The biggest blocker for me is still multiplayer games with anticheat that doesn't officially support Linux (try it unofficially and expect to get banned).
It's going to be a very long road, but Valve has definitely been working on it. Through a combination of Kernel patches and WINE magick, they seem to have something cooking up. It's anyone's guess as to how effective (or accepted) it will be.
When you say "supports Linux", do you mean that it has a native version for Linux titles, or are you saying that it has an option to not flag Proton/Wine users?
For EAC to work on Linux you need a native client, I’m guessing the next thing valve should work on is some proton compatibility layer that could link the Linux client with the emulated game.
Do people know how EAC works? It’s looking inside the windows kernel loooking in the areas not well covered by patch guard to see if I trusted code is running. Providing it false data to look through in Wine defeats its purpose.
> Tim Sweeney @TimSweeneyEpic
> Jul 15, 2019
> EAC has native Linux binaries in beta, supporting several native games in active release. This missing link is native Linux anti-cheat integration with Wine/Proton so that games running under Wine are protected. This is in the works but is a big task.
The issue isn’t as much as bans but that the online multiplayer service won’t let you log in or that servers will auto kick anyone who fail the AC health check when they join.
There are a few exceptions to this general rule. For example, when there was a Linux port of Operation Flashpoint (if I remember correctly), you had to purchase it separately from the Windows version. It's extremely rare, however.
In terms of user experience, it clearly is. No need to install anything (mesa is baked in the distribution for Intel/AMD, and for most distro installing Nvidia drivers is done automatically by the installer these days).
I'm also on NVidia. Using the official drivers causes a lot of glitches unfortunately, as soon as I plug in a second monitor. I'm glad it works for you though.
AMD's drivers are built into mainline Linux, and Nvidia's drivers are basically just the Windows ones with a different kernel module. I've honestly had a better experience with AMD cards on Linux than I have on Windows.
In terms of single-player games, the figure is more like 85%. You can probably get an additional 5% to work with various levels of tweaking, but compatibility is remarkably good these days. Many games perform better on Linux than they do on Windows (Borderlands, Overwatch), while others give you a chance to have a flawless experience with games that are pretty busted on modern Windows (Diablo 2, Fallout: New Vegas). As another commenter mentioned, the big issue is with anti-cheat: any game implementing EAC will outright not work, full stop. That makes it about a 50/50 chance that multiplayer titles will work on Linux, with some unfortunate casualties like Rainbow Six Siege and Halo MCC's online multiplayer.
With that being said, I truly and honestly believe Linux is the way to go if you're not into multiplayer. Valve's commitment to Linux is nothing short of herculean, and it's heartwarming to see them give back to the open source community in such a remarkable way. If it weren't for Proton (and DXVK), I'd still be using Windows on my main computer, which made development hell. Now, I feel comfortable moving to a system where I can enjoy Overwatch, Titanfall and Team Fortress on a regular basis without dual-booting.
Valve's commitment to Linux is outstanding. I am genuinely surprised that other vendors (GOG, Epic) haven't joined Valve in making Linux based hedges. Epic have given grants to Godot, Blender and other projects that commoditise their complement, but they still don't want to (or don't want to be seen) doing the same for their platform.
There's an open-source Epic launcher frontend called Legendary[1] that can automagically manage your Wine/DXVK files with minimal user intervention. It's not even close to how easy Valve makes it, but it's certainly an option if you want to get Epic games working on Linux with minimal hassle.
I was thinking more from a point of view of Epic, the company, wanting to secure its future. In Epic's case they're actually currently suing (and running a propaganda campaign) against Apple and Google because the latter are charging 30% of all revenue including in-game purchases.
Rather than funding the development of the similar initiatives on PC (i.e. Linux) to prevent Microsoft from doing the same thing, instead Tim Sweeney tweets about how switching to Linux is like moving to Canada and is generally rude and unpleasant about it.
The fact that someone else had to make a launcher for Epic is further proof that Epic is not interested in even supporting Linux, let alone invest in it.
Sure, but that's always the case. Valve didn't offer native Linux support when Steam came out. With that being said, Tim Sweeney can be as unpleasant about it as he likes, I'm not begging for native Fortnite support anytime soon.
They didn't offer native Linux support, but from its inception Valve has been working to remove dependencies and combat existential threats. It used the quake engine for half life, then developed their own engine. They were dependent on bricks and mortar retail who were losing interest in PC, so they made Steam. Windows 8 made it look like Microsoft was making a land grab for a desktop store, so Valve made Steam OS and Steam machines (and latterly Proton).
Epic is almost taking the opposite approach. Denying or not addressing a problem until it's already established to the point is a market norm. If Epic had caused the amount of fuss they are now in 2011, maybe it wouldn't have needed a hundred thousand dollar YouTube campaign and a multi-million dollar lawsuit to resolve.
I dunno, it's true that's it's not Epic's MO, but it's not _smart_.
Epic promised the linux community lots of love, and then something changed (or they were lying from the start). I am thankful for their contributions to Godot, but Tim S is openly anti-linux, so dont expect anything but massive market pressure to change that.
> Tim once referred to Win32 as a free and open standard. I don't think he _understands_ what it means to be a truly free and open standard.
Sun tried to get the Windows API to be an open standard by submitting it to ISO, so that they could claim their alternate implementation (Wabi) was standards compliant.
Microsoft told the standards committee "you can't do that! That API is our IP!"
And so the Public Windows Initiative came to an end. Funny, now Microsoft is arguing against APIs as IP as an amicus in Oracle v. Google.
"We love Linux!" said Epic back in 2014. Not so much, actually. It is really unfortunately that they didn't follow Valve's lead or Linux gaming would be that much further along.
I mean, if you go way way back to the days of Unreal Tournament 2004 and before (when Epic was still Epic Megagames) they were actually one of the few developers that supported Windows, Linux and macOS for most of their games.
Despite shipping native Linux versions of quite a few titles, the GOG Galaxy client is still not supported on Linux (and both the client and API are closed, so no community port any time soon). That means no achievements, multiplayer matchmaking, cloud saves, update rollbacks, or game update notifications for Linux users (although the last one is do-able with the Lutris runner or Minigalaxy).
Use the Lutris installer [1] and it will work great. It feels about as native as it gets, and it manages to hit 120 fps on my 1440p monitor with my meek 1050ti. Unbelievable performance, if you ask me. There's currently an issue where it will regenerate the shader cache with every launch, but it should only take 1-2 minutes with a decent CPU, which I normally spend in the training grounds. Once the cache is ready, performance is blistering fast.
A lot of this is only true if you only have the most basic setup or you are playing the most played games. Outside of the top 100 or so games or unity games (unity games seem to just work as unity is cross platform anyway) it is extremely variable and there are all sorts of odd issues.
While many games work there are hundreds of annoyances, crashes and quirks that don't exist on Windows at all.
* alt-tabbing out of a game will often crash a lot of games, so you can't really use discord or similar team chat software properly without risking crashing out of the game.
* If you have a multi-monitor system the game will frequently start on the wrong screen. Thanks to how mondern video drivers identify the monitors even switch the cables round might not work!
* A lot of games will work fine at 1080p. At 4K you will see performance problems, also streaming to other people can be terrible.
* Single player games that require high refresh rates and stable framerates like Doom Eternal will have variable performance for no reason what-so-ever and are rock solid on Windows (I had two game crashes in the past year and I play a lot of Doom Eternal).
* Loads of older games that use the build engine or the KeX engine like Blood does not work properly with Proton.
* Lots of indie games do not work at all.
* Game streaming on discord will tank framerate on a lot of games in Linux, but it works flawlessly in Windows.
* Some graphics setttings just don't take at all, it doesn't seem to error.
Everytime one of these articles get posted there are comments such as this where people say that it is flawless and it simply isn't true. Having a dual screen setup isn't a strange setup these days at all and using Discord is the choice of most PC gamers these days. I stream games to friends (some are disabled and can't play the games, others might want just to watch me play the game as I am good at these games).
I am quite proficient with Linux (I've been using it since 2002) and I cannot recommend it. Maybe it is good enough for you but you and many the people on this thread are giving a false impression of the solution. I have about 450 games in my steam library (I've had a steam account since Half life 2 was released) and about 50 in my GoG account and I've tried a fair few, everything from modern triple A titles to older games, so I have a good sample size for anyone claiming that is merely ancedotal.
The official user guide for Skyrim explicitly states that alt-tabbing can cause crashing. Maybe you're using some form of wiccan magic to avoid this issue, but Bethesda themselves acknowledge it's an issue. Perhaps you're referring to Skyrim Special Edition?
Always hit esc before alt-tabbimg out, otherwise I always get two cursors with differing sensitivity. And only one is actually the cursor. It doesn't crash until you re-enter and I can usually fix that by selecting it from the task bar, and when I get a blank screen I then alt-tab through all the open applications and back to skyrim. Wiccan magic indeed.
Can being the operative word there. This is just dishonest. I've got about 200 hours in Skyrim (back in what 2011 or 2012) sometimes you've gotta double-alt tab back out sometimes so the game looks like it has crashed. Loads of games work with that trick btw (e.g Rome Total War, Medieval 2).
But it is rarely an issue with new-ish games (in Windows). But is a big issue in Linux with proton with a lot of games I've tried. Rome Total War 2 (which was at the time infamous for it bugs) could be minimised and left running for hours without issue and that is quite an old game now.
At risk of turning this discussion into a "my anecdata vs yours" discussion, I honestly have no idea where you're coming from on this. Many of those issues are very much present on Windows, if not exacerbated by the overhead Windows has.
No they are not. People claim they have them. I simple don't believe them.
People usually have problems when they have bad hardware, gunked driver installs. As for the overhead of Windows. Linux and Windows benchmarks on games (from many many sites, even places like phoronix) show that framerates on games that have native versions of each are about the same.
Go pull out the game disks for any DX3 or DirectPlay games. I guarantee you're likely to have a bad time. The same follows for a great many games released on Steam that targeted WinXPSP2.
Again, it sounds like you've come full circle here. You aren't making much of a case if your argument is "it works fine if you know what you're doing", because that is also the status quo on Linux. We could continue to argue about how we've both misconfigured our respective systems, but that's missing the forest for the trees. Your point is moot.
I didn't say that though. I was specifically talking about poorly looked after Windows installs and many of the people who think they are tech savvy do the dumbest things (like turning off parts of th memory management the OS expects in Windows, not keeping things updated etc. etc) because they think they know what they are doing and they don't. It is pure dunning kruger.
So at no point does it make my point moot. Windows does not need any special configuration with the vast-vast-vast majority of games. Many things just work and that does include a lot of older games (btw compatibility with older software has actually improved under 10).
You mis-characterising what I said doesn't negate the fact that many of the things I mentioned are issues in my original comment are real problems that continue to exist (and have existed for many years) and are unlikely in my opinion to be ever be fixed. You and many other pretending they don't exist doesn't make them go away.
Fair comments and mostly true. I would however add that the point is the direction of where things are going. It was impossible to play more than 10 percent of steam games just a few years ago. Now the range has massively improved and support is progressively better. In another 2 years you can expect less odd cases and better monitor support.
It's certainly not flawless, but I haven't seen some of these issues you're mentioning. I'm running a dual-monitor setup off my 1050ti, with my primary display being a 1440p 144hz display. I only have windowing issues on games that already had windowing issues natively (the Fallout and Elder Scrolls games are a particularly large sore thumb), and I have never seen a game spawn on the wrong display. I haven't played Doom Eternal, but Doom (2016) ran at a locked 60hz for me. I could push it higher, but at 1440p I'm already stretching the capabilities of this card. Game streaming, while partially broken (eg. you can't stream an individual display), never had that considerable of a performance impact for me. I streamed Valheim over Discord the other day, and only lost ~3 or 4 FPS overall.
Besides that, I understand where you're coming from. The experience isn't flawless, but neither is gaming on Windows. It's ultimately up to you to pick and choose your battles, but the majority of the games I play work relatively well, even compared to Windows.
> It's certainly not flawless, but I haven't seen some of these issues you're mentioning.
You previously said for single player it was.
I experience them all the time and I tried different distros (Ubuntu, Fedora, Manjaro) it has been quite consistent issues over at least the last two years.
I find it very hard to believe you haven't seen any of these issues (especially alt-tabbing). I actually sometimes think people are just straight up lying but I have no hard evidence.
> I'm running a dual-monitor setup off my 1050ti, with my primary display being a 1440p 144hz display. I only have windowing issues on games that already had windowing issues natively (the Fallout and Elder Scrolls games are a particularly large sore thumb), and I have never seen a game spawn on the wrong display. I haven't played Doom Eternal, but Doom (2016) ran at a locked 60hz for me. I could push it higher, but at 1440p I'm already stretching the capabilities of this card. Game streaming, while partially broken (eg. you can't stream an individual display), never had that considerable of a performance impact for me. I streamed Valheim over Discord the other day, and only lost ~3 or 4 FPS overall.
Discord streaming literally halves my framerate and I have a 1080Ti with a Ryzen 3700X. So I just don't believe you. You won't see performance problems with Doom 2016 as even a medicore card back in 2012 can play that game decently (my old 660GTX played the game fine at medium on a i7 from 2014ish).
> Besides that, I understand where you're coming from. The experience isn't flawless, but neither is gaming on Windows. It's ultimately up to you to pick and choose your battles, but the majority of the games I play work relatively well, even compared to Windows.
It isn't flawless on Windows but it doesn't have any of the problems I've mentioned, it is generally very stable and it has worked consistently for year. I have no idea about the so called issues you have. I have a sizable library and I will fire up old games every so often and they work without issue.
However I know how to look after a Windows installation (a lot of people don't and that includes so called tech savvy users). I've played all sorts of games on Windows 10 fine. Games going back to 2002. The main problem I have is the resolution of my screen is soo high the fonts and sprites are tiny.
>...others give you a chance to have a flawless experience...
I'm sorry that Discord streaming doesn't work for you. It sounds like an isolated issue judging from the reactions of other commenters here, perhaps you should contact Discord? And as for Windows, I honestly don't know what you're going for here. Yes, games run "fine" on Windows, we are in agreement here. Many games also run "fine" on Linux, and that has been my argument from the start. If your concession is "it runs fine if you aren't tech savvy", then it sounds like this whole point is moot and we're back to square one.
> No, I had originally said >...others give you a chance to have a flawless experience...
This is splitting hairs. You were making out like it "just worked". It doesn't for me and I know plenty of other people that have run into the problems.
> I'm sorry that Discord streaming doesn't work for you. It sounds like an isolated issue judging from the reactions of other commenters here, perhaps you should contact Discord?
It does "work". The problem is the performance is crap. I have far better GPU than you do and I have a pretty decent CPU, so if you were playing the same game you would have it worse. The fact that it is that variable is the problem. It just quicker and easier to reboot into Windows and not have to deal with the issue at all. Which is the real point I am driving at.
> Many games also run "fine" on Linux, and that has been my argument from the start. If your concession is "it runs fine if you aren't tech savvy", then it sounds like this whole point is moot and we're back to square one.
They don't run fine on Linux . If you have even the most non-standard screen configuration things do not work correctly (as I said in my original post) and I have the same problem on different distros on different machines I own (I have some computers in the graveyard with different GPUs). I have messed around with GPU pass through (GT1030s are garbage so regular desktop video playback was poor but the gaming worked fine).
Gaming on linux is a massive compormise in terms of either quality, reliablility, performance or compatibility. You cheer leading to people in your comment and giving them a false impression of the situation will just sour those that attempt it against using alternative operating systems (I am an operating system enthusiast and I use some very odd things for fun).
> I find it very hard to believe you haven't seen any of these issues (especially alt-tabbing). I actually sometimes think people are just straight up lying but I have no hard evidence.
I've got thousands of hours gaming on linux and I've never had an alt-tab problem. Kind of weird to go right to claiming people are outright lying, maybe there's another issue you're running into?
I've been around here for a while and I've been lurking for a while. If you are alluding I am somehow trolling or something else, I am not. I
If you actually have any solid rationale against my position other than the lies of these things never happening (even though on proton db there are reports of it happening in games).
Most of the arguments have anecdotes about how it works fine for them and then claim I am making anecdotes myself even though I have a very large steam and gog library and have tried a good sample of games on at least two machines now and a few distros. It isn't anecdotes when you have made a lot of effort to investigate the viability.
I really want to stop using Windows but unless the gaming situation improves I can't and people pretending these issues such as the ones I have mentioned don't exist they won't get solved.
Anyway it will be back to lurking again because this place is a total hive mind.
Tbh I don’t have an opinion on this matter as I don’t game on Linux at all. I’m inclined to believe your side actually. As I find doing almost anything on Linux is a harder than it is on windows.
It would be more fruitful if you both mentioned your concrete specs/drivers/proton-version to compare experiences. Remember to check your game in protondb.com and contribute if you want.
Many of us dang-strokers are making one account per comment. It's pretty retarded to 'keep an account' in here, or anywhere else on the internet. Yeah except having a stable email. But there too we choose to throw away as much as possible. I bet your mind is blown. Imagine having 'I had a curated groomed HN account' as your epitaph. Sounds pretty retarded doesn't it. So we use one account per comment. It's pretty easy.
I'm sure your epitaph of "made alternate accounts to call people retarded" will look great on a tombstone too. It's pretty silly to be concerned with other people's optics when your glass house looks as brittle as it is.
Peripheral support is an issue too. I managed to fiddle around and get my g27 wheel working in most games, more or less, but my TrackIR was basically worthless (it could kind of emulate a mouse, but that just gives you the xy position, not proper head tracking).
To expand a bit on some of the "tweaks" that must be endured....
To play War Thunder you must use the launcher to set it in a window at native screen resolution then start the game. Then you move the game to your desired monitor and Layer>Always on top, and Undecorate the window.
I wonder if Proton as a PoW (Proton on Windows) wrapper would enable long term compatibility for games on Windows as well. While I use and prefer Linux personally I recognize there's many will continue to use Windows for years to come.
> Many games perform better on Linux than they do on Windows (Borderlands, Overwatch)
Do you have anything to back that up? In my personal experience Overwatch absolutely doesn't perform better on Linux. Haven't tried Borderlands, but in any case two games don't count as 'many'. Unless you mean all Borderlands games.
Someone posted a pretty good comparison video of Overwatch performance on Windows vs Linux:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=voXc1nCD4IA
Windows runs hotter and tends to have a slightly lower average framerate with a much lower 1% low. In the case of Borderlands, 1 and 2 have much better performance than what I saw on Windows, and TPS pretty much identical to Windows performance. Borderlands 3 is about a little slower on Linux, but I'm guessing that has to do with DXVK's incomplete DX12 support. Overall, the Borderlands franchise is completely playable on Linux, and oftentimes a better experience.
Also, I refrained from listing more games out of respect for your time. Out of the games I've tried, I've noticed better performance in the following:
Team Fortress 2, MGSV The Phantom Pain, Valheim, Fallout 4, CS:GO, Insurgency, Mirror's Edge, Payday 2, Warframe, Prey, Kerbal Space Program, DOOM (2016), and Terraria.
If I had a larger library, I'd probably try more games.
I'd say there's something wrong with your Windows installation then, in my opinion if you tune your Linux distro for gaming, then maybe (depending on your hardware) you can get on par results with Windows. But more benchmarks are always nice, so let's leave it at that, everyone can decide for themselves
> can probably get an additional 5% to work with various levels of tweaking
My big complaint is the number of titles that receive a Platinum rating on ProtonDB, in spite of technical issues. I have purchased more than one title with a Platinum rating that had significant issues running on my machine.
This is compounded that Steam/ProtonDB user reports typically have an abysmal level of detail to replicate a working configuration. Someone got it to run flawlessly, but there is so much wine configuration jargon that each time I need to dig into the issues, I waste time on something that otherwise would work on Windows. I would love if there was a 'share my Proton configuration' per game that could be made available to the community.
I’ve experiences this, and it’s annoying. Worse is it’s never obvious if it’s a driver problem.
That said, part of why I know anything about computers was trying to get games to work on my old 486. I sort of miss the feeling of reward of really wanting to play a game and needing to dig into the technical weeds to finally get the right boot disk. Proton almost scratches that itch for me, sadly there aren’t enough games anymore to really motivate me.
I was really annoyed when Rocket League dropped native support for Linux, but it turned out it runs much better on my potato under Proton. My only concern now is that they'll add anti-cheat to it (even though there's there no real need for it) and Linux will become flagged. The fact that they moved the game to only be available to new players via the Epic client has me worried they're moving in that direction.
It's possible, but Rocket League has actually never been as popular on Steam as recently, even though you cannot really purchase it anymore: https://steamcharts.com/app/252950 (recent peak players outperform pre-Epic performance).
Hasn't it been a running joke every year that "now is the year of desktop Linux"? Maybe it was never supposed to be the year, but it will be the decade? I've been on Linux for years now after decades on Win then a few years on Mac. I never want to go back to either of those two.
I'm convinced that a clean Ubuntu install has surpassed by Mac and Windows. I feel like the gap is only going to get greater as the battle between something created out of profit and something created out of passion wages on.
A lot of them don't work on Catalina.
My kids accidentally upgraded and now their favorite games won't play.
Steam is not a VM. And once you pay for something you have no guarantees that it will continue to work with an OS upgrade. Well, I guess that's industry standard, but I wish it was more obvious what works and what doesn't, instead of incredibly obtuse error messages.
Not in favor of Steam at all.
And I am not sure what you meant by obtuse error messages? My steam clearly marks the games that don't run under Catalina (which as a few false positive actually -- since .NET game still runs despite being mark as not compatible).
I didn't screenshot the error messages, but I'm a developer and they were at that level: incomprehensible to end users. So I figured it out but only because I was savvy. Now my girls want PCs. Usch!
I don't know what you are talking about because in my stream it is written there in a yellow text next to Play button that 'this games does not support Catalina'.
This is an artifact of not allowing 32-bit applications on Catalina. It seems silly to blame Valve over this. Have you considered setting up bootcamp for gaming? Otherwise you can pick up fairly cheap refurbished laptops off eBay or amazon. Remember proton is for Linux, support has and always will be shotty for MacOS.
Thanks. Yes. But none of this is obvious after the fact and a lot of googling.
Apart from that, if you search for games on Steam and you want to play one, you don't find out that it's incompatible until after you buy it! (Unless you happen to find a friendly site that lists catalina incompatible games). It maddens me that I can buy something that ca't possibly work.
I know it's not the topic here so apologies for the digression, but the Mac compatibility on this list is somewhat misleading. Games like TF2 don't actually work on the Mac any longer unless you stay on or downgrade to Mojave. And even then, the performance and bugginess leaves much to be desired.
If you're using this article at all to make decisions around a Mac for gaming, dive a little deeper to make sure the game you want to play works on Catalina+ (generally requires a full 64 bit port).
Back to the actual topic: I had no idea Proton got this good. That's quite an achievement for Linux gaming. What's the state of modern GPU support?
As for Mac support, my understanding is that Apple's reluctance to support third-party graphics APIs has made development incredibly difficult, especially on modern versions of MacOS where they're moving away from technologies like OpenGL and dragging their feet in the sand with Vulkan. From what I've seen on Github, a lot of Proton developers aren't keen on picking up Mac support, and the last time it was (officially) supported by Proton was nearly 2 years ago (where you had to compile from source to get it working). Given Apple's recent hostility towards Valve, I doubt they have much interest in working with their platform.
As for GPU support, it's fine. I use an older GeForce card that works perfectly fine on Manjaro, and I haven't seen any driver issues so far (though I don't use Wayland, so ymmv). I've even been surprised by their control panel, which lets you easily enable G-sync on supported monitors, force compositing, micromanage your displays, adjust color calibration and more. I've heard the situation is much better on AMD cards, but I have yet to run into any issues with Nvidia.
Pretty good on AMD, still somewhat behind for Nvidia (Raytracing is being worked on, and DLSS is to come at some point). AMD is the preferred way to go for VR as well as they support reprojection on Linux, but Nvidia does not yet.
Even if the game is compatible more often than not it won't be playable on all but the lowest settings. My 2017 MBP struggles with KSP and Cities Skylines. This is an older system but those games are even older.
Server-side measures such as network analysis. Statistical models of player performance. Trust-based online gaming models where people play only with their trusted friends instead of random people.
Alternatively, nothing. From a computing freedom point of view, cheating is a form of playful hacking. The game is running on our computers, we should be able to alter it if we want.
Why are wallhacks even possible? Maybe they're not even trying to design the game securely. That information (who's behind an object) shoudn't be available. In web development it's a critical vulnerability to be able to snoop on other user's activity.
Because online games have latency and jitter, if your client isn't aware of a player before it walks around a corner you'll get a very annoying pop-in effect as the player "appears" small distance from the corner. I believe SCUM is a game that have this.
This kind of culling is also quite resource intensive on the server for games that have many players, large maps or complex geometry.
CSGO has partly implemented this, your client only gets information through some walls and objects, so you cannot see a player on the other side of the map. But it has quite simple maps and is overall not a complex game.
Of course, we need a blockchain. Duping hasn't been much of a problem in online games for some time, its solved without blockchains.
Many games already does this on the server side with client side prediction. But this does nothing for aimbot, wallhacks or other strictly client side hacks.
Bots? Competetive games typically have matchmaking, doesn't do anything against cheaters.
None of these works for most competitive games, especially fps.
Yes, competitive online gaming is the root of all evil rootkits that need to run on one's system. Frankly for the small minority of gamers who are involved in esports we are compromising a hell of a lot of computers out there.
Gamers use their machines for things besides gaming. There are a myriad of reasons to ditch proprietary OSes for Linux software and Proton is making it easier. There might currently only be 1% of sales, but Proton is good enough now where that number is only going to grow.
The only reason I’m buying a PC with windows is to game these days. I don’t care how many games run on linux or mac, I want the platform the game was developed on to get the best experience. And it’s not just about the best, without that it’s really hit or miss. It’s like playing doom on the nintendo switch.
I don't blame you, but the "I want the platform the game was developed on" is a pretty terrible line of logic. Persona 5 was developed for the PS3, but the PS3 is the worst way to play it. Same goes for a number of Sony games that have since been ported to Windows and a massive stockpile of Xbox games that are being upgraded and enhanced for more capable hardware. In many ways, Proton is running the platform the game was developed on: you're still installing DirectX and .NET, but on a different operating system with different system calls. I won't hate on a Windows user who's exclusively there for gaming, but you may soon find that your hostility is misplaced.
You can say that, but the Switch is really just a Linux box with some extra stuff tacked on. If you load custom firmware, you can actually run Python and even GCC on the native OS. Same goes for every Playstation after the PS2, which all run skinned version of BSD. The only reason Linux "isn't a gaming platform" is because people don't prioritize game development for it. The whole point of this article is that people are taking that task into their own hands, and it's working.
I'm really enjoying this narrative that gaming on Linux is now viable because Windows games running through a Win32/DirectX compatibility layer works reasonably well.
I appreciate Valve making Wine actually work for a broader set of games, but if we're being real, statistically nobody writes native games for Linux unless it is their labor of love, and the market share doesn't justify the energy.
It's true, I've loved steam for its pretty great linux support. I love that games like RimWorld, Kerbal Space Program, Stellaris, Civ, and other games are playable on my linux machine!
I’ve been converting my main rig over to Linux full time. In doing so I’ve been researching how to migrate from platforms. Using dual-boot, separate partition for steam games, and which software I’ll need to migrate too. It’s been really easy and now that I have the Steam library mounted, it was a simple update to get the Linux files for games. What I find even cooler is that if you own two graphics cards, you can skip the dual boot step, and setup a Windows VM inside Your Linux install and use GPU bypass to allow the VM to use your graphics card. This allows you to play the very few non-proton compatible games without restarting. This is the only corner case for me. 90% of anything else is a text editor, browser, or chat app (all which are cross compatible). Now if only GPU prices would drop...
That way developers would be more likely to offer NATIVE build of them game! (let's not forget you can easily target linux with Unity engine, which is, i'm pretty use, the most used engine on steam)
Proton perfectly showcase what is wrong with linux, hacks on hacks on hacks on workarounds, as a gamer I DONT WANT TO DEAL WITH THAT SH!T
And as a dev I DON'T WANT TO DEAL WITH RANDOM LINUX WINE SUPPORT TICKETS
For "Linux" to attract gamers, also need a better Desktop Environment, and better software ecosystem, it's not there yet.. sadly, and linux people can come at me whenever they want, it's the reality, and it's the reason why i'm using macOS
-- still a pain to take screenshot
-- still a pain to play games in fullscreen mode
-- still a pain to have a correct mouse movement behavior
Your non-game-related Linux observations make me feel like we're living in different worlds. I haven't really tried playing games on Linux (I like games that require a Windows anti-cheat, so I'm dualbooting Win10), except Factorio and that was awesome. I'm also a power-user, I guess.
Software, hardware driver installation is so comfortable on Linux. Everything is a few commands away. Screenshots? I've never had trouble there.
You wrote Desktop Environment (capitalized). Linux isn't a Prepackaged End Product. You can get something like that from the popular distributions. I find Ubuntu plug and play, for example. That said, I usually assemble my own desktop environment, which is great for me, though I realise not everyone wants to put in the effort.
after all it's only just a personal experience, and it may vary, but still, i believe "defaults" is what push me away..
and it is even more sad because valve is basically alone on the PC market, they could do way more, and they should do way more because... :
it is even more more sad because if that job started many years ago, we'd have way more native linux game, and an overwall better eco system for linux
and what is EVEN MORE sad is now they'll need to rely on Microsoft if they ever want to do cloud gaming, because they'll need to pay for a shit ton of Microsoft server licences
if it was vulkan + linux, things would have been way easier for valve, wich is, i'm pretty sure, the reason why we still haven't heard of an official "steam cloud gaming solution" yet.. very very sad indeed
i am all in for Linux, but efforts shouldn't be all in into windows emulation layers, problem is elsewhere!
Maybe this person saw the recent post on HN about Flameshot (and supporting Wayland) and thought "Oh... you can't even take a screenshot on Linux".
I think the best distro for gaming is Pop_OS!. They have a pretty reliable set of software and they also have an NVIDIA version of the distro which is great for newbies. It also comes with Flathub (instead of Snap) by default so latest version of most of the softwares that newbies will use are available (such as Spotify, Slack... and everything else Electron).
I can imagine if they implemented something like this, you'd end up with a lot of games shipping untested Linux builds just to get reduced tax.
It'd be awesome if Valve could reward those who develop for Linux and properly support it, but it seems unlikely. At least Proton is improving regularly and is making it better in one way at least.
Good point, but still i want to believe in developers, after all if things doesn't work, they can be sanctioned, just like they get sanctioned already if they release buggy games (they get removed from the store)
Proton is already better than most native ports. I play at least half of the games in my library that do have native ports using Proton anyway, because either the native port simply doesn't work, it is less performant (common even for developers who used cross platform engines like Unity) or more buggy, or the Windows version has had content updates released that were never included in the Linux port.
Proton is also essential for all of the games that already exist and that will never be ported to Linux. Any incentive to produce native ports for future games is not a replacement because (a) not every developer will take the bait, and (b) people will always still want to play old games.
Linux purists will always seem to argue against Proton on some philosophical ground but the idea that the ecosystem was in a better place before it just seems absurd. You can now quite often play your whole Steam library on Linux, pretty seamlessly. There is just no comparison to the situation a few years ago.
As a Linux gamer, what I want is to play all the games that I want to play. What I do not want is to waste my time with platform politics. 'Dealing with' the 'hacks on hacks' is already largely irrelevant, because mostly Proton just works.
Great! Now the only things keeping me on Windows are Visual Studio (which can be tolerably replaced with JetBrains Rider) and... drums... the default mail client.
After using it for a while, switching to Outlook or Thunderbird is really hard, as their interface is extremely overloaded. The Windows Mail display mode with two panes, left being combined inbox with mail grouped by threads and large tiles, right for the content and quick actions, that ALSO switches to a single pane mode when window is narrow (E.G. when tiling) is just the best thing ever. Is there anything like that for Linux?
Have you tried the online version? Although I don't think I have high expectations from my mail client, I made the switch some time ago and there wasn't any feature I missed.
I installed Linux on my primary SSD for a brand new computer I built in January. I lasted a week before I had to install windows on the secondary for a game a friend wanted to play, I expected it to take at least a little longer. That being said I am still really happy with the level of support in general for games on Linux. Paradox's strategy games all have excellent Native support for linux, as does Valheim and a couple others I've been playing. I really hope others who game make Linux their main platform to help boost the incentives for companies to support it.
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[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 217 ms ] threadfrom the mouth of Sauron itself:
> Tim Sweeney @TimSweeneyEpic > Jul 15, 2019 > EAC has native Linux binaries in beta, supporting several native games in active release. This missing link is native Linux anti-cheat integration with Wine/Proton so that games running under Wine are protected. This is in the works but is a big task.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/sports/esports/steam-twice-breaks-...
With that being said, I truly and honestly believe Linux is the way to go if you're not into multiplayer. Valve's commitment to Linux is nothing short of herculean, and it's heartwarming to see them give back to the open source community in such a remarkable way. If it weren't for Proton (and DXVK), I'd still be using Windows on my main computer, which made development hell. Now, I feel comfortable moving to a system where I can enjoy Overwatch, Titanfall and Team Fortress on a regular basis without dual-booting.
[1] https://github.com/derrod/legendary
EDIT: i actually meant to reference the Heroic games launcher, which is the frontend for Legendary. you can find it here:
https://github.com/flavioislima/HeroicGamesLauncher
Rather than funding the development of the similar initiatives on PC (i.e. Linux) to prevent Microsoft from doing the same thing, instead Tim Sweeney tweets about how switching to Linux is like moving to Canada and is generally rude and unpleasant about it.
The fact that someone else had to make a launcher for Epic is further proof that Epic is not interested in even supporting Linux, let alone invest in it.
Epic is almost taking the opposite approach. Denying or not addressing a problem until it's already established to the point is a market norm. If Epic had caused the amount of fuss they are now in 2011, maybe it wouldn't have needed a hundred thousand dollar YouTube campaign and a multi-million dollar lawsuit to resolve.
I dunno, it's true that's it's not Epic's MO, but it's not _smart_.
Which is a little troubling, considering all the other concerns with the EGS.
Sun tried to get the Windows API to be an open standard by submitting it to ISO, so that they could claim their alternate implementation (Wabi) was standards compliant.
Microsoft told the standards committee "you can't do that! That API is our IP!"
And so the Public Windows Initiative came to an end. Funny, now Microsoft is arguing against APIs as IP as an amicus in Oracle v. Google.
https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/blog/41-update-preview
They are also doing a great work supporting the SDL2 library. AFAIK they are employing its original author and developer Sam Lantinga.
(works great for original Warcraft III)
and they have a linux version.
[1] https://lutris.net/games/overwatch/
While many games work there are hundreds of annoyances, crashes and quirks that don't exist on Windows at all.
* alt-tabbing out of a game will often crash a lot of games, so you can't really use discord or similar team chat software properly without risking crashing out of the game. * If you have a multi-monitor system the game will frequently start on the wrong screen. Thanks to how mondern video drivers identify the monitors even switch the cables round might not work! * A lot of games will work fine at 1080p. At 4K you will see performance problems, also streaming to other people can be terrible. * Single player games that require high refresh rates and stable framerates like Doom Eternal will have variable performance for no reason what-so-ever and are rock solid on Windows (I had two game crashes in the past year and I play a lot of Doom Eternal). * Loads of older games that use the build engine or the KeX engine like Blood does not work properly with Proton. * Lots of indie games do not work at all. * Game streaming on discord will tank framerate on a lot of games in Linux, but it works flawlessly in Windows. * Some graphics setttings just don't take at all, it doesn't seem to error.
Everytime one of these articles get posted there are comments such as this where people say that it is flawless and it simply isn't true. Having a dual screen setup isn't a strange setup these days at all and using Discord is the choice of most PC gamers these days. I stream games to friends (some are disabled and can't play the games, others might want just to watch me play the game as I am good at these games).
I am quite proficient with Linux (I've been using it since 2002) and I cannot recommend it. Maybe it is good enough for you but you and many the people on this thread are giving a false impression of the solution. I have about 450 games in my steam library (I've had a steam account since Half life 2 was released) and about 50 in my GoG account and I've tried a fair few, everything from modern triple A titles to older games, so I have a good sample size for anyone claiming that is merely ancedotal.
But it is rarely an issue with new-ish games (in Windows). But is a big issue in Linux with proton with a lot of games I've tried. Rome Total War 2 (which was at the time infamous for it bugs) could be minimised and left running for hours without issue and that is quite an old game now.
PC Gaming has long been a brittle experience due to moving OS and hardware targets.
People usually have problems when they have bad hardware, gunked driver installs. As for the overhead of Windows. Linux and Windows benchmarks on games (from many many sites, even places like phoronix) show that framerates on games that have native versions of each are about the same.
So at no point does it make my point moot. Windows does not need any special configuration with the vast-vast-vast majority of games. Many things just work and that does include a lot of older games (btw compatibility with older software has actually improved under 10).
You mis-characterising what I said doesn't negate the fact that many of the things I mentioned are issues in my original comment are real problems that continue to exist (and have existed for many years) and are unlikely in my opinion to be ever be fixed. You and many other pretending they don't exist doesn't make them go away.
Besides that, I understand where you're coming from. The experience isn't flawless, but neither is gaming on Windows. It's ultimately up to you to pick and choose your battles, but the majority of the games I play work relatively well, even compared to Windows.
You previously said for single player it was.
I experience them all the time and I tried different distros (Ubuntu, Fedora, Manjaro) it has been quite consistent issues over at least the last two years.
I find it very hard to believe you haven't seen any of these issues (especially alt-tabbing). I actually sometimes think people are just straight up lying but I have no hard evidence.
> I'm running a dual-monitor setup off my 1050ti, with my primary display being a 1440p 144hz display. I only have windowing issues on games that already had windowing issues natively (the Fallout and Elder Scrolls games are a particularly large sore thumb), and I have never seen a game spawn on the wrong display. I haven't played Doom Eternal, but Doom (2016) ran at a locked 60hz for me. I could push it higher, but at 1440p I'm already stretching the capabilities of this card. Game streaming, while partially broken (eg. you can't stream an individual display), never had that considerable of a performance impact for me. I streamed Valheim over Discord the other day, and only lost ~3 or 4 FPS overall.
Discord streaming literally halves my framerate and I have a 1080Ti with a Ryzen 3700X. So I just don't believe you. You won't see performance problems with Doom 2016 as even a medicore card back in 2012 can play that game decently (my old 660GTX played the game fine at medium on a i7 from 2014ish).
> Besides that, I understand where you're coming from. The experience isn't flawless, but neither is gaming on Windows. It's ultimately up to you to pick and choose your battles, but the majority of the games I play work relatively well, even compared to Windows.
It isn't flawless on Windows but it doesn't have any of the problems I've mentioned, it is generally very stable and it has worked consistently for year. I have no idea about the so called issues you have. I have a sizable library and I will fire up old games every so often and they work without issue.
However I know how to look after a Windows installation (a lot of people don't and that includes so called tech savvy users). I've played all sorts of games on Windows 10 fine. Games going back to 2002. The main problem I have is the resolution of my screen is soo high the fonts and sprites are tiny.
No, I had originally said
>...others give you a chance to have a flawless experience...
I'm sorry that Discord streaming doesn't work for you. It sounds like an isolated issue judging from the reactions of other commenters here, perhaps you should contact Discord? And as for Windows, I honestly don't know what you're going for here. Yes, games run "fine" on Windows, we are in agreement here. Many games also run "fine" on Linux, and that has been my argument from the start. If your concession is "it runs fine if you aren't tech savvy", then it sounds like this whole point is moot and we're back to square one.
This is splitting hairs. You were making out like it "just worked". It doesn't for me and I know plenty of other people that have run into the problems.
> I'm sorry that Discord streaming doesn't work for you. It sounds like an isolated issue judging from the reactions of other commenters here, perhaps you should contact Discord?
It does "work". The problem is the performance is crap. I have far better GPU than you do and I have a pretty decent CPU, so if you were playing the same game you would have it worse. The fact that it is that variable is the problem. It just quicker and easier to reboot into Windows and not have to deal with the issue at all. Which is the real point I am driving at.
> Many games also run "fine" on Linux, and that has been my argument from the start. If your concession is "it runs fine if you aren't tech savvy", then it sounds like this whole point is moot and we're back to square one.
They don't run fine on Linux . If you have even the most non-standard screen configuration things do not work correctly (as I said in my original post) and I have the same problem on different distros on different machines I own (I have some computers in the graveyard with different GPUs). I have messed around with GPU pass through (GT1030s are garbage so regular desktop video playback was poor but the gaming worked fine).
Gaming on linux is a massive compormise in terms of either quality, reliablility, performance or compatibility. You cheer leading to people in your comment and giving them a false impression of the situation will just sour those that attempt it against using alternative operating systems (I am an operating system enthusiast and I use some very odd things for fun).
I've got thousands of hours gaming on linux and I've never had an alt-tab problem. Kind of weird to go right to claiming people are outright lying, maybe there's another issue you're running into?
Rule 1 for having a good time on HN: Never argue with a green account.
If you actually have any solid rationale against my position other than the lies of these things never happening (even though on proton db there are reports of it happening in games).
Most of the arguments have anecdotes about how it works fine for them and then claim I am making anecdotes myself even though I have a very large steam and gog library and have tried a good sample of games on at least two machines now and a few distros. It isn't anecdotes when you have made a lot of effort to investigate the viability.
I really want to stop using Windows but unless the gaming situation improves I can't and people pretending these issues such as the ones I have mentioned don't exist they won't get solved.
Anyway it will be back to lurking again because this place is a total hive mind.
My green account rule is separate to the matter.
To expand a bit on some of the "tweaks" that must be endured....
To play War Thunder you must use the launcher to set it in a window at native screen resolution then start the game. Then you move the game to your desired monitor and Layer>Always on top, and Undecorate the window.
Boom. War Thunder works.
Do you have anything to back that up? In my personal experience Overwatch absolutely doesn't perform better on Linux. Haven't tried Borderlands, but in any case two games don't count as 'many'. Unless you mean all Borderlands games.
Also, I refrained from listing more games out of respect for your time. Out of the games I've tried, I've noticed better performance in the following: Team Fortress 2, MGSV The Phantom Pain, Valheim, Fallout 4, CS:GO, Insurgency, Mirror's Edge, Payday 2, Warframe, Prey, Kerbal Space Program, DOOM (2016), and Terraria.
If I had a larger library, I'd probably try more games.
https://www.youtube.com/c/FlightlessMango/videos
https://www.youtube.com/user/beronori/videos
My big complaint is the number of titles that receive a Platinum rating on ProtonDB, in spite of technical issues. I have purchased more than one title with a Platinum rating that had significant issues running on my machine.
This is compounded that Steam/ProtonDB user reports typically have an abysmal level of detail to replicate a working configuration. Someone got it to run flawlessly, but there is so much wine configuration jargon that each time I need to dig into the issues, I waste time on something that otherwise would work on Windows. I would love if there was a 'share my Proton configuration' per game that could be made available to the community.
That said, part of why I know anything about computers was trying to get games to work on my old 486. I sort of miss the feeling of reward of really wanting to play a game and needing to dig into the technical weeds to finally get the right boot disk. Proton almost scratches that itch for me, sadly there aren’t enough games anymore to really motivate me.
For me that was 2000.
And I am not sure what you meant by obtuse error messages? My steam clearly marks the games that don't run under Catalina (which as a few false positive actually -- since .NET game still runs despite being mark as not compatible).
I would like if the OS upgrade advised me of all the things that I had installed that would stop working.
https://support.steampowered.com/kb_article.php?ref=1055-ISJ...
But I thought Steam = Steam. My mistake :) I didn't consider the computational model until it was too late.
If you're using this article at all to make decisions around a Mac for gaming, dive a little deeper to make sure the game you want to play works on Catalina+ (generally requires a full 64 bit port).
Back to the actual topic: I had no idea Proton got this good. That's quite an achievement for Linux gaming. What's the state of modern GPU support?
As for GPU support, it's fine. I use an older GeForce card that works perfectly fine on Manjaro, and I haven't seen any driver issues so far (though I don't use Wayland, so ymmv). I've even been surprised by their control panel, which lets you easily enable G-sync on supported monitors, force compositing, micromanage your displays, adjust color calibration and more. I've heard the situation is much better on AMD cards, but I have yet to run into any issues with Nvidia.
Pretty good on AMD, still somewhat behind for Nvidia (Raytracing is being worked on, and DLSS is to come at some point). AMD is the preferred way to go for VR as well as they support reprojection on Linux, but Nvidia does not yet.
What's being worked on is DirectX Ray Tracing.
[1] Provides a virtual pc, game developers can't deduce whether you are on the cloud: https://shadow.tech/
[2] Gateway to a game instance: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce-now/
https://www.theregister.com/2016/09/23/capcom_street_fighter...
https://mobile.twitter.com/TheWack0lian/status/7793978407622...
I barely trust the proprietary video game code. There's no way I'll trust anti-cheating modules explicitly designed to own my machine.
Alternatively, nothing. From a computing freedom point of view, cheating is a form of playful hacking. The game is running on our computers, we should be able to alter it if we want.
So we shouldn't have competitive online gaming at all?
This kind of culling is also quite resource intensive on the server for games that have many players, large maps or complex geometry.
CSGO has partly implemented this, your client only gets information through some walls and objects, so you cannot see a player on the other side of the map. But it has quite simple maps and is overall not a complex game.
- Blockchain to validate ownership of items.
- Distributed processing of events among player instances to eliminate cheating. This may add latency, but will be small if used for validation only.
- Automatically grouping players by skill, so that skilled bots will not fight less skilled humans.
Many games already does this on the server side with client side prediction. But this does nothing for aimbot, wallhacks or other strictly client side hacks.
Bots? Competetive games typically have matchmaking, doesn't do anything against cheaters.
None of these works for most competitive games, especially fps.
Furthermore, 19 of those 50 games (38%) support Linux natively.
Native Linux support is worth about 1% of a game’s playerbase. Varies by game of course. But 1% is a very fair and reasonable starting point.
I appreciate Valve making Wine actually work for a broader set of games, but if we're being real, statistically nobody writes native games for Linux unless it is their labor of love, and the market share doesn't justify the energy.
God, I hate Tim Sweeney
https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey
Valve strategy is the wrong one
Here is how i would have done it:
- 30% steam tax if you only target 1 OS
- 25% steam tax if you target 2 OS
- 20% steam tax if you target 3 OS
That way developers would be more likely to offer NATIVE build of them game! (let's not forget you can easily target linux with Unity engine, which is, i'm pretty use, the most used engine on steam)
Proton perfectly showcase what is wrong with linux, hacks on hacks on hacks on workarounds, as a gamer I DONT WANT TO DEAL WITH THAT SH!T
And as a dev I DON'T WANT TO DEAL WITH RANDOM LINUX WINE SUPPORT TICKETS
For "Linux" to attract gamers, also need a better Desktop Environment, and better software ecosystem, it's not there yet.. sadly, and linux people can come at me whenever they want, it's the reality, and it's the reason why i'm using macOS
-- still a pain to take screenshot
-- still a pain to play games in fullscreen mode
-- still a pain to have a correct mouse movement behavior
-- still a pain to install software
-- still a pain to install my hardware driver
-- where all the donations go?
Software, hardware driver installation is so comfortable on Linux. Everything is a few commands away. Screenshots? I've never had trouble there.
You wrote Desktop Environment (capitalized). Linux isn't a Prepackaged End Product. You can get something like that from the popular distributions. I find Ubuntu plug and play, for example. That said, I usually assemble my own desktop environment, which is great for me, though I realise not everyone wants to put in the effort.
and it is even more sad because valve is basically alone on the PC market, they could do way more, and they should do way more because... :
it is even more more sad because if that job started many years ago, we'd have way more native linux game, and an overwall better eco system for linux
and what is EVEN MORE sad is now they'll need to rely on Microsoft if they ever want to do cloud gaming, because they'll need to pay for a shit ton of Microsoft server licences
if it was vulkan + linux, things would have been way easier for valve, wich is, i'm pretty sure, the reason why we still haven't heard of an official "steam cloud gaming solution" yet.. very very sad indeed
i am all in for Linux, but efforts shouldn't be all in into windows emulation layers, problem is elsewhere!
I think the best distro for gaming is Pop_OS!. They have a pretty reliable set of software and they also have an NVIDIA version of the distro which is great for newbies. It also comes with Flathub (instead of Snap) by default so latest version of most of the softwares that newbies will use are available (such as Spotify, Slack... and everything else Electron).
It'd be awesome if Valve could reward those who develop for Linux and properly support it, but it seems unlikely. At least Proton is improving regularly and is making it better in one way at least.
Proton is also essential for all of the games that already exist and that will never be ported to Linux. Any incentive to produce native ports for future games is not a replacement because (a) not every developer will take the bait, and (b) people will always still want to play old games.
Linux purists will always seem to argue against Proton on some philosophical ground but the idea that the ecosystem was in a better place before it just seems absurd. You can now quite often play your whole Steam library on Linux, pretty seamlessly. There is just no comparison to the situation a few years ago.
As a Linux gamer, what I want is to play all the games that I want to play. What I do not want is to waste my time with platform politics. 'Dealing with' the 'hacks on hacks' is already largely irrelevant, because mostly Proton just works.
After using it for a while, switching to Outlook or Thunderbird is really hard, as their interface is extremely overloaded. The Windows Mail display mode with two panes, left being combined inbox with mail grouped by threads and large tiles, right for the content and quick actions, that ALSO switches to a single pane mode when window is narrow (E.G. when tiling) is just the best thing ever. Is there anything like that for Linux?