We talked about it a few months ago, Psyonix decided to drop the ball on the Linux and Mac ports shortly after being stuffed with dollars acquired by Epic Games. For Windows, they moved from a DX9-based client to a DX11-based client and justified a lack of resources to maintain all platforms (the Linux client used OpenGL) just like before.

In the pre-Proton world that we used to live in, we would have been screwed, but Proton has once again come to the rescue. At the time of writing Rocket League still works fine using Proton 5, and you don’t need the previous launcher command for D9VK anymore (i.e. it launches properly out of the box). Here’s a quick video I recorded last week (using OBS so expect a better framerate in reality):

And that’s a simple story, really: it works just like before, if not better in terms of frame rate, and I could not notice any glitch or any particular bug so far.

Of course, this does not mean we should trust in Psyonix or Epic not to force some changes down the road. The worse ones could be:

• to include some anti-cheat technology that has no Linux support
• to remove Rocket League from Steam altogether and make Rocket League an Epic Games Store exclusive, where Linux support is virtually non-existent apart from setting up your own Lutris client and hoping for the best.

With the track record of Epic Games so far, I can’t say I am too confident in the future of this game on Linux. My advice would be: Carpe Diem, my friends.