May is here and we can now have a quick look at the ProtonDB data again for April! April 2019 did not show any major Proton release but a couple of fixes on Proton 4.2 showed up and we are now at 4.2-3b at the time of writing.

Overall the number of reports is fairly stable in April vs March 2019:

Looking again at individual contributors, we can derive the share for the distributions they use for testing. This time around we see some deviation from previous samples, with Manjaro being ahead of Mint, which was never seen until now. Another deviation is the share of PopOS (an Ubuntu fork developed by System76) ahead of debian while it used to be much smaller in previous months.

I would not make any conclusion at this stage, but it is true nonetheless that both Manjaro and PopOS have been popping up (no pun intended) in different discussions about recent distributions that are worth trying out. I don’t think we should expect a massive migration anytime soon, but among April 2019’s contributors we may find more of such users. We’ll see if the next few months look alike or different.

Looking at hardware now, hardly any change in the CPU share by brand, or the quantity of RAM used by most contributors.

On the GPU side this month’s sample seems to return to previous levels seen in late 2018 between AMD and NVidia (i.e. NVidia representing about ⅔ of the GPU market for gamers).

Looking among AMD GPU users, it’s pretty stable vs last month. The RX580 keeps the lead, followed by APUs (Vega) and the RX480. We still don’t see much penetration of the RX590 model yet.

Among Nvidia users the GTX1070 is once again ahead of the GTX970 share, and even more so than in previous month. The newer RTX cards are still pretty far behind the GTX series for now.

And the most popular games this month in terms of reports are… Risk of Rain 2 followed closely by Borderlands Game of the Year Enhanced! HexDSL talked about it in a recent video:

Here’s the list of all popular reports in this month:

Looking at the new reports that did not exist until April 2019, we find of course Borderlands Game of the Year Enhanced, as expected. and also Anno 1800, which is surprising since you can’t even purchase it on Steam anymore (Another exclusive for the Epic Game Store…). Note that Anno 1800 was still delivered to Steam users who purchased the game before release, so such people are able to test the game with Proton.

This month you are able to play pretty much out of the box, among other things:

• **Borderlands Game of the Year **Enhanced

• Islanders, a cute city builder:

• Ace Attorney Trilogy (as long as you activate WINED3D11). This is a new PC version with updated graphics of the first 3 episodes of the Ace Attorney series.

• Katana Zero, a 2D action game

And to finish our update, here’s what the word cloud of all comments left by contributors in April 2019 looked like. It’s a mixed bag but more often than not people seem to have a positive experience with what they tried.

And that’s all for this month! I hope you liked this update.