There's still room for improvement, but Linux gaming has come a long way in a short time.
I remember when Proton launched it was like magic playing games like Doom and Nier Automata straight from the Linux Steam client with excellent performance. I do not miss the days of having the Windows version of Steam installed separately.
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I remember using bare wine to play games before proton. You would have to go and find the exact libraries needed to run the game, install them one way or another, pray a bit, and maybe the game will run with acceptable fps. If it ran at all.
And these days its just plug and play. Dont remember the last time I had to install a game dependency with proton, from steam or otherwise.
Freaky to read your account. I switched to ubuntu desktop like 3 weeks ago, bought a gpu, installed steam (ok, I had to reinstall from apr since snap didn’t work well), 2 days ago I installed cyberpunk and it runs at 80 fps mostly high-ultra settings without one crash so far, no special boot parameters. (I had to edit the exe today so it wouldn’t force controller config though)
It’s insane how far linux has come in the last 5 yrs. I hope it goes on like this. In opposition to amd, linux actually is our friend. :)
I was wondering that too. As far as I know, when it comes to Linux, AMD and Intel are the way to go. Nvidia are the ones who generally tend to suck on linux (although I never had problems with my nvidia gpu, its pretty old tho)
In this case, you need to take my comment more literally.
AMD does a lot better than nvidia but amd still makes a lot of business decisions that are not consumer friendly. For example pricing their gpus a lot higher than they used to instead of more competitive to nvidia.
They do good but in opposition to open source, it is still a company and therefore not our „friend“. Open source in contrast is made by us, therefore undeniably more our friend.
It was a figure of speech, not meaning to dump on amd.
I remember back in the day I thought one of my favorite games, Elite: Dangerous, would never run on Linux. I dualbooted for a while just so I could play it. After a while I stopped playing it much and figured I could get rid of Windows, so I did. About a year later the community came out with a complicated setup you could perform to get it running on Linux through wine. It's just as you said, lots of manually finding and installing libraries, tweaking environments, and eventually got it working (jankily) at a pretty mediocre framerate. I thought that was the best I was going to get. Another two years and it was running seamlessly on proton with no configuration or tweaking at all. It really is incredible what Valve has done for Linux gaming.
most shit was literally click and play
I still remember installing the sims 3 on wine. This was before proton, before the sims 4. I started by looking the game up on winehq - the results were not promising. The rating was not exactly garbage, but still runs with problems. Some brave soul had come up with installation instructions though.
So I try to install the game using those instructions. Took me about 40 minutes of installing things like ms c++ runtimes. Then when I tried to run the game? Crash. Doesn't work. So I went back to WineHQ and found another instruction (luckily there were multiple ppl that made the game work)
After following it for another hour, the game still didnt work. After googling the error for some time im pretty sure I just downloaded some random dll that was missing from runtimes and put it with the game. Voila, the game ran! Laggy, but playable. Took only about 3 hours of research and tinkering.
Today? I'm pretty sure I can just download the game and it will run, just like that, no config required.