Quoting: GuestHas Valve actually been helping Linux gaming though, or has it helped mainly themselves and Microsoft?

Remember when we got big titles such as Metro Last Light, Bioshock Infinite, and Mad Max?

Yeah, I remember. It was after Valve made Steam for Linux, made Linux a first-class citizen on Steam, and created the Steam Machine, and before everyone realized that said machine had flopped for the foreseeable future. In short, never woulda happened without Valve.
Before Valve got involved, the number of such games, or even the somewhat-smaller-but-not-tiny-indie which are still fairly plentiful right now, on Linux was zero, zilch, nada, fuggedaboutit. So was the prospect of Linux support for major game engines such as Unity. It's frankly ridiculous to ask if Valve has been helping Linux gaming.
If you want to question the Proton strategy, sure, that debate is reasonably debatable. But going hyperbolic and saying "Proton strategy no work, therefore Valve is no help to Linux gaming" is pretty much like the People's Front of Judea asking "What have the Romans ever done for us?"

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Quoting: ageres

Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: ageres1. Promoting Linux among Windows users to lure people away from Xbox Game Pass for PC, the biggest competitor for Steam. No Windows 10, no Game Pass.

That's an interesting point.

I just don't see any other reason why would Valve prefer people to use Linux and not Windows 10 (if they even want that). Only to use their dominance on Linux. On Windows, there are Steam, Origin, EGS, etc. So many stores to choose where to spend money. On Linux, it's just Steam.

Ah, this on the other hand isn't very relevant. Nothing stops most of those from jumping onto Linux, and if Linux grew big enough that they smelled profit they would do so and then it wouldn't be just Steam any more. There's no real way Valve could grow Linux massively while maintaining it as mostly a Steam captive market (well, maybe with a successful Steam machine).

But your first point isn't like that--Microsoft isn't going to do an Xbox Game Pass for Linux.

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Quoting: ageres1. Promoting Linux among Windows users to lure people away from Xbox Game Pass for PC, the biggest competitor for Steam. No Windows 10, no Game Pass.

That's an interesting point.

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Quoting: DuncIt's an intriguing idea. Back in the days of physical media, it occurred to me that you could ship a game with a live distro on the disc. The OS would always be optimised for the particular game, and you weren't dependent on Microsoft. Yes, you'd have to take varying hardware into account, but Knoppix was surprisingly good at that back in the day. That said, this was probably one reason that publishers never tried it: working on 99% of the PCs out there still leaves you with an angry 1%.

Yeah, I thought about that too. And sure, there'd be hardware troubles, but you wouldn't have to worry about different versions of Windows, .dlls, or anything.

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Quoting: 3zekiel

Quoting: Liam Dawe

Quoting: rcritSimilar to what Hori said, if I already have a Windows system capable of playing games why would I reboot using a USB stick to play them in Linux?

And that is the real question no one as of yet has a true answer for other than the existing arguments for using Linux over Windows that many of us are already aware of, and probably already using Linux for.

For me, there is a clear win, which is privacy.

Everyone gave up on privacy ages ago. At least at a personal level--plenty of people are happy to support government action to improve their privacy, but not click on the (article/game/whatever) because someone's gonna harvest their data? Doesn't happen.

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Quoting: CatKillerA portable Steam library that you can update anywhere with a good Internet connection is useful if your gaming machine itself has a terrible Internet connection. Much of the US has terrible Internet connections, but they can otherwise afford good gaming hardware and to buy games. PC gaming in China (which is a market they'd like to expand) generally uses cyber cafés rather than someone's own PC hardware. Those users could take their games with them, rather than having to download them again each session. For both of those scenarios you're reducing the friction of buying and updating large games.

Of course! I'd never thought about the ramifications of those PC Bangs . . . that's probably one reason why China always seems to stampede towards a couple of really popular games: The cybercafes install the most popular games on all their computers, so when you go there that's all you're gonna play.
I suppose this could have some impact on that . . . if the owners are willing to sit still for people using the things.

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It's not a terrible idea. But I don't think it will drive a huge wave of adoption or anything. And for it to drive much adoption at all they'll need to think beyond games.
The thing about Linux is that it's an excellent OS overall, partly due to its open source nature (which is why it's been able to take over so many areas of computing). And it's IMO a pretty dashed good general desktop OS. There are use-cases that need software that isn't sold for Linux, but I'd say for a very big percentage of users and maybe the majority, there's nothing they need that Linux won't give a good experience with, while it has quite a few advantages as a desktop OS that I don't expect I need to itemize in this community.

But as a pure gaming OS it's still somewhat lacking. Proton is imperfect and can't do games with most anti-cheat, drivers are still on average a bit behind although much better than they were, and a few other details. People game on Linux mainly because they're committed to doing other things with Linux and they don't want to use more OSes than they need.
So you replace Windows with Linux because you're cheesed with problems Windows has outside of gaming, that Linux doesn't have, or because you want things Linux does outside of gaming that Windows doesn't do . . . and then you game on Linux too and, depending just how hard core you are, find that it's decent.

So if this USB thing is oriented towards, and pushed as, a pure gaming experience it's not gonna tempt a lot of Windows users--they already have that, it's the general purpose OS experience that's a PITA.

(At the rate things are going it might actually be possible to sell Linux as a better gaming experience to Mac users though--MacOS is trying so hard to suck at gaming, and it's not like you can plug a Windows USB into a Mac and have it work)

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And the mome Wraths outgrabe.

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I feel like I keep seeing GoL headlines somewhat like this. How many of these things are there now?

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Well if you're going to experiment with something like ray tracing, where better? The game has already flopped, so you're not on a tight schedule. You're already throwing good money after bad at this point, why not at least get some practice on new techniques out of it? And it's not a real-time thing, so it doesn't need that level playing field Liam mentioned. Precisely because RT won't matter to the game, it won't screw anything up.

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