- I've gone over to Linux after using Windows for 25 years.
As someone who enjoys older games, I am pleasantly surprised that Wine (with dxvk and cnc-ddraw) lets me run more games in a better way than I was able to on Windows.
I can run some 16-bit games on a 64-bit OS!
Games that rudely switch to fullscreen, I can run in Wine Virtual Desktop. Previously on Windows, I had to configure hacks like DxWnd and it didn't always work.
I only wish Wine also allowed me to zoom 2x or 3x, but this is where Gamescope comes in:
gamescope -S integer -F nearest --borderless wine game.exe
Also there is a potential to use a different Wine configuration (prefix) for every game specifically. So far I haven't had to resort to this.I noticed some Unity games waste disk space with gigabytes of zeroes, Linux lets me run them from inside a compressed SquashFS image, this even makes the game load faster:
mkdir ./game
squashfuse ./game.squashfs ./game
pushd ./game
wine game.exe
popd
sleep 1
umount ./game
rmdir ./game
I encountered a game that crashes due to multiprocessor system, the fix is simple, restricting it to one CPU: taskset --cpu-list 1 wine game.exe
by jakebasile
3 subcomments
- I'm never going back. If something changes and the only option is Windows or consoles I'll just stop buying new games or take up another hobby.
Being able to use sane scripting to solve problems, ZFS snapshots to undo bad mod installs, using the same system for development, and so on is no longer something I'm willing to give up. I've also started amassing a small collection of Cloud Init configs that set up game servers inside LXD containers. Some of these have native Linux binaries but a few only have Windows servers. They run perfectly well through Wine.
Anyone here even vaguely interested, I encourage you to just try it. I use Ubuntu and it works great on both AMD and Nvidia cards for me. What have you got to lose?
by hamdingers
3 subcomments
- After being impressed with my Steam Deck, earlier this year I purchased an RX 9070XT (my first card from team red since the Radeon 9800 Pro) for my gaming PC and switched to linux full time.
Now hundreds of hours in, I have nothing interesting to write about it. For me and the games I play it's been a seamless transition.
by mindcrash
4 subcomments
- In case you don't own a Steam Deck and would like to see how much of your library would run on Linux:
1. Go to your library
2. Click the filter button
3. Under "hardware support" you'll see a dropdown "Steam Deck" with 4 options, here's some explanation what they mean:
Verified - Means this game 100% works on Linux (and Deck), which is verified by Valve
Playable - Means this game works on Linux (and Deck) but it might have some tiny issues (e.g. font size)
Untested - Might work, but not tested
So to check if your games would run pretty nicely either filter on "Verified" games or "Verified or playable" games and it filters out everything which will or might not run at all.
You'll be surprised how much games can run on Linux these days -- thanks to the massive effort Valve puts in Proton and some devs (including Valve) publishing native Linux builds of their games on Steam, and even things you might not even consider at all like Skyrim or Oblivion with all your favorite mods (!)
- 2003 me thought Wine is a dead end project and a waste of developer time. Granted valve put a lot of effort into Proton but they wouldn't even have considered it without the massive amount of work done before, kudus to all the non cynical wine devs
- What percentage of Windows games runs on Windows? I'm not trying to be funny; it's clearly less than 100%.
I've been personally running Linux on my gaming box for 2-3 years I think. AMD hardware, obviously. BF6 doesn't work (and perhaps never can work) because of its quite invasive anti-cheat, but there are so many games out there that it's not a big deal. Insurgency: Sandstorm is a vastly better game anyway.
I realize that this is probably a big deal for many people, though, but perhaps those people are better off with a Playstation anyway.
- I am an avid linux user but never switched my gaming PC to linux, until the Win10 > Win11 debacle which has made me switch.
I am using EndeavorOS, my first Arch flavoured distro, it's excellent. Honestly it has all "just worked". Drivers were auto installed, I pointed Steam to my existing library on an NTFS drive originally used by windows, and it just plays my existing library fine.
Cyberpunk2077, Red Dead 2, Starfield all objectively AAA modern games, working fine. I even get a bit better performance in some areas, comparable in others.
I can swap back to windows and it still runs the same library. I really didn't expect it to work like that.
The only thing I have had to troubleshoot is getting a Quest3 VR headset to work, and an Alpha stage game which others are getting to work, I just haven't bothered to chase it down.
by LennyHenrysNuts
0 subcomment
- I switched to Slackware in the early oughts, but gaming was hit and miss at best with Wine. The occasional native game (like Neverwinter Nights) was always welcome.
I've dual booted to game for the last seven or eight years because of coworkers and family nagging me to play games with them, but now I don't need to. I haven't come across a game that won't run flawlessly on Linux (through Steam) for a couple of years now. I can enjoy my nightly game of Deep Rock Galactic or Necesse without being part of the botnet.
No further requirement to run Windows!
by theshrike79
1 subcomments
- Now imagine Apple put the same amount of effort and resources into a Proton-like layer for macOS.
The M-series hardware is perfectly fine for most games, overpowered even. What is lacking are the actual games. Very few companies bother with Metal ports of games.
Build a compatibility layer so we can just install any Windows game from Steam and start playing.
- Proton/Wine is so good these days. Rarely have I had an issue running a game in the last 3 or 4 years. Sometimes EA/Ubisoft games that have their own special launchers don't work immediately, but ProtonDB and the Proton GitHub issues are great resources to get them going.
I remember when Cyberpunk 2077 came out it didn't work at first, but the Proton and Glorious Egg Roll devs got it running within a few days. Legends.
Even many games that support native linux run better under wine.
- Nice to see this. Worth noting that a lot of Windows (or DOS) games past may also not run well on current Windows versions. The anti-cheat issue is likely to persist for at lest a few more years... though I think the relative success of the Steam Deck itself has moved the bar significantly in terms of demands for support.
I do think there's a few hiccups still with Linux support. The shift up to 6.16 kernel has itself resolved many of the issues I'd been having in the past. If you're on an older LTS that hasn't moved, you're likely to see more issues than with a more current distro.
- I recently ran into a game where online match making was broken in windows, but worked just fine in Linux. I felt like I was trapped in the upsidedown.
- I feel like the minority. The few times I’ve tried games on linux with decent hardware (eg radeon vii, rx580, rtx3060?) it was just trash. like straight up stuttering and nonsense.
Maybe the only games I ever tried were in that 10% that aren’t supported or will never be supported (hitman, deus ex, etc).
this led me down the rabbit hole for a while of gpu passthrough w/ vfio / sriov and virtual machines. those worked really well but also had their own problems.
in the end i just bought a damned ps5 pro that rarely gets used. but at least it “just works” when I want it to. which is more than i can say for anything remotely related to using linux for games or even as a decent desktop.
and yes, i tried your distro. the only one perhaps that wasn’t a headache was void.
by marcodiego
2 subcomments
- That means 10% of windows games use invasive anti-cheat?
by colonCapitalDee
2 subcomments
- I've been happily playing Overwatch 2 on Linux for a couple months now. I need gamescope to get it to play nicely with my multiple monitors, and it crashes maybe once a month, but performance is great and I have no major complaints. I'm never going back to Windows, except for work where it isn't optional :(
by apatheticonion
0 subcomment
- Love this so much and do so much of my gaming on Linux now.
I just wish I could run Linux on my MacBook Pro so I could actually play games on this beautiful, portable, power-efficient criminally nerfed masterpiece of a laptop.
- What percentage of Windows games still run on current Windows?
I never managed to get anything close to 90% of my library to run on the same windows installation, but I gave up years ago, and just use Linux instead.
- As someone who only has a windows machine to play games, specifically driving sims, I really wish my hardware worked on Linux.
by benlivengood
0 subcomment
- I finally got rid of the last Windows gaming box because Windows 10 started warning me about not getting security updates. So far no compatibility issues under Debian with Steam, but I play mostly single-player or multiplayer strategy.
EDIT: I remember now that Civilization 5 for Linux would crash frequently. I switched to Proton and it's been fine since.
- It's been months since I've booted into Windows to play a game. Feels amazing. The only exception I've run into is heavy anticheat titles, like trying to play on Faceit CS2 servers.
I can live without that though. I don't think I'll bother setting up a Windows partition on my next PC.
- I was seriously irritated with Windows 11 for the past few months. If my PC went to sleep, it would wake up and freeze at the logon screen. The constant updates that would reset some preferences - and worse, reinstall CoPilot and OneDrive - pushed me over. I went and installed Bazzite on the PC I built early this year with a Nvidia RTX 5080, somewhat skeptical that it would work well despite my extremely positive experience with the Steam Deck. The result is outstanding.
by 29athrowaway
1 subcomments
- In terms of compatibility and performance, there is a noticeable increase over the last years since Proton came up.
Racing wheels are still not well supported IMO. Although on Linux you can map a racing wheel to any other peripheral and work this around.
Another thing is that streaming experience is not as good on Linux as it is on Windows. OBS exists but the whole ecosystem around it is largely not.
Still... Linux is my choice of OS.
- And they do run quite well, out of the box.
On Linux, I've been having a good run for years now. Steam's Proton is fantastic, if the thing doesn't work, I just select another Proton version, and try again. Or look at ProtonDB on how others did it.
I have also tried the Heroic Launcher, which is similarly good, and open source even. Just create an entry for a game or software, select the executable, select the Proton / Wine version, and it's good to go. No need for an account or anything.
I also have a Steam Deck now, which natively runs Linux, and Steam, and Proton. I'm sure my game selection also matters, but my experience is that everything just works. Valve did a tremendous job with integration - standing on the Wine giant's shoulder, of course.
Multiplayer, specifically the nasty anti-cheat software is the last remaining bastion, I think. For that, I reboot into my Windows 10 LTSC.
by constantcrying
0 subcomment
- As someone who only plays videogames on Linux I have to say that it is a surprisingly good experience, even with an Nvidia Card. Some things just are unavailable, e.g. the new Battlefield, mostly due to developers wanting to insert very specific Anti-Cheat software.
But so much just works, old games, new games, singleplayer, multiplayer.
- I see a lot of mention of ProtonDB in this thread, so I thought I'd take a look at which of my favourite games are supported.
Unfortunately, when I try to open it, it gives me a NS_ERROR_UNKNOWN_HOST when it tries to download the page's .js and CSS from a head.protondb.pages.dev domain.
I tried to add that to my /etc/hosts file, but then I got an error about a certificate.
Most strange, and the only clue I found online was this YouTube video[1] that suggests accessing it through Tor...
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2DY3snvH9Xc
- Anecdotally, it's way above 90%.
I think the only game in the last 2 years I haven't been able to run is battlefield 6.
Any game that is reasonably popular has a very good chance of running. Just go to protondb and anything gold and above is generally good to go.
- I have a dumb and probably easily-googled question, but I trust the average knowledge here:
What's the best Video Card / Brand / Model for running games on Linux? I'm considering upgrading my old gaming PC and would rather also switch to Linux for gaming. (I'm already familiar with Linux for regular use and programming, but haven't gamed on it once).
by nobodyandproud
0 subcomment
- As Satya Nadella runs Windows OS and Office into the ground.
I still can get my desktop gaming fix, at least.
by myfirstacc7234
0 subcomment
- Created my first account to comment on this post.
I'm considering the switch but I use emulators like BlueStacks or MuMu to play mobile games with gpu acceleration. The alternative on Linux is supposed to be Waydroid but I've heard the support for gpu acceleration with Nvidia cards like my 2070 is not there yet.
Does anyone have some experiences for this use case?
by knallfrosch
3 subcomments
- Number of games is a weird statistic.
What about market share of play time?
- It's a bit painful hearing all of the success stories on this page. I ran into endless bugs running games under Wine, eventually gave up and bought a vanilla PC just to run Windows for games, and that still gives me endless bugs with most major games, but somewhat less than Linux does. With my level of hardware fu I should stick to consoles, but mods make games accessible to me.
- I have a pc I built when the 2080 TI came out. How is Linux support for the supporting drivers for those cards today? The machine is still more than powerful enough for my needs but I haven't used it in a couple years because Windows really is just complete garbage. I'd like to be able to take advantage of new to moderately old hardware without dealing with Windows.
- I have been thinking on dropping Windows, that I use only for gaming, but the issue is that I got a Nvidia graphics card and didn't have time to check if the support for it in Linux got better
But after experiencing the new Windows 11 "always-online" model it might make me stick to AMD in the future
- But it seems like all the ones I like to play the most don't :(
Yes competitive online multi-player games, but these are what I love to play and I play them with many of my friends.
by _imnothere
0 subcomment
- Dual-boot user here, while this is definitely good to hear, but I think it's even more important that how many players could ditch Windows and switch to Linux for their games.
Suppose I play one of the 10% games that wouldn't work on Linux, I'd still need to keep my Windows installation around, right?
- Microsoft is bleeding a large-ish userbase with win 11: the gamers. They’re left with corpo and the laggard users who are aware their computer is not friendly , are not aware they can change OS yet. Soon they could rename it to Corporate Windows
- I play (and work) exclusively on Linux for 17 years -- most games run fine, yes, except for competitive ones (Rust, League of Legends etc), because they require kernel-level backdoors to spy on the OS kernel-level cheats.
- Original source:
https://boilingsteam.com/windows-games-compatibility-on-linu...
- In my experience, the only Windows games that don't run on Linux are those with malware-esque anti-cheat that explicitly block Linux. Almost all games I tried worked out of the box.
- Next laptop is probably going to be the quietest PC I can find that still runs linux. I love my Air but I've been eyeballing a new system as my M1 is getting a little long in the tooth
by 29athrowaway
0 subcomment
- Outside of Steam, you can use Proton as well. Via Lutris, for example.
The Internet Archive happens to have many game ISOs for some reason.
protontricks and gamemode can be useful too.
- It's sad that games like battlefield 6 use an invasive anti cheat that forces the use of windows and secure boot... But aside from this, my transition from win 10 to linux mint has been seamless
- I've been full-time Linux again for about 12 months, gaming isn't my main problem anymore. I think the only thing I'm having a bit of difficulty with is trying to get Jedi Knight working without crashing my entire computer.
Biggest problem I'm running into now is replacing all my music mixing tools. It's getting there, but it's a whole process.
by Simulacra
1 subcomments
- There's really not many reasons left to not use Linux. With windows 11 it's only going to get better as more refugees switch
by commiepatrol
0 subcomment
- But do they work well, that's the question. I don't really care about the subject much but from reading some posts in the past games play like shit on Linux and Mac because they're not optimized for it with ~90% of the market being Windows.
by estimator7292
0 subcomment
- I think it must be at least four years since I've had to boot into Windows for a game. It's wonderful.
by starkeeper
1 subcomments
- It would be amazing to have data specifically and only for steam games.
This post gives me hope that I can ditch windows forever for all things soon! Games is the only reason I do windows for development these days.
- I'm an indie game dev. Which Linux OS do most users typically use? I'm not sure, so I'm asking. Would it be okay to test the game running on Ubuntu?
by rustystump
3 subcomments
- Funny. About 50% of my steam games do not run on linux and while many can be installed they usually come with all kinds of glitches and issues.
The harsh reality is that until linux requires absolutely zero extra lift for end users, windows will still be the default for the overwhelming majority.
God i hate windows but they are the only company who gives a damn about gaming anymore.
- I keep having issues with Proton (on steamdeck). With that said, these are primarily older games from the 90s. Modern games generally run hassle free.
- Cachyos here, it just works. I can even do all my .net dev on here without issue and let of some steam on overwatch
- For some definition of "run". I heard Wine silently stubs some graphics calls.
by Kim_Bruning
0 subcomment
- nixos on zfs is a fun one, allowing you to tailor specific environments to specific games if you so choose. Not that I've needed to very often. Steam mostly Just Works(tm) now.
- I wish we could have Proton on MacOS...that would be awesome!
by mortsnort
2 subcomments
- Will MS implement some kind of software signing that breaks wine?
by Fire-Dragon-DoL
0 subcomment
- Sadly Nucleus Coop us heavily focused on Windows
by chequoredDaemon
0 subcomment
- (Windows) Gta v online won't play on (linux) steamdeck due to some battleye anticheat nonsense.
What matters if it will run if anti cheat software then breaks it?
Shame on you Rockstar (although cheating ruined the game on PC there's been enough time to fix it).
- We need to have a steam os hardware map … or an easy to use linux installation for a hardware path for game playing.
by pentagrama
0 subcomment
- Am I the only one who finds the linked ProtonDB dashboard hard to understand? https://www.protondb.com/dashboard
It could use some help from a data visualization designer to make it clearer and easier to read.
- How are Ubisoft games running on Linux nowadays? I think that is the only thing holding me back honestly.
by not_a_bot_4sho
0 subcomment
- This comment section feels like a circle jerk lol
by wiredpancake
0 subcomment
- [dead]
by charcircuit
1 subcomments
- Now look at what percentage of time users spend playing windows game is spent in a game that works on Linux. This raw game count metric is sqeued because everything someone releases a Unity game it will most likely work out of the box. Due to there not being that many game engines actively being used in modern times the scope is not huge. Bigger issues like Linux not having good enough security means that anticheats do not allow it.
See how with mac os, games like LoL and Valorant do not need a kernel anticheat because the operating system provides enough security.
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