I've been using Linux exclusively for like 20 years, have followed wine development - including contributing a few patches - for almost as long, and since Vulkan, dxvk and proton arrived, it's like game compatibility has sped up x20. It's insane. I've played AAA, graphic-intensive Windows games that just came out through wine+dxvk with similar performances as on Windows. This was unthinkable even 5 years ago.
The large amount of Unity games has also helped - both because developers can usually port them very easily on Linux and because even if they don't, they usually instantly work perfectly through wine. It's amazing.
Mind you, Valve may have helped, but this is still largely the result of almost three decades of thousands of volunteers all over the world working on wine for no financial incentive. Imagine the kind of projects we'd see if everyone had their basic needs taken care of and much more free time to dedicate to such pursuits (and not just software but art, books, research...).
Oh yeah, don't mean to minimize all the community effort over the years, but for a tech moron like myself being able to just check a box in steam and have everything work is great. In the past I had tried to use wine with little success and would always spend way more time tinkering than actually playing anything so the only games I would play on linux were the few with native support. Same kind of thing used to be my main hangup with linux in general due to everything being just a bit too difficult to be worth it, but yeah now it's just easy as hell to get set up with everything I use a computer for.
Oh yeah, don’t mean to minimize all the community effort over the years
I know ! just trying to convey how incredible it seems after decades of steady progress. I was on Linux when basically the two only mainstream native games available on it were Neverwinter Nights 1 and Doom 3. That was it. Wine was hit or miss, almost only worked for very old games, and using it meant having to compile it and patch it yourself, and spend hours to make a game work. We've come a long long way and it's awesome.
I've been using Linux exclusively for like 20 years, have followed wine development - including contributing a few patches - for almost as long, and since Vulkan, dxvk and proton arrived, it's like game compatibility has sped up x20. It's insane. I've played AAA, graphic-intensive Windows games that just came out through wine+dxvk with similar performances as on Windows. This was unthinkable even 5 years ago.
The large amount of Unity games has also helped - both because developers can usually port them very easily on Linux and because even if they don't, they usually instantly work perfectly through wine. It's amazing.
Mind you, Valve may have helped, but this is still largely the result of almost three decades of thousands of volunteers all over the world working on wine for no financial incentive. Imagine the kind of projects we'd see if everyone had their basic needs taken care of and much more free time to dedicate to such pursuits (and not just software but art, books, research...).
Oh yeah, don't mean to minimize all the community effort over the years, but for a tech moron like myself being able to just check a box in steam and have everything work is great. In the past I had tried to use wine with little success and would always spend way more time tinkering than actually playing anything so the only games I would play on linux were the few with native support. Same kind of thing used to be my main hangup with linux in general due to everything being just a bit too difficult to be worth it, but yeah now it's just easy as hell to get set up with everything I use a computer for.
I know ! just trying to convey how incredible it seems after decades of steady progress. I was on Linux when basically the two only mainstream native games available on it were Neverwinter Nights 1 and Doom 3. That was it. Wine was hit or miss, almost only worked for very old games, and using it meant having to compile it and patch it yourself, and spend hours to make a game work. We've come a long long way and it's awesome.
Yeah it really is great. :rat-salute: to you and all the other contributors over the years!