In Steam you just click the play button and it launches the game under Proton.

It’s very rare to have issues if the game is rated Platinum in protondb and sometimes a setting in the Steam GUI needs to be changed if it’s gold or silver.

All in all I find it significantly less annoying than dealing with Windows’ ads and forced updates.

The user experience is pretty smooth from a high-level perspective but there are often performance issues from the emulation. Not a huge issue in many situations but not flawless either.

Steams Linux support (proton) is forked from wine. So no, it doesn't emulate.

Performance can still be an issue, mostly because the Nvidia graphics drivers are performing worse on Linux vs on Windows.

While it's not conventional emulation, my understanding is that the DirectX 9-11 support isn't very far removed from how shader recompilation works in modern console emulators (RPCS3, Xenia, Cemu, Yuzu, etc.). Steam now even distributes shader archives among Proton users so that they can be translated in advance instead of on-the-fly, which is something that Cemu users had been doing among themselves for a while.

The question then becomes if extra 100$ worth of hardware balances out these issues. For 500$ machines it clearly does, but I don’t know about the 1000$ price point.

Wine (and proton) is a reimplementation of windows APIs. You can call that emulation but that would just further dilute the word.

For example, it would mean every graphics card driver that supports opengl is an emulation of opengl.

Alright, emulation was the wrong word to use. Still, the performance on Proton is noticeably worse compared to playing on Windows on the same hardware, at least for a decent chunk of games. I'll generally get similar FPS with a lot more GPU/CPU usage or overall lower FPS.

Wine is not an emulator (scnr)

> Sad to say, but Linux just isn't a good experience for gaming yet. Even if games work, there's usually caveats (like needing to be run through some sort of emulation) and they almost always run faster and in a more stable manner than Windows.

This is an outdated take, from my perspective, as someone who is an avid gamer and who is running only Linux at home currently. While no doubt it's easy to find problem games, the point of the very article this thread linked is that it's come such a long way that the majority of the top titles in terms of hours played on Steam now work in Proton.

There's been a few examples where people have compared the performance across games and found it's basically tied in the majority of games but occasionally there will be an outlier that plays better on Windows. Less often, there will be an outlier that plays better on Linux.[1]

If Valve sorts out the Anti-Cheat stuff, the number of games that don't actually run (and run well) on Linux could drop to near zero.

Proton isn't really emulation; a better way to think of it is that it's a compatiblity layer, much the same way DirectX, Vulkan, et. al, are compatiblity layers.

> Most people I know are more than happy to pay that premium compared to the hassle of dealing with Linux.

This part is more likely for far more users. However, it misses the point entirely. For a great number of years, as a gamer, I had to keep around a Windows system in order to partake in my hobby. That's not really the case anymore.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aE5WyObAFtk

For me, when I've tried old valve native games on a 2018 macbook pro 15" with a GPU on macOS, I still get these stutters in input and other small things that happen that I don't get on even 10 year old gaming PCs today that were mid-tier back then. Those stutters and such make the game frustrating and I perform worse during key moments, which makes me go back to my gaming PC.

I can see how something would be rated 'platinum' for linux still be unacceptable in those ways. If your playing a single player game I can see how it's ok, but not for twitchy multiplayer games like MOBAs or FPSs.

> macOS

Due to macOS not supporting Vulkan and other stuff required for Proton, it's been on the backburner for support from Valve for a while. Portal 2 can't even run on macOS anymore since it is 32-bit only. Most games work how they would on Windows when running under Proton vs a native port, you should try it on a Linux machine when you have time.

As the other commenter noted, MacOS is not Linux.

You should give it a go (even on the same hardware) on Linux.

Not sure why this is getting downvoted - this is absolutely true. A binary "works" or "doesn't work" categorization doesn't capture the difference.

This on a post of using steam on linux. Proton is "emulation" for some of the listed but it's pretty good emulation. It requires no savvy, open steam and play.