Through the lens of a lover, Linux video gaming is healthy. Valve and Codeweavers (the business behind Red wine) have actually enhanced its profile considerably considering that introducing Proton, a compatibility option that lets you play actually countless Windows-only games across lots of Linux circulations. Ditto that for terrific services like Lutris, which employs Red wine and pre-configured scripts to make setting up video games from Epic, Origin and Blizzard a mainly painless click-and-go affair. The real problem with Linux gaming in 2020 has absolutely nothing to do with real games.
The Radeon Adrenalin dashboard crams in more features than any companion app on Linux
In truth, I’m going to make a vibrant claim: Picture for a moment that the only purpose for PCs was video gaming. Even if 100%of Windows-only games were perfectly playable on Linux and with equivalent efficiency, Windows would still win the battle, would still dominate mindshare and marketshare. Because PC gaming is increasingly about the whole community surrounding the video games we play.
Let me describe.
I’ve been doing the professional tech journalism thing here at Forbes for 8 years, and have evaluated a closet full of GPUs and PCs. I covered lots of hardware launches and spoke at length to AMD, Intel and Nvidia engineers. And over the last couple of years I’ve seen consumers put even more value on the “complete