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I enabled it on my Fedora laptop and tried a handful of games. About half a dozen of them bombed out immediately. So, very glad to see improvement, but we're st

I enabled it on my Fedora laptop and tried a handful of games. About half a dozen of them bombed out immediately. So, very glad to see improvement, but we're still a ways off from being able to chuck my last Windows 7 machine. I find myself more often just biting the bullet and re-buying some old classics when they get "Enhanced" editions (ala Baldur's Gate, Planescape Torment, etc)--even though I still have the original CD's kicking around--just so I get native Linux support.

jedimastert 8y ago
>I find myself more often just biting the bullet and re-buying some old classics when they get "Enhanced" editions (ala Baldur's Gate, Planescape Torment, etc)--even though I still have the original CD's kicking around--just so I get native Linux support. I think it's a good thing to do anyways. It shows that there's a solid market interest in gaming on Linux.
- kungtotte 8y ago
  That's another hidden feature of Steam/Proton: Whichever platform you play a new game on the most during the initial two weeks after getting it will be registered as the platform you bought it for. E.g. play a Windows-only game for two weeks using Proton and both Steam and the gamedev will see it as a Linux purchase in their stats. Meaning they get actual numbers how big their Linux demographic is.
  - jedimastert 8y ago
    Really? Wow. That's awesome. Of course, that's kind of unfortunate for games that don't work with Proton right now. Does that remove the Windows purchase too? That could be seen as 2 purchases for the same game.
    - kungtotte 8y ago
      AFAIK it's only for new purchases. So if you've played a game for some time under Windows it won't change the stats for that game.
  - londt8 8y ago
    Are you sure about this? I would think using wine or any other emulator would show up as windows in the statistics.
    - wtallis 8y ago
      The game might think it's running under Windows, but the Steam process that launched it is Linux-native.
      - yellowapple 8y ago
        Also, IIRC Steam under Wine was/is able to detect that it's running under Wine and thus adjust its reports accordingly.
module0000 8y ago
Got the enhanced BG...but I didn't know there was an enhanced Planescape Torment, that's awesome news. That was such a favorite game. Does the enhanced release work well for you under linux? Any big breaking issues?
- icen 8y ago
  Not OP, but for me it works flawlessly. Load times are instant, lots of nice quality of life features. Not tried multiplayer, but it's hard to make that worse. Also never worked out how to mod things, but if you're just after the vanilla experience, it's very good.
  - grive 8y ago
    Modding on linux is a little finicky. For all Beamdog's edition, I wrote a script[1] that would symlink datafiles as a lowercase version everywhere (unless they were already lowercase). After this, all WeidU mods were working okay (at least for BG I&II). I have P:TEE but never modded it however, but the process should be relatively similar. [1]: http://pastebin.com/raw/nmkSGj0L http://pastebin.com/raw/nmkSGj0L
    - icen 8y ago
      tolower and related things I'm comfortable with - the main question I can't answer is where do you run the weidu mod?
      - grive 8y ago
        Sorry, indeed this can be useful to know. You must run weidu where chitin.key is
    - yellowapple 8y ago
      Another option is to setup a FUSE mount for a case-insensitive virtual FS. I remember having to do this to get Civ5 mods to work.
Double_a_92 8y ago
With very old games you might have problems on windows too...
- navaati 8y ago
  Yep, bought Populous 3: The Beginning from GoG the other day, would not work (except in software rendering which was so slow as to be unplayable). It was €0.79 so whatever, but it was a bit of a disappointment. What about Windows legendary backward compatibility ?
  - ThrowawayR2 8y ago
    > What about Windows legendary backward compatibility? The OS is backwards compatible; nVidia's / AMD's video drivers and hardware, well, not so much...
- ocdtrekkie 8y ago
  Yeah, I have a lot of classic game discs from the Windows 98 era, which often require Windows 98 with DirectX support, and sadly, nobody supports DirectX on VMs that old AFAIK. (VMware supports DirectX on XP and up, I believe.) It's often a much better prospect to see if it's available on GOG with any given fixes or notes on how to make it work.
  - aaronmdjones 8y ago
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18328088 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18328088
- aaronmdjones 8y ago
  I still occasionally play Malkari, a 1999 4X space game written for DirectX 5. It doesn't work on anything but Win9x, so I have a VM for it. On Win2K/XP it will just draw a half purple screen, even in compatibility mode. Even then... Windows 98 doesn't work under VirtualBox, unless you run the VM with the Legacy paravirtualisation interface, and with the ICH AC97 audio card, which Windows 98 doesn't have drivers for ... nor does it have drivers for VirtualBox' VGA adapter. Those problems are easily worked around, of course, but one day, either VirtualBox will drop its Legacy emulation code, or SciTech Display Doctor will stop working with VirtualBox' VGA adapter, or the sound won't work anymore, ... I'm one glitch away from being unable to play a game I really like, and bought as a teenager...
Abishek_Muthian 8y ago
If your use case for a Windows machine is just for the Games; A Xbox is a decent alternative.
- bmurphy1976 8y ago
  Not if you like games like "Baldur's Gate", as per parent comment.
- driverdan 8y ago
  It really isn't. You can't use Steam or GOG, you have to pay to play online, the hardware is much lower end than what you can buy for a desktop, they have advertising all over the place, everything has DRM, and it's still another box.
  - ta4631983 8y ago
    Modding is also lacking on consoles (limited on some). Fantastic to see Valve etc doing this, I imagine it's the last thing keeping a fair few people on Windows (certainly for me if I can get a fair portion of Steam games on Linux that's it for the Windows partition). Old classics like Everquest I might need to look at GPU passthrough if VirtualBox supports that now).
  - markbnj 8y ago
    Not to mention playing with a controller is a very different experience. A lot of younger people are probably already familiar enough with them, but I'm a fossil and need my keyboard and mouse.
    - driverdan 8y ago
      Consoles support keyboard + mouse but it depends on game support.
  - Abishek_Muthian 8y ago
    I would like to differ w.r.t to hardware price front, concurring with my initial point; my Windows use-case was only casual Gaming & an upgrade to Xbox One X has been impressive for my use as a casual frugal gamer. 1. Freesync support over HDMI gave good stutter free gaming experience on a low end Ultrawide PC monitor. (I didn't have to switch between my workstation setup). 2. Hardware is power-efficient & silent; I'm extremely power/noise conscious & specifically select extremely low TDP CPU's for my work. I'm not sure if I would have been able to build a PC of such low power/silent feature-set & get same gaming experience albeit; for the value. 3. Value - A new windows machine for similar gaming experience actually costs more in my country (at-least was at the time of my purchase). 4. OS - I didn't have to deal with the gripes which I have with full-fledged Windows OS; a toned down version only for gaming such as the one on Xbox is turning out to be a good fit. 5. Apps - Youtube on Xbox plays 4K without dropping frames; where as my 7th gen intel core i5 U series CPU couldn't. Youtube on Xbox is actually has less distractions than one on the web (Like comments, Ads).
passwd 8y ago
Which ones? There was quite some improvement since the release; also you need to consider that some particular types of software don't work well yet (some games related to XNA/.NET, anti-cheats, DRMs with other stores being a big offender)
optimiz3 8y ago
>I find myself more often just biting the bullet and re-buying some old classics when they get "Enhanced" editions People have to do real work to produce newer versions of software, often this work is quite extensive (newer graphics APIs, resolutions, art assets, etc.) If it wasn't a viable enterprise this work wouldn't get done. It's not reasonable to expect perpetual free upgrades.
- tomc1985 8y ago
  It still does get done, in many ways, by the fan community. Commercial entities updating games en masse as it is happening now is fairly new.
octonion 8y ago
Many of the older games that have problems running under Steamplay also have problems running under Windows 10 (for similar reasons). Another group of games that don't currently run under Steamplay require some form of additional DRM. Once that's supported, most of those games should work.
aerique 8y ago
I can imagine still keeping Windows around for gaming, it really depends on the person but Linux is really becoming a nice alternative. Myself, I chucked Windows 10 a couple of months ago before the SteamPlay news (which was a really nice cherry on top). But it was easy for me since I'm not quite the gamer anymore that I used to be.
- yellowapple 8y ago
  I've been Linux-only (plus other oddballs like OpenBSD and the occasional Haiku or 9front or FreeDOS) since about 2012 or so (after 4 or 5 years of gradually weaning myself off Windows). Steam for Linux was my nail in the coffin then; the only Windows installs on any of my machines have been virtualized. Lately I've been tempted to setup Win10 LTSB on a NUC or something to play a couple oddball games that are too modern to be VM-friendly but old enough to be comfortable on Intel graphics and a relatively-weak CPU. Proton was released just in time to indefinitely postpone those plans.
neltnerb 8y ago
FYI, I tried this with tyranny and while it didn't work with steam play (started but super slow and crashed) it did work nearly at native quality using steam itself running under wine with play4linux. So with the windows binary for the steam application running under wine, the game worked better than the Linux steam client running wine under the hood. Unclear why, but maybe worth trying both ways if one fails. I also couldn't figure out how to report this, sadly. If it works better in play4linux steam than directly it seems like it should be straightforward to copy some configuration settings to improve things.
johnny22 8y ago
Fedora's default fd limit is too small for many games, so that might be causing your problem. I'm not sure if the games you played rose above that threshold, but if they did then you'd probably see "eventfd: Too many open files" on the console or in the systemd journal. It looks like Fedora will change the limit in a future update of the systemd package, but you can fix it manually if you chose to.

jedimastert 8y ago

>I find myself more often just biting the bullet and re-buying some old classics when they get "Enhanced" editions (ala Baldur's Gate, Planescape Torment, etc)--even though I still have the original CD's kicking around--just so I get native Linux support. I think it's a good thing to do anyways. It shows that there's a solid market interest in gaming on Linux.

kungtotte 8y ago
That's another hidden feature of Steam/Proton: Whichever platform you play a new game on the most during the initial two weeks after getting it will be registered as the platform you bought it for. E.g. play a Windows-only game for two weeks using Proton and both Steam and the gamedev will see it as a Linux purchase in their stats. Meaning they get actual numbers how big their Linux demographic is.
- jedimastert 8y ago
  Really? Wow. That's awesome. Of course, that's kind of unfortunate for games that don't work with Proton right now. Does that remove the Windows purchase too? That could be seen as 2 purchases for the same game.
  - kungtotte 8y ago
    AFAIK it's only for new purchases. So if you've played a game for some time under Windows it won't change the stats for that game.
- londt8 8y ago
  Are you sure about this? I would think using wine or any other emulator would show up as windows in the statistics.
  - wtallis 8y ago
    The game might think it's running under Windows, but the Steam process that launched it is Linux-native.
    - yellowapple 8y ago
      Also, IIRC Steam under Wine was/is able to detect that it's running under Wine and thus adjust its reports accordingly.

module0000 8y ago

Got the enhanced BG...but I didn't know there was an enhanced Planescape Torment, that's awesome news. That was such a favorite game. Does the enhanced release work well for you under linux? Any big breaking issues?

icen 8y ago
Not OP, but for me it works flawlessly. Load times are instant, lots of nice quality of life features. Not tried multiplayer, but it's hard to make that worse. Also never worked out how to mod things, but if you're just after the vanilla experience, it's very good.
- grive 8y ago
  Modding on linux is a little finicky. For all Beamdog's edition, I wrote a script[1] that would symlink datafiles as a lowercase version everywhere (unless they were already lowercase). After this, all WeidU mods were working okay (at least for BG I&II). I have P:TEE but never modded it however, but the process should be relatively similar. [1]: http://pastebin.com/raw/nmkSGj0L http://pastebin.com/raw/nmkSGj0L
  - icen 8y ago
    tolower and related things I'm comfortable with - the main question I can't answer is where do you run the weidu mod?
    - grive 8y ago
      Sorry, indeed this can be useful to know. You must run weidu where chitin.key is
  - yellowapple 8y ago
    Another option is to setup a FUSE mount for a case-insensitive virtual FS. I remember having to do this to get Civ5 mods to work.

Double_a_92 8y ago

With very old games you might have problems on windows too...

navaati 8y ago
Yep, bought Populous 3: The Beginning from GoG the other day, would not work (except in software rendering which was so slow as to be unplayable). It was €0.79 so whatever, but it was a bit of a disappointment. What about Windows legendary backward compatibility ?
- ThrowawayR2 8y ago
  > What about Windows legendary backward compatibility? The OS is backwards compatible; nVidia's / AMD's video drivers and hardware, well, not so much...
ocdtrekkie 8y ago
Yeah, I have a lot of classic game discs from the Windows 98 era, which often require Windows 98 with DirectX support, and sadly, nobody supports DirectX on VMs that old AFAIK. (VMware supports DirectX on XP and up, I believe.) It's often a much better prospect to see if it's available on GOG with any given fixes or notes on how to make it work.
- aaronmdjones 8y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18328088 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18328088
aaronmdjones 8y ago
I still occasionally play Malkari, a 1999 4X space game written for DirectX 5. It doesn't work on anything but Win9x, so I have a VM for it. On Win2K/XP it will just draw a half purple screen, even in compatibility mode. Even then... Windows 98 doesn't work under VirtualBox, unless you run the VM with the Legacy paravirtualisation interface, and with the ICH AC97 audio card, which Windows 98 doesn't have drivers for ... nor does it have drivers for VirtualBox' VGA adapter. Those problems are easily worked around, of course, but one day, either VirtualBox will drop its Legacy emulation code, or SciTech Display Doctor will stop working with VirtualBox' VGA adapter, or the sound won't work anymore, ... I'm one glitch away from being unable to play a game I really like, and bought as a teenager...

Abishek_Muthian 8y ago

If your use case for a Windows machine is just for the Games; A Xbox is a decent alternative.

bmurphy1976 8y ago
Not if you like games like "Baldur's Gate", as per parent comment.
driverdan 8y ago
It really isn't. You can't use Steam or GOG, you have to pay to play online, the hardware is much lower end than what you can buy for a desktop, they have advertising all over the place, everything has DRM, and it's still another box.
- ta4631983 8y ago
  Modding is also lacking on consoles (limited on some). Fantastic to see Valve etc doing this, I imagine it's the last thing keeping a fair few people on Windows (certainly for me if I can get a fair portion of Steam games on Linux that's it for the Windows partition). Old classics like Everquest I might need to look at GPU passthrough if VirtualBox supports that now).
- markbnj 8y ago
  Not to mention playing with a controller is a very different experience. A lot of younger people are probably already familiar enough with them, but I'm a fossil and need my keyboard and mouse.
  - driverdan 8y ago
    Consoles support keyboard + mouse but it depends on game support.
- Abishek_Muthian 8y ago
  I would like to differ w.r.t to hardware price front, concurring with my initial point; my Windows use-case was only casual Gaming & an upgrade to Xbox One X has been impressive for my use as a casual frugal gamer. 1. Freesync support over HDMI gave good stutter free gaming experience on a low end Ultrawide PC monitor. (I didn't have to switch between my workstation setup). 2. Hardware is power-efficient & silent; I'm extremely power/noise conscious & specifically select extremely low TDP CPU's for my work. I'm not sure if I would have been able to build a PC of such low power/silent feature-set & get same gaming experience albeit; for the value. 3. Value - A new windows machine for similar gaming experience actually costs more in my country (at-least was at the time of my purchase). 4. OS - I didn't have to deal with the gripes which I have with full-fledged Windows OS; a toned down version only for gaming such as the one on Xbox is turning out to be a good fit. 5. Apps - Youtube on Xbox plays 4K without dropping frames; where as my 7th gen intel core i5 U series CPU couldn't. Youtube on Xbox is actually has less distractions than one on the web (Like comments, Ads).

passwd 8y ago

Which ones? There was quite some improvement since the release; also you need to consider that some particular types of software don't work well yet (some games related to XNA/.NET, anti-cheats, DRMs with other stores being a big offender)

optimiz3 8y ago

>I find myself more often just biting the bullet and re-buying some old classics when they get "Enhanced" editions People have to do real work to produce newer versions of software, often this work is quite extensive (newer graphics APIs, resolutions, art assets, etc.) If it wasn't a viable enterprise this work wouldn't get done. It's not reasonable to expect perpetual free upgrades.

tomc1985 8y ago
It still does get done, in many ways, by the fan community. Commercial entities updating games en masse as it is happening now is fairly new.

octonion 8y ago

Many of the older games that have problems running under Steamplay also have problems running under Windows 10 (for similar reasons). Another group of games that don't currently run under Steamplay require some form of additional DRM. Once that's supported, most of those games should work.

aerique 8y ago

I can imagine still keeping Windows around for gaming, it really depends on the person but Linux is really becoming a nice alternative. Myself, I chucked Windows 10 a couple of months ago before the SteamPlay news (which was a really nice cherry on top). But it was easy for me since I'm not quite the gamer anymore that I used to be.

yellowapple 8y ago
I've been Linux-only (plus other oddballs like OpenBSD and the occasional Haiku or 9front or FreeDOS) since about 2012 or so (after 4 or 5 years of gradually weaning myself off Windows). Steam for Linux was my nail in the coffin then; the only Windows installs on any of my machines have been virtualized. Lately I've been tempted to setup Win10 LTSB on a NUC or something to play a couple oddball games that are too modern to be VM-friendly but old enough to be comfortable on Intel graphics and a relatively-weak CPU. Proton was released just in time to indefinitely postpone those plans.

neltnerb 8y ago

FYI, I tried this with tyranny and while it didn't work with steam play (started but super slow and crashed) it did work nearly at native quality using steam itself running under wine with play4linux. So with the windows binary for the steam application running under wine, the game worked better than the Linux steam client running wine under the hood. Unclear why, but maybe worth trying both ways if one fails. I also couldn't figure out how to report this, sadly. If it works better in play4linux steam than directly it seems like it should be straightforward to copy some configuration settings to improve things.

johnny22 8y ago

Fedora's default fd limit is too small for many games, so that might be causing your problem. I'm not sure if the games you played rose above that threshold, but if they did then you'd probably see "eventfd: Too many open files" on the console or in the systemd journal. It looks like Fedora will change the limit in a future update of the systemd package, but you can fix it manually if you chose to.