It either runs on Linux or refund

Uluganda@lemmy.ml to Linux@lemmy.ml – 2898 points –
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One of the refunds reasons you can select is "the game doesn't run on my PC". This is completely valid.

Or do as I do.

  1. Buy game.

  2. Never play it.

I have a problem.

Or as I do:

  1. Watch videos of Cyberpunk
  2. Think of buying it
  3. Realize I still haven’t finished Mass Effect
  4. Never actually buy Cyberpunk.

Currently I’m thinking of Baldur’s gate 3, but you know… I’ll probably get around to it in a few years.

Buying any game after 3-5 years is the way to go. The bugs are fixed, patches are out, so mods are stable and most of the time you can find a sale where it costs 10-20€. And if you forget about it before that time, that means the game was not worth it

On top of that, there might be a bundle with the base game + a few DLCs + christmas discount or whatever.

I think the last game I bought on release was Fallout 4. I'll still enjoy a game just as much of it is two years old and only $20.

Fighting games would like to have a word

Why? What's up with fighting games?

The lifeblood of fighting games is the online community. If you wait too long, everyone online is either way better than you or has moved on to the next fighting game.

Oh. That sucks. "Previous" fighting games don't have people that stayed?

When I was finally playing Dark Souls 2, I was surprised that finding someone to play with was not hard. Fighting games scene might be different, though

The people who stay have often been there for years and you can't really fight them because they're so good.

You’re allowed to get another game even if you haven’t finished a previous one. You’re only here for like 80ish years so why not sample all that interests you?

This is what I feel. I've finished ToTK and Baldurs Gate 3 once(so far...), but beyond that I haven't finished a game in probably years. Hasn't stopped me from having fun in tons of games over the years. I usually play for gameplay more than story anyways, with a couple exceptions.

Video game monogamy is a recipe for no fun 👍

It's not that great tbh. I spent maybe 6 hours in it and didn't get hooked. With BG3 however, I'm at 60 hours and I can't put it down

Cyberpunk feels like it so much missed potential it almost made me sad playing it.. The game is gorgeous and in many ways it really nails the cyberpunk feeling, which I've been very fond of since I was a kid so I would just love to be able to immerse myself in a game like this.

However it keeps slapping me in the face with stupid things that break the immersion.. Primarily the low effort CRPG item system, where each weapon and piece of clothing has random stats. So you find 10 identical looking guns but they all do different amount of damage and add some random elemental damage, which would've made more sense if they were magical weapons in a fantasy game.. When I last played it I found an oversized dildo that does 4 times as much damage as my katana.. And of course a tiny bikini can have better armour value than actual armour..

LOL, seems like the devs decided to implement anime physics. More naked skin -> more armor. More weight -> faster machine. That’s why mechas are the fastest moving things know to man.

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Complex and recent games run on Linux these days.

Not allowing run a game in Linux is, nowadays, a choice from its developer rather then a causality. Proton is a really powerful tool!

If a game don't run in Linux, via Proton or natively, that's dev issue that actively blocked Linux.

It is almost always due to the anticheat programs.

Still... There are anticheats that allow Linux, like EAC, Hyperion and many others... If they choose one that does not allow Linux, or choose one that allow Linux but block it, it's a dev issue

Virtually no anticheat worked on Linux just a few years ago except maybe Valve and Blizzard in-house solutions. Games that are out and already committed to a specific anticheat can't do much but to wait, so it is not really on them. Changing the anticheat solution mid-way on a released game would piss off so many people you can't imagine. On a brand new game though, I would agree that this should be considered.

EasyAntiCheat doesn’t have an excuse it’s essentially a switch.

Indeed. What sucks is that it is off by default, I figure most small-time devs simply need to be told it exists. I definitely wouldn't excuse the big players though, most AAA game companies can get fucked for all I care.

All the games o can't play on linux are exactly this Roblox and their anticheat blocking wine Tarkov and it's anticheat etc.

Even VR games with my quest 2 can run on linux just fine

Roblox is working on it there is unofficial way using grapejuice coming soon.

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What? I thought Steam VR wasn't working, I'v checked recently. How did you get it working?

On xorg works fine out of the box altough buggy On wayland you need some launch arguments that I dont remember rn

Edit: actually it might also be nobara making some fixes for it for me Would have to check what it does exactly

Steam VR works fine, but you need a headset that supports Steam VR without needing other software. The main options are the HTC Vive and the Valve Index.

You can actually use headsets like a Quest 2, Pico 4 or Lynx R1, both wireless and through a wire. Check out ALVR, it works reasonably well!

Good point! I was aware of ALVR, specifically that it supported the Quest, but I wasn't sure how stable it was. I didn't know it supported those other headsets, that's cool!

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Blaming the Publishers and Devs because it's actually pretty hard to fuck up a game so that it doesn't work on proton these days

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If there's a game that can't run on Linux in the current year then that's intentional and it's not worth anyone's money.

You almost have to go out of your way to make a game incompatible with linux. Considering wine/proton and their various forks cover the vast majority of things at this point.

Even with ACs, the two most used ones completely support Linux. One is completely out of the box, maybe even as far as linux support being opt out. The other requires you to contact its developers to enable compatibility their end iirc.

I don't agree. There are cases with Windows only root kits for DRM, but there are also games that don't work because of bugs. You see games coming out that barely work on Windows.

Yeah, there's this very obscure match-3 game I wanted to play because of nostalgia. The series peaked with 3 and 4 (and those are the ones we played on the family computer circa 2015) and worked perfectly on Windows. Now 3 works perfectly (in terms of compatibility) but 4 was better (in terms of gameplay). 4 is marked as borked, last I checked. For anyone wondering, it's The Treasures of Montezuma series.

I've been gaming exclusively on Linux since 2014. Gaming on Linux is so good nowadays, thanks to Proton, there are so many amazing titles available to play. Proton makes it all easy - thanks to it, it's just a matter of hitting install and play on Steam (in most cases).

There are so many of them, If something doesn't run on Linux, I just don't care. My backlog of great games is so big, who cares about some singular titles that are not available.

I've recently been playing Baldurs Gate 3, ARMORED CORE VI, Anno 1800 and Battlebit Remastered on my Ubuntu rig. All run great. Neither need any special tweaks (I own them on Steam).

BG3 and Battlebit Remastered are especially stellar.

I recommend BG3 to anyone who likes true roleplaying games with great writing, reactivity and player agency.

Battlebit Remastered is a great multiplayer title with massive 256 player battles and it sits somewhere between Battlefield and Squad (a mixture of arcade and mil-sim elements).

Modern (post DS2) From Software games tend to run flawlessly on Linux. They are one of the greatest developers now. No bullshit, just greatness all around.

I heard a lot of BG3, although I dont have any doubt that it is a great game, I dont think it suits my taste. Battlebit tho, I'll check that otu.

It had nothing to do with From Software but Elden Ring actually ran better on Linux than on any other platform shortly after release (there was a silly bug that affected performance on all platforms that Valve fixed within Proton.)

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What are your specs? I'm trying to see if BG3 min reqs are a little bit over estimated

I have i7-7700k, GTX 1070 (nvidia driver version: 535.86.05), 16 GB ram, running the game off an SSD.

The game has been improving in a tremendous manner since release. They've been releasing meaningful patches really often. I've been playing it since the full release, and it's been awesome to witness it improve so quickly in so many aspects.

Since the latest performance updates, I haven't noticed the game dropping below 60 fps (it now sits mostly in the 60-80fps range) at 1080p, high settings, FSR set to off.

Thanks for the info!

Hmm, I wonder if I would be able to run it on my i5-3470 and Rx 550 with FSR, at 30+ fps

This kind of mentality only works if you don't play games with other people.

Multiplayer only folk usually have a friend group that plays multiple games. If they don't work in Linux you're SOL.

Back when I tried to use Linux and never boot Windows a good 2/3rd of games I couldn't participate in and was left behind. So while it's better than it was, it's still not good.

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This comment sounds like chatgpt

I'm just some meatbag, unfortunately, though I'd happily merge with machine If I could.

But only if it's an open source, penguin style machine.

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Especially if they use an engine that natively supports Linux, they have no excuse not to release a Linux version.

There are tons of reasons my dude. You can still have platform-dependant technologies in your game even if the base engine itself supports linux.

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Yes, they do. There is more than just the engine at play on compatibility. The main reason is actually usually the anti cheat.

Looking at Destiny. Game worked okay on Linux before they integrated Battleye, which HAS Linux support, but Bungie just doesn't want to interact with it.

This is why it's mainly larger developers that care about their community that implement Linux support. Take valve for example. Wonderful company that cares about their playerbase more than the average game development team. They have Linux support on almost all of their games as far as I am aware. Bungie is a decent company but most of their community doesn't want to play on Linux anyway, so they won't bother with it. However most teams that are smaller or care more about money than players won't do it.

Valve is definitely an exception. I am not sure why, but it is pretty much in the open that Gabe Newell has a bone to pick with Microsoft and he has been throwing money at Linux for over a decade to break their monopoly on gaming. I'd argue that this has nothing to do with their love for the community and more so with Gabe's personal vendetta against Microsoft.

Reality is that most game devs, most executives and most people in marketing don't really care about Linux. It is good PR to support Mac and Linux, and some of the geekier developers will go the extra mile to support it, but I think it is common in the industry to assume that Linux users are not gamer, or that they have enough knowledge to install a dual boot. They don't care in the sense that they don't even think about it, its not even on the radar for most game companies. Most studios probably never even had a discussion about it. That is how irrelevant Linux has been to gaming. Hence why Proton is such a tour de force.

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For me Linux gaming is Steam/Proton. If is works with Steam/Proton, I am playing them. I find that native Linux games are not updated regularly or at all. And Steam wants games to run with the Steam deck. And they are willing work to make that happen.

And game companies know there are a lot of Steam decks out there. And it is not hard to put some effort to see that it runs on that equipment.

All this is a big help for the Linux community. Many gamers don't know that they don't need to buy windows to game. Linux/Steam/Proton is a great option. That is why I make a point to tell people that I am playing Baldur's Gate 3 on my Linux Ubuntu gaming PC. This is how I found out that Linux can play games and switch from Windows. Another Linux gamer told me it was possible.

Agreed. It’s just so sad to me that GOG to this day does not seem to understand their target audience. Seems to me that people who value DRM-free Games overlap vastly with the group of Linux users and still GOG Galaxy is not available on Linux. I would absolutely love GOG Galaxy natively on Linux with Proton integration. Sure we can run it with Lutris etc. but this has been asked from GOG for years. I tried buying everything on GOG instead of Steam until that point where that whole Proton and Steam Deck integration happened. Now I buy everything on steam, just for convenience. I would love to buy everything from GOG but there are just to many hoops to jump through.

Yes I think you're right, there's probably a significant overlap in the target audience of GOG and Linux users. I guess the reason why GOG hasn't released a Linux version of GOG Galaxy might be because a large portion of their catalogue is Windows and doesn't want to include something like Proton or Wine support. I don't think it absolves them from criticism however.

@Hairyblue @Uluganda yeah I care less about a Linux native game than a game that has DRM and anti cheat that works with proton. I’ve found that all the games I play on Linux that run on proton run so well on X11 (haven’t gone to Wayland yet).

Considering wine and thus proton don't support Wayland the games will just run through XWayland so should perform the same as on X11. Personally haven't encountered any issues outside of things that are caused by X11 limitations

If there is one, I tend to use the native Linux version when I can, just to do my miniscule part to encourage devs to support native Linux, though on one or two games I have noticed bugs in the native Linux version that were fixed in the Windows/Proton version. That said, I am still quite thankful and impressed with how well Proton works for anything I use it with.

As someone new to Linux the fact that I could just check a box on steam and suddenly I could install and run the witcher 3 blew my mind. I had no idea. Last I checked on Linux gaming the solution was install windows 😂

Yeah I can't play rainbow 6 siege since I switched to Linux but I'm staying strong. Fuck ubisoft. And fuck my friends for trying to make me go back to windoz.

The fact that it even supports vulkan, and BattleEye has a Linux version, they just don't use it

They just don't like linux. Even if you run it in a VM with VFIO they will still ban you.

And, that their UPlay (Don't care aboyt the rename) launcher is probably one of the other companies, useless launcher which work the best via wine.

And apex legends started randomly banning Linux users again, how hard is it to fix the game that earns them millions of dollars every year? Unbelievable.

Because they're not earning those millions from users. I have no data to back this up, but I'm sure even the Linux users that do play are less likely to spend money on the game.

Off topic but your username looks different in my inbox. It says Nate here but in my inbox is says alphapuggle. Btw I'm using eternity for lemmy might be a bug on the app.

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I'd just like to interject for moment. What you're refering to as Linux, is in fact, Steam/Linux, or as I've recently taken to calling it, Steam plus Linux. Linux is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another component of a fully functioning Steam system made useful by Steam Proton, DXVK, and vital Wine components comprising a full OS as defined by Valve.

No, it is actually GNU/Linux+Steam 😒🤓

(Please don't take this comment seriously, it's a joke)

Too late, I now have "GNU/Linux+Steam" stuck in my neck beard, ready to be spewed forth at every opportunity.

Wine and DXVK made it increadably easy to support Linux and if a company doesn't even put in that much effort or intentionally breaks the game for you it's certainly not worth your money! I pirate rather than use the refund window but the principal is the same since I do buy good games after all.

Cries in pipeline hacks for DirectX. Didn't Space Engineers do this?

I am not really sure what you mean with that tbh

Probably space engineers more abuses the direct pipeline than uses it, in ways that translation layers wouldn't be able to emulate the quirks.

Their goal is to be compliant not equivalent

True, it can't add new ones ether because it's a extra layer and not part of the actual game!

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I mean, it is not a fault on Linux's end. We have all the tools we need in the form of wine and dxvk, it's the game which fails to work due to some obscure dependency or a mandatory rootkit. One great example is genshin- the game itself works flawlessly, but it has a rootkit which obviously does not work on Linux and you have to patch it out.

A reminder that on last steam report, Linux overcome Mac as second in usage operating system. They don't have to excuse of only support the top 2 OS.

Instead to refund is to negative review, games companies are much more affected by losing a positive rating that a refund.

Who is "they"? Not all game companies can afford to support multiple platforms. You're not entitled for developers to support your preferred platform nor does it make sense yo give a negative review unless they lied in the product description.

It does make sense if they sell in a store for with support to multiple platforms and they only support the paid one.

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Jesus lol.

This is probably true for big games, but I wouldn't get angry at any small developer for not supporting Linux. It's just not worth it/still such a small base.

Most of the time indie games actually do run on Linux, it's the games from big studios that don't (in my experience)

all the indies I play run completely without issues, even those that don't use major game engines like celeste and rain world

Most off-the-shelf game engines these days have been well tested with Proton.

Steam and Proton have been huge. I've managed to make the switch to a mostly Linux setup due to them.

Revit's kinda a bitch still though.

Luckily most of the small inde games always support Linux. Most of those devs don't have a need or time to go out of their way to botch the support.

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At this point I wouldn't be suprised that some dev companies are taking Microsoft kickback money under the table. There is really no excuse for a game not to work on Linux natively on 2023.

Well, the thing is that developers need to go out of their way to intentionally break Linux support. The community does 99% of the work in most cases. Launchers, along with anti-cheat are the most egregious.

Anti-cheat I can semi-understand, the developer has to do some work, but popular anti-cheats support Linux no problem.

Launchers, however are 100% useless other than Steam itself, I wish Valve would ban third-party launchers. I wouldn't be surprised though if some publishers would pull their games from Steam if Valve outright banned them.

@Rooty @Uluganda you mean apart from the extra work it takes for devs to give support to the platform, a platform where they will get less than 1% of sales.

saying "theres no excuse" is just delusional

what kind of support mate? jesus I hate this argument. As if publisher do anything out of the ordinary to provide linux compatbility. All the work was done by valve already or is still being done.

Look at no man's sky and how they in the past have had to patch their game for Linux via proton. It happens, proton is not perfect and it never will be

Steam decks and other deck PCs are rapidly gaining ground, not to mention that steam runs natively on Linux. The "less than 1% marketshare" meme is 20 years old at this point and no longer relevant. Once again, there is no excuse.

It's still less than 5%, so unfortunately it's still at a level they can ignore.

We need more gaming devices that ship with Linux out of the box, like the Steam Deck. Market share is not going to go up only with PC gamers choosing Linux over Windows.

@Rooty even 3 - 5% is not worth it for a lot of devs for the amount of time it would take. you must also consider every update also needing the same care taken to it. financially small devs don't have the resources and big devs know it would eat into their profits

I don't think it neccesarily takes much to make a game compatible, from what I hear at this point it basically just consists of not doing really weird things with your game and not choosing an anti cheat that doesn't work

By the fact basically every indie game I've ever tried has worked flawlessly in proton I'd say there's no excuse for new triple a games not to

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Honestly, the 2 hour refund window is the perfect length to see how bad the Linux compatibility is. A half hour to try a few tweaks, if I care enough to. Another hour to see if there are subtle bugs or intermittant crashes.

I definitely have tried to run a few games I wouldn't have bothered with otherwise.

The infinite refund window offered by piracy also works, mind you

Also sometimes due to DRM/launcher shit the pirate version actually works much easier on wine/proton. I've downloaded cracked versions of games I actually bought in the past due to this

I hate to admit I had to do it with Nioh Complete Edition. I dont know but my store downloaded copy just refused to load. When it did, it had 15fps for a while and then crashed. Meanwhile, when I played the pirated version, it worked good. It stuttered for the first 20 minutes, but once all the caches were built it worked amazingly. Bummer I cant use the online feature.

I've fallen so far out of the loop with games piracy.

I gather that there are repacks now for Linux? Or do you dl the windows version then just run it through proton?

The latter - downloading the windows cracked version and yeah, wine or proton. It works beautifully.

That's when there is no native linux version obviously; these days you can also find pirate versions of those when they exist (most notably on rutracker).

I think there is one person putting out repacks especially made for Linux mind you (can't remember their name though found it, it's johncena141), including specific wine versions and so on in the repack, though I've never used them

Hopefully they become a little more well known. I am apprehensive of downloading from any repacker that isn't on the Piracy Megathread or FMHY wiki.

I had this with the Sims, I bought and paid for the game legit but trying to run it through steam it kept trying to load the origin store for auth or something which was a pain in the ass and I couldn't get it to run reliably.

I ended up using a crack just because it ran without any BS!

Refund window is great until the devs decide to change up their anticheat to something less compatible later (fall guys, rocket league, nearly happened to battlebit) or there is instability that only appears late in the game you can't find in 2 hours (Jedi fallen order, Horizon zero dawn) or the publisher decides to update their stupid launcher and break compatibility that way (EA comes to mind)

Even if something works today, with how modern game devs operate it's certainly not guaranteed to work tomorrow, and that's a problem.

Customers have more power than companies would like you to believe. Politely explain the situation to customer support, and ask for a refund. If they refuse, mention that you purchased a game that was promised to work for at least several months, and you haven't received the product you paid for. Because of that, you're considering charging back through your bank. If that doesn't work, say you'll charge back if they don't refund. If that doesn't work, actually charge back through your bank. Banks are surprisingly cool about it as long as you don't do it too often. Of course, you need to buy the game directly (no account balance) from a credit card.

Just don't be a jerk to the support person, because it's almost certainly not their fault. It's also less likely to get you what you want. They'd rather give you what you want so you go away, and you just need to give them reasons that they can relay to their supervisor if necessary.

My experience is that all games run on Linux these days. Wine, DXVK and Vulkan are really good. The only games that don't run are those that explicitly ban Linux users with some creepy anti-cheat.

Ok, hear me out. Linux is not an easy platform to develop for because it's in constant flux where systems and libraries come, change and go constantly. Linux itself is a somewhat slippery concept (if we expand from the kernel) where "works on linux" can really mean it's been tested on one particular distro. Debian stable and rolling releases are not the same. Unless I am completely mistaken, I can see why major developers are hesitant to support linux, whatever it even is. Is Android linux?

Now, I'm all for this message. Given how OSs have been developing, I advocate for linux adoption and wish people would "vote with their wallet". Otherwise things just will not change. Well, not for better, if recent history is anything to go by. I just feel that this problem has more prongs than we like to admit, being linux enthusiasts.

Please correct me if I'm wrong.

Not really the case anymore because of proton, game devs develop for Windows and proton and then it'll run on anything that can run proton, Linux, android, Mac or otherwise in the future

From what I hear thanks to proton it's incredibly easy to develop for Linux, as long as you don't use one of the anticheats that doesn't support it or intentionally prevent it from running in proton you're fine

Well, yeah, but I think the issue is that the best way to develop for linux is to make a Windows binary. I don't like that. Developers actively sabotaging Wine/Proton compatibility is kind of malicious though.

I don't think the best way to develop for Linux is by making a windows binary, I think the best way for game developers to make a Linux version of a game they otherwise wouldn't is by making a windows binary compatible with proton

Problem is very few developers actively choose to make a Linux game and windows games if done right run at native speeds on Linux anyway.

I'm gonna be unpopular for saying this but it's the same thing as using HTML for desktop/mobile apps, sure it's not optimal performance wise but it's a hell of a lot better than often nothing at all because companies can't or won't justify development time to support smaller groups of people on smaller platforms

If such a time comes that desktop Linux has a large enough market share for large companies to take seriously then I'm sure they'll start developing native versions of maybe even make Linux-first games but sadly we're nowhere near that point yet so best we can hope for is good cross compatibility tools

As a big Linux fan, it makes me said that Wine needs to exist. But, maybe it's not such a bad thing. Linux is just a kernel, with no associated libraries for app developers. App devs don't want to manually write system calls, so it's always been the case thar they lick and choose which set of libraries to target for their Linux apps. A popular low level choice is the GNU standard C library, and a popular high level choice is the GTK/GDK/Gnome stack. But these aren't the only choices. I mean you can use the MUSL standard C library if you want. You can choose between OpenGL, Vulkan, and WGPU for graphics already.

I see Wine and Proton as just being another set of standard apis to target. Maybe they don't have the best design, but is traditional Unix really the best design either? Now the Valve and company are supporting Wine, it's one of the Linux targets with the most actual developers. And of course it has a huge advantage over the glibc + Vulkan stuff: it retains binary compatibility forever.

Yes, Wine and Proton are great and they do actually solve a lot of issues with linux gaming. I don't exactly begrudge anyone for choosing to go that route because linux is complicated. But I do wish we'd talk more about native linux gaming and didn't always default to Proton. Valve has done wonders for gaming on linux, but I am not fan of Steam and their DRM policies.

I really appreciate programs like Bottles these days. Back in 2006 or so I beat Deus Ex on Wine and setting it up was a hassle. Today I'm amazed it was even possible back then.

I totally agree. The real problem for Linux gaming tho is that games are almost always distributed as compuled binaries, but Linux is built around open source. It you had a model where you paid for the source code of a game, and then it got compiled for your machine right when you downloaded, Linux gaming would probably work great. You'd have better fps too. (I actually really like this idea, somebody like GOG should make a client that does this).

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You could bundle your specific versions of libraries. And link it statically. Like most games do anyways.

Pretty sure that's not just a Linux thing either.

I'd think so, too. But afaik windows people don't do so much dynamic linking anyways. Most of the times it's Linux executables that are few megabytes in size and most windows executables are at least tens of megabytes because people prefer statically link things in that world.

Nobody stops you doing the same thing with linux executables.

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Linux game devs should be targeting the Steam Linux Runtime which provides a stable environment.

it's in constant flux where systems and libraries come, change and go constantly.

Same applies to every non-deprecated OS.

I had some issues running the native version of Prey 2006 because of that

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A friend recently asked me to play a game with him that had an anticheat that Intentinay made it impossible to play the game on linux

I had both linux and windows on my computer, but windows was broken

I tried to make a virtual machine and install windows on it, but i couldnt install it

He blamed all the problems on linux

I had the same with Genshin Impact; it refuses to install on Linux due to “cheating rootkits”, it even refuses to install on a Windows 11 VM in VirtualBox!
How does it do that‽

In my experience, the effort to fix Linux issues serve as a good litmus test as to how well supported the game is in general.

At least with games that aren't from big studios.

Linux compatibility or I send it back!

If it's anti cheat stopping it I blame the game. If it's a bug or poor performance I just say oh well it will work one day.

There's some BS happening around Linux support from some devs. e.g. Metro Exodus is Linux native, Metro Exodus Enhanced is Windows only and doesn't work with AMD GPUs.

I bought the game twice (made a mistake and bought it on Epic at launch and now bought it again on Steam to support Linux development and companies that release native builds).

I'm disappointed to see I'm unable to play the Enhanced version.

To be fair, game programming is very often hot garbage. Most things I run do not respond for a while at startup. How difficult can it be to decouple your threads?

I've recently started gaming on linux with surprisingly little problem, given that the last time I tried was about 15 years ago. I don't even know what proton is, but I just installed steam and then my games.. surprisingly on some slightly older games (tf2, HL2) I get a huge FPS boost in Linux compared to windows. Not sure why that would be.

I'm not completely sure about it, but I believe both TF2 and HL2 are native ports that Valve did themselves. Could be the reason.

surprisingly on some slightly older games (tf2, HL2) I get a huge FPS boost in Linux compared to windows

Oh, I remember watching video on youtube on that topic. Short answer: because opensource. Long answer: because developers better understood how to optimize. Same optimizations slightly boosted FPS on windows.

I don't even know what proton is

Valve games run natively on Linux, so no need in proton.

I've had issue with Stray not detecting my game controller. Went to the customer service and they told me it only runs on Windows...

I've successfully run it, only missing the controller support. Turns out I needed to install the udev support to solve it.

Weird. stray ran great on my deck out of the box via proton. Glad you got to play it though!

Paladins is a pain for this. Game runs fine on proton, and all it needs is some work with EAC to enable linux on multiplayer but despite all the requests they've yet to bother.

Same thing with Post Scriptum, even though the devs other game, Squad, works perfectly fine with proton...

Ny friend, if you play Paladins, you have much bigger problems than EAC

It was a pretty fun game to play on the Switch ngl. Might just give in and play overwatch tho

I'm pretty sure it's rather simple for the developer to enable EAC for Linux. (https://www.protondb.com/news/steam-deck-eac-update)

I've noticed a lot more games that I can play now with EAC. I don't know why some devs are dragging their feet on this.

Halo MCC devs complained the port to EAC is harder than Valve claimed but even they went to the effort to enable it.

I have no idea what could hold up other devs to do the same.

I'm blaming companies making a windows and linux version of a software while the linux version is wastly inferior, full of bugs and unstable. I do love the OS but the software experience sometimes ruining it.

Yeah as long as proton works fine I'd rather use that over a buggy port. Usually works better for the devs too since they can target one API and binary and just debug whatever makes proton poop itself afterwards.

If a game cant be run on linux, thats usually intentional. Microshit at least gives discounts to the developer if the game runs only on their shit. Also m$ have some of components that ultimately lock things to wincrap, for example d3d is meant to do this. Microsoft is a cancerm just like google become one

Time to flip it around. Windows is a cancer.

Funnily enough, Ballmer backtracked on his "Linux is a cancer" when he saw Satya Nadella (current M$ CEO), make M$ (and its shareholders, which includes Ballmer), a lot of money off Linux through Cloud, or more specifically, Azure.

I think microsoft is the cancer (and google), not just windows alone. Teams is also like a crime against human kind, just like office, and the xbox publisher octopus.

I had a heck of a time trying to get It Takes Two to work on my machine. Apparently every game that launches the EA App from Steam is broken now and needs a custom fix using ProtonTricks.

After a while of searching, I found this guide and it was a lifesaver.
https://steamdeckhq.com/tips-and-guides/fixing-ea-play-blank-screen-for-ea-games-on-steam/

These are sadly the kind of issues that scare people away from Linux gaming. The stuff that works, works great. But when something is not supported, it can be a real pain to find a fix.

I believe this was fixed in the latest Proton Experimental. It's working for both Titanfall 2 and Sims 4

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I was just thinking about this the other day...like games are optized for windows usually, but windows is not optimized for games. A fresh Windows 10 runs at 2gb ram on idle. It all went down hill for gamers when Microsoft killed xp

RAM is the cheapest upgrade possible, unless you're trying to run a game on 8GB in 2023 idk why you'd be that concerned with RAM usage.

Perpetual software bloat should not be encouraged; idling at 2GB is fucking insane

Really? My arch install is idling at 2.8gb. Picom (310mb), XOrg (160mb) and pipewire (140mb) are big chunks, and kitty isn't cheap either but the rest is mainly sub 50mb services that all add up. I'm not running anything heavy like Gnome or KDE either, just bspwm and 2 polybar instances (one for each monitor).

Yeah that sounds fishy, a default KDE installation of Fedora would at least be under a gig for me

Depends on settings and the amount of availlable RAM. Install fedora KDE spin on three systems, one with 4GB, one with 8 and one with say 16GBs of RAM. You should see, that the vanilla install of KDE uses different amounts of RAM on each system. KDE uses caching of all kinds of stuff to make the overall experience smoother. The amount and aggressivenes of the caching depends on distribution defaults. And KDE using, say, 8GB of RAM when idling isn't bad. RAM is only useful, when it is used. When memory pressure increases (applications are actively using lots of RAM), KDE will automatically reduce cache sizes to free the RAM up again.

The entire notion of the system using as little RAM as possible is really weird and usually (imho) shows that people who say that don't understand how the RAM is used. I want my system to make good use of my RAM, and as much of that as is reasonable.

Damn, you said it better than I could have. Unused RAM is like unused screen space.

Bragging you have three monitors but have mastered Alt-Tab and don't use them.

How heavy is your kitty? It usually averages at 40-45 Mb on a new window for me (with custom zsh with starship and some plugins, and customised neofetch)

Yeah that's weird, after a systemctl soft-reboot, both picom and xorg's memory usage is way down. Either way, it's still not that unreasonable to see Windows idling at 2GB.

Compared to what? And based on what advancement of technology and software? What should it take? Cause we can strip features all day long until we get there.

Compared to Linux which idle at half a gig with the most bloated DE. Hell, even Mac isn't that bad.

Cause we can strip features all day long until we get there.

Good? Okay? We need more minimalism

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Me running on lxde using 512mb: 😎

Then you'll turn around and tell me to use Firefox even though Vivaldi runs on half the RAM.

Your guaranteed response?

"Well you have it, might as well use it!"

Cool, exactly how I feel about the OS. Who cares if it can't run on less than a GB. I gave 32GB and can't use all of it if I wanted to even with all my monitors full of applications. Don't see a difference in the argument.

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RAM is the cheapest upgrade possible

Unless you use laptop with soldered-in RAM and insane pricing options.

I've never seen a laptop with soldered RAM, they've all been pop and swap in my experience.

GPU/CPU, yeah. Always soldered.

Trying on 6GB. As a Linux user I usually don't need more RAM, so haven't added any yet.

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Meh swap is pretty crazy, I am squeezing modded Minecraft in 4gb ram on win10, it takes about 10 minutes to load, but by the time the first few chunks are rendered I think most pages are swapped to disk, letting java take almost the full 4 gigs. Don't ask why I'm doing this, exactly 😅

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As a GOG customer, I'll take anything they are giving away, even if I can't run it.

I can always install it in someone's computer for them to enjoy.

Does "plays on linux" mean native , or just 'works fine with WINE (edit: or proton, apparently)'?

There are plenty of games that are very specifically targeting Proton compatibility at a very minimum thanks to the Steam Deck, so I'm perfectly happy with any game that's developed with that in mind.

Being verified on Steam Desk is my parameter for deciding if I'll consider a game or not, even if I don't have a Steam Deck (yet). I'm perfectly fine with that, not asking for a Linux native version as long as the game works as it should on Proton.

Verified is probably a stricter metric than you need/want. Many games aren't verified just because of font-size issues and the like on the small screen.

Proton* Proton is the way. Granted, proton uses wine... but, makes getting games running nearly effortless is the majority of cases.

Also, has a nice website, protondb.com, which tells you how well / if a game works on linux.

I'm on Linux Mint right now and when I go my library and toggle the "Show only games that run on Linux" button, nothing happens. I don't think Valve cares about the distinction, so long as it runs.

if you have proton enabled the library shows all games as linux compatible. If you disable proton in the steam settings on linux the filter will only show games that run natively

So that options is really just useless. It's a remnant from the dark ages, from a time before proton. I do not like to reminded of those days.

I'll buy Windows games at full price only if the developer has made efforts to better support Linux users (say by fixing a bug that only affects Linux users).

Gaming on Linux has evolved by leaps and bounds. We're now at the point where only a select few Windows games (usually due to the anti cheat) won't run.

Or spend a lot of time reverse engineering the game and fixing shit, and completely losing interest in playing once the game is running perfectly.

I don't know some of my favorite projects are open source engine recreations like OpenMW and re3 for example. If they don't get shut down by the owner of the IP some of them can be in development for years

I think you have the pictures the wrong way round. At least it isn't sarcastic this way. And the meme is supposed to be.

i bought asseto corsa on sale once, it didn't even start i still have it though, as it was reaaally cheap maybe someday it'll run

Minecraft and Dota2 run on Linux :)

ngl i consistently have a better experience running games through wine than using their native versions. linux ports are often completely dysfunctional and it sucks ass

It may be silly but I usually will blindly buy a game, find out it doesn't work, then wait for a few years until it does. Because it will. Even if someone has to reverse engineer the game engine to use the game assets.

That's silly and dumb on top, because games rapidly lose value. The $60 game you buy today (and don't play) costs $40 in a year. And will be in a $12 Humble Bundle with 9 other games in 3-5 years tops.

I already get enough games in bundles that I don't play, when I actually buy a game (even on sale) I only do it if I want to play it immediately. Otherwise in the future it will be cheaper anyway and have plenty of updates on top (if it didn't get abandoned).

The thing is: I'd never buy a €60 game, because money is hard to earn. I have clear priorities, games are just a hobby.

Most of the games I buy are either old and more suitable to run on lower end hardware, or discounted, or bundles. I hate multiplayer games, so I won't jump on the latest hyped up AAA franchise either. I'm a proud member of /c/patientgamers and /c/retrogamers.

My comment was meant as a tribute to how much gaming on Linux has improved, and to the people that make it happen.

How often does that happen though? Usually these games get a couple updates early on to fix major bugs, and once it’s stable it’s never touched again.

On the Mac side it’s been a real sad story because so many old 32bit and/or x86 games simply can’t run anymore.

The work that is going into Wine, Proton, DosBox, ScummVM, Luxtorpeda and all the other compatibility tools is what makes me quite positive that any game I buy will eventually get supported.

Sometimes that assumption will fail, but it's a very small percentage of the games I own. I can live with that.

As the other guy pointed out that’s a little silly from an economics standpoint. Games depreciate quickly so it’s going to be cheaper to wait until someone confirms Linux support.

Also, buying something in hopes of it one day getting the support you want? That’s just crazy! Don’t buy something until it fits all your needs.

I usually buy games with heavy discounts or in bundles. For example, the last bundle I bought was Skyrim Special Edition + Prey for under €20. I was OK if one (or both) were unplayable or I if simply didn't like them.

I don't get upset if once in a while a game does not work, because I've seen the evolution of gaming on Linux since the 90's, and have seen many unplayable games become playable. Yes, it sometimes takes a decade or so. :-)

I don't spend too much on games because I have too many already that I most certainly will not be able to play before I die.

You're free to spend your money however you wish, but buying a whole bundle and being OK with not being able to play any game in it? If you would wait for the 10 years until it actually becomes playable you'll probably be able to get it for even less than $20.

You do you, but I personally don't advise people buy something until it's actually working. "Sit on this for 10 years and maybe then you'll get what you paid for" is bad advice.

It certainly is, I'd never advise anyone to do what I do.

Please, don't take financial advice from me.

Personally I prefer to get a refund with the explicit reason "Game wont run on proton" It gives clear quantifiable feedback to valve and the developer that they lost this money because it wouldnt run on linux.

Or at least I would if that had happened recently. Last time a game wouldnt run for me was ace combat 7.

Seems like a good idea, I might start doing just that.