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Keep an eye out for games supported on Proton (Steam's Wine facilitation) on protondb.com. In a mere five years gaming on Linux went from a solid selection of n

Keep an eye out for games supported on Proton (Steam's Wine facilitation) on protondb.com. In a mere five years gaming on Linux went from a solid selection of native games, to those, plus an impressive amount of high profile titles that just work out of the box (often with better performance on Linux). Of course there may be one or two titles that tie you to Windows, or perhaps multiplayer specific gaming related software, but if you are flexible in that regard gaming on Linux is just… good.

maltalex 5y ago
"just work out of the box" is an overstatement. I ran Manjaro for about half a year recently, including using it for gaming. Very few games actually worked out of the box for me, including games with so called "native" Linux support. I ran into multiple games with "official" Linux support that were simply broken or became broken by an update. Some of those that weren't broken had significant performance issues (that Windows on the same machine didn't have). Is it possible to game on Linux? Yes. But at the very least it requires fiddling. As much as I love Linux, gaming is just a lot easier on Windows.
- leppr 5y ago
  Many Linux games are only tested on Ubuntu. I personally haven't had more issues running Linux native games on Ubuntu than Windows native games on Windows. Playing games on Windows often requires fiddling as well. Either having to lock the mouse to one monitor, fiddling with V-sync and FPS limits (often only possible through graphics card drivers, launch arguments or text config files), disabling Windows malware scanning, fiddling with Windows compatibility settings for older games, ... Admittedly I now dual-boot to Windows to play videogames, but that's not because of faults in native Linux games, just the reduced selection.
  - maltalex 5y ago
    It's possible that some of the issues I ran into were due to Manjaro not being Ubuntu, but they could also have been due to drivers or some random setting somewhere in the system. Plenty of people on protondb reported zero issues with the same games on their Manjaro/Arch boxes. > Playing games on Windows often requires fiddling as well. Either having to lock the mouse to one monitor, fiddling with V-sync and FPS limits (often only possible through graphics card drivers, launch arguments or text config files), disabling Windows malware scanning, fiddling with Windows compatibility settings for older games Maybe it's the type of games I play, but this is extremely rare in my experience. I don't remember the last time I had to fiddle with anything outside the game's own settings despite having a multi-monitor setup.
checkyoursudo 5y ago
My biggest pain point is that some of the mainstream multiplayer anticheat implementations don't work on wine. I'd like to be able to play Tarkov or Hunt or Apex on Linux, but I can't. So far, I have just not played those titles, even though I really want to. I don't really want to have to dual boot just to play them, because Windows 10 messes up my EFI booting. I used to run Windows with a GPU passthrough, but I stopped doing that once proton came along. Maybe I'll look at doing that again, though it was hell to set up on Gentoo at the time. Maybe other distros have smoothed that out a bit? It's been like 6 years since I did it the last time. I know the wine guys have been doing great work trying to get anticheats working in wine/proton. Hopefully that progresses well. Getting anticheat to work in wine would really be the best.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- binarybanana 5y ago
  It's gotten much easier with Nvidia cards thanks to VM gaming being officially supported. No more hiding the VM and that Error 47 nonsense. Basically you bind the graphics card to the vfio driver by writing the PCI ID to /sys/bus/pci/drivers/vfio-pci/new_id and then you can use it in qemu with -device vfio-pci,host=01:00.0. If you have sane IOMMU groups and have an extra GPU for the host it should work with just those two steps. You still have to decide about how you handle input and output, but that's very user specific. Virtual input over the qemu GUI works well enough, there's also an evdev thing that lets you switch by pressing both Ctrl keys, or pass an entire USB controller. For audio I recommend scream[1] for the lowest latency (I get 2ms VM->PA->Speaker with MuQSS scheduler) with full 7.1 audio and if you don't want a dedicated monitor or switch monitor inputs there is Looking Glass[2] which captures frames and shuffles them to the host over shared memory. It also handles input via spice. It's still a bit of work, but for me that's mostly on the Windows side rather than the passthrough stuff itself. [1]: https://github.com/duncanthrax/scream https://github.com/duncanthrax/scream [2]: https://github.com/gnif/LookingGlass https://github.com/gnif/LookingGlass
  - checkyoursudo 5y ago

maltalex 5y ago

"just work out of the box" is an overstatement. I ran Manjaro for about half a year recently, including using it for gaming. Very few games actually worked out of the box for me, including games with so called "native" Linux support. I ran into multiple games with "official" Linux support that were simply broken or became broken by an update. Some of those that weren't broken had significant performance issues (that Windows on the same machine didn't have). Is it possible to game on Linux? Yes. But at the very least it requires fiddling. As much as I love Linux, gaming is just a lot easier on Windows.

leppr 5y ago
Many Linux games are only tested on Ubuntu. I personally haven't had more issues running Linux native games on Ubuntu than Windows native games on Windows. Playing games on Windows often requires fiddling as well. Either having to lock the mouse to one monitor, fiddling with V-sync and FPS limits (often only possible through graphics card drivers, launch arguments or text config files), disabling Windows malware scanning, fiddling with Windows compatibility settings for older games, ... Admittedly I now dual-boot to Windows to play videogames, but that's not because of faults in native Linux games, just the reduced selection.
- maltalex 5y ago
  It's possible that some of the issues I ran into were due to Manjaro not being Ubuntu, but they could also have been due to drivers or some random setting somewhere in the system. Plenty of people on protondb reported zero issues with the same games on their Manjaro/Arch boxes. > Playing games on Windows often requires fiddling as well. Either having to lock the mouse to one monitor, fiddling with V-sync and FPS limits (often only possible through graphics card drivers, launch arguments or text config files), disabling Windows malware scanning, fiddling with Windows compatibility settings for older games Maybe it's the type of games I play, but this is extremely rare in my experience. I don't remember the last time I had to fiddle with anything outside the game's own settings despite having a multi-monitor setup.

checkyoursudo 5y ago

My biggest pain point is that some of the mainstream multiplayer anticheat implementations don't work on wine. I'd like to be able to play Tarkov or Hunt or Apex on Linux, but I can't. So far, I have just not played those titles, even though I really want to. I don't really want to have to dual boot just to play them, because Windows 10 messes up my EFI booting. I used to run Windows with a GPU passthrough, but I stopped doing that once proton came along. Maybe I'll look at doing that again, though it was hell to set up on Gentoo at the time. Maybe other distros have smoothed that out a bit? It's been like 6 years since I did it the last time. I know the wine guys have been doing great work trying to get anticheats working in wine/proton. Hopefully that progresses well. Getting anticheat to work in wine would really be the best.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
binarybanana 5y ago
It's gotten much easier with Nvidia cards thanks to VM gaming being officially supported. No more hiding the VM and that Error 47 nonsense. Basically you bind the graphics card to the vfio driver by writing the PCI ID to /sys/bus/pci/drivers/vfio-pci/new_id and then you can use it in qemu with -device vfio-pci,host=01:00.0. If you have sane IOMMU groups and have an extra GPU for the host it should work with just those two steps. You still have to decide about how you handle input and output, but that's very user specific. Virtual input over the qemu GUI works well enough, there's also an evdev thing that lets you switch by pressing both Ctrl keys, or pass an entire USB controller. For audio I recommend scream[1] for the lowest latency (I get 2ms VM->PA->Speaker with MuQSS scheduler) with full 7.1 audio and if you don't want a dedicated monitor or switch monitor inputs there is Looking Glass[2] which captures frames and shuffles them to the host over shared memory. It also handles input via spice. It's still a bit of work, but for me that's mostly on the Windows side rather than the passthrough stuff itself. [1]: https://github.com/duncanthrax/scream https://github.com/duncanthrax/scream [2]: https://github.com/gnif/LookingGlass https://github.com/gnif/LookingGlass
- checkyoursudo 5y ago