Thanks to the compatibility layer Proton — based on the Windows-compatible runtime environment Wine — which implements DirectX 11 and DirectX 12 with the help of Vulkan, and Steam Play, around 75 percent of all popular Steam games now also run on the free operating systems based on the Linux kernel.
According to publicly available data from the ProtonDB portal, which collects information on the performance of gaming applications in the Steam catalog on Linux, 75 percent of the 1000 most popular games on Steam now also run on Linux. 22 percent of all games even run natively, while only 44 out of 1,000 games (0.44%) refuse to work.
ProtonDB uses a six-point rating scale to classify games for their suitability for Linux.
- Platinum: Runs perfectly after installation.
- Gold: Runs perfectly after installation with minor adjustments.
- Silver: Runs with minor restrictions but is generally playable.
- Bronze: Works but has issues preventing comfortable play.
- Broken: Cannot be started or is not playable.
The current evaluation of the platform comes to the following results for the 100 and 1000 most popular games on Steam, after 80 percent of the top 100 are good (gold), very good (platinum) or native, and 75 percent of the top 1000 are good, very good or native Running Linux.
Unfortunately, as can be seen in the graph, when evaluating only the 10 most popular video games, the percentage of those that run without significant problems on the Linux operating system drops below half, to a mere 40 percent.
If you are interested in checking the degree of compatibility with your Linux distribution of the games that you have acquired through Steam, we remind you that Protondb has a search function that Linux players can use to verify the status of each game.
