If it were a “first-class citizen” there would be native Linux games and not rampant and intentional anti-cheat exclusions.
“First-class citizen” doesn’t refer to the quality of the experience, but how it’s treated in society. At this point it’s mostly something that devs and publishers tolerate, and occasionally offer minor consideration on behalf of a single device.
If it were a “first-class citizen” there would be native Linux games
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.
It’s second class at best, but still better than literally nothing at all.
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.
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.
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.
There are native Linux games, but mostly from AA and indie publishers. So by that mark, it has been a first-class citizen since mid-2010s, after Steam started officially supporting Linux.
That said, I think that goalpost is a bit too far away. I consider it “first-class support” if major AAA devs offering official technical support to Linux users is more common than not, regardless of whether it’s packaged w/ Proton or directly as a Linux native binary. How they distribute it is up to them, as long as they actually support Linux users. We’re not there yet, but we’re a lot closer than we were even just 5 years ago.
There are native Linux games
They exist. How many of them do you see on the front page of the Steam store? Almost never. Games that people actually play are very rarely Linux native. If they were, Proton never would have been created.
All of the Paradox games, Civ, Pillars of Eternity, DoTA, Counterstrike. its a small fraction sure, but its not like no big games have native linux versions.
I did say almost never
of the current top 30 on most played on steam 7 have a native Linux version, just shy of 1/4. I’d hardly call that almost never.
I didn’t say anything about “most played”.
Games that people actually play are very rarely Linux native.
Was your exact quote, I think showing 1/4 of the most played games on Steam are linux native shows that isnt the case.
If a game does not work on linux, i don’t care if it exists…
no tux, no bux
Gaming on Linux is fantastic.
Why? I never found a reason why that site would be useful. It seems to just re-word announcements and not provide anything more of use.
On top of that, the owner is a douche. He was a mod on [email protected] community until they learned that mod logs were public then deleted their account and complained on mastodon that it’s stupid design that mod logs are public. [Screenshot]
I find it hard to trust in a person who takes in a role of responsibility and does not have any idea about the basics of the platform.
Pretty sure they were saying the experience of playing games on Linux is fantastic, not referring to GamingOnLinux. You seem a little obsessed.
At some point you have to let it go lol
