My understanding is that a lot of it has to do with the Steam Deck, which is Valve’s handheld gaming platform. Valve wanted it to run most of their catalog, but they also decided to use Windows emulation rather than Windows, so they forked Wine and put some money and effort into improving it.
But some games are harder to run than others.
If you use Steam, it might be as easy as installing it from Steam, because sometimes the games are multi-platform. FTL is an example of this that I currently have installed. But it seems like more and more game developers want their games to run on the Steam Deck, so they release native Linux versions. (Ironically, I think FTL doesn’t run well on the Steam Deck.)
Some games run simply by telling the Steam launcher to use Proton as a compatibility tool. So, the only hard part is choosing which version of Proton to run, which involves picking it from a list inside of Steam, and then downloading that version of Proton, and then trying the game. And if it doesn’t run well, then try a different version of Proton and iterate. IIRC Rocket League is a game like this. On my computer, it seems to run best with the latest Proton beta. For me and my 5 year old computer, it doesn’t run as perfectly as well as it did in Windows, as it can stutter a bit when there are explosions on screen, but for me, it doesn’t seem to impact my play. And it takes longer to load, but I don’t think it’s possible for an emulated game to load faster on the same hardware.
And some games require you to look up how to install them, and you end up having to install some Windows things into your Proton runtime using something called Protontricks. Skyrim is an example. It took a lot of fiddling to get it set up and the audio working correctly. But now I can’t really tell the difference between how it runs in Windows vs. Linux, except that it takes longer to load in Linux.
Damage@feddit.it 16 hours ago
Now if only big software developers understood this and released business software for Linux…
Smoogs@lemmy.world 2 hours ago
Much of the businesses in media already do. EG: Maya was released for Linux. Its predecessor ‘ALIAS power animator’ was a Unix based program and ran on SGI.
You’d be hard pressed to find a studio involved in fx or 3D or any function of post production not running on Linux.
curbstickle@lemmy.dbzer0.com 13 hours ago
Depends on what you’re looking for, for some fields there are fantastic options already.
The others… Well considering the trajectory I’m seeing now (as a multiple decade Linux user), I think a lot more will start building for it. Maybe one flavor to start, but I do think it will be much more common.
I’m seeing it with some of my clients already.
Damage@feddit.it 9 hours ago
CAD/CAM, PLC IDEs
lemmyman@lemmy.world 8 hours ago
For me: Solidworks, TwinCAT (lol @ plc software built on top of windows…and it’s one of the more open ones)