this post was submitted on 02 Jan 2025
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Linux Gaming
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This was my thought exactly. Proton's emulation of a windows game doesn't count as "first class experience". It's second class at best, but still better than literally nothing at all.
Proton and Wine are not emulators. So while I take your point, I feel it's important to distinguish the difference here where emulators have a lot of negative connotations.
The native ports have frequently been terrible, both in performance and compatibility (missing graphical features etc). Proton is better than those ports, but worse than a native version using Vulkan and 100% of features supported correctly.
While I agree that proton on its own doesn't make gaming on Linux a "first class experience", it does sometimes perform better than the original native "first class" Windows OS that the game was originally intended to be played on. Which is just funny, but also shows all the work that has gone into proton.
Game devs need more Linux players before they make major industry wide changes, but proton makes those numbers have a chance of increasing by making the games playable on Linux.
Another reason why I wouldn't call gaming on Linux a "first class experience" yet is controller and input driver issues. Which can be worked around like if I open a game I bought on gog through steam and use the steam input methods but I shouldn't have to use steam to play a gog game with a controller.
In nobara i literally turned on bluetooth, connected my ps4 controller and started playing. No steam inputs.
Windows games running better with Wine than on Windows has been a thing for at least 20 years, Proton (which is a fork of Wine, people tend to forget) didn't invent anything.
It's mainly DXVK and vkd3d-proton that enable this (projects associated with Valve and Proton). It was usually only native OGL games that performed better on old-school Wine; the wined3d translation layer has been hit and miss historically.
That's not to downplay the huge amount of work that has gone into Wine itself.
Yes, that first pragraph is (sadly?) my experience too. Almost every game that have native version was somehow worse than windows version with proton. Black mesa gave me all sorts of weird glitchy light effects, Pillars of Eternity only ran at 60 FPS and had half of the fonts unreadably blurry, the other game (forgot the name) lacked plenty of updates on linux, etc. And all these problems went away with proton. Is it sad? Yes. Do I care much? Not really as long as proton is hassle free.
Interesting, I haven't had that experience much myself. It might be a bad port to Linux?
I wonder if there is a launch option that you could set that would help? It might also depend on your GPU and drivers. But to your point, it's much less hassel to just tell steam to use proton and not have those issues.