ELI5: What causes a Steam game not to run on an operating system like a Linux distro?
I primarily use my pc for gaming, and want to avoid upgrading to Windows 11. Beginning the journey of looking into alternatives.
I am ignorant, trying to be less so. I have a hard time understanding what exactly makes a game not work just because of OS.
You're viewing a single thread.
Ususally, like 99% of the time, it's absolutely the fault of the game developers and by choice.
Pretty much any game can run on Linux nowadays. Some do even run better than on Windows, but most equally good or a tiny bit worse.
The main problem is (very invasive kernel level) anti cheat.
And sometimes, games work fine on Linux, and then the devs actively lock out Linux users for some ludicrous reasons.
You can visit protondb.com for a very nice overview of which games work and how well they do.
That's putting a lot of blame on devopers.
Not all games have a ton of contributors on ProtonDB and that's not the developers fault.
that’s not the developers fault.
Forcing Ring0 spyware on the users IS the developers fault by 100%.
FWIW, it’s actually more the publishers’ fault. Typically as a developer you get told what environment you’re targeting and how the publisher wishes to publish you.
Yeah, don't let us be too nitpicky here. They intentionally make it not run on Linux because of their spyware. So it's entirely their fault.
But it actually is mostly the developers fault. There are weird corner cases, yes. But all game engines natively support Linux and even games that are not made for Linux will run there via Proton nearly always.
Exceptions are 95+% of the time due to anti cheat and like 2% due to a self written engine, that does exceptionally cursed stuff even for windows.
I play lots of games regularly that were never meant to be played on Linux but work flawlessly without the developer or "contributors on ProtonDB" (whatever they have to do with that) doing anything.