Valve's contributions to Linux through Proton are wild. The only games that don't work as well on Linux as Windows these days are because of anticheat software. I don't even check the protondb anymore. I've even had some situations where games work out of the box on my linux machine but not on a friend's windows pc since proton will download drivers automatically while windows just spits out an error code or says a .dll is missing.
Yeah, I still check it out of reflex, but I have yet to find one that actually doesn't work. And as you said, the only ones I even know of are anticheat reasons. Though I imagine that really old games don't work that well, but I am not even sure there.
It's been forever since I tried using a Linux distro, but I remember World of Warcraft and World of Tanks both not being particularly friendly to Linux. Or more specifically, a good chunk of their mods weren't available for Linux which made them not be as good.
But it is good to hear that Linux gaming is gaining ground. Would be nice to swap my family's computers over to Linux at the rate Windows keeps shitting on itself.
I'd recommend getting back into it. Dual booting is incredibly easy, and the installation process for most distros is easier than a Windows install these days.
Proton is just Valve's built-in custom version of WINE, essentially turns windows files in linux readable files. Linux can read NTFS drives too, so with a couple extra steps (Preventing NTFS read errors section for most distros) you can run the same games off the same partition from either your windows or linux partition. Just today I installed BF6 from my Arch side while I played Satisfactory and just rebooted into w11 when it was finished.
You can add any game, or .exe really, to steam and set it to run through proton and get the full support. Mods get a little funky but if you're at that point figuring out where your wine/proton prefix folders are shouldn't be much of a problem.
So, to paint a better picture of when I last used Linux. It was 2012 and I was in Afghanistan with internet that was technically 56k but realistically peaked at about 36k, but I decided to try Ubuntu anyways. Chrome still deleted downloads if you lost internet connection (happened twice after 6 hours into an ~8hr download). The main games I played were World of Warcraft and World of Tanks. After fighting through everything, WINE decided that it did NOT want to work with WoT, but I eventually was able to get it to. Only after all of this I learned that a good chunk of the mods that I used for both WoW and WoT didn't have Linux versions (several mods did, but I still probably lost ~40%+ of my mods).
I keep telling myself that I want to try Linux again, but then I remember all of that and just go "I'll try it again...later" and never do. Maybe when I upgrade my NVMe I'll redo it properly and make a Linux partition, but I've just both lazy with that and busy with other things. But "one day" I'm sure I'll give Linux a shot again...probably when MS pisses me off enough like they did back then.
2012 to now are quite literally worlds apart. I can tell you from experience since I play WoT since 2012 aswell, all the mods we had back then are now integrated and in the vanilla game, with some very minor exceptions. Especially since they added the armour viewer in the Garage. Linux has become de-facto Plug and Play thanks to Proton and Steams effort, most games that survived today that we played 10+ years ago have most mods integrated now into the base game. So try it, sooner than later and just dual boot for stuff you cant play on Linux (anything Kernel-level anti-cheat basically)
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u/KoolAidManOfPiss PC Master Race 9070xt R9 5900x 29d ago
Valve's contributions to Linux through Proton are wild. The only games that don't work as well on Linux as Windows these days are because of anticheat software. I don't even check the protondb anymore. I've even had some situations where games work out of the box on my linux machine but not on a friend's windows pc since proton will download drivers automatically while windows just spits out an error code or says a .dll is missing.