[SmirkingRevenge]

The progress is vast, but at the same time, it feels overstated.

Linux still is not a great daily driver for video games in many circumstances, unless you're on a specialized device like the steam deck that gets extra attention to smooth out the rough bits.

On my gaming PC I haven't found a single game that runs noticeably faster in Linux. Most run considerably worse often while suffering various glitches (sometimes game-breaking).

Sometimes, with work (different versions of proton, startup options, configs, or even new kernels or compositors, etc) you can get around those problems, but... it takes work. Work that you just don't have to do on Windows.

[coldpie]

> Most run considerably worse often while suffering various glitches (sometimes game-breaking).

That's an interesting experience, I'd be interested to hear more. There certainly are games that do not work well, no question, but as far as I'm aware it's a pretty small minority. To my knowledge, the two biggest issues are anti-cheat and video codecs, both of which are business/legal problems, not technical issues. Are those the main problems you're seeing? If not, are you possibly running fairly niche games, or on a niche distro or specialized hardware setup?

[SmirkingRevenge]

Re-reading that, "most" might be too strong a word - "many" would be more accurate. A few recent examples of games I've tried:

- Borderlands 4 was basically unplayable on my hardware (9800 X3D, 3080 TI) - though I didn't care enough to try and fix it.

- Dune Awakening was decent, but noticeably less performant, stuttery, etc. Probably fixable with some settings tweaks and other stuff, but the experience was markedly worse than windows out of the box.

- ARC Raiders runs fantastic - but even still, it had noticeable visual issues particularly with shadows

General issues:

- It seems to vary by desktop environment how confused steam and/or the games were as to which monitor to play the game on

- Steam itself required some futzing to get big picture to use hardware rendering (software rendering is very laggy)

- Multiple games seemed confused what my native resolution was

- Mouse issues with multi-monitor setup in several games (though sometimes this is an issue in windows too)

[coldpie]

"Many" is definitely more in line with what I'd expect, yeah :) Sounds like most of your issues are multi-monitor & windowing related, which isn't surprising.

Games make a lot of assumptions based on how Windows's one-and-only window manager operates, stuff like windowing message and focus event sequences, effects of various windowing states on window sizes and chrome and mouse cursor behavior, and so on. Linux WMs don't match Windows's behavior or even other WM behaviors, so it's a nightmare trying to get every WM to align to how every game expects Windows's WM to behave. Then multi-monitor adds another layer on top of that, for things like reporting resolutions, cursor behavior, window focus, etc.

We focused on the big 2 (Gnome & KDE) on X11, and personally I use multi-monitor XFCE on X11 so I was quite motivated to get games working well there, too. Plus SteamOS's compositor/manager on Wayland, obviously. But there's so many combinations affected by so many things (I didn't even mention graphics driver behaviors on any of the above...) it's just really hard to get right as you add more little edge cases. And as you said, many games get it wrong on Windows, too. We'd often reproduce bugs on Windows just as they were reported against Proton.

All that is to say, yeah, I believe that has been your experience now that you've explained a bit more :)

[SmirkingRevenge]

Ah wow I see you did work for Code Weavers. You guys are rock stars!

Once upon a time I was a paying customer (like in the early early aughts). Glad to see them still doing their thing.