Slashdot Mirror
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.
Steam is illegally stealing Windows and letting cheap freeloading Linux losers play Microsoft's games! They should sue!
Linux already has solitaire and minesweeper.
Why UNIX?
Not a fair metric when 90% are crappy clones of each other.
Better metric would be, how many games that I want to play work on Steam on Linux, I promise you the number is far, far lower then the Hackers Quarterly.
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
Someone pissed in this dude's windows cheerios.
Quake has been available natively on Linux for 22 years now.
i think the long-term play here is making the 'steam box' a viable thing from a hardware perspective. The more triple-A games that run natively in linux, the better chances a valve branded box running their customized distro has at being a going concern.
Check out Xonotic. A modern, fast paced arena FPS. Really awesome game but it could use more players!
Linux, Mac, and Windows binaries available and it is open source.
100% free. No loot boxes, no ads, you are not the product, and it never tries to sell you shit. Free period.
There are lots of people who prefer linux to windows, but don't really have a problem with proprietary software.
It's not just about proprietary software. The *nix environment is better at doing a lot of tasks than windows. My primary work desktop (What all our software development is done on) is linux. We also have a windows box for doing Ms office and outlook. My primary home desktop would be Linux if I could play the games I want to play on Linux.
The irony is that Open source software is so convenient, that it runs perfectly good on Windows, allowing me to do everything I want (work and games) on one machine. If open source software did not work so well on windows, I might actually have to make a hard choice between windows and linux, or just run 2 machines
The same cannot be said of the proprietary software that I use (e.g. some games, and MS Office). Those do not run well on platforms other than windows, so using windows is more convenient. But these problems are not a result license (i.e. that it is proprietary). I don't have a problem paying for software. I pay for some games on linux. I pay for plex (which runs on all major platforms).
I don't use linux because it's free. I use it because it is better at doing lots of things, and the list of things it is worse at is shrinking every day.
My feeling is use what works. I have no problem running wine or mono software on Linux. One of my daily critical pieces of software (keePass2) runs on Mono. My big concern is how does the software developer support me running it on Linux. Does the software developer support me running the their software wine or mono? The developer need to make very clear that they support these products on Linux and what libraries/dependencies are needed to be supported.
I understand that Linux has lots of distributions and support all of them in completely untenable unless you open source the program. Even then, that is difficult. The developer need to pick a few well known distros and support those. If I was software developer I'd make sure to only support the place were most of my customer or potential customers would want to install it. This is to limit manage my support costs.
Business Software: RHEL / CentOS, Ubuntu LTS, (Open)Suse
Games: Ubuntu / Mate, SteamOS, Fedora (maybe)
Server Software: RHEL / CentOS, Debian, Ubuntu LTS, Suse
No good deed goes unpunished.
the database of games that work with Proton has increased to over 2,600
But how many of that number are simply variants on hitting something, shooting something or jumping over something?
While the number of games sounds imppressive, how many of those titles are actually novel or unique and how many are simply variants on the small number of 30 year-old concepts?
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Ah yes, the small niche market of 99% of business desktops and the vast majority of home PCs.
I would like to meet one. I mean that seriously, I would like to meet someone who favors Linux for the OS design, because the only people I have met who prefer Linux have a deep hatred of everything else. I'll use Linux if it's a reasonable option for the task, but I have yet to meet someone who suggests Linux who does not deeply believe it is the ONLY option for EVERY task.
Strawmen convention much? Linux is a Unixy OS MacOS is Unix.
The design is inherently better. Linux or MacOS is what I use unless there is no other choice. Windows 7 is a functioning Operating system.
Windows 10 is so bad that it makes Vista look like an order of magnitude improvement. But that would be true no matter what my personal opinion is. I do hate it, but that is an earned hatred.
And wherever you got the idea that we who like Linux think it is the only computing solution, is just weird.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
It's not just about proprietary software. The *nix environment is better at doing a lot of tasks than windows.
One of the biggest advantages of *NIX operating systems is that they tend to function when they are booted.
My latest Windows 10 cockup is on an SDR radio with several receivers, and has 8 separate sound and a transmit audio drivers, plus 2 IQ stream drivers. Each has a different name of course. Windows update decided that all the audio drivers had to be renamed to the IQ drivers names. Then it fought me to name them back to what they should be. The result was hours of work plus a Teamviewer session to restore what windows did to the friggin computer.
Meanwhile, my MaxOS machine chugs along, my Windows 7 on Bootcamp chugs along, and the Linux machine sits there politely working all the time.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
For those that want to look at the ProtonDB site.
https://www.protondb.com/
Random breakages, strange error messages, complicated multistep fixes.
That's the typical Windows 10 experience.
Circumcision is child abuse.
Chromebooks are pretty goddamned legit now. About 90% of my customers could probably do all their business functions on them and that number would be 100% if more small dev shops would quit using MSVB6something front ends that haven't been updated since Windows NT was a thing for MSSQL Express databases and move their client logic to some kind of web application instead.
No cure for games but Steam and nVidia both have remote display systems that work pretty well for that if you really need it.
-- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K
https://www.protondb.com/app/9...
Some report it broken, some report it working great. Give it a try and see how it goes for you.
Circumcision is child abuse.
I'd like to hear this honestly: how is it malware? There are some questionable DRM schemes in some of the games like Denuvo, but Steam only does an online login check every once in a while. Besides those, what does Steam do that is likened to malware?
That's ok, Windows now comes with complete built-in Linux distributions (under Windows Linux Subsystem) allowing freeloading Windows losers to do work! He should sue!
Gosh.
If only you could run it in a sandboxed environment so that, despite being "malware" as you claim, you can still safely use it without advertising anything about your machine and/or granting it access to anything that you don't want it to touch.
Like... say... chrooting it into a steam-games-only folder, and whacking permissions around it so it can't do anything interesting and runs as a limited user?
Or are you saying "I disagree with having to use Steam", in which case your comment is really badly worded as it suggests you're quite happy to run it on other OS that don't offer that kind of functionality.
> Ah yes, the small niche market of 99% of business desktops and the vast majority of home PCs.
So what? I probably wouldn't be satisfied with ANY of your other consumer choices either. You probably have no taste what so ever.
The beautiful thing about a free market is that I don't have to be held hostage by your stupid choices.
Although your FUD is simply out of date. Microsoft is entirely optional these days.
You may even find the non-WinDOS games on Steam to your liking.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
I just recently tried adding an additional hard drive to a Win10. What a hot mess that is. It's like they are going out of their way to annoy everyone both n00bs and power users.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
> I don't see the business model of trying to sell to freetards.
I use Linux because it's not crap. The fact that there is no licensing nonsense associated with the OS is just an added bonus.
I would have paid for payware Unix back in the day if it actually had supported common PC hardware.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
> Strawmen convention much? Linux is a Unixy OS MacOS is Unix.
That's utter bullshit. What spec that MacOS conforms to is far too restricted and low level to be of any practical value. Macs underneath are alien to anyone that's worked with real Unixen. Far more alien than Linux.
Macs have always been their own proprietary GUI based thing. These days they happen to be a variant of OpenStep.
They aren't Unix to your average Mac user and they aren't Unix to those of us that have worked with other Unixen.
The jack-of-all-trades approach in Apple apps is like the opposite of Unix.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Of course, half the dads reading that article are thinking "I don't get it, what's wrong with peeing on the floor?"
The way I see it, all software makes tradeoffs between complexity of use and complexity of design. Windows 10 is trying to be simpler to use by relying on an AI voice assistant, and guessing at what your intentions are, this leads to complexity of design. Some people (e.g. people who are not used to using computers) may find this orders of magnitude easier to understand than a CLI. Other uses (i.e. people who know exactly what they want to do and how) may find Cortana useless and frustrating, and prefer the lack of restrictions and handholding of a simple linux distro. It's a spectrum. I think windows is designed very well for what it is (i.e. I dread to think what the open source version of windows 10 would be like), but I am definitely more at home piping text commands to eachother. I think I did prefer windows 7 to windows 10, but I upgraded anyway because I knew windows 10 will be supported longer. I had a few problems that a falsely attributed to windows 10 so I had a negative first impression, but some of those problems turned out to be a result of faulty network cables. After realizing that I upgraded to windows 10 the same day I changed rooms (and in wall cables), my experience has been better. I can't speak to your specific driver problems.
> Strawmen convention much? Linux is a Unixy OS MacOS is Unix.
That's utter bullshit. What spec that MacOS conforms to is far too restricted and low level to be of any practical value.
MacOS is Unix certified. You might not like that but first read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... , then go argue with the people who certified it.
Macs underneath are alien to anyone that's worked with real Unixen. Far more alien than Linux.
Funny, but the Unix people I deal with have no problem that you claim exists. And if you are so pissed that MaxOS is Unix certified, then why don't you work to decertify it.
What you are doing is making a stereotyped meme of Mac Users. Whatever, but Bullshit it aint.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
For those labouring under the assumption that these counts are inflated with crappy games, I collected some stats on the 4500 best games on Steam. These are the ones that Steam flags as "Very Positive" or "Overwhelmingly Positive" based on aggregated reviews. Of those, 1500 are supported natively on Linux and another 1500 are playable without much trouble in Proton. It's also become clear that most of the reports being submitted to ProtonDB are for the better, well-known games. Hardly anyone is submitting reports on the crappy shovelware games.
im forced to use windows in the office for one year now. i feel so handicapped its no joke, the people i work with just dont use any unix goodies at all, they would rather write a native java app to sort shit for 2 days instead of some magic cli oneliner, or a bash/python script.
I run Fedora 28 and it works.
The business model is to not be dependent on microsoft...
As it stands, all games publishers are utterly beholden to microsoft, who is also their competitor with their own games to push. Microsoft could make life difficult for any game publishers, and has incentives to do so. If your entire business depends on the good will of one of your biggest competitors, your on very thin ice.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
I'm not forced to use windows at work for real work (though I am forced to use it for microsoft office and outlook). But when I use windows at home, I have cygwin, gcc, bash, python, linux VMs, etc at my disposal. There is almost nothing *nixy I can't do in windows (thanks to *nix tools, not so much windows)
About 90% of my customers could probably do all their business functions on them and that number would be 100% if more small dev shops would quit using MSVB6something front ends that haven't been updated since Windows NT was a thing for MSSQL Express databases and move their client logic to some kind of web application instead.
Let's say the developer rewrites the server side in Python, C#, or some other "modern" language. How would the user run the server on the Chromebook as well so that the user can continue to use the application while away from an Internet connection? As far as I'm aware, that would require one of two things: A. developer mode, which runs the risk of losing everything every time you turn it on; or B. selling your Chromebook and putting the money toward buying one of the newer Chromebooks that supports Crostini.
No cure for games but Steam and nVidia both have remote display systems that work pretty well for that if you really need it.
Cellular Internet service providers in Slashdot's home country charge $10 per GB for tethering. How much data transfer per hour can a user expect when running these "remote display systems" in standard definition (circa 800x480 pixels, 30 fps)? And how much latency does it add?