Comment by craftkiller
2 days ago
That is why I bought a steam deck: to financially support Valve's Linux efforts. I barely play games anymore but thanks to the Wine devs, CodeWeavers, and Valve, I no longer have to listen to the knuckle-draggers claiming that "Linux sucks because it can't play games". In fact, now it is the opposite: Linux is outperforming Windows[0].
I have a near infinite amount of respect for Wine. It seems like for at least the last twenty years, Wine just keeps getting better and better with every release.
I don’t know for sure, but I suspect a lot of the work is spent sussing out weird edge cases with different binaries. This is tedious, thankless work, but it is necessary to have true Windows compatibility.
Wine and Proton have gotten so good that I don’t bother even checking compatibility before I buy games. The game will likely run just as well or better than on Windows and it is so consistently good that it’s not worth the small effort to check ProtonDB.
I do wish that they would get Office 2024 working on Wine. This isn’t a dig at the Wine devs at all, I am sure that it’s a very hard problem, but if I can get that then I will have even more ammunition to get my parents to drop windows entirely.
Sadly Wine only seems to be working well for games. Every non gaming app I've tried to run does not work. It does seem like Valve and the gaming community is contributing almost all the effort on the project.
CodeWeavers sells app support: https://www.codeweavers.com/crossover
I haven't been able to get MSOffice working, but I didn't have much issue getting Toon Boom Animate to work. Which apps give you trouble?
If its for your parents, then why not switch them to OnlyOffice? Its UI is very similar to MSO and it has excellent compatibility with the 2007+ file formats (much better than LibreOffice).
Oh it’s not for lack of trying on my end. I tried getting them to play with OnlyOffice, and they said it was worse.
If it doesn’t say Microsoft Office on there, they will say it’s worse. Objectivity has little to do with it.
In a bit of fairness, my dad makes extremely liberal use of the VBA in Excel, and I am not sure how compatible OnlyOffice is for that.
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> knuckle-draggers claiming that "Linux sucks because it can't play games"
they still do it because you can't play all the multiplayer games with kernel level anticheats
Let them have their rootkits, good riddens
I wonder when games will start supporting Linux natively, especially after the Steam Machine is released.
Given how good Proton is, I don't think it's useful to target Linux for most indie devs unless it's a one click build for multiple platforms. Even then, I've definitely had more issues with games with native Linux builds than Proton, where there's been a number of games I've set to use Proton over native to get better performance.
Until Microsoft decides it is enough.
Given that older Linux builds of games consistently run worse than the Windows versions of those same games through Wine/Proton, I hope never.
Targeting Wine/Proton is the best of both worlds for everyone. Developers need to Just™ not use a few footguns that they mostly don't have reasons to touch anyway, and otherwise they don't need to change anything, while consumers get a game on that works just as well on Linux as on Windows.
Yes but the Proton team needs to do work for basically each game to iron out the quirks, no?
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This is extremely shortsighted.
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It would be better for Linux to gain native support for some of the Windows and DirectX 12 APIs.
Linux gets a useful set of API targets and meets Windows devs more than halfway.
What benefit would that have over the current situation, with Wine?
They sold the Deck hardware at a loss, so I hope you've bought several full-price games to play on it since.
Has that been confirmed? Got a link?