4 ms·

Anecdotally, it's way above 90%. I think the only game in the last 2 years I haven't been able to run is battlefield 6. Any game that is reasonably popular ha

Anecdotally, it's way above 90%. I think the only game in the last 2 years I haven't been able to run is battlefield 6. Any game that is reasonably popular has a very good chance of running. Just go to protondb and anything gold and above is generally good to go.

ErroneousBosh 1y ago
> I think the only game in the last 2 years I haven't been able to run is battlefield 6. Neither has anyone else, if they bought it directly from EA.
Telaneo 1y ago
That anecdote goes the other way if you skew towards popular multiplayer games, since those are the ones with anti-cheat. Someone who plays League, Apex, PUBG, and Destiny 2, and was really looking forward to BF6, will be mightily disappointed. You're unlikely to be invested in all of those games, but a pretty large amount of people are very, very invested in at-least one of those, which, unfortunately, makes Linux a non-starter for them. Even if 99% of games worked fine on Linux, a large amount of people spend 50+% of their time in-game in one of those games, so it doesn't end up feeling like 90+% of games work. Thankfully, the corollary of that is that single-player games pretty much all work, barring some edge cases, like very recent titles that haven't had the kinks ironed out yet.
- spookie 1y ago
  The death of a server browser and privately owned servers led to this. The whole anti-cheat situation grew from publishers wanting to control the whole experience. Besides, the gaming industry keeps shooting themselves in the foot by only supporting Windows (Mac is a thing too). That is slowly changing, but so many game devs are drinking the Microsoft koolaid they don't even consider using another graphics API other than DirectX. Many other decisions like that as well. It really is impressive how many they are willing to leave behind. A quick check gives about 19% of the market.
  - anonymous908213 1y ago
    Not really sure why you're trying to draw a connection between private servers and anti-cheat, I understand if that's your pet grievance but they really aren't related. Games were already implementing anti-cheat even when server browsers were the norm. The "anti-cheat situation" grew out of cheaters killing multiplayer games. What are you even trying to imply with "wanting to control the whole experience"? Letting your players actually play the game they paid for is a bad thing now? When cheaters are in the game, you do not get to play it in any meaningful sense, and in short order a literal sense as servers rapidly die off. Note that I'm not endorsing kernel anti-cheat, but you didn't say kernel anti-cheat, but instead went on a polemic against the concept of anti-cheat in general.
    - spookie 1y ago
      I apologise not being clear before, I really wanted to mean kernel level anti-cheat. Besides, in privately owned servers you were protect via human mods, who were there playing with you. They would bring down the banhammer when a sufficiently suspicious player was deemed as cheating. That is the biggest issue nowadays, one that has brought the bar even higher for anti-cheat solutions. They are now the ONLY line of defense. It really is clear as day that anti-cheat solutions got more and more intrusive as more games stopped allowing third-party servers to exist. I'm a game dev, I see this, I understand the intentions, I get the consequences. In many ways the intentions weren't bad, it does create a more unified competitive experience. But it made it impossible to not resort to kernel level anti-cheat, even though it is a fruitless effort as so much of the game still needs to be rendered by the end-user's machine (of course, the grim reality is that cloud streaming is the end goal for any competitive game if we continue down this path).
      - anonymous908213 1y ago
        There are so many problems with human mods. For one, they have lives and sleep. A community server should ideally be run 24/7 (because otherwise finding new servers all the time sucks and massively degrades the experience relative to the convenience of matchmaking), but when there are no mods around, the server is liable to be ruined. This can lead to the long-term stagnation or even death of the server. And human mods suck. Really, really suck. They don't have perfect information, and their false positive / negative rate is probably an order of magnitude worse than an anti-cheat. Even a perfectly neutral moderator is bad at judging. And perfectly neutral moderators don't exist. It was not remotely uncommon to be banned from a server for killing the admin too many times. This is exacerbated by the fact that moderating itself sucks. Moderators are there to play the game. Actually moderating on the side of that is a burden. This leads to the same incentive structure that you see all over the internet, where volunteer moderation mostly attracts people who are interested in power tripping, because otherwise there's very little appeal, and bad actors are more common than people willing to do it out of the goodness of their heart. There are great points about private server browsers, but it's also just a massive pain to find servers that both have a gameplay configuration you like and also have decent moderation. Improving anti-cheat systems was the obvious way forward rather than relying on humans who are much more fallible. Kernel anti-cheat should fortunately only be a stopgap solution and not something that is here to stay in the industry. Kernel anti-cheat was a result of the failure of Windows to provide sufficient security features themselves. Riot's Vanguard doesn't rely on kernel access for macOS, and Microsoft is actively working on improving the kernel security such that it shouldn't be necessary on Windows in the future either. With any luck we'll be able to forget this era of anti-cheat in a few years.
TinkersW 1y ago
My experience was that every game ran.. but also nearly every game had issues with controls being different than Windows(mouse sensitivity was way off), control pad not working, screen or font scaling issues, and full screen wonkyness. Somehow changing the font scaling in Linux caused the game to be scaled by a similiar amount.. so 2x font scaling = full screen is 2x bigger than actual monitor.. and I can only see 1/4th the screen.
twic 1y ago
I couldn't run Delta Force [1], due to anti-cheat as far as i can tell. Shame about Battlefield 6, some of my friends are playing that and it would be fun to join them. Oh well. Fortunately they're mostly still playing Helldivers 2 as well, and that works fine. [1] https://www.protondb.com/app/2507950 https://www.protondb.com/app/2507950

ErroneousBosh 1y ago

> I think the only game in the last 2 years I haven't been able to run is battlefield 6. Neither has anyone else, if they bought it directly from EA.

Telaneo 1y ago

That anecdote goes the other way if you skew towards popular multiplayer games, since those are the ones with anti-cheat. Someone who plays League, Apex, PUBG, and Destiny 2, and was really looking forward to BF6, will be mightily disappointed. You're unlikely to be invested in all of those games, but a pretty large amount of people are very, very invested in at-least one of those, which, unfortunately, makes Linux a non-starter for them. Even if 99% of games worked fine on Linux, a large amount of people spend 50+% of their time in-game in one of those games, so it doesn't end up feeling like 90+% of games work. Thankfully, the corollary of that is that single-player games pretty much all work, barring some edge cases, like very recent titles that haven't had the kinks ironed out yet.

spookie 1y ago
The death of a server browser and privately owned servers led to this. The whole anti-cheat situation grew from publishers wanting to control the whole experience. Besides, the gaming industry keeps shooting themselves in the foot by only supporting Windows (Mac is a thing too). That is slowly changing, but so many game devs are drinking the Microsoft koolaid they don't even consider using another graphics API other than DirectX. Many other decisions like that as well. It really is impressive how many they are willing to leave behind. A quick check gives about 19% of the market.
- anonymous908213 1y ago
  Not really sure why you're trying to draw a connection between private servers and anti-cheat, I understand if that's your pet grievance but they really aren't related. Games were already implementing anti-cheat even when server browsers were the norm. The "anti-cheat situation" grew out of cheaters killing multiplayer games. What are you even trying to imply with "wanting to control the whole experience"? Letting your players actually play the game they paid for is a bad thing now? When cheaters are in the game, you do not get to play it in any meaningful sense, and in short order a literal sense as servers rapidly die off. Note that I'm not endorsing kernel anti-cheat, but you didn't say kernel anti-cheat, but instead went on a polemic against the concept of anti-cheat in general.
  - spookie 1y ago
    I apologise not being clear before, I really wanted to mean kernel level anti-cheat. Besides, in privately owned servers you were protect via human mods, who were there playing with you. They would bring down the banhammer when a sufficiently suspicious player was deemed as cheating. That is the biggest issue nowadays, one that has brought the bar even higher for anti-cheat solutions. They are now the ONLY line of defense. It really is clear as day that anti-cheat solutions got more and more intrusive as more games stopped allowing third-party servers to exist. I'm a game dev, I see this, I understand the intentions, I get the consequences. In many ways the intentions weren't bad, it does create a more unified competitive experience. But it made it impossible to not resort to kernel level anti-cheat, even though it is a fruitless effort as so much of the game still needs to be rendered by the end-user's machine (of course, the grim reality is that cloud streaming is the end goal for any competitive game if we continue down this path).
    - anonymous908213 1y ago
      There are so many problems with human mods. For one, they have lives and sleep. A community server should ideally be run 24/7 (because otherwise finding new servers all the time sucks and massively degrades the experience relative to the convenience of matchmaking), but when there are no mods around, the server is liable to be ruined. This can lead to the long-term stagnation or even death of the server. And human mods suck. Really, really suck. They don't have perfect information, and their false positive / negative rate is probably an order of magnitude worse than an anti-cheat. Even a perfectly neutral moderator is bad at judging. And perfectly neutral moderators don't exist. It was not remotely uncommon to be banned from a server for killing the admin too many times. This is exacerbated by the fact that moderating itself sucks. Moderators are there to play the game. Actually moderating on the side of that is a burden. This leads to the same incentive structure that you see all over the internet, where volunteer moderation mostly attracts people who are interested in power tripping, because otherwise there's very little appeal, and bad actors are more common than people willing to do it out of the goodness of their heart. There are great points about private server browsers, but it's also just a massive pain to find servers that both have a gameplay configuration you like and also have decent moderation. Improving anti-cheat systems was the obvious way forward rather than relying on humans who are much more fallible. Kernel anti-cheat should fortunately only be a stopgap solution and not something that is here to stay in the industry. Kernel anti-cheat was a result of the failure of Windows to provide sufficient security features themselves. Riot's Vanguard doesn't rely on kernel access for macOS, and Microsoft is actively working on improving the kernel security such that it shouldn't be necessary on Windows in the future either. With any luck we'll be able to forget this era of anti-cheat in a few years.

TinkersW 1y ago

My experience was that every game ran.. but also nearly every game had issues with controls being different than Windows(mouse sensitivity was way off), control pad not working, screen or font scaling issues, and full screen wonkyness. Somehow changing the font scaling in Linux caused the game to be scaled by a similiar amount.. so 2x font scaling = full screen is 2x bigger than actual monitor.. and I can only see 1/4th the screen.

twic 1y ago

I couldn't run Delta Force [1], due to anti-cheat as far as i can tell. Shame about Battlefield 6, some of my friends are playing that and it would be fun to join them. Oh well. Fortunately they're mostly still playing Helldivers 2 as well, and that works fine. [1] https://www.protondb.com/app/2507950 https://www.protondb.com/app/2507950