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7 years later, Valve's Proton has been an incredible game-changer for Linux (www.gamingonlinux.com)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 15 points 1 year ago (9 children)

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.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago (6 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    Strange, WOW should have been able to run. Maybe needed a command line switch to enable OpenGL for optimal performance. But back then Blizzard games had a great track record of Wine compatibility. I never had any problems with their games.

    There was one instance of Linux WOW players being banned for cheating. But that was rectified in a matter of days.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    This was 2006/2007 I think. Every article I read about it had a different solution and none worked fully.

    I also remember when I asked for help on wow centric forums being crappy replies of "don't use Linux" and when I would post on Linux centric spaces getting "don't play wow" replies.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago

    Blizzard used a cheat detection system in wow that allowed their server to send arbitrary code for clients to run. The code failing to return an expected result was a sign that there was tampering going on. Emulating windows api to run on Linux is a form of tampering, though obviously not necessarily a sign of cheating. Guessing they used some code that didn't work on Linux and banned everyone who failed before realizing that some failed due to Linux, and then were able to separate the Linux users from detected cheaters by how it failed (either that or they had to undo all bans from that round).

    Though it does make me wonder if it meant they can't/don't detect cheaters on Linux. Probably not, because my guess is they start out by looking for any cheats they can find, install them on test machines, then work at detecting the differences between those test machines and ones without the cheat. So they'd know about Linux-based cheats, too. They might even be able to use timing-based attacks to detect kernel level ones, too.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (1 child)

    I played WOW under Linux since open beta of WOW 1.0 until the first expansion, after which I quit it. The performance probably wasn’t on bar with Windows, but besides some problems after some of the patches, the stability was rock solid even in 25-man raids.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago

    There are the obvious options that can't work due to the general mode anti cheat software, but over the past 1.5 years, I've only had a couple of steam games where I had to tweak something because it didn't work out the gate. Every major title I've played worked first try.

    I tried Linux a couple times over the bast 20+ years and it was still too raw for me. Now, it just works for me. I'm by no means a Linux guru but I am a computer smart guy. I setup a laptop with Mint for my brother who knows the bare minimum about computers, and he's had no issues using it. The progress made over the past decade has been wildly positive.

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