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With Proton and Steam Play, many Windows games now work on Linux

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Re: With Proton and Steam Play, many Windows games now work on Linux

#411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now I'm biased because I'm an anti-cheat developer, but I really can't see how checking the integrity of your installed kernel device drivers is at all invasive.

On Linux, you can check to see if the kernel is operating in lockdown mode to verify the integrity of the system. Lockdown mode forces all modules to be digitally signed and trusted by the kernel keyring before they can be loaded. This would functionally be equivalent to what you do on Windows.

Don't you mean tainted?

https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/118117/14305

Re: With Proton and Steam Play, many Windows games now work on Linux

#412
post #48

I switched back from Pop!_OS about a month ago, after nearly a year of using it exclusively. My previous laptop broke, so I got a new one. Of course I immediately created a Pop! partition and started installing stuff. I tried Doom Eternal... and it was running extremely slow for what you'd expect from a RTX 2080. Surely enough, I switched to my Windows 10 partition and the game ran smooth like butter over there. I sp…

This mirrors my experience. Proton gives frequent issues including both crashes and slow downs.

But it's worth a try. Some games run well enough for me that I don't bother booting into windows to play them.

Re: With Proton and Steam Play, many Windows games now work on Linux

#413
post #331
post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With a bit of effort it’s a solved problem, however as soon as that was sorted, developers started using snaps and flatpaks that just Do Not Care about your system settings... and we’re back at square -1, because now you won’t even get consistency between Gtk apps and Gtk apps. The Linux desktop sometimes is like a bad comedy sketch.

Well now I've gone from not caring about snap/flatpak (only selling point seemed to be ease of install; I've never had a problem with arch & the AUR) to making mental note to steer well clear if the temptation ever began to set in.

Yes snap is bad. Compared to the AUR qhere you can read the build script, snap is compiled by someone else and the build script isnt available to perform yourself, at least as far as I looked.

Re: With Proton and Steam Play, many Windows games now work on Linux

#414
post #413
post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well now I've gone from not caring about snap/flatpak (only selling point seemed to be ease of install; I've never had a problem with arch & the AUR) to making mental note to steer well clear if the temptation ever began to set in.

Yes snap is bad. Compared to the AUR qhere you can read the build script, snap is compiled by someone else and the build script isnt available to perform yourself, at least as far as I looked.

The advantage here is that malware can't be shipped as part of the build process.

Re: With Proton and Steam Play, many Windows games now work on Linux

#415
post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thoroughly agree, Linux KVM and GPU passthrough is amazing. I was disappointed with USB for guests though, I found it impossible to restore my iPhone via iTunes on a Windows VM, because the USB device wouldn't automatically bind to the VM. Which is something even VirtualBox can do well. But maybe the tech has progressed, or there's a better solution to that issue now.

I "solved" that issue by getting a pcie usb card and passing that through.

This is the best way to connect VR headsets as well.

Re: With Proton and Steam Play, many Windows games now work on Linux

#416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From my experience, I think it is. A non-small part of multiplayer game engineering is to handle latency. With streaming you have none of that, and even if the connection just stutters for a few 10's of ms you will get a horrible playback experience. Game streaming is most comparable to live video streaming with a frighteningly small buffer (< 10 ms).

The GeForce Now client itself told me my connection was good enough for gaming... I’m not arguing that wired cables aren’t faster, but these streaming services aren’t advertising based off of that and their own clients aren’t requiring that level of performance either.

I've tried GeForce Now also, the client told me everything was fine over Wifi (but it wasn't). Switched to wired, and again everything worked perfectly. I'm in the same room as my router.

I'm just saying that my guess is that this probably has nothing to do with your ISP or net neutrality, and more with technical limits of wireless connections. But I could of course be wrong... Try it with ethernet and see how it goes, I just have a long cable I temporarily run through the room when I wanna play :-)

(And yeah, I think it's kinda fishy that they don't make it clearer if/that wired connections can make big improvements. Look around the subreddits about these services, or their support pages and you'll see that people recommend ethernet, and the vendors first recommendation when having trouble is to use wired ethernet [0], [1])

[0]: https://support.google.com/stadia/answer/9595943?hl=en&ref_t... [1]: https://nvidia.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/4504/

Re: With Proton and Steam Play, many Windows games now work on Linux

#417

Gaming on Linux has been so fucking good. I switched from Windows to Linux a month ago and literally haven’t found a game I can’t play. Even Red Dead Redemption 2, Hades, Fallen Jedi, Ghostrunner... Oh the really icing on the cake is just how easy it all is. You literally just install the Windows version and things “just work.” Its amazing. I’ve said this a lot of times now but it’s pretty amazing to write code and p…

Agreed, however after months of being "Linux only" (Manjaro KDE + Proton), just this weekend I broke and installed a Windows as a dual-boot option. 90% of games with Proton "just work" like you said. It is amazing. But then there's that one game that doesn't work, or works but with half the fps... for me, it was Death Stranding. It runs at 60+ fps at 1440p on Windows, but runs at half that on Proton, with horrible ar…

If you're privileged enough you could buy another GPU, pass it through to a Windows VM, install looking-glass to pass display output over a shared memory buffer, barrier for mouse sharing and bam, you have Windows in a window in your Linux machine running close to bare metal performance. (It does eat memory bandwidth linearly with refresh rate though).

Re: With Proton and Steam Play, many Windows games now work on Linux

#418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It wouldn't be the first time, there's a bunch of games on Stadia that have no public Linux build or Vulkan support in their Windows build Maybe Google are licensing a proprietary DX->VK wrapper for Stadia developers to use, so they can't release it elsewhere?

Sometimes your Stadia build is done by another company, or is using some obscure Stadia_VK extension, or your renderer is statically linked, so you'd have to do another build to switch to VK. Whatever it is, it's probably just enough work, and DX11/DX12 works better enough anyways that there just isn't enough incentive to spend the effort to get your VK backend running on Windows.

> DX11/DX12 works better enough anyways

DX isn't performing better than Vulkan, is it? The performance of Vulkan titles has been almost absurdly good.

Re: With Proton and Steam Play, many Windows games now work on Linux

#419
post #22

Another Linux gamer. I seriously don't miss windows anymore. At this point I'm not worried about compatibility, but rather shitty game companies banning you the second they figure out you're playing on linux. This is especially an issue in PvE heavy games that have only small PvP elements. Looking at you Destiny 2. I really wish companies stopped their draconian policies about Linux gaming. Or at the very least just…

Forgive my ignorance, but why do game servers ban Linux players in pvp games? Fear of some sort of modding only available on Linux?

Not just about anti-cheat software.

Typically people who write bots will host them on linux servers, so it's easy to blanket ban linux as a whole, that will catch most bots.

Also, some multiplayer games's servers trust their game client's inputs - if that game client suddenly runs on a system that has full control over the game (like linux and the kind of tech savvy people that knows how to use linux to it's fullest), it makes it harder for them to trust that the 1000 players online are not exploiting the game by manipulating network requests right before it goes over the wire.

This is a compromise that devs have to make when integrating network code with their game: if you click the mouse, does it immediately update the server in a synchronous fashion and introduce latency but having guaranteed consistency of your world (while the game state lives on the server and the client is "dumb") OR do you make the game client smart and hold some portion (or whole) of the game world on the client and just send small updates to the server. In the last case there will be less latency but you have an occasional glitch when packets drop and it is more susceptible to attack, since more work is done locally (Path of Exile have/use to have this setting and you could choose which way you want the game to talk to the server - depending on your connection - I think it's automatic now, haven't played in a while). Why do I mention this? I'd argue it's easier to attack this compromise from a linux box or a compromised linux game client - so again, game devs just outright ban linux since that is the path of least resistance.

Another thing with multiplayer: some games, esp older ones, have to have some minimum fps to keep the game world consistent for all connected players. So between fps and network latency and the mitigations/compromises that the devs have to make here, the code becomes realllly messy/complex and can easily turn into a blackbox - a blackbox that maybe only work on Windows, or a windows specific gfx stack or network stack to guarantee the minimum conditions to make multiplayer playable. I mention this because there are quite a few differences in the network and gfx stacks between Windows and linux, add on top of that different windowing systems and compositors (X11, Wayland etc).. the devs will spend triple the amount of work to get their game stable on both platforms. And again, easiest path is to just ban linux since it is harder to guarantee that the game client behaves in a specific way. This is a hard pill to swallow but its true.

And this is why something like Proton exists: it is better in this case to emulate a Windows environment than it is for each game dev to write 2 implementations for their network/gfx stack in their game, and then hope that the two game clients have similar performance/behaviour traits that keeps the game stable (never mind safe against exploits).

Luckily for us things are getting better, esp in the indie space and in some single player games. Some game engines has also made it waaay easier to build to linux so that has become a non-issue at this point. I'd argue the main stumbling block is in the game clients as described above - the compromise between a stable game world in multiplayer games and possible exploits that can originate from linux hosts.

Anyone else have thoughts on this or want to correct me, please raise it. These are just off the top of my head, I'm not a game dev.

edit: another silly thing that differs between Windows & Linux: font rendering. Your gfx might work fine and when you start rendering text you realize you need to rebuild some portion of your gfx stack, which then maybe breaks on linux... so easier to skip linux then you know your text renders correctly.

Re: With Proton and Steam Play, many Windows games now work on Linux

#420
post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not Chrome specific though.

afaik Stadia is chrome specific. try visiting http://stadia.google.com/ on another browser. I can't even login and view my previous screenshots, let alone play a game.

For what little it's worth, Stadia is opening to play through Safari (on iOS) soon.
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