Millions of gamers are facing a critical decision; upgrade their operating system, invest in new hardware or explore alternatives like Linux with the end of ...
I actually like what Steam did for Linux gaming in general, but in the end it is slowly becoming a crutch. Why should I spin up the Steam client (that is neither fast nor easy on resources, too) every time I want to play a non-steam game?
Again… it’s nice what Valve is doing in general and that most of the stuff is open source and thus can be back ported to Wine.
I however find it concerning that the number of people doing so seems to be constantly decreasing. And I don’t actually understand why the majority of gamers -people that are insanely obsessed with very small FPS or other perfomance increases sometimes- seems to be content with using Steam as the one-size-fits-all solution for games. Just simple Wine Staging can often match the performance for older games, for all games once you start backporting some patches and fixes developed for Proton. And yet the contributors seem to get less by the day and a lot of projects pre-compiling patched Wine versions are vanishing for a lack of interest.
In short: I don’t get that voluntary lock-in to Steam for very little convenience of having a fancy interface for starting your games.
It makes the entire process from purchase to playing completely painless, on top of a large community of people, guides, achievements, etc. I think I’d maybe improve my performance by like…a fraction of a frame per second. Good trade off.
And as others have mentioned, Lutris does a good job if you don’t want steam.
Proton is not even really designed for non steam games but it works so well people use it.
There are a few devs that are working on taking the work proton did and tying it up in a way that is decoupled from steam and can be used by any launcher. Its called umu.
I actually like what Steam did for Linux gaming in general, but in the end it is slowly becoming a crutch. Why should I spin up the Steam client (that is neither fast nor easy on resources, too) every time I want to play a non-steam game?
Again… it’s nice what Valve is doing in general and that most of the stuff is open source and thus can be back ported to Wine.
I however find it concerning that the number of people doing so seems to be constantly decreasing. And I don’t actually understand why the majority of gamers -people that are insanely obsessed with very small FPS or other perfomance increases sometimes- seems to be content with using Steam as the one-size-fits-all solution for games. Just simple Wine Staging can often match the performance for older games, for all games once you start backporting some patches and fixes developed for Proton. And yet the contributors seem to get less by the day and a lot of projects pre-compiling patched Wine versions are vanishing for a lack of interest.
In short: I don’t get that voluntary lock-in to Steam for very little convenience of having a fancy interface for starting your games.
Not everything needs steam. Lutris opens up a whole wider ecosystem while taking advantage of the wine and proton advances valve brought us.
Because it’s not “just a fancy interface”?
It makes the entire process from purchase to playing completely painless, on top of a large community of people, guides, achievements, etc. I think I’d maybe improve my performance by like…a fraction of a frame per second. Good trade off.
And as others have mentioned, Lutris does a good job if you don’t want steam.
Steam is optional for gaming now.
Proton is not even really designed for non steam games but it works so well people use it.
There are a few devs that are working on taking the work proton did and tying it up in a way that is decoupled from steam and can be used by any launcher. Its called umu.