Proton is the only stable and maintained runtime you can target for Linux and it comes with no performance penalty.
Few games actually get more fps than on Windows. What alternative runtime would you suggest and more to the point what problem would it actually solve.
If the game studio actually so much as tests on Proton (or more realistically Steam Deck) that’s great gold medal and as much targeting Linux as you can get.
Demanding anything more is not realistic given current market share, but also again what would you even gain.
The actual threat to gaming on Linux is any form of DRM.
With the increasing efforts from Asus, MSI, Lenovo, and the potential XBox Handheld that keeps being hyped about, let's see how long SteamDeck keeps its relevance.
The Deck is tied into the most popular PC games store, and one with followers so loyal they'll refuse to buy a game until it comes to Steam because they don't want another launcher.
It'll do fine. People don't want to re-buy their gaming libraries for an Xbox handheld and the OS integration for the other devices is pretty poor.
I keep reading this on the internet and I’m fully convinced that this is written by people with powerful machines.
Whenever I try to play a game that barely runs at 60 fps on windows in my basic system it invariably runs in the range of 45-55 fps on Linux.
This would be perfectly acceptable except that it eventually leads to stutters that I never experienced on windows..
Ps. Yeah I tried to troubleshoot this with everything google and ChatGPT had to offer: disable composers, different proton versions, different distros and different desktops environments. The matter of the fact is that there’s an overhead and if your system is barely running it on windows you will probably have performance headaches on Linux.
> Whenever I try to play a game that barely runs at 60 fps on windows in my basic system it invariably runs in the range of 45-55 fps on Linux.
This is not a valid test. You need to compare Linux native vs. Proton rather than (Proton+Linux) vs. Windows. Otherwise you’re comparing at least three things at once.
Yeah I mean if you look at windows vs linux gaming benchmarks on phoronix it's clear there's about a 10% performance penalty. On the other hand there's a 10% penalty using bitlocker on windows vs almost none on linux, so it evens out if you care about privacy. Also you know for certain MS isn't keylogging everything you type to some godforsaken MS service, and the developer experience on linux is miles better.
Few games actually get more fps than on Windows. What alternative runtime would you suggest and more to the point what problem would it actually solve.
If the game studio actually so much as tests on Proton (or more realistically Steam Deck) that’s great gold medal and as much targeting Linux as you can get.
Demanding anything more is not realistic given current market share, but also again what would you even gain.
The actual threat to gaming on Linux is any form of DRM.