Valve Software, the company behind popular and hugely successful Steam gaming platform Dota 2, Half-Life and Team Fortress, announced plans in 2018 to improve support for Windows games for Linux.
Steam Play, a feature that Valve launched in 2010 to allow cross-platform play on Steam, will be used to improve support. Originally launched as a way for players to play their games on all platforms without having to purchase games for each platform, Valve Software has included a modified version of Wine, called Proton, in Steam Play.
Proton has improved compatibility and Linux users on Steam have been able to access more games with the new feature.
Mike published a guide in 2020 describing how Linux gamers can play AAA games made for Windows on their Linux devices using Proton.
The independent database protondb tracks compatibility using user reports. Compatibility has improved significantly in recent years. The site highlights compatibility with the top 10, top 100, and top 1000 games on Steam.
Steam games protondb linux
75% of the top 1000 games run on Linux right now, and the number is even higher, at 80%, for the top 100 games. Only the top 10 games are not well represented, only 40% of them run on Linux without major issues according to the database.
Ads
Users have submitted over 150,000 reports of over 21,000 games to the site. Of these 21,000 games, more than 17,600 are in operation according to the site.
The games in the database are arranged using the medal system. Games rated platinum and gold work perfectly, and silver games may have minor issues. Bronze games may crash or have serious problems.
Borked games won't work at all or can't run, and native Linux games are just the opposite.
Protondb has a search feature that Linux gamers may use to find out if the games they are interested in run well on Linux. All games that match the search term are returned, which means you can search for a whole series of games, for example King's Bounty, Final Fantasy or Civilization, get all the games reported and rate their compatibility.
ProtonDP steam
Compatibility is improving, and while there are still games that won't run on Linux, it's clear that compatibility has improved dramatically in the past couple of years.
Now You: Do you play games? If so, on which platforms? (via Newwin)
