Apropos, running Steam on my Archlinux Desktop with Windows compatibility turned on works really, really well. Much better than what I remembered from the bad old days of trying to get stuff running in Wine.
Wine and it's alternatives have greatly profited from valve going this route and as a result all software runs better. It's a gradual improvement over time and we are past the early stages. I'm still running a gaming PC on windows but that is going to end quite soon if Microsoft keeps doing these things.
Stream actually paid for contributions to Wine if I understand correctly.
I too planning to use a gaming centric distro for my next gaming PC build. The horseshit they've been pushing at me on 10 has been atrocious. The lie that 10 would be the last. Injecting pages into Chrome. Windows acts more and more like literal malware.
> I too planning to use a gaming centric distro for my next gaming PC build.
I don't find that the distribution makes that much of a difference?
I just use Arch Linux, and install all the programs (gaming centric or otherwise) that I need when I need them. I guess I'm lucky, because the Steam Deck's distribution is based on Arch Linux, but I used it before it was cool.
I suspect the main differences between the distributions is what you get by default, and that can be a huge factor in terms of convenience?
Yeah and good on you for using Arch but gaming distros are designed to support dummies, meaning people like me that don't really want to build the OS from the ground up get to coast. We just want to use it.
I know a fair bit about OS internals but especially when I'm gaming I want to play rather than read and follow technical docs.
I game using Steam on Pop_OS![1] with a home-built AMD machine and, while I know there are some background processes (Proton) that run to establish and maintain a compatibility layer, it's nearly seamless to me as a user. The most I really see is a progress bar that appears before some games where Vulcan shaders have to be pre-rendered. In my experience everything needed for Windows-native games to run on Linux is handled automatically, without any configuration, runtime flags, or anything else.
Early on I consulted ProtonDB to see if my games would run, but honestly now I don't even look at it any more. While YMMV depending on the games you play, I haven't encountered really any major bugs and zero crashes. The most I found was some strange shadow texture rendering artifacting in Baldur's Gate 3, but it was contained to a particular part of a particular map.
A decade ago it was kind of rough, but now? I am never going back to Windows for gaming. Playing games on Linux is light-years better than what it used to be. If you're curious but haven't tried it because you had bad experiences in the past, I'd encourage anyone to give it another go.
Just a note to readers who are interested in this: some games in your Steam library may still not work with Proton, but the ones that do work should have rather few issues. (I play exclusively on a Steam Deck so “should” is in reference to the variance in hardware among bespoke machines.)
The Steam Deck has done well, and releasing SteamOS for free so people can install it on their own PCs is great, but I think they should make a “Steam PC” they could sell. The majority of gamers aren’t technical and buy pre-built PCs. A Steam PC with Steam OS pre-installed would make it easy for these people to game on Linux and pump up the Linux gaming share of the gaming market.
