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Nearly 90% of Windows Games Now Run on Linux

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Re: Nearly 90% of Windows Games Now Run on Linux

#211
post #100
post #53

I've gone over to Linux after using Windows for 25 years. As someone who enjoys older games, I am pleasantly surprised that Wine (with dxvk and cnc-ddraw) lets me run more games in a better way than I was able to on Windows. I can run some 16-bit games on a 64-bit OS! Games that rudely switch to fullscreen, I can run in Wine Virtual Desktop. Previously on Windows, I had to configure hacks like DxWnd and it didn't alw…

> Games that rudely switch to fullscreen, I can run in Wine Virtual Desktop. Previously on Windows, I had to configure hacks like DxWnd and it didn't always work. Maybe Wine could be ported to Windows :-)

Just run it under wsl

Re: Nearly 90% of Windows Games Now Run on Linux

#212

Now imagine Apple put the same amount of effort and resources into a Proton-like layer for macOS. The M-series hardware is perfectly fine for most games, overpowered even. What is lacking are the actual games. Very few companies bother with Metal ports of games. Build a compatibility layer so we can just install any Windows game from Steam and start playing.

Apple did! The Game Porting Toolkit does (I think) what you're talking about and what Steam did for Linux.

https://developer.apple.com/games/game-porting-toolkit/

Why it hasn't taken off, I have no idea.

Re: Nearly 90% of Windows Games Now Run on Linux

#213

Now imagine Apple put the same amount of effort and resources into a Proton-like layer for macOS. The M-series hardware is perfectly fine for most games, overpowered even. What is lacking are the actual games. Very few companies bother with Metal ports of games. Build a compatibility layer so we can just install any Windows game from Steam and start playing.

Apple did! The Game Porting Toolkit does (I think) what you're talking about and what Steam did for Linux. https://developer.apple.com/games/game-porting-toolkit/ Why it hasn't taken off, I have no idea.

Without even opening the link "porting toolkit" seems like something I need to put effort into.

Proton + Steam is pretty much just clicking "Allow Linux" on a dashboard somewhere and then it'll just work.

Re: Nearly 90% of Windows Games Now Run on Linux

#214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At this point, that's exactly what Windows needs. As Microsoft only adds new features and doesn't remove almost any, Windows is getting reaaally bloated. And what was Microsoft's response? Everyone should buy a new faster computer to run Windows 11.

Tbh, a better strategy would to slim down Windows again would be to remove all the new user-facing stuff which was added over the last two decades. There have been significant improvements in the kernel and DirectX, but on the surface, Windows somehow managed to remove user-facing features while at the same time adding an incredible amount of bloat in layers above the core operating system. From a usability perspecti…

> remove all the new user-facing stuff which was added over the last two decades

That's not all that needs to be removed from Windows, and it's not what they're interested in removing. The old MFC, GDI, COMCTL, COMDLG, Winsock etc. must be a lot higher in their "do delete" list.

Re: Nearly 90% of Windows Games Now Run on Linux

#215
post #118
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it helps I used to use a gaming laptop for work that had a RTX 2060 mobile version, I was able to run some recent games like Elden Ring (including mods & online play), and some older but still demanding titles like Witcher 3. All of this without tinkering too much on a oob Ubuntu LTS install (I later switched to popOS because I don't like snaps that much).

Someone else recommended PopOSin other comments. I pulled up the page but haven't looked at it extensively. In what ways is it different from a recent Ubuntu LTS install?

The two are very similar in a lot of aspects, they both make it very easy to install proprietary nvidia GPU drivers, they both use Debian as base, and the default desktop for them is Gnome.

In the past I migrated to PopOS mainly due to these two things:

1. I prefer flatpaks/system packages over snap[1], if you run `sudo apt install firefox` you'll get a snap application in Ubuntu, that for me is an anti-pattern from Canonical to force adoption of snaps.

2. I found some weird performance issues with my laptop when I installed Ubuntu, thankfully I managed to find a fix after hours of tinkering[2], but I was surprised I had to do these workarounds in the first place (I've been running linux as my main OS since I was a teenager and never had to do anything similar)

If gaming is your main goal I'd consider using something like Bazzite or CachyOS, these two distros will still serve you if you want to run work/office apps too, they just come preconfigured w/ a lot of gaming goodies (like steam and nvidia drivers oob) but won't get into your way if you plan to install other stuff.

[1] https://snapcraft.io/ [2] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/1973434...

Re: Nearly 90% of Windows Games Now Run on Linux

#216
post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There will be a day when Microsoft ships a "Windows" that cuts all legacy compatibility except for an included distribution of Wine.

At this point, that's exactly what Windows needs. As Microsoft only adds new features and doesn't remove almost any, Windows is getting reaaally bloated. And what was Microsoft's response? Everyone should buy a new faster computer to run Windows 11.

That was the idea with UWP and Windows 10X, but folks really want that backwards compatibility.

Re: Nearly 90% of Windows Games Now Run on Linux

#217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tbh, a better strategy would to slim down Windows again would be to remove all the new user-facing stuff which was added over the last two decades. There have been significant improvements in the kernel and DirectX, but on the surface, Windows somehow managed to remove user-facing features while at the same time adding an incredible amount of bloat in layers above the core operating system. From a usability perspecti…

Win2k with WSL without systemd would be so kino

Hardly, given that systemd author is a Microsoft employee nowadays.

Re: Nearly 90% of Windows Games Now Run on Linux

#218
post #168

I feel like the minority. The few times I’ve tried games on linux with decent hardware (eg radeon vii, rx580, rtx3060?) it was just trash. like straight up stuttering and nonsense. Maybe the only games I ever tried were in that 10% that aren’t supported or will never be supported (hitman, deus ex, etc). this led me down the rabbit hole for a while of gpu passthrough w/ vfio / sriov and virtual machines. those worked…

To fix stuttering I had to disable compositing in the window manager (Xfce on Linux Mint, nVidia proprietary with AMD CPU).

Re: Nearly 90% of Windows Games Now Run on Linux

#219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple did! The Game Porting Toolkit does (I think) what you're talking about and what Steam did for Linux. https://developer.apple.com/games/game-porting-toolkit/ Why it hasn't taken off, I have no idea.

Without even opening the link "porting toolkit" seems like something I need to put effort into. Proton + Steam is pretty much just clicking "Allow Linux" on a dashboard somewhere and then it'll just work.

Hence why studios have no reason to bother with GNU/Linux even if they happen to target Android/Linux, let Valve do the work.

Re: Nearly 90% of Windows Games Now Run on Linux

#220
post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Without even opening the link "porting toolkit" seems like something I need to put effort into. Proton + Steam is pretty much just clicking "Allow Linux" on a dashboard somewhere and then it'll just work.

Hence why studios have no reason to bother with GNU/Linux even if they happen to target Android/Linux, let Valve do the work.

There was some anecdotal stuff floating around some years ago that smaller studios stopped doing custom Linux builds because Proton+Windows ran faster than their native build =)
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