If one day I manage to build a billion dollar empire, my sole inspiration on how to conduct business is Gabe Newell. [1]
Which is exactly the thing Epic can't compete on. They can give away all the free games they want, but Steam and Valve have done much more than offering games on sale.
(I got a 13 year old account on Steam, more than 500 games bought, almost $10k spent on the platform. No Windows partition for the past 3 years)
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1: I honestly couldn't name anybody else that has kept their company private, grown it to such heights and stayed true to their founding principles, without selling out to shareholders and advertisers for an easy buck.
Update: iTunes Store started in April 2003, Steam started selling third-party titles in late 2005 (around when the 360 launched).
Don't get me wrong, many features are experimental since 4.26 but getting them production ready is the game changer.
I mean, with these criteria is Epic really that far behind? They made desktop a better experience for devs, have decent enough customer support, and they don't exactly shit talk their users like other parts of the industry. The only arguable part is good platform, but it depends on what you need out of the platform. Does a platform have to offer a way to play windows games on linux to be "good"?
>I honestly couldn't name anybody else that has kept their company private, grown it to such heights and stayed true to their founding principles, without selling out to shareholders and advertisers for an easy buck.
hard to find platforms like that, but there are certainly creators that stayed small and humble despite growing huge in influence and pull.
I was starting to diversify my store fronts before Valve came out with the Deck.
But the release of it and the message it sent (that they take this seriously), made me reverse course and now I always buy my games on Steam, even if it costs 10 euro more.
Isthereanydeal.com
Valve will be fine :)
I think it’s a little bit of a stretch to say it’s a problem they created - they were just a victim of their own success. They can’t force developers to write games in a particular platform, and making games work under Linux is no small task.
It was probably easier to stream games from a Windows machine, which was their first approach with Steam Link and Steam Machines. It kinda sorta worked, and what they saw was enough encouragement to go and build the Steam Deck. On top of that, CPUs/GPUs just weren’t good enough 10 years ago to do what Valve wanted to do.
So I think it’s a little unfair to say they “created” this problem.
Valve becoming big enough to break into the hardware market (first Steam Machines and then the Steam Deck) was the first time they had any incentive to care about the OS layer. They could've made some deal w/ Microsoft but instead went the open-source route to the benefit of everyone. Kudos to Valve.
Not a laptop, but I am livestreaming games from a Linux desktop. In the roughly two years since I've started doing this on a regular basis, I have played 23 games on stream using Steam Proton. My experience matches what Steam Deck owners told me about compatibility. It's not been completely glitchless, but all the problems I ran into were minor graphics glitches. When I buy games, I check protondb.com in advance, and it's always either Platinum or Gold for me these days.
I will note though that all the games I played were either single-player or cooperative multi-player. With competitive multi-player, there is an entire can of worms because of anti-cheat software. Valve's own anti-cheat should be fine, but if the game developer is using a different anti-cheat, it usually relies on Windows kernel drivers or some other shenanigans that conflicts with Wine in a major way.
I prefer linux to windows generally so the ability to game without re-booting is a bonus on top of that. If I preferred being in windows I wouldn't run linux just for gaming.
* there is one caveat to that though - if you have a VR headset, then there are many people reporting performance issues on Linux with those headsets. And personally I also find VR performance subpar on Linux (although it still improved in the last year).
Longer version: https://www.retorch.com/blog/linux-mint.htm
The games I play like CSGO work very well*, you have a steamdeck so you know how game support especially with anti cheat is.
However, I've had many bugs. Nvidia on linux is painful. Just linux things - I get a bar at the top of the game when starting sometimes and have to change my resolution back and forth to fix it, I've had to restart pipewire to get my audio to reappear, I've had to replace pulse with pipewire (mid game).
Linux is not smooth, ESPECIALLY with nvidia. If the games you play are well supported, use AMD graphics, and doesn't tinker with their system at all, on a very stable OS - maybe you could call it stable?
Also if you want smooth - for the love of god don't use a rolling distro. If you check the arch wiki you'll see various nvidia/steam/wine/proton issues occur every few weeks. Many completely break playing games for several days unless you downgrade packages.
tl;dr - I would not recommend linux as a desktop to anyone who doesn't mind having their nose in their terminal desperately trying to figure out why you have no audio while your friends grow tired waiting for you.
The steamdeck specifically is very well managed by valve and I'm incredibly impressed that they made it work so well.
So I've started buying games from DRM-free platforms like GoG and adding them to Steam as non-Steam games. Same compatibility and no need to use an external tool to maintain Wine/Proton prefixes. With the boatloads of money Valve makes from Steam, they probably won't miss me too much.
I'm very curious how widespread this advice is. It's a little sad & ironic to me if Proton is now entrenching Windows as the only target platform. I'm hoping this wasn't blanket advice Valve is handing out but really something specific to the team.
Very. Win32 ABI is the most stable and rock solid compared to the messy moving target of the Linux world, so recommending it is not entrenching Windows, just very good advice to save time and resources to target a platform that's alredy known and stable, and since the target is fixed and well known, it makes it also very easy to emulate on their end for Linux.
As much as FOSS-Linux evangelists hate it, Win32 emulated on Linux is better for everyone, than tryin to port games natively on Linux, and makes the most business sense of you want the same games on Linux.
In the gaming world where steam installs apps itself and you need the Windows version for commercial viability anyways, it does make sense to push them to win32.
Outside of gaming though, I don't really see this being the case. You random desktop apps are better off with flatpak and distros like Fedora are already moving everything that direction. Flathub also has the benefit of allowing devs to push to one repo and support multiple distros (again, like Steam).
That's bullshit, for game developers there shouldn't be any "messy moving target" outside of the Steam Linux Runtime[1], which is pretty much rock solid.
[1] https://gitlab.steamos.cloud/steamrt/steamrt/-/blob/steamrt/...
Blatant lie bordering on disinformation.
The only reason it is a "stable ABI" is that every dev of every windows program bundles every library with their program. You could do the same thing on Linux and the stability "story" would be exactly the same, or in fact even better on Linux because Win32 isnt actually stable and the Linux system call ABI is.
The packages pulled in by steam define a bunch of vulkan providers which then confuses steam. Many games won't even launch and you have to manually kill off a bunch of steam worker processes to even successfully shutdown and restart steam. You can't uninstall the package due to dependencies, so instead have to manually move/rename some files under /usr/share/vulkan/icd.d/ to only leave the one for NVIDIA.
Then, games launch but have very inconsistent performance. I don't know if this is because Optimus is competing with the game for PCIe bandwidth, or something else still going awry with the driver stack.
I’m dead serious. Grab a copy of Nautilus or GNOME Files from Ubuntu 16.04; try running it on Ubuntu 22.04. It isn’t easy. Now imagine a game.
Evangelism is useless in the face of results.
This is meaningless if you change the definition of "on Linux" to mean "on Windows".
https://github.com/GloriousEggroll/wine-ge-custom
Personally, I've been using Windows fully offline with GOG games, although I'd like to some day try putting together a Linux based offline game console (or maybe NetBSD based if Wine is sufficient).
As such, this is a mixed bag. Actual users that cut support issues from random machines will be worth trying to engage with. General cries that you should support it with no payment in play should likely be ignored, though.
I still prefer they go with the proton approach though.
I tried Overwatch 2 with Proton and performance was abysmal. My computer seemed to be melting and FPS was jumping all over the place.
It does 144fps on Windows 11 without sweating (same PC).
But I think of the steam deck which is basically a Linux PC. Its lowerer spec, low power, but it seems to run pretty well without terrible battery life.
Apple has done some work with their game porting toolkit to support certain flavors of DirectX games with a combo of Wine and Rosetta. But this isn’t officially pitched as tool for end users to run Windows games.
Maybe Value should give more an 10% of a thought to the Mac and make Steam not be terrible on the Mac first.
They don’t care about the Mac. They only care about Linux because it lets them ship the Steam Deck and have a hedge against MS.
The Mac is worse than an afterthought.
And that's a more general comment than just this.
Honestly I think a lot of newbie gripes about "Linux" are just gripes about Gnome, sometimes quite justified ones.
Is it possible that proton could become the de facto target platform?
That is, if a developer builds to ensure that their game works correctly under proton, then will it also work correctly under windows? So by just ensuring it works under proton, which seems to be minimal effort, do they get access to the expanded market for “free”?
Do any of the consoles support proton, so that the only barrier to releasing a game are the legal agreements?
Steam deck
You can build a "Steam box" console with any Linux distribution and Steam's Big Picture mode. Autologon and start Steam in Big Picture mode on startup. I have this on Debian on a NUC, and there's a distro ChimeraOS which offers a polished pre-installed A/B update experience too.
The thing is, currently, having a game built for Windows directly produces a much more performant game on Windows. Wine still has some hiccups here and there.
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The impact of Steam, as the first digital distribution platform for video games, is probably magnitudes bigger again.
Valve was so far ahead of the competition, and still remains there to this day.
Which is kind of a miracle, in some alternate timeline we could have ended with EA as the patron of PC gaming.
I guess I'll have to brush up my rusty AK one taps again when the new Counter Strike comes along.
all I know is that I have the operation payback challenge coin, but no real memory of those maps. i do wish they'd bring back some of the operation maps... (santorini anyone?)
One multi-million-unit-selling handheld gaming system later and I don't see those arguments much anymore.
If your memory is about [1], which is the first main topic on Proton, the criticism seems quite muted (and otherwise downvoted).
Is it daily-drivable on a laptop without any issues, and stable long term without any breakages? Not just for gaming, but for daily entertainment and productivity task of those with one distro for everything?
I tried installing it a while back and found the default installer partitioning much more janky and messed up GRUB making my system unbootable, unlike other "Just Works™" distros like Ubuntu, EndevourOS or Mint where they worked flawless on multi-boot systems.
I'm not knocking it, I can imagine it's tough for a single developer to do all that and test everything, it would just be cool to know if it's gotten some polish now and how stable it is to daily drive.
I'm probably less technically savvy than a lot of the HN crowd, and I just have not ever had a significant problem running linux. For sure, I've avoided some problems by being picky about what PCs I buy. But for the most part it's been pretty pain free. Running Linux full-time has been effortless and easy. And thanks to Valve, gaming on Linux gets better every year. I played Elden Ring on launch, and on launch, it actually played better than PC.
To the extent that HN types have trouble with Linux, I can only imagine it's because they're doing _more_ on their PC than me. ie, they have some software or project that just needs to run a certain way. For sure, Linux isn't always perfect for that.
Which is fine, mind you, just pointing out that most people that are NOT in tech would find Linux very usable, if not more usable than Windows.
Technical impressiveness aside it’s a really nice device too—I like having something that feels mostly like a console in the “it just works” factor, but still allows me to do some fiddling if and when I want to.
I tried it a few years ago to play some not-uncommon game and it was absolutely terrible, regardless of the hardware power available.
Steam makes most of the configuration seamless, though.
Proton is the basis of Chromebook's experimental Steam games support. It works pretty well, as well as Proton itself as far as I can tell.
Steam also makes it very easy to switch between Proton versions. If version X doesn't work, perhaps version X-1 or X+1 does work, or even the experimental version.
* Yes, ScummVM is available for Linux but the Steam Linux distribution included an old ScummVM which wasn't able to load some libraries. Running the Windows version through an compatibility layer was easier than modifying shell files to run the latest ScummVM through flatpak.
Today, Ubuntu sorts the drivers and steam setup just lovely. I've gifted out old workstations to extended family and they are pretty happy with what they can do from a gaming/browsing perspective. With Windows 11 not able to support these boxes, having something 'just work' gives these older boxes an extended life. Most have not needed to pick up a Windows license. Very much at that 'good enough' state.
I only play multi-player games, and when I search ProtonDB none of the games I play say they are supported.
Call of Duty, Battlefield 2042, Rainbow 6 Seige, PUGB, Destiny 2
