Noice!

[aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place]

Noice! Allegedly the nearly 90% of Windows-only games on Steam run at all on Linux via proton, and more than half of them work perfectly https://boilingsteam.com/windows-games-compatibility-on-linux-is-at-a-all-time-high/

[dkesserich@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@aeva yeah, with the exception of the anti-cheat games (PUBG being the only one that I have any interest in), I haven't run into much trouble running anything. Games from the Epic Games Store have given me the most trouble, and that's mostly down to having to use Heroic Launcher to get around DRM stuff, and there being some quirks to getting that to work 100% right.

[aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@DKesserich i feel a 1-in-10 chance of a game not working at all is representative of my experience playing random games with proton, as is the greater-than-50% chance of a game working perfectly on the first try. wine has come a very long ways in the 20+ years i've been using it, and that is very exciting to me. it is also true that it is not perfect and games with anti-cheat snake oil do not make up 10% of all windows-only steam games.

[aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@DKesserich it requires neither excuse or apology. wine is one of the very few long game projects in the Linux ecosystem that I actually have any faith in ever being perfect some day despite the fact that I have been using it for 20+ years

[cow@hachyderm.io]

@aeva it's so wild that in 2025 I can buy a game on _release day_ and expect that it will just work on Linux!

I almost never have to check Windb/Protondb for compatibility anymore :)

(That said, my personal white whale for Wine compatibility is a 15 year old WPF game called Academagia. I've tried so many tricks to get it to work and have failed every time.

Wine is fantastic now at running graphically intensive games that use DirectX/OpenGL/Vulkan/whatever. It still struggles with little spreadsheet games built on UI libraries like this one.)

[aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@cow I feel like it's usually older games that are more likely to have problems in wine, and newer stuff generally has a better shot at working out of the box. I wonder how much of that is because it's a lot more common these days for games to not touch windows APIs directly, either because they're using a big popular game engine or because they're using SDL or similar to abstract it all.