linux but hey, some might
Unfortunately the 10% that don’t include the biggest, most played games in the world.
This. Plus anti-cheat is still a removed on Linux.










