this post was submitted on 15 Nov 2024
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Kubuntu, because when I got my Vega 56 GPU on release day (August 14, 2017), I had to download the proprietary driver straight from AMD to get it working, and Ubuntu was the only distro supported by both it and Steam at the time. (Otherwise, I would've picked Debian or Mint.)
I don't love Ubuntu (especially how they push Snap), but I can't be bothered with the hassle of reinstalling my OS.
My gpu twin! I was also on Kubuntu at the time for the same reasons.
How difficult was it to run games?
In 2017? Well, that's an interesting question. On one hand, it definitely wasn't as easy as it is now. On the other hand, I was motivated to ditch Windows and willing to make the gaming sacrifices necessary to make that happen. The last version of Windows I used was 7, and I was determined that 10 would never touch this machine -- or any computer of mine going forward, for that matter. I also was done putting up with 7, given that Microsoft was starting to backport 10's spyware and forced-upgrade BS to it by then.
It's been a while, so I'm fuzzy on the details of what I was playing between 2017 and 2018 (when Proton came out). I think I just limited myself to the subset of my Steam games that had native Linux versions (e.g. TF2 and other Valve first-party games, Don't Starve, Cities Skylines, etc.), supplemented with PlayOnLinux for Star Trek Online, which, being an MMO I was already committed to, was pretty much the only exception I made. Otherwise, my attitude became "if the developer can't be bothered to support my OS, that's their loss, not mine, and I don't need their shitty Windows-only game anyway."
After Proton came out and I flipped that switch to "enable Steam Play for all other titles", I think the majority of my Steam games "Just Worked" -- yes, even back at that initial release -- and the ones that didn't became compatible pretty rapidly over the next couple of years. With one exception, I don't think I've had trouble getting a game working since the start of the pandemic, if not earlier. At this point, I've softened my "I won't buy a new game if it doesn't natively support Linux stance" and instead simply expect every game I buy to work. And they have!
(That one exception was Star Trek Online, which I had continued running via PlayOnLinux because (a) why mess with a working config, and (b) the Steam version of STO wants to permanently link your STO account to your Steam account, which I didn't want to do. One day, though, they updated the launcher or something and it quit working. I eventually gave up trying to fix it in PlayOnLinux and decided to use Proton for it instead. But I still didn't want to link my accounts, so I had to jump through these weird hoops where I installed the Steam version, but didn't log in or play it, and instead re-imported it as a non-Steam game pointing at the executable for the Steam version and then fiddled with the compatibility settings to find a version of Proton that worked. That's still the configuration I'm using for it to this day.)
Someone told me that he used alot of tinkering to play games before proton.
I mean, yeah, if you were trying to get a game to run using bare WINE in like <2010 or something, you were gonna be troubleshooting it for a while (and might still fail just because the functionality hadn't actually caught up yet). By 2017, though, DirectX etc. support had improved drastically (Valve's first attempt at SteamOS was already a few years old by then), so the main issue was figuring out the right configuration (which version of Windows to mimic, installing supporting libraries, etc.) and tools like PlayOnLinux and Lutris went a long way towards crowdsourcing and automating that.
oh