I am and always was a casual gamer, I like playing puzzles, strategy and builder games, sometimes I play with friends some 7 days to die or AoE2. I am on Linux Mint for more than a year now and was surprised how easy gaming was. From time to time I had problems with weird DirectX error messages, but all in all everything just worked.
My setup:
- AMD Ryzen 5 3600
- GeForce GTX 1660 Super
- 32 GB DDR4 RAM
So last week my girlfriend worked on my computer (we are not living together), she wrote some bills for customers and did some table stuff in calc. When I asked her at the end of the day how it was to work on Linux, she shrugged and said “Oh I didn’t notice” lol (using Cinnamon as DE btw).
Today she bought Until Dawn the remake on Steam while she is here and because she really wanted to play she downloaded it to my PC. She just started to play and everything was great. I wondered again if I should say something like “you see how great you can game in Linux”, but then it came to my mind - she doesn’t care and she didn’t even question it! The Linux Desktop got so mature, that non-tech people just don’t notice!
I think the biggest “problem” with Linux adoption is that it does not come preinstalled on computers, and this kind of proves my point I guess.
Yeah that’s all, I just wanted to share this with you guys.
P.S.: There were some bugs btw. but it turned out they have nothing to do with the OS.
You must be misremembering things to the extreme.
Gaming in Linux was utter shit in 2005, and improvements were only crawling forward. When we checked WineHQ for compatibility the average score was bronze “unplayable”.
Although the Play On Linux program helped a lot and came out in 2008, Linux gaming didn’t improve much until after the Steam Client for Linux was released in 2013.
I dual booted Windows the first couple of years where Linux was my main OS, ONLY to be able to play games. After a few years I got tired of dual booting and ditched Windows completely. The result was that I gamed very little, and when I did, it was retro gaming.
Things improved a lot with DXVK, but that did no come out until 2018. Up until then you could almost only play games made with OpenGL, and even that was hit and miss.
I haven’t seen any Proton propaganda, and fortunately a lot of progress on Proton goes back to Wine, so Wine is also a lot better today even without Proton.
So Proton does not deserve all the credit, a lot of work has been done before and outside Proton. But Proton does make it dead easy with the Steam client, but today it may not be necessary if you use other tools to mange the Wine configuration on a per game basis. Or if you are an enthusiast that like to do it manually.
But 21 years ago, even an expert had very little luck except with very few games.
Everyone’s experience is different. It’s how I remember it. -But I consulted an AI, and it agrees with you. -Thanks for the insight!