I’m providing my experience trying to game with windows-based friends.

I have hundreds of games in steam. Some had poor or broken play with games Windows users play together without issues.

I think this community is a bit defensive. I have hundreds of games in my steam library that I play. A large number with multiplayer, I have had issues with my windows friends.

Most recently the pain in the ass games have been AoE4, and BeamMP. AoE4 crashes in muliplayer, there is a patch for that crash on protondb, but it seems I’m also impacted by an AMD related bug that happens intermittently and will restart X at a random times specifically due to playing AoE4. Tried various kernels and video cards, still crashes.

BeamMP, looks like a lot of people have this issue, some have been able to resolve it.

Civ6 used to have stability issues, the Linux client is a joke, I use the proton version because it’s more stable.

We’re gonna act like Bronze doesn’t mean broken sometimes? Okay.

This is the sort of honest discourse we should be having in the community. The recent advances are nothing short of amazing, and I can play tons of great games with my windows friends, but there are some games, that left me, and sometimes them with terrible experiences.

Nothing like investing over an hour into a game with friends only to crash due to some Linux specific issue.

Ummm, I say that because I’m the friend in the friend group where the games don’t work sometimes, and I’m not going to pretend like that isn’t the case simply because I’m a FOSS advocate.

I own a steam deck, I have decades of experience with Linux as a Desktop, server, and even some years doing game development, so it’s not for a lack of effort.

It’s undoubtedly a fact that some mainstream games don’t work at all, or well enough that you’ll play seamlessly with your windows friends. Even protondb admits hundreds of outright borked games. Being dishonest about this does more harm than good.

It’s amazing what Steam, Valve, AMD, etc, have done recently for Linux gaming, but it’s not the YotLD yet.

Great, but I can still only realistically play a portion of my library with friends on Windows.

Right, well even though San Diego might have state park beach front property, we shouldn’t have a tent city filling it up. This quickly becomes unhygienic, and crime rises, among other issues.