There was a new data dump available a couple of hours ago from ProtonDB, so here’s a quick overview of new items we could identify this time for February 2019.

There were less unique contributors in January, with 1307 individuals for a total of 2907 reports. The volume of reports keeps going down a little bit over time, and it is seen in the graph below both in daily counts (black dots) and in the weekly moving average (7 days) in red. But I would say it seems to reach some kind of plateau soon.

In mid-February there was a new release of Proton 3.16-7, which may have led to some increase in reportings as suggested below:

If we look at individual contributors and what distros they use to test games on their machines, we observe just like before the following split.

It seems to be very consistent month after month, with some changes only on the long tail of the distribution (SteamOS fighting against Deepin for the last place in this chart!).

CPU-wise, with a certain margin of error we always get to about a third of AMD CPU usage vs ⅔ Intel CPU usage. It’s not moving much.

Looking at the RAM reveals a slightly larger sample of folks with 16GB RAM on their testing configuration. Probably just a variation as the sample of reports is going down a little so it may skew towards one way or the other.

The situations remains very stable for GPU ownership as well among ProtonDB contributors, in terms of overall brand.

However, we start seeing some slight changes when looking at Nvidia contributors: there’s now enough owners of RTX 2080 to appear at the bottom of the chart for now. There is a much larger existing installed base for all other cards so it is going to take a while to see the new generation taking over. In the meantime the 1060 is king, and this is consistent with the Steam hardware survey when looking at Linux gamers only.

On the AMD side of things, the situation is overall stable but we can finally see the RX590 users appearing in the stats, at about 2.4% of all AMD users. It shows that even among gamers, the conversion to newer graphics cards remains quite slow. And that’s especially relevant with the RX 590 which is very affordable all things considered.

Let’s move on to the games that received the largest number of reports in February 2019. No surprise for most of them since they are regular entries we see every single month, but Resident Evil 2 RE and Ace Combat 7 are new in this list.

And here’s the games that got a report for the first time ever in ProtonDB in the course of February 2019. (Good on the right indicate the number of ratings that were good/platinium for each title).

Some notes regarding the above list…

• You should be able to play Ace Combat 7 without much issues.
• Dirt Rally 2.0 has some online mode issues, and no force feedback apparently, otherwise it seems to work very well.
• Metro Exodus seems to run absolutely fine out of the box.
• Vainglory, not really a new MOBA, is reported to work very well too. I’m not sure why it took so long for someone to try out this one since it’s been on Steam for a while.
• I’d recommend everyone to check STEINS;GATE ELITE out since it’s an updated, fully animated version of the original Steins:Gate which is an excellent visual novel. It works apparently just fine on Linux (a recent update fixed the crash that happened at the beginning).

So it’s a pretty good month with some high profiles titles working de facto on Steam Play.

Let’s end with a word cloud based on all the comments left in the reports from February 2019…

I am not sure how to interpret it this time, there’s a bunch of rather unique technical expressions like “thread_attach”, “process_attach”, “process detach” which may be either specific configuration steps, or problems coming from logs across different games. I will have to dig a little further on that. If you are aware of what such trends signal, please leave a comment!

That’s all for now. Goodbye February 2019!