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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

#451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember watching the DXVK developer work on Witcher 3 support. Progress was lightning fast and then, suddenly, Proton appeared. Even VR games work! Thank you, Valve. You guys are my low key hero's.

I recently ordered a Valve Index + gaming PC. How's the VR support on Linux looking like? I'd rather not install Windows if I have to.

It works, but still beta quality. Steam still crashes every time I start SteamVR (restarting Steam afterwards works though). There is no official way to play VR videos. Half-Life: Alyx has enough bugs that Valve still does not advertise that it supports Linux on the store page. SteamVR and Half-Life: Alyx have both not been getting many updates on Linux. Maybe I'm wrong and there are fixes coming up but honestly it feels kind of like whoever at Valve got VR running on Linux lost interest.

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

#452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

This won’t get passed anti cheats though.

I've heard of noone so far getting banned for playing in a VM. The anticheats can install their kernel modules as they want, and the lookingglass capture is using the direct X capture API, so nothing weird there. A SHMEM device is nothing out of the ordinary either.

I mean sure they could detect that you're running in a VM, but I'm yet to hear about any cheats where you edit the memory of a VM, so until that's a thing i safe.

There are companies like shadow.tech that builds their entire business around this implementation, so one can only hope it stays this way.

Personal experience: Playing both Overwatch and Counter Strike without any issue (VAC enabled servers)

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

#453
post #406

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…

That's so good to know. No wine etc needed?

Proton is Wine.

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

#455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've not had issues with cheaters on Dots 2.

Assuming you mean Dota 2 I haven't played for some time but it used to be somewhat common 3 or 4 years ago for people to run scripts to instantly cast hex as soon as opponent appeared on their screen this effectively gave people inhuman reflex times. You could tell they were cheating because if you watched replay from the cheaters point of view their mouse cursor would jump from current position to hovering over the…

It is still a problem, although admittedly I haven't seen cheaters myself. Valve will soon™ take Overwatch's replay analysis aproach[1] for anti-cheating, though.

[1] https://blog.dota2.com/2020/11/upcoming-updates/

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

#456
post #72

Funnily enough, one of my most played games on Linux is Age of Empires 2: Definitive Edition, a Microsoft game. No rendering/frame issues and got the multiplayer working (manual steps needed [0]). Less and less reasons to boot on Windows! [0] https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/issues/3189#issuecom...

What resolution? I've been very annoyed it's unplayable for me at all but the lowest resolution, despite it being a 2D game and I having 32 gig ram.

3840x1440. I'm running it on an AMD 3900X, 32GB of RAM and a GTX 1070 on Ubuntu 20.04.

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

#457
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…

It doesn't even matter whether someone is cheating. All that matters is whether they're ruining the game. You don't need a rootkit to determine that.

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

#458
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…

I think their policies have more to do with support costs than anything else. As much as I love playing on Linux and wine, you have to admit there are more technical issues with Linux. People who have low tolerance for glitches and problem solving to get their games working would be up in arms. The last example is Hyper Light Drifter. No matter which forum, the latest threads include several about Linux specific problems. And that's a game with native support.

Another game I played recently - an ancient puzzle game "Riven" - seemed to have bad looking problems. I bought it from GOG because I didn't notice it only officially supports Windows and Mac. Very near the end of the installation, you have to click through a couple of errors that say the game didn't install properly (it did well enough). When launching the game, you get a nasty error if you run Riven.exe instead of Launcher_Riven.exe . During the actual gameplay, there is only one rare crash every few hundred attempts at brute forcing one particular puzzle.

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

#459
post #368

Something else that works super nice for gaming on Linux: GPU passthrough (gaming on a VM that has direct access to the GPU). I've been doing this since 2017. Back then I had built my first desktop computer powered by ryzen 1700 + 2 GPUs. Creating this setup had some challenges, but after the initial hurdle everything has been working perfectly (I imagine things must be easier nowadays). Created a windows 10 VM, assi…

do you do anything special to sandbox the games? I've been wanting to try out linux gaming and this makes it more interesting. I've also been thinking about videoconferencing/etc on linux running in the same manner.

Nothing special except what comes by default on debian 10 qemu setup, which I think has SELinux or AppArmor profiles enabled. I had to disable seccomp sandbox because it was causing random host freezes (might have been fixed on newest debian updates though).

Maybe it is not perfect sandbox for running malicious code, but surely it is enough to make games and anti cheat systems think they are running on a real computer.

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

#460
post #348

Something else that works super nice for gaming on Linux: GPU passthrough (gaming on a VM that has direct access to the GPU). I've been doing this since 2017. Back then I had built my first desktop computer powered by ryzen 1700 + 2 GPUs. Creating this setup had some challenges, but after the initial hurdle everything has been working perfectly (I imagine things must be easier nowadays). Created a windows 10 VM, assi…

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 can't speak for Apple products, but passing USB devices with libvirt/qemu worked nicely so far for me (devices attach/detach automatically when the VM is powered on/off).

My main experience is with a Logitech g933 headset, which requires windows-only software to control certain parts of the device.

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