I am sure many will applaud this but it encourage developers to not bother with an actual native build as it tells them that Linux users will be happy with "proton compatible". Games don't run as well IME (even ones where they claim it runs as well or better). I've given up with Games on Linux.
The alternative is "games don't run on Linux at all". The Linux desktop market is tiny as is, the alternative isn't developers suddenly investing in native Linux ports. Even the more popular Macs OS gets severely neglected.
I don't think it makes sense for developers of games like these to even support macOS. Apple's ARM chips are pretty fast but their GPUs aren't capable of rendering intensive 3D games at native resolutions yet, partially because Apple's displays are so high-res. Previous generations Apple devices all had GPUs in them that I honestly consider lacking for the price you pay for the hardware.
The best macOS gaming rigs I can think off are the mac Pros, but those aren't what most people are running macOS on.
At least Linux users can use the powerful NVIDIA cards in most of their machines. I suppose it's possible to hook up an RX 6800 through Thunderbolt, but that's quite a bulky and expensive solution that even fewer people use.
You can see this in the Steam survey. There are more macOS gamers than Linux gamers, but the gamers on macOS are almost always running on an Intel GPU whereas Linux gamers are much more common to run a dedicated GPU from AMD or NVIDIA.
It makes sense to port Tabletop Simulator or Cooking Simulator to macOS, but for Cyberpunk you're just not finding enough customers. Where Linux lacks the stability of the software stack, macOS lacks the hardware to run the stable-ish software stack on.
With CD:PR being generally reasonably DRM-free, I do wonder how much "hidden" Linux customers they have in their sales. Trying to get AAA-games from Steam to run in Linux is usually a fight with DRM software and the only way to win that fight is to pretend to be running Windows. If you can download the game from GOG without DRM, like CP2077, you'll probably end up with more Linux customers than other studios manage to gather and your OS statistics will make more sense. There's no way in hell that Linux will get any significant margin on the gaming market any time soon, but if the market will ever begin shifting, we'll probably see it in a studio like CD:PR.
>Apple's ARM chips are pretty fast but their GPUs aren't capable of rendering intensive 3D games at native resolutions yet, partially because Apple's displays are so high-res.
I don't think people really care about running the games at native resolution and the Mac Mini doesn't even have a native resolution.
I can confirm that I do care about native res as a mac user and heavy gamer (but I mostly end up gaming on windows for obvious reasons).
Scaling has never failed to look utterly terrible for me. Scaling from eg 1920x1080 -> 2880x1800 looks utterly awful, even on a 15" display. It's not so bad on 3D rendered titles for the 3D content, but for 2D elements such as the GUI it's awful.
Most modern games allow for the rendering resolution to be different from the resolution the UI runs at. Usually, "even" values like half the native resolution tend to look pretty good.
The feature is usually called "render scale" or similar.
I have a feeling those Steam hardware surveys are total bullshit. I've been using Steam on two Linux systems for the past several years and never got a single request to fill a survey, not once. This experience mirrors what I read from other Linux users.
But when I reboot into Windows to spend a couple of hours in that one game which refuses to work under Proton, I immediately receive a request to fill a survey. I've seen at least a half dozen of them in that very same time frame.
I don't know what to tell you. I've gotten two on my Linux laptop over the last while, two on my Windows setup and one on my Linux install on my desktop.
MacOS is neglected because Macs don't have the video capability. I can't speak to the capabilities of the new M1-based machines, but historically no Macbook or Mini had the hardware for 3D-intensive games. Statistically-speaking, there are zero Mac Pro users, and none of their other hardware is up to the task.
I'm a Unix nerd. My first PC ran Linux for years before I ever installed Windows on anything. I've maintained a Windows-based game PC for the past 20 years solely for gaming. It's my most powerful and capable hardware. I wish I could get something remotely as powerful from Apple (for a comparable price) because I prefer MacOS as my daily-driver desktop for professional purposes.
I think it's a decent start to get through the chicken and egg problem (there are not enough linux players so devs don't bother and people don't switch completely to linux because there are games they like which don't work) and if proton brings enough people to linux slowly we might get through this hurdle. If let's say 30% of gamers are linux users the devs might care to do a native port even though they don't right now.
I only use linux and mostly only play natively supported games but sometimes also through proton also I think if you play using proton steam reports as a linux user.
To be fair, there's also developers that technically release an actual native linux build with bugs and then offer zero support for it. At least games on Proton still get worked on by the Proton developers.
And often it only works on the 2016 LTS release of ubuntu because they depend on specific packages that happen to be on that version of ubuntu and any support requests get ignored with the response "We support ubuntu 16.4".
At least when you use proton you can whinge at a whole community of developers and typically one of them will care enough to fix it. These days I find for a lot of the games I play, proton is literally flawless to the point if you didn't tell me, I wouldn't know it isn't native.
And often the "native" build is using the developer (or porter) closed source buggy wine-like compatibility layer (sometime seven using Windows PE binaries directly). Wine is usually superior especially in the long term.
Some native ports are high quality though, like everything Croateam does and a some of Feral ports.
At the end of the day the only thing that it is important is support. Community supported wine/proton is vastly better than an unsupported "native" version.
As rjn said, it is also a way to lure players to Linux. I've personally switched three weeks ago, and I'm not looking back: every game I want to play works, ranging from almost flawlessly to just perfect. All thanks to Proton, and of course the decades-long efforts of Wine.
> As rjn said, it is also a way to lure players to Linux.
It has the opposite effect (on me at least).
> I've personally switched three weeks ago, and I'm not looking back: every game I want to play works, ranging from almost flawlessly to just perfect.
"Works for me" logic. Every game you want to play works. The games I wanna play don't, or they do so with resorting to tonnes of hacks. In the end I just say sod it and reboot in Windows.
I don't understand your logic: you'd rather there be no games on Linux at all instead of some working well, some with hacks, and some not working?
There is a hypothetical reality where all game developers target Linux natively, but in our flawed reality where economics exist, Proton is a godsend
Edit: regarding the "works for me", I see your point but what else would I do? Stay on Windows because some games, not the ones I play, don't work on Linux? Of course I'm switching.
> I don't understand your logic: you'd rather there be no games on Linux at all instead of some working well, some with hacks, and some not working?
Other than the false dichotomy. Yes. I would rather not have the game on Linux, than have to rely on proton.
> Edit: regarding the "works for me", I see your point but what else would I do? Stay on Windows because some games, not the ones I play, don't work on Linux? Of course I'm switching.
Dual boot. It takes seconds to boot to reboot into another OS, drives are dirt cheap. There is also GPU passthrough (which I am going to try with a Geforce 1030 or similar card).
The context in which we are speaking is whether proton is a suitable replacement. It cannot be ignored in this context.
The point is that people pretend everything works perfectly, when it doesn’t. On some games literally moving your mouse out of bounds can crash the game. In other situations there is performance problems that go much deeper than average framerate. None of this is mentioned and it gives users a false impression and is ultimately misleading (I've had gamers ask me if they can ditch Windows for Ubuntu and they had no experience with Linux before).
You should really try again if you haven't tried in the past month or two. Steam recently released proton 5.13 into the list of proton releases, and since then, a great percent of games that didn't work in earlier 5.* releases have started working. Including Doom Eternal and now this game. Guessing they were prepping for this game.
They don't work properly. Things like alt-tabbing out of the game crashes the game for example, or performance with streaming is utter shite. So it doesn't run fine.
The few games I have native linux ports for, I can alt-tab out of and I get consistend performance.
I know they don't, that's why I wrote "if". I wanted to express that I don't see the difference between a perfectly fine native Linux proprietary build, and a perfectly well executed, proton-backed user experience.
I think I get what you're saying, that currently Linux builds behave better than whatever proton can provide, and I agree.
