This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/linux_gaming by /u/darkpyro2 on 2024-08-20 17:55:02+00:00.

I remember when I first started trying to game on Linux. Ubuntu 14. We only had wine as an option. You’d need to install steam in wine, and then hope that it was stable enough to install and run your games. You could play World of Warcraft pretty consistently, and maybe a few smaller games, but not much else without a LOT of tinkering. You’d be lucky if your wireless card was working consistently, let alone any games.

Fast forward a couple of years ago. 2020. Proton and DXVK are out, but it tends to lag behind new releases. Cyberpunk 2077 had significant problems at launch – especially if you were on NVIDIA cards – and took weeks to sort out. Ray Tracing and DLSS were basically out of the question, and your experience was pretty questionable unless you were on AMD. Your monitors were fixed to the lowest refresh rate among them because of limitations in X11.

Today, August 20th 2024, every single brand new game that has released this year has worked for me on launch day with zero issues. It didnt matter if it was on Epic, Steam, GoG, etc. Everything just WORKED. We have the Heroic Launcher, Lutris has gotten really good, basically every steam game just works out of the box with the exception of a few games with anticheat and developers with anticompetitive policies that refuse to enable anti-cheat proton support. We have a variety of branched versions of proton with specific fixes and enhancements for various games. We have a new display server protocol that is (quite recently) stable on all major GPU manufacturers. Black Myth Wukong launched today, and it’s already gold on protondb. Even games that Steam doesn’t supposedly support directly are getting patches to proton to ensure the experience is seamless.

And in the future, support is looking even better! HDR support has come to wayland – if only experimentally – and while it’s not very good, it will get better once they have greater support for color profiles…And not only that, Linux ARM gaming support is starting to take off and get better (though my experience in that regard is limited).

Linux still has a lot of limitations for business users as far as available software goes, but when it comes to gaming, we have an experience that is basically on-par with Windows and universally better than Mac.

Man is it a good time to try Linux.