I feel like I’m fighting a one-person crusade every time I respond politely to some jerk online. Last night I couldn’t sleep because some rando on the internet said mean things. Why are humans like this? Why can’t we just be nice? Sometimes I feel like we deserve to go extinct.

Apple has entered the chat.

That’s a helpful insight about enabling a special mode in Steam, thank you for sharing.

For the record, I take offense to your accusations of me “talking out of my ass” and “spreading misinformation” because I didn’t know about this mode and what Proton is or how to use it. I’d have thought you would be excited to share this knowledge and spread the word about how users can rest assured they don’t need Windows in this day and age. Instead you’ve chosen to reinforce the stereotype that Linux users are antisocial know-it-alls who pick stupid fights through anonymous comment threads.

Many years ago, back on my dual boot Toshiba laptop running Ubuntu 10 LTS, I became frustrated with how Windows was running and spent a good amount of time trying to get Steam and several games running on the Linux partition. I eventually managed to get Steam to run using Wine, and even got some games to launch, but they were unplayable. Although I can’t be sure exactly which games I tried, I enjoyed Counterstrike, Unreal Tournament and Left 4 Dead at the time and suspect it must have included those.

Having been unsuccessful at getting anything to work (including some unrelated desktop software for work)—and I spent a considerable amount of time trying—I was left with the impression that this was a hopeless endeavor.

Fast forward to a few months ago: I heard about the Steam Deck and read that it was running a version of Linux. Out of curiosity, I wanted to see which games in my library are compatible. Steam helpfully shows a compatibility symbol on the product page, but unfortunately doesn’t provide an overview from your own library. So I ended up having to do spot checks, and among my favorites it was less than 1 in 10 that were listed as Steam Deck / Linux compatible.

Now I’m sure there are all sorts of great results for searching the web for games that run on Linux. However, like many people, there are specific games from my library that I prefer to play.

Based on my past experiences with tinkering with Linux to get incompatible games to run, combined with publisher’s own information provided regarding system compatibility, I have been left with the perception that not many games run on Linux. This was the motivation for my original comment that sparked this conversation.

None of what I’ve told you here is a “massive lie” and I’m genuinely confused about why you’re so upset. Instead of having a civil discussion and teaching me about Proton, like many others in this thread have, you’ve attacked me and made wild accusations. Perhaps you might reflect on our interaction and reconsider how you choose to speak with other people.

Why are you being so hostile? How have I been talking out of my ass? I feel I’ve provided a wealth of context here about my experiences over the years and how I came to this conclusion.

In fact, I think my experience is representative of many people’s perception of Linux support for games.

Yes, I’m aware of that now, I was just providing background regarding how I came to the 10% in my original comment.

Thanks, I appreciate your insights! I wonder how many people like me are simply looking at publisher notes and under the impression Linux isn’t sorted. I’m genuinely impressed by the overwhelming feedback that it’s simply good, and I’m excited to try it.

I’ve based my information on what Steam says: https://store.steampowered.com/linux

I honestly don’t know what to say about the misinformation accusation. Blame the publishers, I guess?

I’ve since learned from this thread that it doesn’t accurately reflect how well games run using Proton.

I couldn’t find a way to get a breakdown of this, but browsing Stream’s Linux compatible list showed just a handful of games I own (Portal 2, Dying Light, Terraria), and spot checking my ±20 favorites resulted in just one compatible title (Cities: Skylines). So I ballparked it at <10%.

I’ve since learned from this thread that this information doesn’t accurately reflect Linux support, though.

I had just looked at the publisher’s system requirements on Steam, since my experience with Wine from over a decade ago was a dead end. I’ve learned a lot from this thread, though, and it seems things have improved dramatically.

Among my favorites with anti cheat are Insurgency: Sandstorm and Hunt: Showdown. I will reluctantly play Fortnite if friends insist!

I looked up my favorites, based on my experience in the past with unsupported games. Long ago, I tried using Wine, way back before Steam even had a native Linux client. I managed to get Steam to run through Wine but never succeeded in getting any game to run beyond a loading screen. That was ages ago, though.

I’ve never tried Proton, but I’ve gone down a rabbit hole of trying to use Wine for running games a few years back. I’ll look into Proton, thanks for the suggestion.

So honestly, which percentage of your game collection runs on Linux? Because I’ve looked into doing this just a few months ago, and unless the industry had some kind of mass exodus, less than 10% of my games run on Linux, and that’s a generous estimate.

Not defending Windows or anything, this is just my experience.

Compelling sales pitch for Fleshlight.

Imagine all the times you’ve had a conversation with somebody where you didn’t identify a pattern match with your YouTube recommendations.

Same. My partner and I have heard so much about this that we have over several months randomly brought up topics that are absurd and foreign to us.

We do it like this: while preparing dinner or so, one of us scribbles a word on a post-it note and we engage on it as though we’re making plans or looking to buy something. We have phones, Google Home speakers and Nest devices nearby.

There are a few challenges:

1. Make sure the topic didn’t come up from an internet interaction you already had.
2. Don’t, under any circumstances, search the internet about any of those topics.
3. Simply remember that you’re running this experiment. We keep track of topics we’ve raised through handwritten notes.

I feel that ordinary people are terrible at running these experiments because it’s honestly really difficult to be impartial and evaluate the results with statistical significance. As soon as you encounter one match, the pattern matching part of your brain will scream “told you so!” even if the success rate is 1%.

And guess what? Literally none of the topics appear as targeted ads for either of us.

Apps can use the microphone in secret and there’s no way to know when they’re using the microphone? This is a major security flaw in Android!

This comment is critical of Microsoft because the company name was mentioned in the article.