TL;DR, they are integrating WINE and DXVK into the Linux Steam client to provide a compatibility layer for legacy Windows games to allow those games to run directly from Steam on Linux.
Personally, in the past few weeks I have been exceptionally displeased with W10 on my gaming rig. The last game that I knew would not run under WINE that kept it on my machine was Smite. I finally got sick of Smite last week and haven’t logged in since. I’ve been having a debate on moving my gaming rig to Linux and trying once more to make a break form Windows. Then this news dropped.
I know me. I’m not going to do it tonight, or tomorrow night. But I’m guessing by the weekend I’ll probably give it a serious go with this being the final nudge. World of Warcraft & Warframe are the two big Windows only titles on my machine right now that get regular play time. The rest of my library is either inactive or, and this is key, already has a Linux native version.
Guild-wise, Discord is both browser and has a Linux version. I’m writing this on Firefox running in a Linux VM so Discourse is fine. Holy poop, exciting times!
I’m not particularly invested in Linux or any particular choice. I am interested in seeing more options become available to dilute the overwhelming monopoly power that comes from having so little choice. I believe that the service provided will improve in response to the attractiveness of the competition.
In a similar vein, I’m hopeful that Twitch’s game store becomes competitive. I don’t care that it overtakes Steam, but take some market share and fight for my dollars. The same goes for the coming fight that Discord is looking to bring to Steam. Don’t care that there be a particular winner, but would love it if they all had to take each other seriously in competing for my dollars. Then each service would try things to attract us and novel aspects of the service would become more and more important in distinguishing the services from each other.
I agree. As long as they are truly providing what Steam does, which is a plethora of games across a wide range of gaming companies large and small. What’s honked me off so much about people who consider Origin a competitor to Steam is that Origin doesn’t do that. Let me just pop over to Origin and look up Doki Doki Literature Club. Nope, nada.
If they’re just going to offer a subset from partnered companies, that’s not competition and frankly, we can do without it.
@moriir In a manner of speaking, yes. I have been for years. My past several personal laptops have all run Linux exclusively. At least the last 2-3 have had Steam on them. I have had a bias to buying games with a Linux native version so I can have some gaming on the go.
As for this new thing, so far I’ve only tried two games. I was looking for a small game without a native version. Tried One Finger Death Punch and it didn’t work; but that game is listed as Bronze on WineDB so in hide sight that is expected. Then I tried Puzzle Quest. The process was dead simple. Press install, go through the dialogs that Steam always tosses up to install needed components, press Play, click through a dialog telling me that the way I’m running it is unsupported. It ran fine.
So it’s not perfect, many games will fail, but for those that work this is a giant step forward in convenience.
As for distribution I landed in the Ubuntu camp years ago. I’m a former Debian fan so am most comfortable with DEB based distributions. I’ve heard of Solus, haven’t looked at it. Quick search, it has a MATE version and MATE is my flavor of Ubuntu. While Ubuntu does not install the proprietary nVidia drivers it is a simple task to get them installed after the fact. And if you need later versions you can just toss a PPA into your sources list and you’re good. But if Solus works for ya, go for it. I’m actually debating Ubuntu-MATE or Manjaro for the gaming rig right now.
Oh, and a quick aside. I staged my machine last night for dual-booting. Cleaned off all my games save for Warframe and WoW (60+Gb between the two of them). I started with 60Gb free on my 1Tb drive. I finished with 625Gb free. Me, packrat games? Nevah!
Definetly going to look into this as I have been more and more displeased with the monopoly Microsoft windows has on games and I would have moved exclusively to linux ages ago if there had been a viable option available
For the record, the great Greyed Linux migration of 2018 has begun. Forgot my gaming rig had a 2Tb drive just sitting there so instead of cramming both OSes on my 1Tb drive I just emptied the 2Tb drive, tossed Ubuntu-MATE on it, and am working on setting things up.
I gotta say, I found it amusing that I was installing MATE on one monitor while playing Dungeon Crawl online on the other monitor. Was the fastest OS install I’ve had in ages.
3 hours later (most of it actually playing)… WoW installed via Lutris, ~45FPS in town almost pegged at 60 out and about. Warframe via Steam Play, bombs. WarFrame via Lutris. Pegged at 60FPS. My litmus test was WoW and Warframe. Not bad for a quick first impression.
