I am buying a friend’s PC for games. I want to avoid windows if at all possible, and I’m wondering what people’s experience using Proton in Linux for gaming has been. Are there certain publishers who use libraries Proton doesn’t handle well? Are there distros to avoid using with proton? Any other notes I should be aware of?
I use steam + proton (on arch btw). I’d say 70% of the time, the game just works without issue. 25% of the time, you can get it working with a bit of tinkering, or it works fine but has annoying performance issues. And 5% of the time it just refuses to work.
Pain points usually involve anti-cheat and/or 3rd party launchers.
It’s not perfect, but it’s totally viable.
Cool, thank you! I was thinking about Arch so it’s good to know it generally works well for running games in proton.
Been using Proton for a long time and my experience has been very positive overall. Most games work without any problems, the few that do usually have easy workarounds. The big stopping point for Proton is that many multiplayer games that use anti cheat don’t work well. Aside from that I use it for all sorts of games.
You can see how well each game runs on https://www.protondb.com/
As for distro, Proton should work pretty much everywhere but some distros provide a better out of the box experience.
Thanks! I’m not big on online games so I don’t think anti-cheat tools will be a big deal.
