I really don’t like Epic personally, but this is still pretty huge. Linux and SteamOS have come a long way. CEO Tim Sweeney has always been very negative towards the idea of Linux support, so Epic changing that stance would suggest that Linux/SteamOS has finally become too big of a market to ignore.
Competition is good for consumers.
Damn, how the turn tables. I remember reading somewhere how Tim boy expressed that Linux was "terrifically hard audience to serve due to fragmentation and anticheat concerns”. I also remember thinking “you’ll come around when the money looks good, bitch”. He did.
And him saying switching to Linux is like moving to another country instead of addressing the issues at home lol
That’s after years of talking smack against Valve and Newell, too. Which will not cease, I’m sure, but I bet he’s either real angry now or doing a lot of mental gymnastics to tell his narcissistic ass he’s not being proven wrong.
You’re assuming that these
peoplerobots actually think like us humans. They’re literal robots with vocal cords.
As always, Tim Sweeney only cares monopolies and alternative platforms when it’s financially beneficial.
No thank you.
I would be genuinely shocked if they actually manage to do anything remotely substantial to make games run on Linux. This sounds more like them jumping late on the Steam train (pun intended) as they have been doing up to this point.
Yes, I expect they’ll just make a Linux client and rely on UMU or some other open source project to actually get them to run.
I don’t expect them to meaningfully push the Linux platform forward as Valve has done.
tim will probably whine that you have to add the ppa manually and “linux is blocking our store”.
They can rely on an open source project called Proton.
Proton is really meant to work through steam, UMU is meant to replicate how reliably games run through steam+proton without steam. There’s a reason that heroic and all the other game launchers are switching to UMU as the default for running games.
My basic understanding is that, in addition to proton, steam provides a set of Linux runtimes, to make sure that the converted system calls from proton always match up with the correct standardized runtimes on the Linux system, regardless of distro. They also provide winetricks/protontricks as needed for games. There’s also some system variables passed to tell proton/etc that the game is running through steam and has this setup. Finally steam distributes shader caches, which both improve performance, and bypass proprietary video codecs by replacing them with open source friendly video files.
UMU is basically replicating all of this except the shader/media distribution, hopefully allowing games to run as reliably outside of steam as they do inside of it.
heroic: i’ve been here the whole time
Heroic is a great option, and will likely remain most people’s preferred way to play Epic games on Linux/SteamOS. After all, a lot of windows users prefer heroic there as well due to the bloat/slowness of the official Epic launcher.
That said, official support is always good. It both represents that Linux is growing and a viable alternative to windows, guarantees better support from games on the platform in the future, and pressures other companies to also support Linux.
Basically this (and GoG adding support) are big deals, even if it’s not because we really needed their official support to have a good way to play their games.
I have not needed to use heroic yet, but I keep meaning to install it so I can see what it is all about.
Heroic is more than just an epic games launcher fyi, it’s pretty much a full replacement for lutris (which I have stopped using due to the llm code shitshow)
On a personal level, I also don’t like Epic and Tim Sweeney, but recognize how important this is of a change. Tim said in the past they don’t care bout the Steam Deck, because it is not selling well. They will care if it is selling in the tens of millions. (I can’t link to the original Twitter/X post, so I rely on correct quoting from other places.)
“If we only had a few more programmers. It’s the Linux problem. I love the Steam Deck hardware. Valve has done an amazing job there; I wish they would get to tens of millions of users, at which point it would actually make sense to support it.”
- Tim Sweeney
