Summer is at our door! I don’t know about you but it’s getting really hot where I am. This time this is with an ice-cream in one hand that I write this article, because updates related to ProtonDB can’t wait! In May Proton has gained two new minor versions (4.2.4 and 4.2.5) and the project is as active as ever (a new version 4.2.6 was released just a few days ago).

Overall the number of reports is fairly stable compared to previous months, but there is somewhat of a growing trend of reports compared to earlier this year:

Looking again at individual contributors, we can derive the share for the distributions they use for testing. This is the second month we see some a deviation from previous trends, with Manjaro being ahead of Mint. 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. It’s actually now very close to vanilla Arch in terms of share. By the way, Antergos is dropped further at the bottom and that’s not helped by the fact that they are shutting down. I have used Antergos before and most of the “service” they provided was a broken-installer for Arch (and not broken just once, constantly broken), so when you can’t do the only job you were supposed to do, it’s time to switch to something else.

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 of things, this month’s sample shows a slightly higher share for AMD vs NVidia, but I would not make any conclusion on just a single data point at this stage.

Looking among AMD GPU users, there’s a few changes: most of the top cards are growing in share: the Rx Vega, RX 480, RX 570 and RX 560, while the RX580 is still relatively stable on its throne.

Among Nvidia users there is not much change at the top (GTX1060 and GTX1070 rule), but we finally see the all-time popular GTX970 dropping share progressively: it’s pretty clear at this stage that some previous GTX970 users have moved on to new cards, and we can certainly expect the GTX970 to be a less relevant card 6 months from now.

And the most popular games this month in terms of reports are… MORDHAU followed closely by RAGE 2! :

Note that Rage 2 is not a DirectX game (they use Vulkan just like Doom 2016) so the loss of performance on Linux is pretty, pretty minimal:

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

Looking at the new reports that did not exist until May 2019, we find of course Rage 2, as it was only released in May, and A Plague Tale: Innocence, both popular and supposed to work well. A note for folks who like simulators, looks like UBOAT, a very decent sub simulator, works apparently great on Proton, too. And older gamers might a trip back to the 90s with Blood: Fresh Supply. The main point this month is that most games work well, even when they were just released!

Here are some videos of games that you can expect to work almost flawlessly with Proton (below videos run on different OS though):

• A Plague Tale: Innocence

• UBOAT

• Blood: Fresh Supply:

• **Void Bastards **has an interesting 3D style reminiscent of XIII or Time Splitters:

• Last not but least, Sonic Team Racing is probably one of the first Sonic-derivated games not to suck completely in a while. It kind of looks like Mario Kart but brings a couple of new ideas regarding cooperation. Worth checking out:

And that’s all for June! Now it’s time to grab games for the summer.