7 years later, Valve's Proton has been an incredible game-changer for Linux

Yeah it has. I don't even bother looking at the supported operating systems for most games on Steam anymore. I also don't play overhyped microtransaction-laden bullshit like cod or fortnite, either, so no loss there. If I ever wanted to play that kind of game, I have a PS5.

So, my middle aged ass plays the microtransaction-laden bullshit known as Roblox because my 3rd grader and all his friends love it.
It doesn't even have a Linux version but thanks to the project "sober" it plays absolutely fantastically on Linux. I think they claim 2x the performance of the windows version. I just know I have a powerful but old system (8c/8t 9700k cpu and gtx1080 gpu) and I can lock it at 144fps at 1440p and it uses like 20% of my system resources. Not that it's a visually demanding game, lol.
Going all-in on my switch to Linux (my win10 partition for dual booting lasted less than two weeks) has had zero negative impact on my ability to play the games I want. In fact, it has led to me using my PC a lot more and my phone a lot less. Feels good.
- I've suffered one loss, I can't play Mechabellum any more. But other than that my experience has been much the same, smooth across all fronts.

So, Valve has indeed done a lot to make Linux more attractive for gamers. It isn't perfect yet, but we are getting there. And yes, kernel-based anti-cheat is one of the reasons why it isn't perfect yet.

I'd argue kernel-based anticheats are one of the areas gaming on Linux excels. Video game developers should not have that level of permissions over consumers' machines, certainly with how little your average gamer understands the potential consequences of these rootkits. So the fact that all of the ones I know of can't be installed under Linux is more than acceptable, it's ideal.
Are they working on a fix for the kernel anti cheat? Is it possible?
- Not really. But from a security perspective, giving software for a video game, done by InfinityWard, EA, Activision, Treyarch and similar, access to the lowest level of your operating systen is kinda insane.
  I wouldn't want any personal data on such a device, let alone do online baking on that thing. It's weird how normalized it has become give entertainement-software this kind of power over your devices.

Proton is the reason I daily drive Linux. That is a simple, unequivocal fact.

Not me! I switched in 2017, right around the time Windows 10 "telemetry" (read: spyware) was getting backported to Windows 7.
It was a rough first couple of years, gaming-wise, but I managed to get by playing mostly Linux-native games and using PlayOnLinux with pre-Proton WINE for the one or two games important enough to justify the hassle.
(INB4 "weird flex but OK")
I gotta admit, I was pretty conflicted about Proton when it was first announced, since there was a lot of fear that it would reduce developer impetus to make proper Linux-native games. I'm not actually sure whether that came to pass or not, but I feel like the issue is a lot less important than it seemed at the time.
- weird flex but OK
- It would make sense that developers would support their game as played through Proton, which is not really that different from just making a proper linux-native game. It should work just as fast both ways.
Same here.
Windows 7 EOL is why I switched to linux.
proton is why I've stayed on linux.
I only have windows on my laptop atm, and thats only because of sheer laziness and the fact i dont use it much anymore... will be putting linux on it eventually, though.
Samsies. Steam Deck showed me it was possible. Made the switch a little after that (waited for Hell Let Loose to turn on EAC for Linux).
Me too, soon I guess. I have a Steam Deck, and now using Windows on my laptop is kind of like torture, so the Deck has been my main PC.

Whatever allows us to leave the clusterfuck that is Windows is a blessing. M$ has had a monopoly for too long and I'm not paying for MacOS.

macOS has been free for, like, 15 years.
Yes, you have to already own an Apple computer, but Apple users don’t pay for OS upgrades.
Technically, anyone could download the OS images, but there’s not a lot that non-Apple users can do with them.
- macOS is included with every Mac, not free.
- Macos is free. At the cost of paying *2 for hardware
- Bruh what? Did you really just say that not having to buy software exclusive to a certain hardware makes the software free?
  That's like saying the OS on a PlayStation is free because you only had to pay for the PlayStation.
  Nah man, you purchased the OS with the hardware. That's why it's exclusive.
- Anybody can download Windows images too. That doesn’t mean the OS is free.
- Hackintosh is a thing (or at least used to be), but it’s against the EULA.
- This is a dumb argument. Apple does provide you the OS upgrades for free but getting an ISO file and installing it on a non-Mac computer is impossible so no it's not really free
- there’s not a lot that non-Apple users can do with them
  Oh, there is.
  I am a web developer and I use this to run Safari and the iOS simulator without paying Apple's "debugging tax".

I love it! Not only do I use it on the Steam Deck, but also on my Desktop PC running Linux.

I'm getting back into PC gaming after being consult exclusive for a while. I'm assuming anything with kernel anti-cheat is still not trying to work which is a problem because it means I either have to buy a windows licence or mess around with a cracked one which has its own security concerns.
I think my plan is to dual boot and use Windows as little as often.
- There's this handy list of online games with anti-cheat that are compatible with Linux. The majority isn't supported, but some major titles are, surprisingly.
- https://github.com/massgravel/Microsoft-Activation-Scripts
- If you have a particular game in mind you can check protondb.com, which tries to cover both Proton compatibility and Deck compatibility.
- Yeah, when w10 dies this is probably what I'll end up doing too. I want to ditch windows but a lot of the programs I use don't have Linux support
- You can use windows freely without activating, or at least you could last time I needed it.

Literally this week I learned that you need to install flatpak Nvidia drivers if you use flatpak Steam. Once I found that out, proton works great!

A sidestory to this is that Flatpak and AppImage have been miraculous boosts to Linux OS machines. After I figured out that ya gotta throw the --user flag into your flatpak installs so they don't jam up your / tree, and also throwing flatpak override --user xyz.app onto a few apps that benefit from universal access, things have been fine and dandy.
I continue to be happy with how awesome Linux has gotten just over the past 5 years.
- Have you tried flatseal? It's designed for flatpak permissions
This is why I have used flatpak steam. It's a lot easier to manage drivers in it vs the shitshow that is doing it natively with adding custom driver specific repos and whatnot.
Hoping the new PC I just ordered (with an AMD GPU) will be better with the native app.
- I will remark that that sounds like a distro issue - I use Arch and the drivers are just in the official distros, no need to add external ones. Just look up what you need on the wiki and install it.
  That said, AMD will still probably be a better experience.
I've been using mint exclusively for like 3 months and have been using a hearty blend of terminal installs and the program manager app.
It seems to not have caused any problems YET, but I've been assured it will. I see flatpack conversations a lot and don't fully understand the differences (apart from the install method).
Is it worth understanding and committing to a single system or can I just be a low-power user for a while?
- One thing you might notice is that flatpak defaults to "system" installs. Is your root system directory filling up? You probably want to start installing onto --user, as this will put things in /home where they belong and, by default, sandbox permissions away from root (that, too, can be easily changed).
  Also, don't fear mixing different ways of installing. I use AppImage, Flatpak, the default app-get install method, and .deb. FlatPak at this point is the best, because it offers the ease of use of AppImage, but the flexibility and auto-maintenance of apt-get/Software Update. The only problems I've encountered were due to me not understanding that it was filling up my root partition by default...
  I've been running Mint MATE for about 9 years. Love it to death.
- Basically every app is sandboxed to some extent. That way you don’t get conflicting dependencies. Because I use this machine for work, game performance is a much lower priority than file system permissions and stability and for most typical workloads. MacOS does the same thing by default now and very few apps get access to the actual root directory.

Thank you Lord Gaben

Thank you to the workers who actually programmed, tested, and implemented the thing*
- to his credit as a billionaire he could have paid all those people to do something that sucks way more
- To Gaben's credit he collects a lot less of the surplus these workers create than most other billionaires. But yes.
I'm glad he's not as evil as the other billionaires, but can we stop with the billionaire simping? Ironic that an account on a left-wing anarchist instance made that comment lmao
- It's a meme
Thank you ~~Lord Gaben~~ ~~CodeWeaverss~~ Sun Microsystems
It’s corporations making money off of OSS all the way down
- How do they make money with proton and foss?
He's still a billionaire tho 🤮

I want it to evolve to support more desktop applications. This is the one thing that will continue to hamper Linux adoption. Games are the best place to start, but we need all those old obscure, irreplaceable desktop apps to work now.

Get it to run Office and you've a game changer.
Yes, yes I know Libre/Open Office but try telling Shelly in Accounting who still struggles with Excel after 36 years of experience.
- Or Adobe, that’s the most frequent complaint
- Well, Office365 works fine. You can even run it in MS Edge if you want.
- I would imagine older versions can run properly, no? Like maybe 2007 or 2010. Later ones got too integrated with the OS which must be the main difficulty.
It's built on Wine, any general improvements to compatibility will generally support desktop programs using the same APIs
- A custom wine

Common GabeN win

It's pretty cool.

Praise be to Gaben!

I really only miss fortnite and the ocassional call of duty warzone but other than those two or some multiplayer games Linux is far more enjoyable. Yeah I know this games and those companies but let someone enjoy something for once. Help me find a work around. Until then I dual boot mint and windows debloated as much as possible for only a few multiplayer games.

It's not that the companies should be boycotted, it's that they chose this themselves, the publishers choose these types of drm and anticheats when they could have included decency, neither the players, developers or elitists need to take any heat it's just a greedfaced choice for a publisher that carefully weighs gold against reputation and outrage, because they're a parasite on Earth, a made up elaborate middle man professional scam that; just like hedge funds provide heavy negative benefit to the human race, actively ruining our chances as a species to survive, a bloated boil about to burst and provide nothing but pox on everything they touch

This is what finally let me transition to Mint :3

well what has it been doing for the first 6 years

Building momentum for the year of the Linux.
You know, the one we've been reading about for 20 years.
- Bro actually said it’s the year of Linux

Destiny 2 was the old game I played 2 years ago when I switched to linux full time that does not play nice with Proton. And given how its driven itself off a cliff. I will miss the old space opera, but nothing of value was lost.

Is there a straightforward way to see at-a-glance which games in my library are not compatible?

You can connect your steam library via protondb.com - but I also play games flawless that are ranked silver so yeah
- Yep, this is the way. Pretty much every game works fine unless there is specific anticheat or some launcher nonsense.
Connect to protondb.com and you can filter by games with issues - the community is also great there for posting tricks to resolve those issues. I have a gargantuan library of 250 games including tons of recent big games and everything runs without any problems for me (Linux Mint). The only thing you need to worry about is the big multiplayer competitive games like fortnight or COD because they use really invasive anti-cheat systems which don't work on Linux (mostly). I'm not a fan of that type of game so for me it isn't a concern, but it might be for you. I would be extremely surprised given my experience with it if you ran into difficulties beyond that!

I still use wine for most of my games on the desktop.

Proton upstreams to Wine a lot. You can tell by the number of patches they have keeps fluctuating
- I know but I've been using wine so long that its comfortable and I rarely fail to get a game running on it.

Fortunately Valve publishes monthly hardware statistics so we can back claims with statistics. Linux comprises 2.89% of their surveyed share. Of that 28.31% are using Steam OS. Using the wayback machine we can check the statistics from last year. Checking the July 2024 results using the Wayback Machine shows Linux at 2.08% with Steam OS comprising 40.97% of that.
From that we can see that Linux is growing, while Steam OS is becoming less of a contributing factor to the Linux share.
- Someone citing actual facts on the internet?! Impossible!!
- the deck is a gateway drug for linux
- https://www.gamingonlinux.com/steam-tracker/ has some statistics from the Steam Survey. Somewhat interesting bit is that if you only take users who use English as the language in Steam, the Linux market share is 6.3%.
Proton existed long before the Steam Deck, and before that as DXVK.
This is a battle between closed proprietary OS and open source. Proton enables translating DirectX/Windows APIs not only to Vulkan/Linux x86, but even to ARM and BSD.
- Proton is mostly Wine, not DXVK. Wine does the translation of Windows and some DirectX APIs. DXVK translates Direct3D to Vulkan. Proton pulls it all together with some game specific patches, integration with gamescope and other Steam specific integrations.
  All of this being open source means it can also be compiled for ARM and BSD. Though to get x64 games to run on ARM you need an additional emulation layer like Box64.
  Though rumor has it that Valve is already experimenting with x64 emulation for their Deckard project, which is likely to be their next VR headset.
- Couple technical nitpicks.
  First it's debatable if Proton existed long before Steam Deck. I'm not sure the exact timeline but I think it was created as part of the Steam Box effort which wasn't all that long ago. On the other hand though Wine which Proton is built on top of most certainly has existed for a very long time before either the Steam Deck or even Proton (I have fond memories of LAN gaming with it back when Diablo 2 was new).
  Second Proton doesn't enable ARM (at least by itself) so that claim is a little misleading. There is a project to realtime translate x86 instructions into ARM but that project (Box86) although it fulfills a similar role and could be used in conjunction with Proton isn't actually Proton. Using Proton by itself will not enable you to play x86/Windows games on ARM.
  Lastly Proton is kind of irrelevant to the whole Linux vs BSD thing. Technically what enables that is that both implement POSIX standards plus use mostly the same libraries, frameworks (like Vulkan), and applications. Yes running Proton on BSD will let you game on BSD but that isn't really a result of Proton doing the work so much as it's a side effect of the fact you can run Proton on BSD in the first place. Additionally while there are technical and philosophical reasons why the distinction between Linux and BSD is important, practically speaking they're the same thing these days. OpenBSD isn't that much more different from a Linux distro as one Linux distro is from another.
Do you know what I did last week thanks to Proton? Installed EndeavourOS on my freshly purchased laptop, installed steam, and installed a bunch of Windows games. Then I played them. At no point did I wonder whether they would run.
Now, you may think being able to do that isn't something that is going to get more people using desktop Linux (or that it hasn't already done so), but as much as I'd love to agree with you, then we'd both be wrong.
I say this as someone who used to care about convincing other people to use Linux. (Before shifting into "you can lead a horse to water..." mode, and now I just don't give a shit.)
However, what I gained from that experience is this: In twenty years of being Linux-only on my personal desktop, the number of times I have read the phrase, "I'd love to use Linux, except for [some statement about a game or games]" is astronomical.
Now, is Proton going to make desktop Linux the best choice for everyone? Clearly not, duh. But it is remarkably disingenuous to suggest that it's not had a massive benefit to the Linux community and ecosystem as a whole, including, and dare I say especially, desktop Linux. It is flat out impossible to imagine that a substantial portion of current and future Linux users aren't people for whom Proton solved what they considered to be a substantial barrier to usage.
- In my experience, it's not actually Proton specifically but more generally Wine along with DXVK and Vulkan itself.
  I have as good a success rate with Windows games from GOG under Wine through Lutris (which also defaults to using DXVK and Vulkan plus has Wine configuration scripts for most GOG games, making their install fully automated and zero-configuration) as I have with Windows games from Steam under Proton.
  If I understand it correctly, Proton is mainly a fork of Wine with Steam integration thrown in and changes to make sure it works with specific Steam games, so I don't think the improvements are Proton specific, but rather more global than that (the use of Vulkan instead of OpenGL, DXVK allowing DirectX games run with Vulkan, Wine improvements).
  Mind you, if improvements in Proton are flowing to those other projects and having a big impact, then credit were credit is due for Proton pulling up the whole ecosystem, otherwise Proton isn't actually as crucial in improving Gaming on Linux as seems to be portrayed in so many posts here.
  I can understand that if all people have used for gaming in Linux is Steam and never games from other digital sources - like GOG or even pirated games - via launchers like Heroic or Lutris, it might seem like Proton is the secret juice making gaming under Linux nowadays a vastly better experience than before, but in my experience in the last year of gaming in Linux, a good laucher using Wine + DXVK + Vulkan works just as well as Proton.
This makes Linux desktop a viable option for millions of users where it wasn't before. It's absolutely a battle between Linux and Windows.
- Years ago I made the switch to Linux, then I wanted to play WOW again but it would not run on my Linux machines, so I started to dual boot. Then I began to wonder why I was keeping Linux installed.
  Eventually I made the shift to macOS because I worked in theatre and needed it for specific Mac only programs. But I still have a Lenovo legion that I am getting ready to swap over to Linux (not that all of the games I currently play do not run on macOS or my steam deck).
  If I was able to get WOW running on Linux years ago I likely never would have swapped back to windows. And I am currently trying to convince my son to install Linux on his pc running windows 10.
- I've tried switching to Linux on my home desktop several times over the last 3 decades, but because I always use that machine also for gaming it always had some Windows in a dual boot configuration and I always found myself not really booting Linux more than once in a while.
  Since my last switch, maybe a year ago, even though Windows is still there in duat boot, I've only ever booted it once and that only to move some data files which were in the main windows partition over to a data partition I have in a seperated drive (were most of my data files already resided but a few were still elsewhere) so that I can cleanly share it between both OSes.
  Whilst I know more than enough to muck around with Linux and Wine configuration (and for example had to do the latter to get a pirated version working of a game I have in Steam whose official version won't run in Linux no matter what I do), it's very seldom that I actually have to do it (and I don't just use Steam with Proton but also Lutris with Wine for GOG games), whilst in my previous try maybe 5 years ago getting anything but DOS games to run under Linux was a major PITA.
The Bazzite console I built which is connected to my living room TV stands in contradiction. The Linux-driven gaming PC that’s sitting on my desk is confirmation.
Windows 11 and the forced obsolescence of hardware is leaving a sour aftertaste, and at this point a game maker essentially has to choose to not support Linux via Proton.
You might not be able to run Battlefield or CoD, but Marvel Rivals and Overwatch run particularly well, if not better on Linux.
And with Microsoft entering the handheld market, this is very much a question of Linux vs Windows for gaming.
I haven't booted windows in like 6 months and I game on my desktop PC like 4 times a week.
Edit: also https://www.protondb.com/ distinguishes reports between steam deck and PC so you can see that people are using both there as well.
Obligatory Steam Deck runs Linux BTW.
If BSD had a the same software license as Linux then I would celebrate it running on PlayStation hardware as users would be more free. Instead PS consoles are locked-down, preventing you from running software you want to use unless daddy Sony says you can. It's a battle between consumer rights, including software freedom.
Cry me a river..