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Comment by ACS_Solver

20 days ago

Valve's Proton (so Wine + DXVK + some other additions) revolutionized gaming on Linux. I play games both for fun and work, and for a solid 3+ years now, gaming on Linux has been an "it just works" experience for me, and should be for most games that don't use kernel-level anticheat.

Now if only Steam would add a checkbox on their checkout page to add 10% donation/tip that goes directly to their upstream opensource dependencies (like the Wine team), that would be amazing! I would add extra money on every purchase to support these people!

  • Buy a steam deck. It sends a strong signal to Valve to continue supporting Wine and you get a Steam Deck

    • I wanted to buy the entire new lineup (Machine, VR, and controller), but alas, AI RAM shortage. I hope it can get released soon.

  • You always give 30% to Valve and their interests so far are aligned. Everything that's possible within the Steam ecosystem is available outside of it. Maybe things will change in the future, but I doubt we could be getting a better deal.

  • > if only Steam would add a checkbox on their checkout page to add 10% donation/tip that goes directly to their upstream opensource dependencies

    Or how about instead of passing the cost off to users, Steam actually supports them from their own profits? After all, they are profiting from free work.

    We can't be pushovers about this.

    • As far as I can tell, Valve makes significant contributions back to Wine via Proton development. Isn't that essentially them supporting their upstream dependencies with their own profits, by using some of those profits to pay people to contribute work to their open source dependencies?

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  • Great idea!

    Such donations might even be tax-deductible revenue for Valve, so even the finance bros should love it.

    Although I would prefer if Valve simply commits to a fixed percentage of its Steam fee to be donated...

I really is impressive. I wish publishers like EA and anti-cheat developers weren't so reluctant to support it. I hope Steam devices and SteamOS gain enough traction to force their hands.

  • Idk, kernel anti cheat is a pretty clear sign to me that I should pick a different game to play anyway...

    • Ironically the only way I would ever consider robust anti-cheet is if the game installed a seperate bootable Linux witch didn't have the encryption keys for my main partition.

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    • Does windows make it easy to tell the installer wants to install kernel anti cheat? It used to pop up the generic binary "This application wants to change files on your computer" which could be installing in the protected "Program Files" or could be modifying anything.

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  • Paying for a game that inserts rootkits into your kernel feels like paying money to get molested. no thanks.

    • Hate to be the one saying this, but that rootkit is there to prevent you from molesting/cheating other players. So its not an one-sided issue. It is unfortunate that the developers found no other way of fighting cheats, sure.

      And by all means, if a game community is so toxic that it has to be policed by extreme measures, it is perhaps indeed better to avoid playing such a game altogether.

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It's reached the level where a game not working is a suprise.

Space Marine 2 was the latest one for me, but Steam is great at refunds if you do it quickly enough.

  • Space Marine 2 works, at least on steam deck

    • Yea it seems very variable depending on hw / config etc. And the most recent patch at the time (I think this was during summer?) broke it for a bunch of other people on desktop that had it working before.

      For me it crashed after the first click in the menu.

> and should be for most games that don't use kernel-level anticheat.

It actually gives a far better user experience for games like Battlefield 6, because on Linux they just don't work at all. Try it for yourself - it won't even start!

By contrast if you run Battlefield 6 on Windows, eventually you'll end up playing it, and you'll wish you hadn't. It's a shitty buggy mess and you'll hate it.

So, notch up another score for Linux!