This is just a vent post / unpopular opinion (? unsure if unpopular). Specifically on Steam. Linux native builds are so buggy and glitchy and never work right. Always some combination of:
- No sound
- Old outdated version missing content and incompatible online
- Controllers don’t work
- Crashes, doesn’t launch at all
- Horrific FPS
- Cutscenes don’t play
- Weird game breaking softlocks and logic errors, like critical items not spawning and dialogue not triggering
- Zero support and low priority from the developer
I have none of these issues with Proton. Proton works perfectly fine, I love it. This only happens when a game doesn’t use Proton. As soon as I change to Proton all issues are resolved. This problem has followed me across distros with fresh installs, so it’s not a config issue. Yes I have the correct drivers and such, NVIDIA proprietary unfortunately. It’s so strange, you’d imagine the native build would run better not worse.
The worst part is, it’s not easy to tell when a game will launch using Linux native as it’s the default priority. Games can even silently update and stop working when they gain Linux native “support”. You have to manually go in to properties and override compatibility to proton. Normally I do this when I notice a suspiciously large amount of bugs and I’m like hmm… oh look it’s Steam Linux Runtime 1.0 again.
I wish there was a way to just force Proton globally. Either that or people actually test and maintain their Linux builds. I’d rather there be no Linux build at all if they’re going to be so terrible.
Edit to add commented example list of games:
I couldn’t get a full list because I was relying on having set a flag forcing a specific version of Proton to identify which games were problematic to jog my memory… Unfortunately this data is local only and was not synced between computers, so it was lost when I changed distro. Just from my limited memory though, I can list some that I distinctly remembered when writing up my post, though it’s many more in reality. It’s also surprisingly hard to see whether a game even has a Linux native version, you usually have to wait for the store page to load and scroll down to compatibility, which is just annoying.
Games that worked well:
- Factorio
- Stardew Valley
- Baba Is You
- All Valve games (TF2, DotA2, etc)
Games that had issues:
- 1001 Spikes
- The Case of the Golden Idol
- Broforce
- Spiritfarer: Farewell Edition
- The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe
- Cook, Serve, Delicious
- Valheim
- A Game About Feeding A Black Hole
- Audiosurf 2
- Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes
- Slay the Princess
- TIS-100
- Cassette Beasts
- Brotato
- Bit.Trip runner
- Don’t starve together
- Unpacking
- While True: Learn
- Fez
- Magicka 2 (controllers not working)
- One Shot (critical gameplay bug right at the end. Had to watch a let’s play to finish it. I messaged the dev who left me on Read)
- Just Shapes & Beats (no sound)
- Tiny Bookshop (no sound)
- HiveSwap (critical gameplay bug right at the end, and savefile bricked, had to watch a let’s play and the dev ignored me) (I’m not a “fan” I swear, please don’t lynch me)
I’m getting tired and I’m sure you get the point. Almost every game in my experience has been unplayable on Linux runtime. I’m glad it’s working well for you though.
Part of that is Linux doesn’t really have backwards compatibility as I understand it. When you update and some libraries get updated, the old versions are just… gone. So any application that relied on those will no longer function until it’s also updated.
You also generally can’t even install the old version of the libraries, because the name is the same across versions so having multiple versions installed isn’t possible.
Windows does have really good backwards compatibility, which carries over to proton since it’s mimicking windows APIs and libraries.
Yeah I remember once I couldn’t use most .appimage programs because the way those were run changed and anything old was completely unusable. I tried to install the component that old app images used but it wasn’t possible. Which is just insane to me lol, it’s a huge problem
Here, in a nutshell, is my theory for why what you are describing is so common:
Almost nobody develops a game on Linux, with an engine you can build from source, and use to make the game, on Linux.
If you do… do that… your Linux native game will probably run fine.
But! Almost every major game engine you’ve ever heard of, that says it supports Linux, in the sense of you can build/run the game engine itself on Linux?
They’re full of shit.
Their engines do not actually work on Linux, half the time you can’t even compile them, they don’t even know half the dependencies they actually have. They throw insane errors all the time, because you’re just alpha testing their attempt at porting their engine to Linux.
They just say ‘we added Linux support!’ and nobody ever actually tries to verify this, because Linux based game devs are using one of the fairly small number of engines that… actually work on Linux.
(Hah, or they’re basically just building their own engine, or layering together actually platform agnostic rendering/physics/networking/whatever libraries into basically a custom engine)
Valve, for example, has figured it out.
HL2? Linux native build, running on SteamOS?
Works great.
Godot? Use GDScript, not C#, build the game on Linux?
Also works great.
Most games devs are actually just full of shit when they pretend they understand anything about Linux.
Maybe check out Road To Vostok if you want to see what one guy can do with Godot and a few years.
Its not impossible… most games devs just have God Complexes, its just how it is, very rare to find some that are both humble and competent.
This makes sense to me. I tried to run Unity and UE5 once on Linux. Fuck it’s annoying to even get the SDK running. Valve’s games are perfect on Linux and run like a dream, I wish more games were like that, but it has to start at the tooling level.
Ok, double post, but I may have just answered my own question at the end there:
https://github.com/Zylann/godot_voxel
Pro: Seems to actually do what I was trying to do, and then some, holy shit.
Con: Apparently, the main version of this is basically a rolling fork of Godot, because it needs so much to be done in c++… and… well, that might mean it runs into the exact problem that spawned this whole conversation: reliably reproduceable builds in different OS contexts.
Sorry the only 3d game I ever made was a Doom clone, and it was pretty bad lol. I don’t really know what a voxel even is, I kind of just do things by feel haha.
I I’ll definitely try out Godot, I kind of just gave up on making any games when I switched to Linux about 7 years ago. It’ll be cool if it works
Godot actually has uh…
https://github.com/func-godot/func_godot_plugin
Basically… works to both rip and also create Quake, Quake 2, Half Life 1 maps.
Its also a pretty extensive framework.
If you wanna step up a bit from a Doom clone, to a Quake clone… you could do it with this.
There’s also Godot VMF…
https://github.com/H2xDev/GodotVMF
Can actually rip and convert HL2, TF2, L4D… basically Source up to roughly 2013 maps.
I don’t think its much of a map creator/editor though? I think the idea is you just actually make your map in Hammer, and then basically import it into Godot.
I managed to … mostly correctly … decompile.or convert or whatever, some maps.from NeoTokyo, an old HL2 mod, so… will probably at least mostly work for HL2 mods?
It does rely on the actual SourceSDK though, so… probably not ok for commercial use?
As far as I can tell, if you want a decent level of tooling…
I dunno, so far I haven’t been able to find anything more … straightforward but also powerful if you know what you’re doing… combo… than Godot + GECS.
GECS is a … honestly shockingly well developed entity component system framework for Godot.
If you wanna do a 2D game, Godot basically already has everything you need, but yeah… 3D isn’t quite there yet, though it is making strides. The recent IK rework does help bridge a major … feature parity gap with more ‘big boy’ engines.
GECS helps a good deal too, but yeah, its not Source(2) lol.
I dunno shit why not: Any chance you know of something like a Godot 3d level mapping system based around bsps or octrees or something?
I know there are voxel frameworks, but… lot of people are looking to make something other than minecraft.
I’ve been futzing about trying to figure out how to cajole some system of nested 3d gridmaps into a kind of octree system, but with vertices inside of the grid space, and then you’d have the equivalent of a 3d clipmap deciding which chunks of the grid space to render verticies at what level of precision… but i feel like im trying to weave together hyperspace half the time, which hurts my overdeveloped ape brain.
Linux has a fundamental problem with native builds of closed source applications.
This is lack of true retro compatibility.
On windows you can still run software made for windows XP with more or less issues. But windows api are more stable and it does have retro compatibility tools built in.
Linux does not, once in a while the OS APIs change, and any software not patched for those changes might stop working completely.
I have been thinking for a while. That it would be great if some sort of “linux retro compatibility” tool existed.
Similar to launching a program in windows with “window 7 compatibility” to be able to launch linux apps woth “Kernel 4 compatibility” or something like that.
This is basically what Flatpak and AppImage solve isn’t it? They bundle everything needed to run the app along with it.
AFAIK the flakpak doesn’t bundle the linux kernel. And sometimes the kernel itself is the problem. Specially with programs that run very close to metal.
One thing Torvalds enforces is not breaking userland. So it shouldn’t be kernel problems. More likely its some other lib that breaks compatibility.
The Steam Linux Runtime is basically this! It’s a bunch of fixed versions of OS libraries that games can use.
The kernel itself actually needs nothing special, because the kernel devs are VERY serious about backwards compatibility. One of their core rules is “you do NOT break userspace”. Library devs… not so much.
– Frost
That would be really cool and probably solve all the problems
I had to discontinue Linux builds of my game on Steam because the game engine I’m using has a very buggy and unfinished Linux runtime. I’m not happy about it because I wanted native support, but ironically proton is a better user expertise
Yeah I can see that being a problem. Not much you can do if the game dev tool doesn’t really support the platform properly
Usually its the developers neglecting their Linux port rather than it being Linux itself that is at fault unfortunately. So, unless its a Paradox game or Valve game, I would suggest running it through Proton anyway
Yeah that’s what I meant. I wasn’t saying Linux is bad, just that the native games are untested afterthoughts
Let’s say most devs abandon native Linux and basically everything moves to Proton. Game devs start testing on it, then targeting it. Windows as a gaming platform withers away.
A Windows API, on Linux, is now the stable gaming API. It sets the standard.
…I’m content with that future.
I mean, the irony would be delicious. What better way to dance on MS’s grave than rob their API?
Step one of ‘what engine am I going to develop on?’
Does it natively support Vulkan?
Step two:
Can I build the engine from source, on my debian/fedora based distro, in under 30 minutes, without having to discover that the documentation for how to do this is wrong?
If the answers to either of those are ‘No’, gtfo here.
Without Windows you wouldn’t have Windows gaming. The Linux Kernel is unfavorable to game developers because of its instabilities (ABI/API) -and that’s not counting all the fragmentation after the fact. Linux users are cheap (more likely to pirate), more likely to cheat in online games, more likely to review bomb over stupid things, and more likely to demand refunds. -They don’t even develop for Mac ffs, and they have far more market share than Linux. Developers would migrate fully to consoles and full stack devices (like phones, Haiku, Mac, iPhone).
Windows market share will decline because normal people are moving to devices. A smart phone is far safer to do banking on, especially compared to Linux. The change in % (if real) will simply be a decline in Windows, not an increase in Desktop Linux adoption.
The Linux Kernel is unfavorable to game developers because of its instabilities (ABI/API)
The Linux Kernel is very stable in terms of API and even ABI. It’s the rest of the OS components (graphics libraries, sound libraries, etc.) that is problematic
What would the world would be like if Linux users used a search or co-pilot.
You cited slop that you didn’t even read
Nice accusation.
What would the world be like if Microsoft simps understood what they posted lol
The first part is not relevant, games are not kernel modules or drivers so it doesn’t matter that there isn’t internal kernel ABI stability.
The second part is just what I said before, the instability is in the libraries (like glibc), not in the kernel.
That doesn’t make kernel ABI stability irrelevant. Also, your statement was: 'The Linux Kernel is very stable in terms of API and even ABI."
Internal kernel ABI instability affects anything that depends on out-of-tree drivers (which games do). GPU drivers, input drivers, and certain middleware -all affected, and all can break games.
That’s a problem of the drivers, not the games or other applications. If the drivers don’t work, you would have issues even using Windows applications with Wine.
You’re not wrong about a lot, but I think Linux products, shipped by OEMs, are a pretty good gaming platform.
And if they target Proton anyway, the fragmentation doesn’t really matter.
A smartphone, a tablet, a MacBook Neo and such may be “maintenance free” and secure, but they are not great gaming platforms. Not everyone wants to play mobile-style games.
And this:
Without Windows you wouldn’t have Windows gaming.
This is what I’m saying. We could.
Linux could dominate Windows for that specific use. If it gets true critical mass, the Proton devs would effectively control the direction of API development.
After a couple of YEARS trying to find work around for native rimworld problems. I found a couple interesting things that it’s not the developer that was the problem it was the game engine unity that broke certain things and the unity game engine people wouldn’t fix.
I now play it on proton with its own set if weird problems.
But just know that maybe these Indy games that run specific engines can’t tos shit about things because the fucking people who make the engine won’t fix it.
Just my experience from rimworld is all.
To some extent, I have the same issue with choosing Gog over Steam. I really want to support Gog, because it’s DRM free and European. However, it can happen that the games released on it are lacking patches, achievement or DLCs. For instance look at the commentary of Thief simulator: https://www.gog.com/en/game/thief_simulator
Devs support Steam because it’s the top platform, and do the bare minimum for the rest. And I don’t really see a solution for that.
Other examples: Hitman World of assassination on Epic has less achievements than the Steam version. Hardspace Shipbreaker achievements are broken on Epic and functional on Steam.
This isn’t a problem if the devs target a Steam Runtime. But they don’t. So Proton has become “better”.
Do you mind expanding on this? What makes targeting the Steam runtime different from targeting, say, Ubuntu 22.04?
Valve provides stable runtime libraries for Linux so that dependencies you build against don’t change. Proton also uses these runtimes.
I feel this… just got the binding of Isaac and my friends and I were trying to download the dlc on my Linux machine, apparently the download button doesn’t do anything until you switch to proton (and it didn’t say why it wasn’t working)
Also GMOD has a shitty Native Linux build (e.g, Outdated OpenGL)
Suggesting this in case it helps because I had a similar issue, I was having issues with my system defaulting to integrated graphics for Linux native games, once I turned that off in the BIOS it was fine. Fixed most of my issues immediately.
Like it sucks it’s not just plug and play, but yeah this could be your fix.
What setting was that? For it to live in your BIOS/UEFI of all things ia also bizarre… Unless you mean the secure boot / trusted drivers stuff, which I disabled yonks ago.
Depends on your motherboard manufacturer, if you google your brand with disabling igpu or integrated graphics you should be same to find the right menu? This all assuming your CPU has integrated graphics of course.
I just checked and mine was already disabled. I am on Wayland though so maybe that also causes issues with older Linux games
It definitely can be, though I’m on Wayland and pretty much problem free. You miiiight be able to diagnose further with system logs and that kind of thing? But if I’m honest my diagnostic skills aren’t great compared to like 30+ years of windows.
I’ll just use proton tbh lol. I try and avoid deep dives on my PC, I don’t have the energy or time anymore to do that. Unless I really care about it, like getting my DAW setup with JACK and multi MIDI loops, but you only have to do that once rather than per game
I had the no sound and bad FPS issue on linux. Turns out the Linux sound was misconfiguration somehow and when I fixed that most of my problems went away.
If it was misconfigured, why do all other apps and Proton have sound with no issue? Do you remember what you changed?
I don’t, unfortunately. One was to configure PULSE_LATENCY_MSEC to 60 I believe. The other was to set some sort of default system sound profile, but I don’t remember what it was called or if that is a Mint Linux only thing.
Which distro are you using? What audio card , and what desktop?
Right now I’m using KDE Neon with Plasma, both recent versions. I actually don’t know which audio card, probably whatever comes with my motherboard. Haven’t bought an actual separate audio card for decades, do people still do that,
Proton isn’t solving those problems. What you’re experiencing is Valve quietly patching, shimming, overriding and replacing broken Linux code for Steam. (Not ‘helping’ Linux: they’re helping themselves)
It’s a disservice to Windows users to also charge them 30% when they bend over backwards coddling Linux gamers who are more likely to complain, review bomb, and pirate. -But they make it up in the word-of-mouth sales (the vocal minority) that saved that Steam Deck from being the total disaster it should’ve been.
Valve is helping to destroy native Linux gaming, and the relationship they have with the Linux evangelists is fragile.
Did it smell like burnt toast when you wrote this?
I’m not sure if we would have Linux games at all without Proton, or at least WINE. Like I’m pretty sure a game like Spyro or God of War would never support Linux natively. Ideally there would be Linux native versions for every game that “just work”, but I really don’t see that ever happening unfortunately.
As a thought experiment, let’s say what if Proton and WINE just vanished tomorrow. Do you think Linux gaming would be in a better or worse place in 6 months? What about 6 years?
