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Thanks to Valve's Proton Initiative and related development efforts, gaming on Linux is faster and easier than ever, but just how easy does that make it? Forbes reporter Jason Evangelho decided to find out, as he (seemingly) used Linux as his primary PC gaming platform for 6 months. Jason said that availability and usability aren't huge issues anymore, as Proton officially supports thousands of games while unofficially working with many more, and Lutris makes setting up Windows-only clients like Origin a breeze. But interestingly, the journalist dedicated almost all of his article to one specific issue: setting up graphics drivers. Jason believes that the process of picking, downloading, and in some cases, compiling the right graphics driver for any particular setup is still well beyond what the average gamer is willing to put up with, and failing to use the right driver can lead to unacceptable performance, assuming games run at all.
But here's the first problem: is this all common knowledge for new users? I'm willing to bet it is not. Even if they've been told the differences between open source and proprietary drivers, what happens when they do navigate to this area of Ubuntu and update? Maybe they'll be eager to check out what all this fuss is about Steam Proton and playing their favorite Windows games on Linux. Not so fast. Valve lists the graphic driver requirements for Proton as Nvidia 415, which is several months newer than Nvidia 390. Now users will need to add a "PPA" which is a software repository not built in to Ubuntu. Will that have the right driver? How do they know without extensive googling? Is that going to update automatically, and as often as Nvidia's Windows 10 drivers do?... For as user-friendly as Linux has become, gaming still requires some guesswork, which I've only navigated by completely immersing myself in it. And the direction changes dramatically based on if you're using Team Red or Team Green. It changes based on what flavor of Linux you're using.
But here's the first problem: is this all common knowledge for new users? I'm willing to bet it is not. Even if they've been told the differences between open source and proprietary drivers, what happens when they do navigate to this area of Ubuntu and update? Maybe they'll be eager to check out what all this fuss is about Steam Proton and playing their favorite Windows games on Linux. Not so fast. Valve lists the graphic driver requirements for Proton as Nvidia 415, which is several months newer than Nvidia 390. Now users will need to add a "PPA" which is a software repository not built in to Ubuntu. Will that have the right driver? How do they know without extensive googling? Is that going to update automatically, and as often as Nvidia's Windows 10 drivers do?... For as user-friendly as Linux has become, gaming still requires some guesswork, which I've only navigated by completely immersing myself in it. And the direction changes dramatically based on if you're using Team Red or Team Green. It changes based on what flavor of Linux you're using.