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Six days ago there were less than 5000 games available to install and play on Steam for Linux. Following Valve’s incredible Steam Play update, which adds streamlined compatibility layers for Windows-only games, that number is potentially much, much higher. Granted, not everything works out of the gate as there’s a daunting amount of work and optimization remaining. But one fact stands tall: In less than a week the number of perfectly playable games on Steam for Linux increased by nearly 1000 titles.

That’s an increase of almost 20% practically overnight, and it’s guaranteed to climb higher as the Linux community continues testing the enormous library of Windows games on their favorite Linux distributions.

spcr.netlify.com/

Valve has officially whitelisted only 27 games at this early stage, but we can expect that number to grow at a rapid pace.

As of this writing, 2134 unique games have been user-tested from the Steam for Windows library. Each game receives one of six ratings: Completely Stable, Stable, Unstable, Unplayable, Crashes or Won’t Start. A Completely Stable rating signifies that the game exhibits native-like performance with no bugs or errors. Since testing began, 971 unique titles have been stamped with a Completely Stable status.

It’s worth pointing out that your mileage may vary depending on GPU driver version and operating system. Note that Ubuntu accounts for 37% of all submissions (Arch Linux is in 2nd place), and 64% of users are running on Nvidia.

5 Reasons To Ditch Windows And Switch To Linux

As the hours tick by, it’s becoming clear how beneficial this latest Steam Play update is to the Linux community at large. Valve’s first step at rejuvenating Linux in 2013 with SteamOS and the Linux Steam client yielded results, but “The Year Of Desktop Linux” never arrived. By improving on the tools created by the open source community — and employing the developer behind the DirectX-to-Vulkan project, it has done more for PC gaming on Linux in the last week than it managed to do in 5 years.

Steam Play Compatibility Reports (BETA)

See, before this happened, Linux users were forced to use workarounds like Wine and DXVK to get these games running with varying degrees of success. Even with pleasant GUI tools like Lutris, there was still a lot of guesswork. Now Steam automagically applies those workarounds and various customizations to each game. It’s as transparent as simply installing a game on Windows. You can even point your Steam for Linux client at your Windows installation, and it will download the necessary updates.

Again, this doesn’t mean you can ditch Windows and expect every game to work. Not yet. Possibly not ever. Especially ones that contain aggressive DRM and anti-cheat software. It does means that in the weeks and months ahead, the total available games you can play on Linux — and with native-like performance — should at least double. And I think that’s a conservative guess.

I’ve started doing my own testing and have been pleasantly surprised with games like Monster Hunter: World, DiRT 4 and Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus. All three are games I previously relied on a Windows 10 installation for.

The community-maintained Steam Play compatibility reports can be viewed here. You can submit your own results here. You can also check out a web-friendly version of the compiled results at https://spcr.netlify.com/ and sort them to your liking.

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