"Linux won't be viable for gaming until it has Anti-cheat"
EAC and Battleye announce Proton support
"Linux won't be viable for gaming until there are AAA titles working"
Apex Legends, Fall guys and a bunch of other titles get support
"Linux won't be viable for gaming until the Steam Deck can meet demand"
Valve increase production
"Linux won't be viable for gaming until I can run Fortnite, Destiny 2 and Xbox Game pass"
Well you have me there..
The format of the arguments aren't coherent or well thought through. It uses the quoted argument as a jumping off point before going into an anti-Linux rant, often citing the perception that the year of the Linux desktop has been "coming for 20 years" (or pick whatever number you want) or that the Linux community are toxic (which is ironic since most of the attacks are incredibly toxic).
I think it's laudable that you're giving these people the benefit of the doubt, but they absolutely do exist and their positions are always thin or in bad faith.
I'm using Pop!_OS with an AMD CPU/GPU system that's pretty far from what I'd call stout, but I'm able to play games like "No Man's Sky" or "Crysis" just fine. I've probably tested around a dozen games personally going back as far as "Total Annihilation" from 1997(?) which ran without issue.
* Install the OS of your choice. I would recommend Nobara for minimal tweaking for games. PopOS is another popular choice
* Install steam and enable proton for all games in Settings
* If you want Steam desktop UI, you can opt into the Steam Beta, set Steam to load on boot with launch option '-gamepadui'
and voilà! You have yourself a Steam Deck gaming desktop!
Proton works from the steam Gui so I don’t think there is any install except the steam software.
> "Linux won't be viable for gaming until I can run Fortnite, Destiny 2 and Xbox Game pass"
> Well you have me there..
Fortnite and Destiny 2 are two games where the developers have both, for whatever reason, specifically gone on record to say they will ban players that attempt to play their games on Linux.
Not just "basically a PC" but an actual PC running a modified version of Arch Linux (called SteamOS). One of the options in the menu is "Enter Desktop Mode" which does exactly what it says; drops you to a KDE desktop with all the bells and whistles of a normal Linux desktop. From there, you can use it as a normal PC if you want. Hook it up to a USB-C hub with HDMI and USB I/O, and you have a portable computer you can connect to displays with your keyboard and mouse.
Flexible as hell, and it's also pretty nice as a gaming device.
Having a site like ProtonDB to be a single place to go look up any tweaks or config flags for Wine/Proton to get a game to work is invaluable, and it's now actually getting good traffic and data because of Steam Deck.
Look no further than power management/sleep/awake, which is flawless and snappy on steamdeck. That's more than you can say for 95% of "supported linux laptops".
But to me the fact that the games are not natively supporting Linux and are instead needing a tool like Proton still means that Linux is not ideal for gaming. Just like Mac is not.
It has nothing to do with the OS itself and everything to do with developer support.
I love my steam deck but I also strongly believe that going with Linux was a short cited decision on Valves part to try to protect themselves from Microsoft. Many (most, all?) of us here are technical enough to understand at least on some level what proton does and what native actually is. But most users are not and that is where the problems come up.
When a game pushes an update that breaks support on the steam deck most users will go to complain to the developers. But the developer was not involved in supporting Linux and rightly so they don't test every update on it.
That is not the right path here.
I strongly believe that to claim that an OS can be good for something it must be targeted by the developers of whatever that thing is and run natively (or at the very least if it is prepackaged with something like proton, it is still distributed by the developers for that OS)
And yes I fully realize this is a chicken and the egg problem with linux and gaming.
For the first 6 months of its release, everything works great! A few minor bugs to fix but your game engine figured everything out for you. Flash forward 2 years - your game is broken on every distro. An Ubuntu hotpatch broke your game on most systems months ago, and glibc changes have decimated the runtime for every user. Steam's own runtime has already bumped it's versioning and is missing 3-4 libraries you used to rely on. The Windows version boots through Proton though, so nobody is complaining yet.
Linux shouldn't need Windows as a stable runtime, but until it fixes it's packaging issues this will continue to be the status-quo.
Logically I get it, a tool like proton is most likely the only way that Linux (or anything not Windows) was going to be an option for gaming at all.
My concern here is not in how it runs, how good proton is, or even how "easy" it is to setup.
It all boils down to average users for me. I continue to find myself (and I feel like many of us do) overestimating the technical knowledge of the average consumer. I know for many years I had assumed that my generation (I am now 32) would be the generation that the average user would be able to pick up any new technology and run with it. That has been proven false to me many times now...
What happens with it fails, what happens when a game was previously working but breaks in a future version of proton or worse breaks because the developer pushes an update (and maybe its an online service game so you have to update).
Idk something about this entire thing has just felt wrong to me in how we are pushing Linux as a gaming platform.
All of these are good questions to have, Valve didn't directly come out and address them so it makes sense that people would feel anxious about it.
Largely, Valve has solved this by running every game in a lightweight container runtime, kinda like Docker. Regardless of the distro you're running on, Valve can define a common runtime for the game and the title should boot using the defined settings. If something then breaks with that runtime, Valve can actually go through on a game-by-game (or even system-by-system) basis and fix it. This is how Elden Ring got performance patches on Linux at launch, or how titles like Rocket League became playable when their native version was not.
It's a complicated technical solution to a nuanced problem, but Valve has done a bang-up job so far.
I mean when the big winter update for Halo Infinite came out it broke Proton support. Sure they (the people working on Proton) were quick to fix it, but it did break and since it was an online game there really was nothing the user could do about it.
You’re holding a proof that it isn’t so in your hands and still claim something opposite. The biggest issue with gaming on Linux has always been impossibility of providing a binary build that works everywhere due to lack of a stable kernel API and ABI. Turns out, win32 API is exactly that and works really well on Linux if you put in the work, see proton.
IOW Linux is ready for gaming thanks to and because of Windows, not despite it.
That work is exactly the problem though. This is not an ideal solution for the average user. My dad plays games and there is no way in hell I would give him a Linux machine to play games. If I end up buying him a steam deck (which I am considering) I will be installing Windows on it for him.
Again I will point out the issues with this not being an officially supported release from the developer of a game. Meaning when they push updates they don't test on Linux and could very easily break it. It happened with Halo recently and could just as easily happen with another game.
If we really want to argue that "if you put in the work" linux is a viable solution, it has been for years been viable as a desktop solution and many people played games on it.
But until we enter a time that on Linux you are running native packages from the developer targeting Linux, we will remain in a situation that Linux Gaming will always be an update away from breaking completely. Not that Windows isnt either, but at least developers test their Windows release.
Edit: For the record I would LOVE an alternative to Windows for PC gaming. Wether that is Linux, Mac, or something else. I despise Windows but I relucantly have a Windows PC. BUT I do not believe this is how we will get there.
The only real issue I have is it being a small screen. But I just have any games I need on my desktop and its easy enough to tap an icon.
My mom and dad were gaming into their mid-70's around the time they passed away. I'm approaching 60 and have gamed for 4 decades and see no stopping. I've read multiple comments from people in their 80's and even 90's still gaming.
Proton enables a lot of great games to play on Linux, I use it every day.
Linux lets all users including non-technical, use it every day with ease.
I think I can speak on my dads technical understanding better than you can. We have tried to give him an iPhone and he has struggled with that so he continues to use a flip phone.
The last thing I want to do is give him a device that due to Valve pushing a bad OS update (I mean the last Update made it so I could no longer boot normally and I had to do a boot from file and then fix that in the terminal) or games won't load because something breaks in the update for that game, which has happened to me.
That is not ageist to worry about a device not working as expected (which has happened to me, I just have the technical knowledge to fix it).
Some sort of advanced suspend/resume functionality similar to the Series X's Quick Resume would be a killer feature. And I'm sure Microsoft wouldn't mind having native Game Pass hooks into a device like that
I feel like most likely not, that seems like something that would benefit Microsoft and not give any benefit to Valve. I know they have stated before some concern regarding the windows store or something.
Game Pass is also the reason I installed Windows on my Steam Deck. Being able to sync game saves between my PC, Xbox, and Steam Deck is just way too powerful. And the obvious benefit of the games in game pass.
It’s odd but things like docker and the JVM and browser based software mean the software will run abstracted a bit, less optimally, but good enough. Even among the different Linux distros software is distributed differently (rpm, debs, flat pack, pacman….)
Brining more people to Linux is the goal, more developers! and better software packaging eventually.
For those who don't know, it's basically a PC in the form of a Switch, with access to a large part of the Steam library (even a lot of unsupported games play well if you're willing to tweak things).
It has very good specs for a handheld, and you can emulate most games up to the Switch, and some Switch games run even better on the deck than on the Switch.
As it's open, you can even install Windows or replace parts if you want.
It has surpassed all my expectations and it feels like the deck together with Proton is solving the last big obstacle with Linux on desktop.