Anyone else played around with the new Steam play tech on Linux? The objective is to let you play Windows games on Linux using a compat layer like WINE does, which I think their work is based on.
I just fired it up last night. I’ve only tried Age of Empires 2, and Offworld Trading Company, but I was able to play them both. There were some minor things which I’m guessing is due to them not being officially supported titles (you can enable the tech for all titles). I had to rename the aoe executable to Launcher.exe, and with OTC you can’t connect to the online stuff, so no mp or daily challenges there. I will probably play around with it more tonight to see what other titles I can run.
I’ve been playing Windows games on Linux with WINE for a long time, and have given Proton a few tries as well.
The major difficulty I’ve had is with Unity games, surprisingly—Airport CEO and one other I can’t remember offhand didn’t work. All sorts of esoteric wargames and grand strategy titles have worked fine, including Command Ops, Flashpoint Campaigns, and Civil War II. (That indicates that Proton is pretty up-to-date with fixes in recent versions of WINE—a fix for CW2 graphics problems was pretty recent in WINE upstream.) I haven’t tried anything really graphically demanding yet, though.
The github page for proton has an issues page that shows a lot of games people have been trying to run. CMANO apparently won’t start when you click the button in the launcher, but I wonder if renaming the app to the same name as the launcher will work like AoE2. It sounds like Rise of Nations requires some tinkering to get it working and to have sound. Apparently Rebel Galaxy works, so maybe I’ll try that tonight. I wish the fusion rpm repos would update the nvidia drivers. RIght now I have to install the package from Nvidia directly to get support for my rtx 2080.
Sadly, for CMANO, I have been unlucky even with the non-Steam version. The farthest I got was the game loading then crashing before reaching the main menu. There is a single report of somebody who seemed to have managed it, but he doesn’t provide any guidance as to how.
That was the case in the Windows version as well, until a recent patch last year ;)
Not really, I’m keeping my regular WINE profiles which are more up to date, but I’m not playing anything fancy either.
The important bit of this reply is that you can get the compatibility reports from other users here.
My systems are usually dual-boot. I work remotely, so during the day I will be booted up in Fedora while working. Boot times are pretty quick these days, but it is still a hassle having to reboot.
It’s substantially better, as Steam makes a lot of effort to keep it viable. It’s going to depend on how much you need the latest AAAs, but there’s a lot of native games.
Check out the Steam Play Compatibility Reports site. The layout is terrible, but you can search for any game and it should tell you how well it works using Steam Proton. It even tells you if there’s a native version.