
Valve's Proton Has Brought 6000 Windows Games to Linux So Far - ekianjo
https://boilingsteam.com/proton-brought-about-6000-games-to-linux-so-far/
======
chungus
Amazing, you can buy a triple A title and have it just work out of the box.
I'm so happy with Valve's support for linux. And of course the thousands of
hours of work that have gone into Wine. It's becoming a more reliable
experience to play old windows games using wine than trying to run them on
windows 10.

~~~
m-p-3
Sadly most games nowadays comes with multiplayer as the main product, so that
anticheat engines are a necessity to make the game fair for everyone. Those
aren't friendly to Wine/Proton, therefore I try to stick to mostly single-
player games.

With the kids of how life is going faster everyday, I cannot afford to play on
long stretches of time, and being unable to pause on a multiplayer game on a
whim (which makes sense) makes it logical to go with a single-player game, as
I can simply pause the game and pick it right up when I can, on my own
schedule.

I'm glad that Valve is doing that kind of work, it benefits everyone.

~~~
syshum
One of my biggest frustrations with modern gaming is the lack of single payer
games, everyone focuses on Multiplayer, I have zero interest in playing with
others,

I play games to escape from people.... People suck, I do not want them in my
games

~~~
na85
Conversely, I can't fathom how people can enjoy long stretches of
singleplayer.

I occasionally play a bit of Cities Skylines every few months, but if there
isn't another human involved, games just can't hold my interest.

Where's the satisfaction/fun come from if you're just beating some silly
algorithm?

~~~
wtetzner
Not all games are about "beating" something.

~~~
na85
Can you name one game, electronic or otherwise, that doesn't involve "beating"
something, whether it's the other player, the rules, or even just random
chance (dice rolls)?

I honestly can't think of any. If there are no goals (and goals imply
obstacles to be overcome in pursuit of them) then you've got a toy, not a
game.

~~~
farias0
They may not be "games", but titles like Gone Home are still video games, they
aren't about "beating" something, and they aren't simply toys either.

~~~
na85
>They may not be "games", but titles like Gone Home are still video games

They may not be games, but they're still games? I think whether or not Gone
Home can be considered a game is highly debatable. I haven't tried it, but it
seems that the elements that make a game a game are missing.

That it's available on Steam is completely orthogonal to whether or not it's a
game.

~~~
alleyshack
I'd strongly recommend looking into the Aesthetics of Play[1][2]. It's a
framework that talks about eight primary reasons why people play video games,
and only one of those reasons is "Challenge" (i.e., beating a goal). Games
like Gone Home, Animal Crossing, The Sims, Minecraft, etc all reflect
different play aesthetics, and are intended for people who enjoy different
things than pure Challenge.

[1] [https://youtu.be/uepAJ-rqJKA](https://youtu.be/uepAJ-rqJKA)

[2] [https://theangrygm.com/gaming-for-fun-part-1-eight-kinds-
of-...](https://theangrygm.com/gaming-for-fun-part-1-eight-kinds-of-fun/)

------
chaorace
Proton has been fantastic for me, it finally gave me what I needed to reclaim
my Windows partition and go full-on Arch! In some cases, running the Windows
version inside Proton has actually worked out better for me than the native
port (Dead Cells, for example. The native port crashes the Steam overlay and
lacks Steam Controller support, but running the Windows version in Proton is
seamless)

I highly encourage you guys to check out the tech making this possible: DXVK.
It's incredible what you can do with these lower level APIs. I'm not sure if
this is the right word, but "meta shader pipelines" like this are absolutely
the way of the future in emulation. See also: Dolphin Ubershaders.

Ubershaders: [https://dolphin-
emu.org/blog/2017/07/30/ubershaders/](https://dolphin-
emu.org/blog/2017/07/30/ubershaders/)

~~~
AnIdiotOnTheNet
> In some cases, running the Windows version inside Proton has actually worked
> out better for me than the native port

I, for one, am not surprised. Windows userland APIs are more stable,
consistent, and well documented than their Linux equivalents.

~~~
elteto
The implication from the comment was that Wine is better at running old
Windows games than Windows itself. I’m not sure where this Linux vs. Windows
comparison is coming from.

~~~
coldpie
No, you mis-read. chaorace said that Windows EXEs running in Proton gives them
better results than running the Linux binary that the game developer ships
("native"). AnIdiotOnTheNet stated that Windows APIs are more stable and
better documented than Linux APIs.

As a long-time Linux dev (see my profile), I have also found this to be true.
Linux userland APIs are unstable and change all the time. Some transitions
that come to mind that have affected me personally: ALSA->pulse;
libudev->libudev2->systemd; gstreamer 0.10->1.0. All of those changes required
modifications to my software, and the backwards-compat tools that are provided
are buggy and insufficient. Meanwhile, you can still write and run winmm[1]
applications on Windows 10, and they will work in almost all cases. It's
simply the case that the win32 API is more stable than Linux userland APIs, so
it's entirely plausible that games will run better in Wine, which shares that
stable ABI, than they will on Linux, especially as time goes on and Linux
userland shifts yet again.

[1] winmm dates to the Windows 3.x days!

~~~
JoeAltmaier
I've been suspicious of user-led development (e.g. open source), expecially
Linux. Its popular to put in new features; less so to test, endure backward
compatibility, control user experience. So it doesn't get done (much) in
Linux.

My cohort have a phrase they attribute to me: Linux is not ready until they
get the 'Have Disk' dialog.

~~~
coldpie
Eh, I don't agree. Linux has been "ready" for my usecase for more than a
decade. There's pros and cons to each certainly, but I find Linux much more
pleasant to use than Windows, and I like actually being in control of and able
to modify the software I run. Until I can do that, _Windows_ is not ready for
_me_ :)

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Right. But the point is the vast, vast (non-HNer) use case is not in favor of
Linux. For every 1 Linux-on-the-desktop person, there are what, 1M others?

~~~
resplin
I hope that I never see the "Have disk" button again. The Linux way of
distributing hardware drivers is so much easier.

As for usage, linux on the desktop is between .5% and 2% market share. And
there reason to suspect that Linux usage is undercounted.

[https://www.netmarketshare.com/operating-system-market-
share...](https://www.netmarketshare.com/operating-system-market-share.aspx)

[https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/](https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/)

[https://www.statista.com/statistics/268237/global-market-
sha...](https://www.statista.com/statistics/268237/global-market-share-held-
by-operating-systems-since-2009/)

[https://hostingtribunal.com/blog/operating-systems-market-
sh...](https://hostingtribunal.com/blog/operating-systems-market-share/)

~~~
AnIdiotOnTheNet
> The Linux way of distributing hardware drivers is so much easier.

You mean having to recompile them whenever there's a new kernel because the
developers consider a stable driver ABI to be abhorrent?

~~~
coldpie
I don't think I've ever compiled a driver. So no, I don't think that's what
they meant.

~~~
AnIdiotOnTheNet
Only because the disto does it for you. If they mean because the driver is
distributed from a centralized repository over the internet... that's how it
works in Windows too, only Windows also has the option to use alternate media
and a stable enough driver ABI to have that make some kind of sense.

------
gpm
Yesterday I played civ6 with 4 people on 3 operating systems.

The Mac user couldn't fullscreen the game and had weird rendering artifacts.

One of the windows users had the game take 10x as long to load as it should
have (commparing to mac/Linux/windows on vaguely similar hardware)

The other windows user kept dropping. Note that we were all sitting at the
same kitchen table, with reasonably good wifi.

Linux worked flawlessly.

I'm sure there was some luck involved, but Linux gaming has truly come a long
way from being the most finicky platform.

~~~
wayneftw
And yet, I still have trouble running normal software that was built for
Linux, on Linux.

Every set of updates might cause a problem that I've never seen on Windows or
a Mac. I had an Ubuntu machine that only lasted 2 weeks before it wouldn't
boot one day after an update. Never figured that one out - it was an
experiment to see how much easier Manjaro was to setup and add software to
than Ubuntu. (The answer: it's much, much easier.)

~~~
Topgamer7
I run Manjaro too. Having up to date versions of software is nice instead of
having to wait until ppa's are updated.

Also there is a community version that includes just i3 the tiling window
manager out of the box.

------
0xdeadbeee
Proton has been a game changer for me: after many years on Linux only I ended
up building a gaming rig a few years ago as I wanted to get back into
gaming.The plan was to dual boot and only use Windows for gaming, but in
practice rebooting all the time is just too much of a pain so I was using
Windows almost exclusively there, with all the related frustrations. About 6
months ago I got myself a new SSD and made a fresh install of Linux with steam
and Proton and I've been amazed a the performance and game support. Of course
not all games work out of the box (and some not at all), but I haven't had to
boot to Windows in months. And for the games I play the frame rate is at least
as good as what I used to have on Windows (on a couple of games I do get
occasional drops, but nothing too distracting). I play a lot of Assetto Corsa
Competizione and my G27 steering wheel even worked out of the box!

~~~
augusto-moura
In other discussion someone pointed out about passing a gpu to a windows
kvm[1] and getting the output back to linux[2]. I never tried but seems really
promising, might try it someday

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22905390#22906984](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22905390#22906984)

[2] [https://looking-glass.hostfission.com](https://looking-
glass.hostfission.com)

------
runjake
Now, the kickers behind the headlines (that nobody told me up front):

1\. The majority of the games do not support multiplayer on Linux, due to
dependency on Windows-specific anticheat software.

2\. Many, many of the games themselves aren't totally stable on Linux. So,
expect a crash or two at critical gameplay moments.

That said, Proton is a great effort and it's great they're pushing Linux
forward.

~~~
blaser-waffle
> 1\. The majority of the games do not support multiplayer on Linux, due to
> dependency on Windows-specific anticheat software.

Not even anti-cheat, just different implementations of things in the Linux and
Windows versions. IIRC Paradox games don't have any strong anti-cheat, but
Linux and Windows users can't play due to how their systems handle network
time synchronization.

> 2\. Many, many of the games themselves aren't totally stable on Linux. So,
> expect a crash or two at critical gameplay moments.

Many, many of the games themselves aren't totally stable on Windows, either.
Bethesda games (Fallout, Skyrim) come to mind -- desktop Skyrim had all sorts
of bugs and crashes on Windows.

And why would it crash _only_ at critical gameplay moments? Sounds like FUD.

~~~
wyldfire
> And why would it crash only at critical gameplay moments? Sounds like FUD.

hah! at least back when I played nonstop twitch games there were no moments
that were non-critical gameplay moments ;)

------
danielscrubs
The only things these things teach me is that "Platinum - It runs perfectly"
is that ProtonDB creators clearly have a different view on perfect.

"Doom Eternal runs perfectly - it just have some pink flickering every
minute!"

"runs perfectly - it just closes when you try to start it."

"runs perfectly - multiplayer doesn't work though."

Microsoft can change DirectX whenever they want, that goalpost is always going
to change to suit them, so why even play them at their game?

Create a standard, ask Unity and Unreal Engine to support it, take a smaller
cut when buying the Linux version on Steam.

~~~
fakeSocialMedia
Linux server is so perfect, I don't understand why desktop has so many
problems.

I suppose that's a different topic.

~~~
eklavya
Linux server is perfect because there is huge commercial demand for it. Linux
desktop has problems because there is almost no commercial demand for it. Good
things require money because effort isn't free.

~~~
city41
ChromeOS is a great demonstration of this. A polished, solid, very good
desktop experience based on Linux because a large company has a vested
interest in its success.

------
tgb
I hadn't heard of Proton before and the article doesn't explain. Here's what
the GitHub repo for it says [1]:

> Proton is a tool for use with the Steam client which allows games which are
> exclusive to Windows to run on the Linux operating system. It uses Wine to
> facilitate this.

My question is, what's the "secret sauce"? If this is in fact that much more
successful than Wine, what's different? Is Valve putting lots of dev time into
it? Or is it just pre-configured for ease of use?

[1]
[https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton](https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton)

~~~
Zhyl
In addition to the what others have said (DXVK, pre-configured WINE, D9VK),
the Steam client integration is also a MASSIVE quality of life boost and a
serious lowering of the barrier to entry.

With Proton, the Windows versions of games appear in your library [1] and you
just click to download and install [2]. And then that's it! No faff, no
managing wine versions. If someone is intending to play a whitelisted game
then for all intents and purposes their UX is exactly the same as playing the
game on Windows - which is to say "very straightforward".

[1] By default only whitelisted games appear. While this whitelist is
expanding, it's also possible to enable Proton to automatically run for all
non-native games.

[2] A warning window will pop up to inform the user that a compatibility layer
is being used, but otherwise it's identical.

~~~
snvzz
>[1] By default only whitelisted games appear. While this whitelist is
expanding, it's also possible to enable Proton to automatically run for all
non-native games.

Or better, enable it for the game you want to try. Properties -> use
compatibility tool.

~~~
Zhyl
This also allows you to use different version of Proton for different games
(e.g. it's fixed in a beta build or broken in the latest build) and to enable
Proton for games which have a native version!

------
w0utert
Is anyone using Linux + Proton for in-home streaming?

I'm seriously considering to completely ditch Windows 10 and move my gaming to
PS4/5 + Linux/Proton, but I still want to be able to stream games from the
game PC to the steam link in the living room. Does this work just as well with
Linux/Proton as Windows?

~~~
narcolepsy
Yeah I've had it running and streaming! Have run a few games this was - ARMA3,
GTAV, South Park: Stick of Truth. All worked well. Have also tried running the
windows steam client in WINE and had a few more issues, but as ever YMMV.

The performance isn't _quite_ as good (very close to windows perf levels), but
quite a few anti-cheat systems will not work in Proton (even less so in WINE).

~~~
dmos62
> quite a few anti-cheat systems will not work in Proton

A lot of interesting "hacks" (sorry for calling gaming on Linux a hack) are
made impractical by this.

Another is that you can buy a miner's GPU (no video output, but much cheaper)
and modify the drivers to route video through integrated graphics VO. Or,
modify drivers to support SLI on any nvidia card. These driver modifications
require running Windows in a special mode, which triggers anti-cheats. Maybe
there's a way around that. Haven't heard of it being attempted on Linux. By
the way, these driver modifications are just removing artificial restrictions.

------
nihil75
Hate to be that guy but nobody mentioned it - Lets not forget Proton is a
wrapper for Wine, and we're here today thanks to many many years of community
effort.

~~~
jfkebwjsbx
Not just Wine. Mainly DXVK and related projects are what enabled the latest
boom.

~~~
nihil75
Yes, Vulkan is awesome, but its biggest benefit apart for performance is DX11+
support. Wine had DX9/10 for ages now, and many Proton games don't depend on
Vulkan to run.

~~~
jfkebwjsbx
D3D10 and D3D11 are very similar (I remember DXVK claiming that, which is why
the supported both at once).

I don't think we had usable D3D10 support before DXVK, but I may be wrong.

------
philzook
It seems superfluous when we already have the greatest game ever made
available right in your package manager: TuxRacer.

------
GormHouj
While proton works wonderfully, I've found that most of the time the anticheat
systems do not run at all. So multi-player is usually disabled, even if the
game runs flawlessly as a port. The Halo collection let me log into Xbox live,
but then fails to run anticheat, so you are left with campaign. Same with
PUBG.

So many games run extremely well that it's not a deal breaker for me. My last
gaming rig was on Zorin Ultimate.

------
eximius
I don't know what rock I was living under, but I finally tried it yesterday
after a misadventure forced me to upgrade to Windows 10 to support a new nvme
drive.

Tabletop Simulator, The Witcher 3, Endless Legend, all play perfectly. Haven't
had the chance to try more.

Definitely a fantastic effort by Valve and Wine.

~~~
shrimp_emoji
[https://www.protondb.com/](https://www.protondb.com/) is a crucial companion,
letting you generally know whether stuff runs.

Mentally-downgrade ratings by one, as a rule of thumb.

Also, tfw the native Linux port runs worse than the Proton version PepeHands

------
dsego
For me it worked better than Windows for the Bioshock remastered series. On
Win 10 the games would crash every few times during saving. I tried every
workaround I could find but nothing helped. On Ubuntu the games worked fine.

------
snarfy
Sadly, a lot of the games I want to play have anti-cheat crap

~~~
recursive
You may feel it's crap only because you aren't able to run it. Players whose
games cheaters are being excluded from are more likely to be glad for it.

------
flohofwoe
IMHO "emulating" the (fairly small) subset of the traditional Win32 and
DirectX APIs required for typical games might even make sense on Windows
itself, should Microsoft one day decide to deprecate Win32 in favour of
something more "modern" (heavy air-quotes).

The window creation and input event handling of Win32, together with D3D9 and
D3D11 (the really popular versions of D3D), and whatever is the current audio
API on Windows (this seems to be the least stable area) have proven to be
quite fantastic for games, maybe the best set of low-level APIs needed by
games outside of actual gaming console.

Porting those APIs to other platforms, instead of porting the games doesn't
seem such a bad idea at all in hindsight.

~~~
qplex
>"emulating" the (fairly small) subset of the traditional Win32 and DirectX
APIs required for typical games might even make sense on Windows itself,
should Microsoft one day decide to deprecate

I recently tried to run some WinXP-era games on modern hardware, and had
absolutely no luck on Windows 10.

However some of the games ran fine on Wine (and 64-bit Linux).

The only downside I see to emulation is latency, but for many games this
doesn't matter, and it's worthy to keep them runnable like this.

~~~
outworlder
> The only downside I see to emulation is latency

There shouldn't be significant latency issues, unless there is large amounts
of (CPU) work that's required to make large data structures compatible(for a
silly example, imagine that the texture formats are different and you need to
convert between them). Or if you need to simulate a single function call in a
tight loop with several calls.

But the overhead is usually not much more significant than what you get when
you import a library to call OS functions on your behalf, versus calling them
yourself.

------
bsharitt
I don't have a lot of of super current AAA titles, so most of my games that
didn't already work on Linux(most of what I buy) already worked on Wine. But
with the Proton integration, I do appreciate that I don't have to run a
separate Wine instance of steam and instead running my Windows games is far
more transparent. I guess the only minor downside is that since the whole
process is so transparent it makes it a bit more jarring when I do come across
a game that doesn't work.

------
zelphirkalt
Well, of course all of that would not have been possible, without the long
hard work and experiences of all the people involved with creating WINE in the
first place.

That said, I think it's great that Valve contributes. It might be naive
though, to believe, that they'd do any such thing, if the license did not
force them to. I am quite sure, that they'd see some kind of advantage to
take, if those contributions could be limited to only their own platform.

------
nihil75
Honorable mentions: WineTricks, and its successor - Lutris. If you can't get
it to run on Proton (or not a Steam game), try those.

------
Insanity
Adding to the anecdata, but steam Proton has been great for me under Debian.
I've been gaming on linux on and off for about a decade (mostly with wine
before or the few games that did support linux).

Proton has been a perfect experience for me.

------
everdrive
I've had a great experience with Proton. Glad it's getting some exposure.

------
prince005
If Cyberpunk 2077 runs on linux, I'll remove windows today itself..

------
ressetera
Porting games seems pretty hard IMO. Why isn't there an intensive to port the
latest Adobe CC software [1] too?

I know a few designers & video editors who use passthrough to run Adobe
software on their beefy workstations, which I would also prefer as I'd rather
not use multiarch on my linux system.

[1]
[https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iI...](https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iId=38516)

~~~
coldpie
To be blunt, funding. No one is paying to improve Adobe CC in Wine.

~~~
jannes
Exactly. And to be fair, I doubt Valve is making a lot of money off of Proton
on Linux. I consider it more of a philantropy project from Gabe Newell.

~~~
blihp
While I do appreciate Valve's support of Linux, it's hardly altruism: it gives
them some room to negotiate with/pressure Microsoft. (i.e. while it would be
painful to push even a fraction of their users over to it, it is an option
Valve has) Compare that to the situation app developers on mobile platforms
find themselves in these days. So it's smart strategically even if it doesn't
translate into big $$$ currently.

------
blopp99
I was a ubuntu only user for the last 3 or 4 years. Even though part of what I
did on my computer was gaming, there was a side of 3d design which I was put
in a bad position when I started to get more hardcore. I decided to buy
windows and try it. No regrets W10 is good and universal. I would consider
going back if Linux has more cad programs compatibily. In the time being I'm
just gonna miss Ubuntu remembering to mute if my earphones are plugged in.

------
barbs
I've only discovered Proton recently and I'm very impressed. I'm no stranger
to using Wine to get games running in Linux, but Proton makes the whole
process so easy. And Wine itself has come a long way even in the past few
years. GTA V was the reason I kept a Windows partition when I played it a few
years ago, and now it works amazingly with the latest version of Wine/Proton.

------
mongol
Is Microsoft Flight Simulator running on Linux? It used to be the gold
standard for "PC compatibility" early in the PC era.

------
acomjean
I’m confused.

Is steam selling linux games with proton as Linux games? Or do you have to buy
the windows version and run it with proton.

I got black Mesa on Linux from steam (works great), but is that a proton game?
Last time I browsed Linux games on steam most seemed like they were indie with
very few aaa titles..

I do feel Linux has arrived.

~~~
account42
No, games marked as Linux on the Steam store do not use Proton (by default)
but are native (either ported or in some cases wrapped with Wine/whatever by
the developer).

Black Mesa uses the Source engine for which Valve created their own ToGL
wrapper but it's compile-time and much smaller than Wine.

------
bmorbach
Annoyingly, games that use Valve's own DRM/encryption scheme CEG don't work:
[https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/issues/753](https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/issues/753)

------
Lewton
Proton worked decently for VR last I tried 6 months ago. But I started it up
again recently and everything is broken now, partially due to steam updates
and partially due to updates to Unity. The entire reason I moved to Linux was
because I loathe forced updates >:(

~~~
ekianjo
Sadly if you are into VR the only real viable OS right now is Windows...

~~~
Lewton
I only need a working VR videoplayer and a couple of experiences for demoing
to people. Which 6 months ago was what was available and now nothing works,
not even valves own VR tutorial

~~~
ekianjo
Out of curiosity on which distro are you?

~~~
Lewton
Linux Mint

------
gldev3
One just can't thank enought the contributors for ther incredible work and
effort.

------
StavrosK
How can I tell if a game is playable via Proton versus being natively
supported?

~~~
Zhyl
You can check for individual games or run a check against your whole steam
library (by authenticating with Steam) at ProtonDB [1].

[1] www.protondb.com

~~~
StavrosK
That's very useful, thank you.

EDIT: Clickable: [https://www.protondb.com](https://www.protondb.com)

------
0x1ch
I remember when proton was literally a pipe dream, and that was only only a
few years ago. The improvement across linux drivers for GPUs as well as these
technologies is great.

------
iszomer
ProtonDB is a good place to check for compatibility. I still have trouble
trying to get Elite Dangerous to work on my Linux machine at home.

------
divs1210
I have been playing exclusively on Wine + Mac for a long time now. It takes
some minor fiddling, but works for the most part.

------
moneysake
I think the main problem with playing games on linux is that the anticheats
for the games can't run properly on linux

------
outworlder
I was actually pleasantly surprised by the number of games that my steam
library listed as linux-compatible.

VR games are a large omission.

~~~
coldpie
VR is supported by Proton. Not all games work, of course, but it's not in
itself a blocker.

------
antjanus
Yep! I'm running Final Fantasy III without a single issue which is just
astounding.

------
RedBeetDeadpool
Oh thank god. The more I use windows the more I just want to pull my hair out.

------
papermachete
Do nvidia profile inspector and reshade work in Linux?

------
mikewang
I love games and linux. But never play one in linux.

------
lugermorph
The day Adobe apps get ported to Linux is the day I fully switch to Linux.
Sorry GIMP, but you kinda suck.

~~~
BubRoss
I would say that what is already available for linux is far better than what
adobe has for image editing and video editing. Nuke and Houdini are much
better for editing images than photoshop. Davinci Resolve is a much better
video editor than premiere. Painting and vector illustrations are where Linux
doesn't have good alternatives as far as I know. At this point there are
multiple web based image editors that are far better than the low bar that
Gimp sets. Gimp is a relic that most people would be better off forgetting
about.

~~~
tombert
I think Krita is a pretty nice digital painting product; it's good enough to
where I'd consider paying for it honestly.

------
lordleft
Any issue with nvidia cards?

~~~
mouldysammich
I never had any issues with my nvidia card when i was using it

------
wdb
What about macOS?

------
pengaru
Valve should ship the Steam Client native for ARM/Raspberry Pi Linux users.

It's a fairly large underserved community when it comes to gaming, and they're
practically all Linux boxes, and the latest gens are perfectly capable of
modern 3D gaming, if not all the AAA titles.

~~~
Narishma
How many Steam games work on ARM?

~~~
pengaru
Fewer than there would be if Steam actually shipped ARM support to those who
wanted it.

It's a classic chicken-egg problem.

I have a game on Steam, it builds and runs on ARM/RPi just fine, but there's
no ARM in the list of architectures on Steamworks because the client doesn't
support it. So I don't bother shipping the ARM build despite having one here
and one of my artists using an RPi4 as their primary desktop with a
functioning build of the game for testing.

We're talking about commercial interests here. If a game has been ported to
native linux/SteamOS, it's likely just a recompile away from having ARM
support. If the Steam client were made available to Pi users the demand would
appear on the store for more ARM-compatible games and we'd all immediately
jump on the opportunity for more sales from practically zero effort.

