I’m asking because I just bought Cronos: The New Dawn on Steam because it has a native Linux port. To be fair, I would have bought it at some point anyway but I got excited when I saw it had a Linux port. The game is missing features that the Windows version has, It runs horribly at any setting other than very low. I think they only bothered testing for the SteamDeck. But if that’s the case, why does it support FSR 4.0? To be fair, the Windows version doesn’t run amazing either if you enable ray tracing but it still performs way better than the Linux port. Why do devs keep doing this? I’ve bought many Linux games that have problems that the Windows versions don’t have. Why even make a port if you’re not going to bother testing or optimizing it?
I have a question (an honest one, not implying anything). Given that most games work perfectly on Proton, why does a Linux port excite you?
It can be beneficial in terms of performance if done right. The native Linux build of Baldur’s Gate 3 runs considerably better than the Windows version via Proton, even though the Proton version already runs better than it runs on Windows natively.
Good question. It means to me that developers thought that Linux as a platform was worth targeting. One could conclude, the more Linux ports we see, then more people must be using Linux. It’s my dream for us not to be treated as second class citizens where computer operating systems are concerned.
It’s a baby step thing. They want to develop for Linux but so far it’s about 3% of steam users that use it. So when a studio does its testing/optimizing they focus on the platform their player base is using most.
Obviously there’s a negative feedback loop here. Players avoid Linux because of issues which causes devs to neglect it because of player numbers which causes issues in the game…
Steam is pushing Linux currently but it’s hard to overcome the dominant position windows and consoles have. We’ll get there though.
On paper, a Linux version of a game would perform slightly better, because they wouldn’t have to use Windows system calls for synchronization and disk I/O.
This seems to be true for the games in my Steam library that have good Linux versions, though I can’t comment on the performance of bad ones because obviously I play those through Proton.