Strange headline. Isn’t it always at an all-time high since once you get something to run, that’s it?

Some games get patched to break compatibility, usually with anti-cheat. Apex Legends and Battlefield 1 are examples of that.

No. The most played games on steam are multiplayer games that use some sort of anti cheat. Those anti cheats often break linux compatibility when the game or anticheat itself gets updated. So going by number of games you are mostly right, but going by player counts there are often massive setbacks that either dont get fixed at all or only very slowly. Apex Legends and The Finals are prime examples of this flip flopping between working and broken.

Outlast trials is the latest game (to my knowledge) that added eac (due to a pretty useless pvp mode) and broke Linux compatibility

Oh, I see. I don’t play anything like that, so I was oblivious to the issue. Thanks!

Fortunately those are a minority of games. Most games now are working with Wine/Proton out of the box. Multiplayer games are the only thing I ever look at compatibility lists for.

Not true; works fine on linux.

I guess they enabled Linux support then in eac because it didn’t work initially

Not many because there’s still translation overhead - unless you have very good CPU, the results will be slightly worse.

It actually happens more than you’d expect.

Sometimes you even get fewer bugs on Proton.
One of the best examples was the release of FF7 Remake - it had really bad stutter on release on Windows… but not on Proton.

People even used DXVK (which is part of Proton) on Windows in an attempt to fix it.

I know it happens, but it’s rare. Other example is Nier:Automata after valve created super fast shader compiler for AMD cards - game is so unoptimized that saving CPU cycles on shades not only compensates for overhead but also exceeds windows performance.

Again it’s rare and relates to poorly coded games

Im not sure how they even would make a testing framework. Its not like windows, where you have the os as standard and then just swap parts to see.

Its so fragmented the amount of combinations is mind-boggling. I guess they choose the 3 most popular and just run a limited series of hardware tests?

That would be nice!

Games which run on Vulkan / OpenGL don’t have any GPU translation overhead, and some run straight-up better via Proton than they do on Windows. Doom 2016 does for me, for instance.

Of course, that game is so well optimised it’s the difference between 140 fps and 200+ fps, which is not terribly obvious, but even so.

Unfortunately these minority of games are actually popular games. I think GTA 5 Online no longer works on Linux too. There was more popular games doing that.

just did mine. bazzite loaded on my gaming rig, and still deciding on my server PC on what I wanna load on there but I’m in no rush really.

The most played games on steam are multiplayer games that use some sort of anti cheat.

However, lot of the most played Steam games are well supported and never have an issue with anti cheat whatsoever: https://steamdb.info/ such as Counter Strike 2 and Dota 2 (2 most played games). There are also lot of single player games as the most played games. Therefore this is a mixed bag.

Those anti cheats often break linux compatibility when the game or anticheat itself gets updated.

They not break often Linux compatibility when game or anticheat is updated. That’s false statement. There are games, when it happens. But that is not “often”. I play games with Anticheat on Linux and they do not break, such as Marvel Rivals and previously Overwatch and Splitgate too (besides Valves own games, but that is self explanatory). This never happened. So the “often” part is misleading here.

You would think so, but Windows 11 is so bloated out so badly that I actually got much better performance on Linux for most games I play. I’ve only found 2 games so far that run better on Windows than via Proton on the same hardware.

Windows 11 24h2 update completely screwed all game performance for me so badly I had switch.

While it might not feel like the % of games working on Linux this is just the natural result of more games being added to ProtonDB

Sharing a common kernel is probably why support is so vast, and then people are using the same Vulkan tools or Proton etc.