You Can Play Over 2,600 Windows Games on Linux Via Steam Play (tomshardware.com)

At the end of August, Valve announced a new version of Steam Play for Linux that included Proton, a WINE fork that made many Windows games, including more recent ones ,such as Witcher 3, Dark Souls 3 and Dishonored, playable on Linux. Just two months later, ProtonDB says there are over 2,600 Windows games that users can play on Linux, and the number is rapidly growing daily. From a report: When Valve Software launched Steam Play with Proton, it made it easier for gamers to play Windows games that hadn't yet been ported to Linux with the click of a button. Not all games may run perfectly on Linux, but that's also often the case with Windows 10, which can not play older games as well as previous versions of Windows did, even under Compatibility Mode. In only two months, the database of games that work with Proton has increased to over 2,600 -- more than half of the 5,000 Linux-native games that can be obtained through the Steam store.

Comments

Re:Not the right metric.

[Greyfox]

The number is much higher than the previous status quo. Remember the bad old days of Loki Games? That was the late '90's, so some of the younger readers might not have been born then. I bought several of their titles back then. They did a Linux convention in Denver in '99 and their CEO was complaining that it took three engineers three days to figure out how to set up a multi-display X11 setup for a flight simulator. They finally threw in the towel a short time later.

Back then, the prognosis for commercial games on Linux was "Whoever wants to port them and Loki." There weren't many who would port them -- Id Software for some of the quake titles are the only ones I can think of. And sure, there were some other options -- you could install mame and play some emulated coin-op and console games. There were some open source ones, graphical and not. There was still a pretty healthy Xtrek community back then. But if you wanted a machine to play games on, you installed windows. Funnily, OSX was in pretty much the same boat as Linux. A few more publishers decided to port to them. But you didn't really buy a Mac to play games anyway. And they were really terrible at pushing 3D. The early aluminum tower would cook the video card to death over the course of a couple of months if you actually tried to.

Fast forward to today, you can confidently install steam on Linux and reasonably expect a new title to just work. Take No Man's Sky. Good example, fairly recent game, pretty unique, works great. Borderlands 2, Stellaris, Factorio, even the old Railroad Tycoon 2 work great, for just a random selection that I have installed on my laptop. About the only thing I've tried installing that absolutely didn't want to work was the 64 bit version of Skyrim.

And a lot of the titles that didn't work before work great with wine. I used to run the 32 bit Skyrim that way. Wine will also run Wow and Eve online flawlessly, again a huge step up from the bad old days.

I still need to test it with the HTC Vive VR and my most commonly played titles for that. If that works even remotely well, I could consider formatting Windows 10 off my gaming system and installing Linux instead. That would have been impossible before now.