Three years ago, Valve Software, the developer of the Steam video game platform (and big hits like Half-Life), announced the implementation of a plan to improve Linux compatibility of those ‘Windows only’ games that it offered to its users.
Steam Play, a cross-platform client released in 2010 In order for users not to have to buy a different copy for each platform of their favorite games, it would be the axis around which those plans would revolve.
To do this, said client would include Proton, a modified version of Wine (Wine Is Not an Emulator, a software used in Linux to run Windows applications) jointly developed between Valve and Codeweavers.
What separates Proton from the rest of Wine forks focused on video games lies in your Direct3D implementations over the Vulkan API: DxVK (for DirectX 9-11) and VK3D (for DirectX 12). This translates into a notable improvement in compatibility allowing a wide catalog of titles to be run, even when they are not officially available for Linux.
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Increasing percentage of compatibility thanks to Proton
But, How wide exactly is this catalog? A few months ago the figure was around 14,000. To get an idea of how the situation is today, we can turn to ProtonDB, an independent database that has been around for years. tracking compatibility thanks to reports submitted by users …
… And the conclusion if we evaluate the 1000 most popular games on Steam (out of the total of 21,000 for which there is data submitted by users), 75% of them are considered ‘compatible’ with Linux.
This ‘compliant’ rating is awarded based on a scale of six degrees of compatibility, which – leaving native games aside – establishes grades such as ‘platinum’ and ‘gold’ (no problems), ‘silver’ (minor problems) and ‘bronze’ (possibility of relevant failures):
Unfortunately, as can be seen In the graph, when evaluating only the 10 most popular video games, the percentage of those that run without relevant issues on the penguin’s operating system falls below half, up to a mere 40%.
If you are interested in checking the degree of compatibility with your Linux distribution of the games you have purchased through Steam, we remind you that Protondb has a search function that Linux players can use to check the status of each game.
In fact, in order not to be forced to review the titles one by one, you can also directly connect your Steam account with ProtonDB to know the status of the games in your library. In a minute you can get an idea at a glance of how many titles you can play on your Linux: