Proton has massively changed the game. I'd say the time since 2018 has had more advances in usability than the 25 years before it (for "normal" people), effectively making any "you've been saying this for X years" argument moot.

Proton is Windows PC gaming with a Linux kernel.

It is only a moot point for those "I feel good to use Linux kernel to run Windows on top" kind of feeling.

While ignoring it is still Windows games that are being written, by game studios targeting regular Windows deployments, and those same studios might even have Android games written in OpenGL ES/Vulkan, that they won't bother porting to GNU/Linux.

I don't really understand the issue. I click on 'play' on Steam and the game works. That's all that matters to me.

Might be, doesn't change the fact those are Windows games.

But hang on, your original comment was slating Linux for people saying that it was an escape for the past 30 years. It is now an escape for an ever increasing audience and set of use cases, and you're saying that these new people who have to this point not had any issues with running Windows games won't be able to "escape" because they'd have to play Windows games?

Have some consistency.

2% after 30 years is hardly an ever increasing audience.

Proton is not an escape when it is still Windows software, using Windows APIs, written by companies targeting Windows customers.

I love how you leapt on 'audience' there and didn't want to refute use cases. Also leaning on that '30 year' figure. Funny.

The Steam Deck has sold millions of units (increase in audience) and now supports 89% of the top 1000 games at Silver and above (increase in use case). 2% is indeed an increase from where it started in 2018, but it goes to show how many Windows machines are out there that the % isn't higher.

I don't really understand your position. You're vehemently against any Windows code or games running at all and want to belittle, minimise or dismiss any progress that has been made. It feels like you're arguing in bad faith.

What use cases?

That Linux gamers are so starving for Linux native games that they have to contend with running Windows games via an API translation layer?

Not even studios that target other POSIX platforms bother targeting GNU/Linux natively.

SteamDeck sales are a drop in the ocean of Switch, Playstation, XBox, and Windows PC sales, if you feeling like going into war numbers.

But hey, enjoy your "Linux" games.

I will, thank you

I mean sure it's not using native APIs, but many developers are specifically targeting Steam Deck to get a Steam Deck Verified label and show up prominently on the Steam Store. So despite developing for Windows, they are doing QA on Linux.

> Proton is Windows PC gaming with a Linux kernel.

Who the hell cares? Besides RMS I suppose, but he wouldn't want to run closed source games to begin with.

Proton is the only stable and maintained runtime you can target for Linux and it comes with no performance penalty.

Few games actually get more fps than on Windows. What alternative runtime would you suggest and more to the point what problem would it actually solve.

If the game studio actually so much as tests on Proton (or more realistically Steam Deck) that’s great gold medal and as much targeting Linux as you can get.

Demanding anything more is not realistic given current market share, but also again what would you even gain.

The actual threat to gaming on Linux is any form of DRM.

With the increasing efforts from Asus, MSI, Lenovo, and the potential XBox Handheld that keeps being hyped about, let's see how long SteamDeck keeps its relevance.

The Deck is tied into the most popular PC games store, and one with followers so loyal they'll refuse to buy a game until it comes to Steam because they don't want another launcher.

It'll do fine. People don't want to re-buy their gaming libraries for an Xbox handheld and the OS integration for the other devices is pretty poor.

> it comes with no performance penalty.

I keep reading this on the internet and I’m fully convinced that this is written by people with powerful machines.

Whenever I try to play a game that barely runs at 60 fps on windows in my basic system it invariably runs in the range of 45-55 fps on Linux.

This would be perfectly acceptable except that it eventually leads to stutters that I never experienced on windows..

Ps. Yeah I tried to troubleshoot this with everything google and ChatGPT had to offer: disable composers, different proton versions, different distros and different desktops environments. The matter of the fact is that there’s an overhead and if your system is barely running it on windows you will probably have performance headaches on Linux.

Yeah I mean if you look at windows vs linux gaming benchmarks on phoronix it's clear there's about a 10% performance penalty. On the other hand there's a 10% penalty using bitlocker on windows vs almost none on linux, so it evens out if you care about privacy. Also you know for certain MS isn't keylogging everything you type to some godforsaken MS service, and the developer experience on linux is miles better.

> Whenever I try to play a game that barely runs at 60 fps on windows in my basic system it invariably runs in the range of 45-55 fps on Linux.

This is not a valid test. You need to compare Linux native vs. Proton rather than (Proton+Linux) vs. Windows. Otherwise you’re comparing at least three things at once.