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Linux already has around 75% of the most popular games on Steam

Andy Vilchez
2 min read

The times in which Linux was not useful to play are long gone, over the years, we have seen the arrival of more and more games for this operating system. Steam is the video game company that has bet the most on Linux, so much so that it has around 750 games available for this operating system.

Linux already has around 75% of the most popular games on Steam
Steam for Linux.

Steam is a video game platform that was born in 2010 with one goal and that was that all players could have all popular games in one place.

To this day, this is the most popular gaming platform in the world with hundreds of millions of active users. Three years ago the platform started offering games for Linux operating systems. Although they started with only a few games, today the catalog has grown.

Steam for Linux features 80 of the 100 most popular games on the platform.

In this sense, we have that it will no longer be necessary to have a Windows system to enjoy the best Steam games.

How does Steam emulate games on Linux?

Linux already has around 75% of the most popular games on Steam
Proton, the Windows emulator for Linux on which Steam is based.

The first thing to be clear about this is that the games are not native, so they cannot run directly in the operating system. In order to do this, Steam relies on an emulator known as Proton, which is a variant of the well-known Wine.

Proton has a key difference and that is that it is capable of implementing Direct3D in the Vulkan API: DxVK and VK3D feel capable of emulating DirectX 9, 10, 11 and 12.

This small difference achieves great compatibility and allows games to run even when they are not designed for the operating system.

Game compatibility is improved

Linux already has around 75% of the most popular games on Steam
List of the 20 best games compatible with this platform.

The number of games supported by this emulator has been significantly improved. In the previous image we can see a list with the 20 most popular games on Steam.

As you can see, most of them can be emulated quite well. Those that are in green are those that present a high level of compatibility, the yellow ones are those that can be emulated, but that may present some problems.

Finally, the reds and grays cannot be emulated on Linux.

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