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Re:The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source by nickserv on Monday May 19, 2025 @02:38PM (#44033209)
Just curious, which games gave you problems?
Re:The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source by zamadatix on Monday May 19, 2025 @03:20PM (#44033733)
Unfortunately many of the more popular multiplayer games with anti-cheat tend to consider "made working on Linux" a bug rather than a feature. E.g. Easy Anti-Cheat and Unreal Engine both support Linux natively but Epic still doesn't want to allow it for their own game, Fortnite. https://x.com/TimSweeneyEpic/status/1490565925648715781
Re:The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source by ozgrakkurt on Monday May 19, 2025 @06:14PM (#44035502)
Really hope valve’s server side anti-cheat will be a success and more competitive games will move over to that.
Re:The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source by zamadatix on Monday May 19, 2025 @10:29PM (#44037197)
I'm not familiar with what new changes Valve has been working on in the anti-cheat space but historically most major anti-cheat systems, such as Easy Anti-Cheat, already have long included a server-side anti-cheat component. The catch rate (and overall accuracy) with both is just always going to be higher than only going with one approach.
Re:The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source by rossy on Tuesday May 20, 2025 @03:15AM (#44038671)
There are even games like Infinity Nikki with anti-cheat that allows the Steam Deck but specifically detects and blocks desktop Linux. You have to wonder if that gets them any real security since the method they use to detect the Deck is probably spoofable.
Re:The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source by dncornholio on Tuesday May 20, 2025 @03:54AM (#44038930)
Nowhere it says they don't want to.
Re:The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source by zamadatix on Wednesday May 21, 2025 @01:32PM (#44053898)
I think you're hitting on ideal vs. constrained wants (or, at least, that's how I've always referred to them). That is: what they want to be able to allow in itself vs. what they want to allow given the trade-offs with other wants.

E.g. "I'm going to go to the beach all day" and "I'm going to keep my job" are both likely the results of ideal type wants whereas "I'm going to go to my job today and then the beach tonight" would likely be the result of a constrained want.

Re:The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source by belthesar on Tuesday May 20, 2025 @02:21PM (#44044374)
There is more nuance to the anti-cheat systems supporting Linux argument than "it supports it but they won't use it". Turning on Linux support does weaken the security posture of the anti-cheat system, so it's not simply a decision of "it works with Linux, but they won't do it". It is moreso a question of whether the security posture changes for the game with this platform support enabled meet the business requirements. It's not a surprise that games with high MTX revenue do not turn this on, as I imagine this would be the biggest concern with this weaker security posture.

One of the boons of console hardware is also the strict execution environment that is presented on the system. While this of course doesn't prevent all cheating behavior in online games, a large selling point of it as a platform to publishers is not only the market segment available, but the security aspects of the runtime environment.

Re:The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source by zamadatix on Wednesday May 21, 2025 @01:32PM (#44053908)
Agreed, that's the angle Tim Sweeney argues in the linked comment as well.
Re:The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source by npteljes on Monday May 19, 2025 @03:47PM (#44034039)
For the curious, the protondb front page gives a pretty good overview of the state of Linux gaming:

https://www.protondb.com/

Scrolling to Medals, 50% of all 25.000+ games tracked by the site are playable, either working perfectly or mostly (Platinum or Gold ratings). Another 20% can be alright under specific circumstances, and with compromises (Silver rating).

Re:The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source by frollogaston on Monday May 19, 2025 @04:27PM (#44034450)
AoE2:DE has a gold rating, but multiplayer doesn't work at all, and it's not even due to anticheat.
Re:The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source by alexjplant on Monday May 19, 2025 @07:12PM (#44035960)
Did this change recently? I haven't played in a month or so but it's been working great for around a year now for me.
Re:The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source by frollogaston on Monday May 19, 2025 @07:17PM (#44036008)
It's been waffling back and forth but always had a "gold" rating even when I verified it was broken. I haven't tried recently (haven't really played video games in years), but there's a comment from 5 days ago saying it's broken again.

At some point, Proton users reported success using some patch, then that stopped working, then there was a different patch... A lot of user reports say "thumbs up" then have a comment explaining how it goes out-of-sync unless you fiddle with it, so it's hard to trust.

Seems the root of the problem is this game's picky netcode, which is similar to the original 1998 game I played as a kid. If your game state diverges from the other players' at all, it goes oos and ends the game for everyone. And yes this happened often enough that people had an abbreviation for it.

Re:The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source by CorrectHorseBat on Tuesday May 20, 2025 @01:20AM (#44038046)
It's been several months since I played but getting ucrtbase.dll always worked for me and it was the only thing I ever had to do for the game. You need to redownload it after every update because it gets wiped though.

Oos can till happen, but as you said it can also happen on Windows, hard to blame Wine for that.

Since gold means "works as good as Windows with workarounds" I think that's a correct rating.

Re:The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source by frollogaston on Tuesday May 20, 2025 @11:03AM (#44042438)
I can only testify to oos being common in the Mac version of the original game, and I've heard it happening in the og Windows game. In DE under Windows, I've never seen it happen, so I'd be concerned if you're still seeing it occasionally.

Also, "gold" should mean that it works by default, not that you have to patch in a DLL. The only place the site even says "playable with tweaks" is in a tooltip if you hover over the gold symbol, right above a separate list of details that doesn't mention tweaks. I didn't even know until now.

Re:The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source by CorrectHorseBat on Tuesday May 20, 2025 @11:27AM (#44042688)
I've got it from here: https://gitlab.winehq.org/winehq/appdb/-/wikis/Rating-Defini...

We can argue all day over what a rating means, but if it would work without a tweak I'd say it should be rated platinum. (The only other thing I know is missing is Xbox live login, but I don't really care about that)

Re:The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source by coldpie on Tuesday May 20, 2025 @10:26AM (#44042049)
I worked on this problem for a bit. What's going on is the game relies on the OS-provided C runtime libraries ("msvcrt"-style things) to do its math. Wine's implementation of these libraries does not match Windows's perfectly. If all players are using the same implementation, then they will agree, and there are no problems, so people think it is working. But if a player on Wine tries to play against a player on Windows, they will fall out of sync because the math errors eventually add up.

That was as far as I was able to take it. Another much more skilled dev at CW dug in a lot deeper and wrote a blog post about it[1], but as far as I know the problem remains unsolved.

[1] https://www.codeweavers.com/blog/rbernon/2022/9/12/ucrtcring...

Re:The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source by CorrectHorseBat on Tuesday May 20, 2025 @11:14AM (#44042553)
Oh interesting, I always wondered what the underlying issue was and why downloading some obscure looking dll solves it.

For a practical solution, just using the Windows dlls seems to work fine. Without AoE2:DE goes out of sync immediately, with I've played hour long games.

Re:The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source by frollogaston on Tuesday May 20, 2025 @11:00AM (#44042400)
Oh wow, thanks for sharing. I knew it was an oos but didn't think a math lib specifically was the issue.
Re:The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source by coldpie on Tuesday May 20, 2025 @11:22AM (#44042638)
I remember it being interesting to work on. It's been years, but if I remember right, there is some way to convince the game to dump a log of unit positions during a multiplayer match, possibly as part of its desync handling. I enabled that on both Win & Linux hosts, ran a match between the machines until they desynced, and diff'd the game's own logs, then confirmed from the Wine logs that the faulty values were coming from CRT-related math functions. It's always fun when you get to use a game's own debug utils to track down a problem.

Anyway it'd be great if the game devs included their own math libraries instead of relying on the OS's. That would fix the problem quite nicely.

Re:The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source by CorrectHorseBat on Tuesday May 20, 2025 @11:55AM (#44043014)
Do you know if the code from the blogpost you mentioned is publicly available? I don't think I could find it but I'd love to give it a try
Re:The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source by coldpie on Tuesday May 20, 2025 @12:18PM (#44043288)
I don't, he did that work after I left the job. You could email Rémi or hop into one of the Wine dev channels to start up a conversation.
Re:The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source by npteljes on Monday May 19, 2025 @04:46PM (#44034682)
Yeah there's a lot of random issues with the different games. In case user experience is the main goal, I always recommend going with the main supported ways, which in this case would be Windows 11. I personally try things first on my Linux, but I always keep a backup Windows just in case.
Re:The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source by jjcm on Monday May 19, 2025 @03:02PM (#44033524)
Overwatch is the big one - lots of random issues with it. But basically any game with Denuvo DRM is extremely high risk, resulting in either a ban or the game not running at all.
Re:The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source by zamalek on Monday May 19, 2025 @03:41PM (#44033971)
Denuvo counts each proton version as a unique activation, might help you avoid this issue going forward
Re:The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source by foresto on Monday May 19, 2025 @05:04PM (#44034845)
Can you remember any particular problems in Overwatch? I've been down that road, so there's a chance I might have some info that you would find useful.

One problem that was unsolved last time I checked: Saving highlight videos. It used to work if you told Overwatch to use webm format instead of mp4, but Blizzard broke that somewhere along the line, possibly in the transition to Overwatch 2. (I worked around this with OBS Studio and its replay buffer feature.)

Re:The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source by 2OEH8eoCRo0 on Monday May 19, 2025 @04:02PM (#44034186)
Escape from Tarkov and GTA V (online).
Re:The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source by delduca on Monday May 19, 2025 @03:30PM (#44033834)
For me, Red Dead Redemption 1 via Proton does not work on Pop_OS + NVIDIA.
Re:The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source by la_oveja on Tuesday May 20, 2025 @03:24AM (#44038729)
i play rdr1 via proton on opensuse + amd and i get better frames than windows
Re:The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source by margorczynski on Tuesday May 20, 2025 @04:06AM (#44039013)
In general you want to avoid Nvidia if you want to play games on Linux, but maybe things will get better.
Re:The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source by arzig on Tuesday May 20, 2025 @06:37AM (#44039958)
Isn’t pop_os shipping ancient components at this point due to their hate brained idea to try and create their own de and pinning their next release to it?
Re:The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source by delduca on Wednesday May 21, 2025 @12:03PM (#44052905)
RDR is now working fine on Pop_OS with Proton 10.x.
Re:The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source by falcojr on Tuesday May 20, 2025 @11:17AM (#44042585)
https://areweanticheatyet.com/

Anything "denied" won't work ever unless they change their minds. Anything "broken" is...well...broken.

Re:The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source by neogodless on Tuesday May 20, 2025 @12:10PM (#44043201)
When I ran a two month experiment, Hogwart's Legacy and Anno 1800.

The former ran slowly at low settings, with the occasional complete single digit slowdown. On the same laptop in Windows 10, it ran medium settings and easily twice the frame rate, no issues.

The latter wouldn't connect to multiplayer, and would occasionally just crash out.

(Comment written from memory, but I enshrined my experiment here: https://retorch.com/blog/linux-mint.htm )