TBH it would never take off unless they fire Tim (which is not going to happen). As nearly everything wrong with EGS can be boiled down to “Tim is an ass.”
The level of cuckness and chadness on display is amazing.
The cuck epic : We need to be able to put our storefront on our competitors operating system, if they’ll let us please have some sales on the PC market ;_;
The chad valve : yeah, we don’t care if our competitor’s storefront is our systems, they don’t really take any business from us anyway, and if the customer wants to, they can do what they want with their computers.“We’ll bring our games to Linux! Using Proton, made by Valve”
cryingWojak.jpg
to reiterate another post though, Unreal Engine has always had a linux port, it’s just actual devs/businesses not bothering.
You can already run the EGS on a deck via Heroic. Anyone remotely interested in this is already doing it.
That’s also why they chose not to subsidize their hardware prices. You can buy their hardware and do whatever the hell you want with it, including not use Steam.
Another genius move by Valve. I would never have purchased
- Steam Deck (the OG, then the OLED)
- Steam Frame
- Steam Machine
If I couldn’t rip the Big Picture mode out and fuck with the underlying linux OS.
Hell, I brought my original Steam Deck on a work thing instead of my work laptop because it worked so well (including with an external monitor).
Hell yeah. I’m pretty locked into the Steam ecosystem myself and finally got the Frame purchase email last Friday. I’m hella excited.
I never played half life Alyx, and omg, it’s great. You can crush cans by just squeezing.
I can’t believe nobody else has made a VR game like this.
Do they even have any linux-native games or are they going to rely on proton?
Valve themselves recommend Proton over native builds these days, so that’s like the one thing I wouldn’t fault Epic over.
That’s mostly because games tend to be static software, and some really uptight people that don’t understand that static software doesn’t always need to be secure and bug free really hate the concept of static software on linux; and all the bundled secure packages tend to have drawbacks while modding.
But it’s still a half step and especially blocks off older devices from accessing games that can run just fine under windows on those devices. Between that and the still weird ‘find the right proton version for each game’ step, that hurts adoption because people aren’t going to just play around with settings forever just to play a game.
The solution would be just ship the libraries the games need for the native version bundled with each game. Congrats. You’ve solved the only problem with linux native gaming, and eliminated a whole lot of hassle and compatibility issues.
There’s another reason they’ve been encouraging devs to use Proton on Linux instead of a native build: you’re less likely to ship Linux-only bugs that can’t be replicated on Windows, which saves a ton of debugging (and maintaining a separate dev environment) to fix something a minority of players will ever encounter.
And those Linux-only bugs that do pop up are likely an issue with Proton itself, and Valve directly benefits when bugs in their product are reported.
And this is why I go to GoG for older games, because this is exactly how they handle packaging such games. That, or they tweak them for modern needs.
I realize this isn’t very helpful for people with a 20±year-old Steam library, but it’s a decent way to try to handle the problem if you’re looking for older games today
GOG has done a bit better recently, but they have their own issues. For the longest time neither of the baldur’s gate enhanced editions worked on newer linux distros. They were built against Ubuntu 22.10. This would be fine, but they did not ship the libraries from Ubuntu 22.10. So the easiest way to run these linux native games were download random libraries online and pop them in, which is actually dangerous or run it through steam, or download all of the linux runtimes through steam and copy over or symlink the close-enough versions that the game is expecting.
Which is a ridiculous set of circumstances to go through for a remake of an older game that runs on every single windows version on every single piece of hardware that supports windows past XP.
Again they’ve gotten a bit better, but if you do get GOG games on linux, you will want to start a little folder to collect the random libraries you’ll need for when the team and the publisher just outright forget to include one or two libraries because they thought they weren’t updated enough for it to matter.
Yeah, their Linux support is relatively new-ish, so I expect a slightly bumpy road for a little while before it all gets smoothed out. Such is life.
It’s just that their focus on getting older games to run properly - generally speaking -it’s a lot better than Steam’s
Unreal engine (like idtech) has always had linux support. It’s just individual companies and games not bothering.
Yep, Epic has a lot of faults but I remember the first game I played on Linux was UT2k4. I don’t think I played another game on Linux until two decades later.
UT2k3 (maybe 2004 as well) actually came with a bootable Linux disc that would boot directly into the game. So they basically had an Epic OS long before Valve even thought about SteamOS.
Maybe Tim was always so anti Linux because it didn’t pan out back then.
