I primarily use my pc for gaming, and want to avoid upgrading to Windows 11. Beginning the journey of looking into alternatives.
I am ignorant, trying to be less so. I have a hard time understanding what exactly makes a game not work just because of OS.
Put simply, it’s like a translator that knows many of the languages Windows will speak. However, it’s not always fluent in every language it might speak. This is what proton does, it translates system calls into Linux, essentially. It almost always will work, specially with Steam games.
In other cases, it’s game devs making desicisons to disallow use of Linux. Specifically anti cheat. Not all anticheat is disallowed, but game devs could allow it. They just choose not too.
Most games will run just fine on Linux. I’ve switched entirely to Linux and said goodbye to those few online anitcheat games that disallow. Most everything works.
Also to add to this is if windows users understood what kernel level anti-cheat does most people wouldn’t want it on windows ether.
What does it do? Could you explain?
It runs in the kernel of the OS as a driver, which means that it’s basically a trusted malware that has even higher permission than the admin of the computer, and have access to more things than yourself, to closely monitor the whole system in order to find signs of cheating.
And for context, it does this because cheaters are willing to run cheats that run at that kernel level, and the only way to detect and prevent them is if the anticheat is in your kernel first.
To expand on the translation metaphor:
Trying to run a window program on Linux (without proton) is like trying to read a completely alien text. Your have basically 0 in common and no way to understand it
Proton is doing the translator job of helping. And it’s doing a great job for a lot of the alien language. Which is why so many programs and games work on Linux with proton
But even it can’t always be perfect, and if the language is using some weird dialect, it might not understand or misinterpret things, which causes games to be buggy or unplayable on Linux