Comment by oxonia

2 days ago

Windows only? :-(

Nowadays most games will run on Linux thanks to Valve's Proton compatibility layer.

  • "most" is doing a lot of work in that sentence.

    Multiplayer games generally don't.

    Haven't tried this one yet, but in my experience it's like 90% of single player games work and the remaining 10% will never work.

    • At least in my experience, every single game I've launched has worked on Linux. I don't play online shooter games which seems to be the only category that doesn't work.

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    • I game on Linux (have so for years) and the only thing I can't play is a few AAA FPS titles. Honestly not much of an issue depending on what games you play.

    • I do not play multiplayer games, and it has come to the point where I don't even check Proton compatibility on these because it is so reliable now in that situation.

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    • I was just playing Sand: Raiders of Sophie.

      Before that Arma Reforger.

      Before that Arc Raiders.

      There are a very small minority of games that use kernel-level anticheat that won't work, including newer BF6 and COD. Tbh I wouldn't play those anyway because of that feature, which sucks because BF series was fun.

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2026 Steam hardware survey [1]:

    Windows: 94.10%
    Linux: 3.68%
    macOS: 2.21%

[1] Click the "OS Version" row to expand the table, https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Softw...

  • Something of a self-reinforcing statistic. Steam is rarely installed on Mac because there’s hardly any point doing so.

    • Steam needs a statistic for Wine/crossover. I play tons of games on my mac via steam through crossover. It's crazy that multiple layers of translation work so well.

    • Macs have a single digit market share globally, so even if people started installing games on them the needle wouldn't move much.

      1 reply →

    • Proud 2.2%er

      But I also have had it installed via Crossover at some points to check out a Windows-only game.

      Which I just realize also skews the statistic because Crossover basically creates a Windows VM.

Windows versions running on Linux over Proton tend to be more stable than any native Linux version would be.