The year of Linux on the desktop has not arrived, and it has been waiting for years. But what does seem to have arrived is the era of Linux gaming. And not only because of some of the game consoles based on it, such as Steam Deck, or the Atari VCS, but because thanks to projects like Proton from Steam Play, a very high percentage of AAA video games are available for this operating system.
According to protondb.com, with the information of the videogames of the steam catalog Since they already work on Linux, the number of titles that run on GNU / Linux distros is higher than many people think. Something totally unthinkable a few years ago, that anyone who said that at this point we would have this panorama would have been taken as a joke ...
The protondb.com service data of the Steam video games that already work on Linux are:
- Top 1000If you look at the 1000 best games in the Steam catalog, then the Linux support rate is 75%, which is not bad at all. That means there are about 750 functional video games. Of these, 22% are natively supported, the rest must be released through the Windows version using Proton.
- Top 100: among the 100 best video games in the catalog, 80% of them can be run on Linux, either natively with ports or with Proton.
- Top 10- If you look at the best AAA video games, the creme de la creme, then 40% of them are ready to run on your distro. Among them, 30% have native support for Linux, and 10% get it through Proton. The 10 most successful titles today are: Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, Dota 2, Team Fortress 2 and Grand Theft Auto V, PUBG: BATTLEGROUNDS, Apex Legends, Halo Infinite, New World, NARAKA: BLADEPOINT and Destiny, of them , only 2 are not yet compatible with Linux.
Very good figures for Linux gamers, who have 83% of the 21244 video game titles in the Steam catalog available, that is, a total of 17649 games they can already be run on GNU / Linux.
Fantastic figures to be to thank both to developers who decide to release native ports for Linux, as well as to the compatibility layer Proton (and Proton Experimental in cases where the stable version cannot) of Steam Play, as well as to DXVK and vkd3d-proton, and even ffmpeg, which allow non-natives to run in the vast majority of cases.
And the situation will continue to improve, as we are also working on the development of a new runtime container for Linux: Soldier Linux (Steam Runtime 2). With it, games can be run in an isolated container.