738
7 years later, Valve's Proton has been an incredible game-changer for Linux
(www.gamingonlinux.com)
this post was submitted on 21 Aug 2025
738 points (99.2% liked)
Technology
74296 readers
4517 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Literally this week I learned that you need to install flatpak Nvidia drivers if you use flatpak Steam. Once I found that out, proton works great!
A sidestory to this is that Flatpak and AppImage have been miraculous boosts to Linux OS machines. After I figured out that ya gotta throw the --user flag into your flatpak installs so they don't jam up your / tree, and also throwing flatpak override --user xyz.app onto a few apps that benefit from universal access, things have been fine and dandy.
I continue to be happy with how awesome Linux has gotten just over the past 5 years.
I've been using mint exclusively for like 3 months and have been using a hearty blend of terminal installs and the program manager app.
It seems to not have caused any problems YET, but I've been assured it will. I see flatpack conversations a lot and don't fully understand the differences (apart from the install method).
Is it worth understanding and committing to a single system or can I just be a low-power user for a while?
One thing you might notice is that flatpak defaults to "system" installs. Is your root system directory filling up? You probably want to start installing onto --user, as this will put things in /home where they belong and, by default, sandbox permissions away from root (that, too, can be easily changed).
Also, don't fear mixing different ways of installing. I use AppImage, Flatpak, the default app-get install method, and .deb. FlatPak at this point is the best, because it offers the ease of use of AppImage, but the flexibility and auto-maintenance of apt-get/Software Update. The only problems I've encountered were due to me not understanding that it was filling up my root partition by default...
I've been running Mint MATE for about 9 years. Love it to death.
This is why I have used flatpak steam. It's a lot easier to manage drivers in it vs the shitshow that is doing it natively with adding custom driver specific repos and whatnot.
Hoping the new PC I just ordered (with an AMD GPU) will be better with the native app.
I will remark that that sounds like a distro issue - I use Arch and the drivers are just in the official distros, no need to add external ones. Just look up what you need on the wiki and install it.
That said, AMD will still probably be a better experience.
:)
No flak. I do, too.
(btw)