As a Linux user, the Steam Deck is an amazing system to work with. I kinda dropped off with gaming in the last few years and the SD really rekindled my desire to game both solo and doing cozy co-op with my partner.
Truly a game changer and I’m so happy it’s supporting Linux while doing it
Haha forreal, my Steam Deck is the primary thing getting me to play through my backlog of single player games. Spent the past 2 weeks playing a ton of Yakuza 0 and will now probably go back and play the rest of the series in order on this thing. What a beautiful device
The improvements in the last 5 years or so have been dramatic. When I switched to Linux ~12 years ago I had to give up gaming. Now, we can get the best of both worlds.
10 years, that’s a long time ago! It’s mostly in the last 3-5 years that things started getting really good with Vulkan becoming a thing and DXVK being made. DXVK is really impressive how fast it got put together and how drastic the improvement is over wined3d.
Cheating is simply a losing arms race. Client side monitoring may be a deterrent for the lazy cheater but it won’t be enough to stop them. Only thing I see actually being viable is server-side machine learning to detect and monitor anomalies and suspicious behavior. (I don’t know much about this in actual practice and this is just some wild speculation)
I think realistically you need both client and server side checks.
If you were updating a password, server would need to check the password meets policy; you might as well check that client-side as well - provides immediate user feedback, but also keeps the load off the server for verifying invalid items. If user hacks their client to submit invalid stuff anyway, then it still doesn’t get through.
If it takes three frames minimum (assuming fixed 60fps) to select an item in a menu, then obviously anyone submitting a hundred menu items selections per second is a cheat who has hacked their client, and you can ban them. Client-side check keeps the load off the server, but server must verify. Also, you don’t want to instantly ban cheaters, because otherwise they’ll know what the limits are and push against them. Waiting for twenty minutes and then making it so that they can only connect to other known cheats strikes me as a suitably ironic hell; go have fun in there.
Honestly moderated self hosted servers always seemed like an obvious solution, but no game company would do this since they can’t monetize their products to the degree that a live service can.
It's wild to me how native proton feels in so many games. Though, I'll still have a special place in my heart for Super Tux Kart, Warsow, Armagetron Advanced, 0 A.D. et al. Not to mention all the ports Feral Interactive has done over the years.
Because of the brouhaha over 2B’s butt, there are loads of rude drawings and whatnot being uploaded [online]. And since going around and collecting them is a pain, I’d like it if I could get them sent in a zip file every week.
Valve really has contributed to Linux gaming so heavily. It felt insane playing through GTAV on my steam deck and it ran really well. I honestly don't think anyone expected it to ever get this good. I certainly didn't.
I've been waiting for such a long time for this. Late 90's I think? I've finally made the switch and it's great to not have to worry about the little annoyances that were always present.
For real, the world of Linux gaming owes a lot to Valve and to Proton's contributors. The last five years have taken gaming on Linux from a fiddly nightmare to, in many cases, performance as good as native. There has never been a better time to run Linux as your primary operating system.
I feel people are often not positive enough. I mean, in my experience, I think that in most cases, running games on Linux with Proton is as good as Windows. The exceptions are unsupported and not-enabled-for-Linux anti-cheat engines and some exceptions, like updates to certain non-Steam launchers breaking things.
Years ago I moved to Linux and one of the reasons was to not spend as much time gaming. Nowadays if I wanted to do the same I would have to move to BSD.
i got a steam deck a few months ago and am constantly amazed at how well it performs. in fact, assassin's creed 2 plays better on the deck than it does on my seven-year-old gaming rig
needless to say, once windows pulls the plug on 10 i'm fully converting to linux and not looking back
Agreed, I installed Ubuntu 22.04 last week to play with stable diffusion. Decided to have a quick look at steam / proton and was blown away with how easily it works. Fallput 76, my primary online game installed and run with almost no hassle. I even managed to get a long time irritation with runaway frame rates fixed.
The only glitch that remains unsolved is a hang on exit. Which is a known issue.
Yeah - I’d narrow that down to brand new AAA game (likely to have Denuvo) or multiplayer, as some anticheats don’t work. Basically everything else now? Perfect.
I took the day off work to play Elden Ring when it first came out, and was gutted when it didn’t start on Linux. Glorious Eggroll had the fix up about three hours later, after which it’s been absolutely perfect.
It’s crazy. I’ve tried 100s of games on my Steamdeck, and I can’t think of a single example where one straight up failed to run. The most I’ve had to do is change the Proton version after a bit of Googling. Best of all, it doesn’t feel compromised - it feels like you’re running natively.
(I should say, I don’t do much online gaming, so I haven’t been thwarted by anti-cheat)
I realised the other day how ubiquitous Linux has become in my life. I have a Steamdeck, I run Mint on my laptop. I have numerous Pis around the house doing various things. For emulation I have a MiSTerFPGA and a Miyoo Mini Plus. My arcade cab runs RetroPie. It all just kind of sneaked up on me…
I’ve only had issues with EA’s launcher, every time it updates and sometimes just because it feels like it, it doesn’t load the game. I squarely put that blame on EA though and not proton. Besides that it’s pure witchcraft.
Yeah the whole EA App thing is so frustrating. When it was still Origin I had issues here and there but nowadays if I don’t play Battlefield 4 for a while it just won’t launch until I reinstall the EA App smh
Yeah I am currently using my steam deck as a main desktop drive, I was blown away at how good this operating system is. I can’t go back. I just can’t. The only thing that pisses me off is that I can’t use adobe software, but hey my wallet is thanking me.
What really makes me happy, is no ads. No store, no xbox icon, no bloatware, no <activate windows>, no edge being like a jealous gf, no programs to install programs, no windows defender making me paranoid, no firewall, no forced graphics chosen for me by microsoft, no ten ways to do the same action…
Honestly I don’t know why I didn’t switch. I remember trying to get a computer without windows and my brother advising against it, I want to go back in time and slap him from depriving me from such a well conceived experience.
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