11 ms·

Nearly 90% of Windows Games Now Run on Linux

499 points by jamesgill 1y ago

youngNed 1y ago
As someone who only has a windows machine to play games, specifically driving sims, I really wish my hardware worked on Linux.
- dontlaugh 1y ago
  There are lots of niches like that. The other big one is competitive games with invasive anti cheat.
- rererereferred 1y ago
  My only limitation to ditch Windows for games is my nvidia card. I wonder if their drivers will become better before I go for an upgrade. I do have a Steam Deck for lower requirement games.
  - qudat 1y ago
    Nvidia drivers are already much better now. How old is your card? I have a 2080ti and once you get through the initial setup it works fine
  - ErroneousBosh 1y ago
    NVidia has probably the best support for Linux. None of the "game" versus "studio" nonsense, either.
    - preisschild 1y ago
      Nah amd gpus work best in linux. Official mainline support in the kernel + mesa.
      - ErroneousBosh 1y ago
        For gaming maybe, but I need something with either CUDA or OpenCL for video work, and of the two CUDA is preferable. It doesn't hurt that it works for gaming too though, even though I rarely get time to play anything.
  - chneu 1y ago
    I run an intel CPU and an NVIDIA 4080. Works great on pop os. I do AI shit, too, without issues. NVIDIA is pretty good on Linux lately. Id always wait a week before updating drivers tho.
- zamalek 1y ago
  Have you actually tried it? Dual sticks (which is not quite as niche as a racing cockpit but still somewhat) via Wine just worked for me with zero effort - actually less than Windows which had joystick ID horrors.
- mkozlows 1y ago
  There are apparently are some semi-experimental FFB drivers out there for a few wheels... but yeah, most hardware has a zero percent chance of working, because it's a niche of a niche. And then if you're doing online racing, they all(?) have anti-cheat stuff that won't work for you anyway. If games transition to SteamOS/Linux in general, I think this niche is going to be one of the slower ones to move, but never say never.
- maxhille 1y ago
  How deep did you look into it? Don't be misled by maybe your manufacturer not supporting Linux directly. As an example https://github.com/berarma/oversteer https://github.com/berarma/oversteer helped me to set up my wheel better than any rubbish windows OEM software could have.
stusmall 1y ago
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.
- scotty79 1y ago
  I tried GOG version of Soul Reaver and some polygons and UI kept disappearing depending on the direction the character was facing. On Windows 10. I should try Linux.
tracker1 1y ago
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.
- o11c 1y ago
  > Worth noting that a lot of Windows (or DOS) games past may also not run well on current Windows versions. To be fair, anything old that wasn't famous has a decent chance to be broken under WINE too. It might just be a single call to some obscure animation API or something, but it can be enough to break the entire game.
  - tracker1 1y ago
    I've actually had better experiences with Wine with older games than newer Windows.
  - constantcrying 1y ago
    Many old games work well. Check out protonDB before trying, but I have had good experience running older GoG games through proton.
    - o11c 1y ago
      If it's on GOG it probably wasn't that obscure. Also, sometimes the original version doesn't work but the GOG version does, or even vice versa. I've seen all sorts of oddities.
starkeeper 1y ago
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.
- shmerl 1y ago
  There is ProtonDB: https://www.protondb.com https://www.protondb.com
marcodiego 1y ago
That means 10% of windows games use invasive anti-cheat?
- qudat 1y ago
  Yea, all the really popular online games are gonna be in that 10%. All i want is rocket league :( At least tf2 works
  - wingmanjd 1y ago
    FWIW, Rocket League works just fine on Linux, but you need to set it to the Proton compatibility, not the native Linux client.
    - amarant 1y ago
      I too recall having issues with the anti-cheat last I tried (years ago at this point). How did those issues get fixed? Did they abandon the anti cheat, or does the anti cheat now work under proton?
      - Zambyte 1y ago
        Rocket League never had issues with anti-cheat. I have been actively playing it since before they stopped shipping a native version.
        amarant 1y ago
        What? They use Easy Anti Cheat, which is one of those nasty kernel level anti cheats. Even ignoring my personal experience with the issue, a kernel level anti cheat built for windows seems quite unlikely to not have any issues whatsoever on Linux... Do you only play offline or something?
        Zambyte 1y ago
        Rocket League literally has a platinum status on ProtonDB[0]. It works perfectly on Steam using Proton if you have it there, or Heroic[1] if you have it through EGL. Rocket League has literally never been unable to run on GNU/Linux. The full game. Multiplayer, Steam workshop, everything. I suspect you may be thinking of a different game honestly. Maybe League of Legends? I think they switched to an invasive anti cheat a few years ago that caused it to no longer work on GNU/Linux. [0] https://www.protondb.com/app/252950 https://www.protondb.com/app/252950 [1] https://heroicgameslauncher.com/ https://heroicgameslauncher.com/
hamdingers 1y ago
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.
- SchemaLoad 1y ago
  I found myself just never using my PC after getting a steamdeck. I had the deck plugged in to my TV most of the time. I recently just installed Bazzite on my PC and moved it to the TV so now I play on that all the time. What Valve has done to make gaming on linux work is remarkable. I remember the days of having to manually install steam in Wine and how only a few games would work like that.
  - braebo 1y ago
    I like to think I would do the same if I got one.. then I turn on Path Tracing in Cyberpunk 2077 and my skepticism sinks in. It’s just _so dope_ I don’t think I could walk away from it… and the sequel will surely give my 3090Ti a run for its money.
    - crowbahr 1y ago
      Cyberpunk 2077 has a Gold level seal for Linux support according to Proton DB - but it looks like Path Tracing is why it isn't better. Is path tracing really that amazingly better than ray tracing (which works)?
- samrus 1y ago
  Ive been yearning for the days when using linux in daily life isnt "interesting" but just something you do. It feels great
  - Redster 1y ago
    I realize this is not evenly distributed across all hardware and distros, but I really think we're here for a lot of use cases.
knallfrosch 1y ago
Number of games is a weird statistic. What about market share of play time?
- em-bee 1y ago
  yes, but not marketshare played on linux, but rather, how much of the marketshare that's currently played on windows would be playable on linux.
- NoboruWataya 1y ago
  Both metrics have their uses. Personally I'm not all that interested in playing the latest hit AAA games. I am much more likely to play indie games or older games, which probably means I play more titles but the titles I play tend not to have much market share (individually or even in aggregate). You could say I'm an outlier but I feel like a lot of Linux nerds probably have similar gaming habits. So for me it's better than 90% of all games are playable on Linux, than if a handful of games accounting for 90% of market share were playable.
  - Gigachad 1y ago
    The latest hit AAA games also tend to work day one these days. The only thing that doesn’t work is competitive online games.
    - maxhille 1y ago
      WRT competetive: No reason to state that in absolutes. I play Rocket League, CS2 and Overwatch2 just fine in Linux.
- 3eb7988a1663 1y ago
  Ignoring the Steam Deck, most Linux gamers are probably going to be older so that they have the funds and/or technical interest to setup a Linux machine. Which is going to remove the younger demographic which likely plays a different genre and has more available total free time for gaming. As a young teen with nothing to do, I probably had some days in Summer where I clocked in 16 hours of gaming.
constantcrying 1y ago
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.
pton_xd 1y ago
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.
- PeaceTed 1y ago
  I think the last time I had Windows installed was right around the release of Proton in 2018. Those initial releases were not great but the trend was very obvious. There comes a point were you just don't miss it. The only moments that it is apparent is that disassociation you have when someone else just assumes you run Windows. I don't blame them, I am statistically the odd one there, but that is when you have to figure out things your way.
Simulacra 1y ago
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
- almiron10 1y ago
  If Adobe apps worked on Linux, I'd switch in a heartbeat.
  - 29athrowaway 1y ago
    If your choice of OS is the one that can run Adobe products better, they work better on macOS anyways
    - MangoToupe 1y ago
      I generally agree, but it's hard to fault people for either not buying apple hardware or preferring the IBM PC-type OS.
  - iroger321 1y ago
    Honestly I feel like this is the last big wall for a lot of creative pros. Affinity Photo is closing in on Photoshop-level capability, and things like Bottles + Wine can actually run older versions of Creative Cloud surprisingly well now. The real issue isn’t capability but just adoption (IMO): most studios and agencies are chained to Adobe’s ecosystem. If even one major studio publicly switched pipelines to Linux, the floodgates would probably open to actually allow this.
  - wetpaws 1y ago
    [dead]
sthuck 1y ago
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
- eterm 1y ago
  2003 me was optimistic that wine was a dead-end, with games like Neverwinter Nights, and Quake 3 Arena having native linux releases. The Year of Linux on the Desktop was near, and wine would surely be a temporary stop-gap.
  - TheCycoONE 1y ago
    Turns out Linux needed a stable abi for games and Wine provided.
    - buildbot 1y ago
      Which amusingly, also serves as a stable API for Windows now too.
    - Zambyte 1y ago
      Such is life dealing with propriety software.
  - miffy900 1y ago
    for the longest time, no one in linux land cared about API stability or backward compatibility - then app/game developers realised if they could port a portion of Win32 to Linux via WINE, they could just target the win32 API or at least a portion of it and so long as WINE was installed, their app/game would always work. i find it a bit ironic; desktop Linux is being enabled by re-implementing APIs from another OS.
    - wavemode 1y ago
      It's like they always say: win32 is the only stable ABI on Linux.
Fire-Dragon-DoL 1y ago
Sadly Nucleus Coop us heavily focused on Windows
adverbly 1y ago
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.
- ErroneousBosh 1y ago
  > I think the only game in the last 2 years I haven't been able to run is battlefield 6. Neither has anyone else, if they bought it directly from EA.
- Telaneo 1y ago
  That anecdote goes the other way if you skew towards popular multiplayer games, since those are the ones with anti-cheat. Someone who plays League, Apex, PUBG, and Destiny 2, and was really looking forward to BF6, will be mightily disappointed. You're unlikely to be invested in all of those games, but a pretty large amount of people are very, very invested in at-least one of those, which, unfortunately, makes Linux a non-starter for them. Even if 99% of games worked fine on Linux, a large amount of people spend 50+% of their time in-game in one of those games, so it doesn't end up feeling like 90+% of games work. Thankfully, the corollary of that is that single-player games pretty much all work, barring some edge cases, like very recent titles that haven't had the kinks ironed out yet.
  - spookie 1y ago
    The death of a server browser and privately owned servers led to this. The whole anti-cheat situation grew from publishers wanting to control the whole experience. Besides, the gaming industry keeps shooting themselves in the foot by only supporting Windows (Mac is a thing too). That is slowly changing, but so many game devs are drinking the Microsoft koolaid they don't even consider using another graphics API other than DirectX. Many other decisions like that as well. It really is impressive how many they are willing to leave behind. A quick check gives about 19% of the market.
    - 1y ago
mindcrash 1y ago
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 (!)
- 29athrowaway 1y ago
  Or use ProtonDB https://www.protondb.com/explore https://www.protondb.com/explore
- ndsipa_pomu 1y ago
  To be fair, the Steam Deck support level is a bit arbitrary and some Verified games may work worse than some Untested games. The only game that I had an issue with is The Unfinished Swan which I bought on Steam after having enjoyed playing it on a PS3 (good enough to buy twice). I couldn't get it to work initially with it just going to a blank screen (not the game itself which ironically does start with an all white screen) no matter my tinkering with Proton versions. However, tried it again a few months ago and it worked perfectly with default settings.
- raron 1y ago
  Also in some / many cases even "unsupported" games work out of the box or needs only minimal tweaking. AFAIK most of the issues are with online competitive games which uses anti-cheat.
  - Zambyte 1y ago
jakebasile 1y ago
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?
- chneu 1y ago
  Pop OS! With NVIDIA GPU here. Shit just works. When it doesn't, changing the proton version usually fixes it. Way better than Windows.
  - layoric 1y ago
    Same setup here, one game setup I've hit but this will be a rare problem, is StarCraft Remastered. Wine has an issue with audio processing which I can't seem to configure my way out of. It pegs all 32 threads and still stutters. Thankfully this game can likely run on an actual potato, so I have a separate mini PC running windows for this when I want to get my ass kicked on battle.net.
  - Macha 1y ago
    I've stopped even checking protondb before getting a game these days. Pretty much unless they've gone out of their way to make it not work (which is mostly competitive games, so you can tell beforehand), it works. I realize by posting that here on HN I'm tempting people to send me the ProtonDB garbage tier list, but it's true for the types of games I play.
  - roldie 1y ago
    Also have the same setup. Very few issues. Been very happy with the switch
  - 1y ago
29athrowaway 1y ago
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.
- gpderetta 1y ago
  I have an ordinary logitech G29 (I think). It works uneventfully in all games I tried (including force feedback).
  - 29athrowaway 1y ago
    I'll have to retest then, few months ago I had various issues with this.
charcircuit 1y ago
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.
- bigyabai 1y ago
  LoL didn't have kernel-level anticheat for the majority of it's lifetime; when it was added to the game, Apple had removed kexts from the OS entirely. And Valorant doesn't support macOS in the first place, presumably because it didn't run Riot's Ring 0 anticheat at-launch. What point are you trying to make here?
  - charcircuit 1y ago
    >What point are you trying to make here? 1. That the raw percentage does not important. 2. That Linux distros do not care about investing in security, (nor to game studios themselves) to be able to get major titles like LoL.
    - nmz 1y ago
      I agree with the first point but not the second, if anything anticheats break security.
    - bigyabai 1y ago
      Security isn't the issue. There is effective Ring 1 anticheat on Linux just like there is on Windows and macOS.
      - ladyanita22 1y ago
        Not ring 0, though.
Grom_PE 1y ago
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
- riizade 1y ago
  Can you elaborate on Unity wasting disk space on gigabytes of zeroes? How did you discover that? Is it intentional on Unity's part? Percentage-wise, are we talking 2% of a 100GB game, or 50% of a 4GB game? I can't find anything about it online.
  - Grom_PE 1y ago
    I suppose that is an issue how a specific game was made, not inherent to Unity. I like to look inside game files and a .zip archive of 1GB unpacking to ~10GB game made me suspicious.
    - marcosdumay 1y ago
      My first guess would be it has lots of uncompressed images or badly compressed videos as artifacts.
      - 1y ago
geuis 1y ago
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.
- ludamn 1y ago
  If it helps I used to use a gaming laptop for work that had a RTX 2060 mobile version, I was able to run some recent games like Elden Ring (including mods & online play), and some older but still demanding titles like Witcher 3. All of this without tinkering too much on a oob Ubuntu LTS install (I later switched to popOS because I don't like snaps that much).
  - geuis 1y ago
    Someone else recommended PopOSin other comments. I pulled up the page but haven't looked at it extensively. In what ways is it different from a recent Ubuntu LTS install?
    - ludamn 1y ago
      The two are very similar in a lot of aspects, they both make it very easy to install proprietary nvidia GPU drivers, they both use Debian as base, and the default desktop for them is Gnome. In the past I migrated to PopOS mainly due to these two things: 1. I prefer flatpaks/system packages over snap[1], if you run `sudo apt install firefox` you'll get a snap application in Ubuntu, that for me is an anti-pattern from Canonical to force adoption of snaps. 2. I found some weird performance issues with my laptop when I installed Ubuntu, thankfully I managed to find a fix after hours of tinkering[2], but I was surprised I had to do these workarounds in the first place (I've been running linux as my main OS since I was a teenager and never had to do anything similar) If gaming is your main goal I'd consider using something like Bazzite or CachyOS, these two distros will still serve you if you want to run work/office apps too, they just come preconfigured w/ a lot of gaming goodies (like steam and nvidia drivers oob) but won't get into your way if you plan to install other stuff. [1] https://snapcraft.io/ https://snapcraft.io/ [2] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/1973434/comments/25 https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/1973434...
dottjt 1y ago
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.
nobodyandproud 1y ago
As Satya Nadella runs Windows OS and Office into the ground. I still can get my desktop gaming fix, at least.
rdudek 1y ago
How are Ubisoft games running on Linux nowadays? I think that is the only thing holding me back honestly.
- ludamn 1y ago
  If it helps I played AC Odyssey w/o issues using Proton GE, the biggest issue for me was that when I launched the game through steam, steam would launch the Ubisoft launcher which then launched the game , so I had to manually close this launcher to prevent having proton running in the bg for too long It's been a while since I gamed though (2022), but the game ran smoothly on a mobile RTX 2060 card
- arlcode 1y ago
  The launcher is a bit annoying at times but what finally made me commit ot the switch was when I realized that Anno 1800 and the demo for Anno 117 were running flawlessly. I also recently finished AC Origins for the first time on my Linux machine. However I don't play multiplayer ever and apparently that's where most issues are.
  - rdudek 1y ago
    Was the demo through Steam or through Ubisoft Connect launcher? I'm a huge Anno fan and I play Anno 1800 like all the time. I own that game on the Ubisoft platform. If Anno 117 runs flawlessly, I maybe will cancel the preorder on ubisoft and get it on Steam...
- chrysoprace 1y ago
  I think typically the problem with Ubisoft is dealing with their launcher. You can check individual games via ProtonDB e.g. Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag: https://protondb.com/app/242050 https://protondb.com/app/242050
tonfreed 1y ago
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.
- smj-edison 1y ago
  > Biggest problem I'm running into now is replacing all my music mixing tools. What are you finding that works for this? I know there's a couple decent DAWs, but running Windows-only plugins was a nightmare last time I tried.
  - tonfreed 11mo ago
    Yeah, had no luck getting windows tools running. I'm only an amateur mixer thank God, but I found this list a while ago and have been having mixed success here and there https://github.com/alex-tee/lv2-plugins-ultimate-list https://github.com/alex-tee/lv2-plugins-ultimate-list Just running these through reaper and it's ok enough.
delichon 1y ago
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.
- bigyabai 1y ago
  > eventually gave up and bought a vanilla PC What were you trying to run games on before you bought the so called "vanilla" PC?
  - delichon 1y ago
    A random assemblage of parts running Ubuntu, upon which most things that weren't Windows games ran fairly reliably for a decade plus. As far as I can tell nothing challenges a computer like games, except games from an alien OS.
- hatthew 1y ago
  Similar anecdote, in the past week there have been two separate games that I wanted to try out, and both were nonfunctional on linux. One had a completely black screen, and the other ignored all mouse/keyboard input. For each of them I spent 15 minutes tinkering with winecfg, installing packages, googling error messages, etc. Eventually I gave up and booted back into windows where they worked perfectly.
- hamdingers 1y ago
  How long ago was this? That you say "running games under Wine" is a hint it was a while ago, the modern way to do this is to install Steam and let it handle the compatibility layer.
- stavros 1y ago
  I think the difference is that we aren't talking about stock Wine, but Steam+Proton (which uses Wine, but just makes everything seamless). I uninstalled Windows completely. There are many, many more games that work on my Linux PC than on my Mac.
seabombs 1y ago
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.
- gilgoomesh 1y ago
  > Even many games that support native linux run better under wine. The same is often true on macOS, too – running games through CrossOver is often better than the native port. The reality is that there simply aren't enough professional game devs on Linux and macOS platforms to polish that last 20% and make all the difference.
- PeaceTed 1y ago
  Out of the 150-isg games in my library, the only one I have had any issue with is 'From Dust' released in 2011. This is part because of the Ubisoft launcher and some video codex issues, but even so. Switching the too and from the game a few times seems to get past this. About a month back, a demo for Lumines Arise came out and it fired up without issue, didn't even think to check ProtonDB because it has become so reliable. I suspect a big part of this is because Steamdeck has been popular enough to have it be targeted for Proton compatibility day 1.
lostmsu 1y ago
For some definition of "run". I heard Wine silently stubs some graphics calls.
- Joel_Mckay 1y ago
  And proton was found to get better frame rates than native Windows on some games. Dual booting from 2 SSDs is a pretty solid solution, as some programs are windows only. YMMV =3
ngcc_hk 1y ago
We need to have a steam os hardware map … or an easy to use linux installation for a hardware path for game playing.
colonCapitalDee 1y ago
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 :(
- omikun 1y ago
  Which OS and amd or nvidia? With win10 expired I just might make the switch on my gaming pc
- asadawadia 1y ago
  how are you running OW2? I am using steam and proton and it is so rough to play Windows I get 300fps and on linux ~100 and frequent dips
  - zamalek 1y ago
    I no longer support Blizz, so can't weigh in specifically, but: have you tried PrtotonGE? The are also the Proton forks, such as CachyOS's one that support wayland directly (which is in WINE, but not Proton yet) - might be xwayland relayed? Also, try `LD_PRELOAD="" %command%` to disable steaminput, which can cause input stuttering after around 45min on some machines (such as mine).
  - colonCapitalDee 1y ago
    Ok, maybe I oversold this a little bit. It's running smooth now, getting it to run smooth was not easy. I'm on Ubuntu. I spent a few days in a debug loop. Run steam from the terminal to get a log stream, keep an eye on CPU and GPU utilization and temperature, and futz around in the training range or vs AI bots (more "realistic" than training range). Identify which components of the system aren't performing up to spec. CPU running hot? GPU not being utilized? Steam emitting warning messages? If hardware all looks good, it's probably a software problem somewhere. Identify, then fix. Rinse and repeat until linux performance is in the same league as Windows performance. Things I'd try: 1. Check in game graphics settings 2. Update graphics drivers to the recommended version (may be non-trivial, I had to update my kernel version) 3. Experiment with different proton versions, including proton GE 4. Experiment with different Direct X versions (in game option) 5. Make sure CPU cooler is running 6. Make sure GPU is being used 7. Use gamescope to configure a virtual monitor that exactly matches the capabilities of your physical monitor
omoikane 1y ago
Original source: https://boilingsteam.com/windows-games-compatibility-on-linux-is-at-a-all-time-high/ https://boilingsteam.com/windows-games-compatibility-on-linu...
pentagrama 1y ago
Am I the only one who finds the linked ProtonDB dashboard hard to understand? https://www.protondb.com/dashboard https://www.protondb.com/dashboard It could use some help from a data visualization designer to make it clearer and easier to read.
_imnothere 1y ago
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?
benlivengood 1y ago
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.
estimator7292 1y ago
I think it must be at least four years since I've had to boot into Windows for a game. It's wonderful.
rustystump 1y ago
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.
- wetpaws 1y ago
  [dead]
- jetbalsa 1y ago
  I don't think its Microsoft directly that care about gaming, There are a few factors at play. but every time a game is ported to a Playstation/Switch its being ported to a form of Linux, and in most cases the Graphics APIs are the same. Its the companies making the game have no incentive to port to Linux if the tiny user base is fine with Proton and dealing with its hacks.
- godshatter 1y ago
  Generally, a lot of games play fine just by selecting Proton Experimental, though some of the games I play do require adding a configuration in the steam menu for the game which I usually crib from the protondb page for the game based on user comments. There are a lot of people that are used to tweaking games on Windows, too, I used to be one of them. Lots of people mod their games and have to run them differently to do so or have to shim them in some way to make them work, lots of people search to find answers to problems they are having. Getting up to date graphics drivers used to be a pain in Windows (haven't had to try for many years), it's part of system updates in Linux for me (even running NVIDIA cards). If anything, getting a game to work that has issues on Windows was harder than getting a game to work on Linux that is having issues thanks to protondb.com, at least for me. So I think there are a lot of people that could just hop over if they wanted to, trading one kind of tech-related problem solving for another kind.
mortsnort 1y ago
Will MS implement some kind of software signing that breaks wine?
- PeaceTed 1y ago
  Not impossible but that might be something that would eventually force developers onto tools that don't have that restriction. A walled garden doesn't just keep people in, but it keeps other out. And once folks jump out they aren't likely to jump back in.
- 15155 1y ago
  This already exists: a TPU and trusted Microsoft signing certs are required with Windows 11 and certain anti-cheat software.
grugagag 1y ago
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
apatheticonion 1y ago
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.
LennyHenrysNuts 1y ago
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!
ehnto 1y ago
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.
- baobun 1y ago
  Nice! I'm curious if you experience any difference in IO performance (e.g game loading times)? Last I tried NTFS on Linux it was stable but not fast, especially for writes. If it's not a notable difference between Windows and Linux then that's a big improvement from those days. I think you could probably get a decent IO performance boost and reduce loading times by moving the library over to something like ext4 or xfs, at the cost of portability.
  - ehnto 1y ago
    I will have to take note next time I play, but I haven't noticed anything so perhaps if it's there it's not too bad. They are SSDs and I do have 32gb of ram and 24gb of vram, so I bet quite a lot of IO bottleneck could be hidden by that. I'll probably switch to ext4 when I decommission the Windows install entirely.
- FaradayRotation 1y ago
  Almost the same happy story here on my end. I had an Ubuntu home server, but with windows as my main. Then Win 10 --> Win 11 hit. I was already annoyed at MS for many reasons, and then I realized just how much money I would need to spend on getting equivalent functionality, for an OS (Win 11) that I hated and had a dismal preview of at work. Now I have Mint. With an AI terminal to help guide/teach me, I find myself really enjoying the power and capability the terminal gives me. My computer has been genuinely USEFUL for debugging serious problems with WiFi calling on my phone and other network connectivity issues, and I still get to play games on steam! Sure, there were one or two hiccups on Outward when I first started, but Bannerlord and everything else I've tried so far plays just fine. It just works! Really!
Kim_Bruning 1y ago
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.
EasyMark 1y ago
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
chequoredDaemon 1y ago
(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).
deleted 1y ago
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deepsun 1y ago
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.
hedora 1y ago
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.
not_a_bot_4sho 1y ago
This comment section feels like a circle jerk lol
sharts 1y ago
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.
- sussmannbaka 1y ago
  Did you try before or after Valves push for proton? Both of those are rated Platinum.
  - gradientsrneat 1y ago
    If platinum-rated, should run fine with latest Proton, and maybe also some environment variables on launch to force using the dedicated GPU. Assuming the kernel and drivers are up-to-date.
- jryb 1y ago
  fwiw, upgrading from rx580 to rtx5070 solved all of my performance problems (both on windows and Linux) for a number of games.
- zepearl 1y ago
  To fix stuttering I had to disable compositing in the window manager (Xfce on Linux Mint, nVidia proprietary with AMD CPU).
  - nmz 1y ago
    And there's also pulseaudio, which I had to run in some games with PULSE_LATENCY_MSEC=90 %command%, other games you can only run in lutris, other games you can't even minimize it or it will mess up with the screen entirely.
Mobius01 1y ago
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.
myfirstacc7234 1y ago
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?
wiredpancake 1y ago
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buyucu 1y ago
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.
vga42 1y ago
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.
29athrowaway 1y ago
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.
hyfgfh 1y ago
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
- dannersy 1y ago
  While I would like to champion AMD a bit more because Nvidia has been doing some anti consumer shenanigans, I have to say that at this point, the Linux support is good. It is a bit of a myth or perhaps just outdated info that if you want to have a headache-less experience, you need to use AMD. For new hardware, it may even be a bit better than AMD to be honest. The only difference is that updating is a bit easier on AMD, after all, mesa just updates with your OS. But this is merely a note on convenience.
aquir 1y ago
I wish we could have Proton on MacOS...that would be awesome!
- ikbr 1y ago
  https://www.codeweavers.com/crossover https://www.codeweavers.com/crossover
moonAA 1y ago
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?
- Tajnymag 1y ago
  That's a reasonable baseline, yes. I would also consider trying running it on Arch Linux, because it usually has newer library versions and it's the base of SteamOS.
  - moonAA 1y ago
    Oh, thank you for your reply. I'll check out Arch Linux as well.
- tmtvl 1y ago
  The Debian derivatives, particularly the Ubuntu line is generally considered the most popular. That said, they tend to be 10 to 20 years behind on versions of various pieces of software so things that work there may not work on something a little more up-to-date, like Fedora; which also means that after a while those things will also stop working on the Debian derivatives. If you're not very interested in keeping on top of changes and maintaining things you're better off just targeting Wine, in which case the distribution you test on doesn't matter very much as Wine is very stable.
  - moonAA 1y ago
    Thanks, that makes sense. I’ll start with Ubuntu for now and check other distros later if needed.
npteljes 1y ago
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.
theshrike79 1y ago
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.
- decryption 1y ago
  Apple did! The Game Porting Toolkit does (I think) what you're talking about and what Steam did for Linux. https://developer.apple.com/games/game-porting-toolkit/ https://developer.apple.com/games/game-porting-toolkit/ Why it hasn't taken off, I have no idea.
  - theshrike79 1y ago
    Without even opening the link "porting toolkit" seems like something I need to put effort into. Proton + Steam is pretty much just clicking "Allow Linux" on a dashboard somewhere and then it'll just work.
    - pjmlp 1y ago
      Hence why studios have no reason to bother with GNU/Linux even if they happen to target Android/Linux, let Valve do the work.
      - theshrike79 1y ago
        There was some anecdotal stuff floating around some years ago that smaller studios stopped doing custom Linux builds because Proton+Windows ran faster than their native build =)
commiepatrol 1y ago
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.
wernsey 1y ago
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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2DY3snvH9Xc
drbytes 1y ago
Cachyos here, it just works. I can even do all my .net dev on here without issue and let of some steam on overwatch
valbaca 1y ago
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).
- AuthAuth 1y ago
  Any modern (last 5 years) amd/nvidia card will do. Intel cards have a few issues in certain games but overall they are fine to. AMD cards are nice and what I prefer because they are plug and play and you dont have to think about drivers as they're baked into the kernel. So really the best card for linux is the card that makes sense for your budget/PC specs/desired target games.
  - valbaca 1y ago
    Thank you for the response!
leogout 1y ago
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
SirMaster 1y ago
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.

499 points by jamesgill 1y ago

As someone who only has a windows machine to play games, specifically driving sims, I really wish my hardware worked on Linux.

dontlaugh 1y ago
There are lots of niches like that. The other big one is competitive games with invasive anti cheat.
rererereferred 1y ago
My only limitation to ditch Windows for games is my nvidia card. I wonder if their drivers will become better before I go for an upgrade. I do have a Steam Deck for lower requirement games.
- qudat 1y ago
  Nvidia drivers are already much better now. How old is your card? I have a 2080ti and once you get through the initial setup it works fine
- ErroneousBosh 1y ago
  NVidia has probably the best support for Linux. None of the "game" versus "studio" nonsense, either.
  - preisschild 1y ago
    Nah amd gpus work best in linux. Official mainline support in the kernel + mesa.
    - ErroneousBosh 1y ago
      For gaming maybe, but I need something with either CUDA or OpenCL for video work, and of the two CUDA is preferable. It doesn't hurt that it works for gaming too though, even though I rarely get time to play anything.
- chneu 1y ago
  I run an intel CPU and an NVIDIA 4080. Works great on pop os. I do AI shit, too, without issues. NVIDIA is pretty good on Linux lately. Id always wait a week before updating drivers tho.
zamalek 1y ago
Have you actually tried it? Dual sticks (which is not quite as niche as a racing cockpit but still somewhat) via Wine just worked for me with zero effort - actually less than Windows which had joystick ID horrors.
mkozlows 1y ago
There are apparently are some semi-experimental FFB drivers out there for a few wheels... but yeah, most hardware has a zero percent chance of working, because it's a niche of a niche. And then if you're doing online racing, they all(?) have anti-cheat stuff that won't work for you anyway. If games transition to SteamOS/Linux in general, I think this niche is going to be one of the slower ones to move, but never say never.
maxhille 1y ago
How deep did you look into it? Don't be misled by maybe your manufacturer not supporting Linux directly. As an example https://github.com/berarma/oversteer https://github.com/berarma/oversteer helped me to set up my wheel better than any rubbish windows OEM software could have.

stusmall 1y ago

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.

scotty79 1y ago
I tried GOG version of Soul Reaver and some polygons and UI kept disappearing depending on the direction the character was facing. On Windows 10. I should try Linux.

tracker1 1y ago

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.

o11c 1y ago
> Worth noting that a lot of Windows (or DOS) games past may also not run well on current Windows versions. To be fair, anything old that wasn't famous has a decent chance to be broken under WINE too. It might just be a single call to some obscure animation API or something, but it can be enough to break the entire game.
- tracker1 1y ago
  I've actually had better experiences with Wine with older games than newer Windows.
- constantcrying 1y ago
  Many old games work well. Check out protonDB before trying, but I have had good experience running older GoG games through proton.
  - o11c 1y ago
    If it's on GOG it probably wasn't that obscure. Also, sometimes the original version doesn't work but the GOG version does, or even vice versa. I've seen all sorts of oddities.

starkeeper 1y ago

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.

shmerl 1y ago
There is ProtonDB: https://www.protondb.com https://www.protondb.com

marcodiego 1y ago

That means 10% of windows games use invasive anti-cheat?

qudat 1y ago
Yea, all the really popular online games are gonna be in that 10%. All i want is rocket league :( At least tf2 works
- wingmanjd 1y ago
  FWIW, Rocket League works just fine on Linux, but you need to set it to the Proton compatibility, not the native Linux client.
  - amarant 1y ago
    I too recall having issues with the anti-cheat last I tried (years ago at this point). How did those issues get fixed? Did they abandon the anti cheat, or does the anti cheat now work under proton?
    - Zambyte 1y ago
      Rocket League never had issues with anti-cheat. I have been actively playing it since before they stopped shipping a native version.
      - amarant 1y ago
        What? They use Easy Anti Cheat, which is one of those nasty kernel level anti cheats. Even ignoring my personal experience with the issue, a kernel level anti cheat built for windows seems quite unlikely to not have any issues whatsoever on Linux... Do you only play offline or something?
        Zambyte 1y ago
        Rocket League literally has a platinum status on ProtonDB[0]. It works perfectly on Steam using Proton if you have it there, or Heroic[1] if you have it through EGL. Rocket League has literally never been unable to run on GNU/Linux. The full game. Multiplayer, Steam workshop, everything. I suspect you may be thinking of a different game honestly. Maybe League of Legends? I think they switched to an invasive anti cheat a few years ago that caused it to no longer work on GNU/Linux. [0] https://www.protondb.com/app/252950 https://www.protondb.com/app/252950 [1] https://heroicgameslauncher.com/ https://heroicgameslauncher.com/

hamdingers 1y ago

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.

SchemaLoad 1y ago
I found myself just never using my PC after getting a steamdeck. I had the deck plugged in to my TV most of the time. I recently just installed Bazzite on my PC and moved it to the TV so now I play on that all the time. What Valve has done to make gaming on linux work is remarkable. I remember the days of having to manually install steam in Wine and how only a few games would work like that.
- braebo 1y ago
  I like to think I would do the same if I got one.. then I turn on Path Tracing in Cyberpunk 2077 and my skepticism sinks in. It’s just _so dope_ I don’t think I could walk away from it… and the sequel will surely give my 3090Ti a run for its money.
  - crowbahr 1y ago
    Cyberpunk 2077 has a Gold level seal for Linux support according to Proton DB - but it looks like Path Tracing is why it isn't better. Is path tracing really that amazingly better than ray tracing (which works)?
samrus 1y ago
Ive been yearning for the days when using linux in daily life isnt "interesting" but just something you do. It feels great
- Redster 1y ago
  I realize this is not evenly distributed across all hardware and distros, but I really think we're here for a lot of use cases.

knallfrosch 1y ago

Number of games is a weird statistic. What about market share of play time?

em-bee 1y ago
yes, but not marketshare played on linux, but rather, how much of the marketshare that's currently played on windows would be playable on linux.
NoboruWataya 1y ago
Both metrics have their uses. Personally I'm not all that interested in playing the latest hit AAA games. I am much more likely to play indie games or older games, which probably means I play more titles but the titles I play tend not to have much market share (individually or even in aggregate). You could say I'm an outlier but I feel like a lot of Linux nerds probably have similar gaming habits. So for me it's better than 90% of all games are playable on Linux, than if a handful of games accounting for 90% of market share were playable.
- Gigachad 1y ago
  The latest hit AAA games also tend to work day one these days. The only thing that doesn’t work is competitive online games.
  - maxhille 1y ago
    WRT competetive: No reason to state that in absolutes. I play Rocket League, CS2 and Overwatch2 just fine in Linux.
3eb7988a1663 1y ago
Ignoring the Steam Deck, most Linux gamers are probably going to be older so that they have the funds and/or technical interest to setup a Linux machine. Which is going to remove the younger demographic which likely plays a different genre and has more available total free time for gaming. As a young teen with nothing to do, I probably had some days in Summer where I clocked in 16 hours of gaming.

constantcrying 1y ago

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.

pton_xd 1y ago

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.

PeaceTed 1y ago
I think the last time I had Windows installed was right around the release of Proton in 2018. Those initial releases were not great but the trend was very obvious. There comes a point were you just don't miss it. The only moments that it is apparent is that disassociation you have when someone else just assumes you run Windows. I don't blame them, I am statistically the odd one there, but that is when you have to figure out things your way.

Simulacra 1y ago

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

almiron10 1y ago
If Adobe apps worked on Linux, I'd switch in a heartbeat.
- 29athrowaway 1y ago
  If your choice of OS is the one that can run Adobe products better, they work better on macOS anyways
  - MangoToupe 1y ago
    I generally agree, but it's hard to fault people for either not buying apple hardware or preferring the IBM PC-type OS.
- iroger321 1y ago
  Honestly I feel like this is the last big wall for a lot of creative pros. Affinity Photo is closing in on Photoshop-level capability, and things like Bottles + Wine can actually run older versions of Creative Cloud surprisingly well now. The real issue isn’t capability but just adoption (IMO): most studios and agencies are chained to Adobe’s ecosystem. If even one major studio publicly switched pipelines to Linux, the floodgates would probably open to actually allow this.
- wetpaws 1y ago
  [dead]

sthuck 1y ago

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

eterm 1y ago
2003 me was optimistic that wine was a dead-end, with games like Neverwinter Nights, and Quake 3 Arena having native linux releases. The Year of Linux on the Desktop was near, and wine would surely be a temporary stop-gap.
- TheCycoONE 1y ago
  Turns out Linux needed a stable abi for games and Wine provided.
  - buildbot 1y ago
    Which amusingly, also serves as a stable API for Windows now too.
  - Zambyte 1y ago
    Such is life dealing with propriety software.
- miffy900 1y ago
  for the longest time, no one in linux land cared about API stability or backward compatibility - then app/game developers realised if they could port a portion of Win32 to Linux via WINE, they could just target the win32 API or at least a portion of it and so long as WINE was installed, their app/game would always work. i find it a bit ironic; desktop Linux is being enabled by re-implementing APIs from another OS.
  - wavemode 1y ago
    It's like they always say: win32 is the only stable ABI on Linux.

Fire-Dragon-DoL 1y ago

Sadly Nucleus Coop us heavily focused on Windows

adverbly 1y ago

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.

ErroneousBosh 1y ago
> I think the only game in the last 2 years I haven't been able to run is battlefield 6. Neither has anyone else, if they bought it directly from EA.
Telaneo 1y ago
That anecdote goes the other way if you skew towards popular multiplayer games, since those are the ones with anti-cheat. Someone who plays League, Apex, PUBG, and Destiny 2, and was really looking forward to BF6, will be mightily disappointed. You're unlikely to be invested in all of those games, but a pretty large amount of people are very, very invested in at-least one of those, which, unfortunately, makes Linux a non-starter for them. Even if 99% of games worked fine on Linux, a large amount of people spend 50+% of their time in-game in one of those games, so it doesn't end up feeling like 90+% of games work. Thankfully, the corollary of that is that single-player games pretty much all work, barring some edge cases, like very recent titles that haven't had the kinks ironed out yet.
- spookie 1y ago
  The death of a server browser and privately owned servers led to this. The whole anti-cheat situation grew from publishers wanting to control the whole experience. Besides, the gaming industry keeps shooting themselves in the foot by only supporting Windows (Mac is a thing too). That is slowly changing, but so many game devs are drinking the Microsoft koolaid they don't even consider using another graphics API other than DirectX. Many other decisions like that as well. It really is impressive how many they are willing to leave behind. A quick check gives about 19% of the market.
  - 1y ago

mindcrash 1y ago

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 (!)

29athrowaway 1y ago
Or use ProtonDB https://www.protondb.com/explore https://www.protondb.com/explore
ndsipa_pomu 1y ago
To be fair, the Steam Deck support level is a bit arbitrary and some Verified games may work worse than some Untested games. The only game that I had an issue with is The Unfinished Swan which I bought on Steam after having enjoyed playing it on a PS3 (good enough to buy twice). I couldn't get it to work initially with it just going to a blank screen (not the game itself which ironically does start with an all white screen) no matter my tinkering with Proton versions. However, tried it again a few months ago and it worked perfectly with default settings.
raron 1y ago
Also in some / many cases even "unsupported" games work out of the box or needs only minimal tweaking. AFAIK most of the issues are with online competitive games which uses anti-cheat.
- Zambyte 1y ago

jakebasile 1y ago

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?

chneu 1y ago
Pop OS! With NVIDIA GPU here. Shit just works. When it doesn't, changing the proton version usually fixes it. Way better than Windows.
- layoric 1y ago
  Same setup here, one game setup I've hit but this will be a rare problem, is StarCraft Remastered. Wine has an issue with audio processing which I can't seem to configure my way out of. It pegs all 32 threads and still stutters. Thankfully this game can likely run on an actual potato, so I have a separate mini PC running windows for this when I want to get my ass kicked on battle.net.
- Macha 1y ago
  I've stopped even checking protondb before getting a game these days. Pretty much unless they've gone out of their way to make it not work (which is mostly competitive games, so you can tell beforehand), it works. I realize by posting that here on HN I'm tempting people to send me the ProtonDB garbage tier list, but it's true for the types of games I play.
- roldie 1y ago
  Also have the same setup. Very few issues. Been very happy with the switch
- 1y ago

29athrowaway 1y ago

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.

gpderetta 1y ago
I have an ordinary logitech G29 (I think). It works uneventfully in all games I tried (including force feedback).
- 29athrowaway 1y ago
  I'll have to retest then, few months ago I had various issues with this.

charcircuit 1y ago

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.

bigyabai 1y ago
LoL didn't have kernel-level anticheat for the majority of it's lifetime; when it was added to the game, Apple had removed kexts from the OS entirely. And Valorant doesn't support macOS in the first place, presumably because it didn't run Riot's Ring 0 anticheat at-launch. What point are you trying to make here?
- charcircuit 1y ago
  >What point are you trying to make here? 1. That the raw percentage does not important. 2. That Linux distros do not care about investing in security, (nor to game studios themselves) to be able to get major titles like LoL.
  - nmz 1y ago
    I agree with the first point but not the second, if anything anticheats break security.
  - bigyabai 1y ago
    Security isn't the issue. There is effective Ring 1 anticheat on Linux just like there is on Windows and macOS.
    - ladyanita22 1y ago
      Not ring 0, though.

Grom_PE 1y ago

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

riizade 1y ago
Can you elaborate on Unity wasting disk space on gigabytes of zeroes? How did you discover that? Is it intentional on Unity's part? Percentage-wise, are we talking 2% of a 100GB game, or 50% of a 4GB game? I can't find anything about it online.
- Grom_PE 1y ago
  I suppose that is an issue how a specific game was made, not inherent to Unity. I like to look inside game files and a .zip archive of 1GB unpacking to ~10GB game made me suspicious.
  - marcosdumay 1y ago
    My first guess would be it has lots of uncompressed images or badly compressed videos as artifacts.
    - 1y ago

geuis 1y ago

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.

ludamn 1y ago
If it helps I used to use a gaming laptop for work that had a RTX 2060 mobile version, I was able to run some recent games like Elden Ring (including mods & online play), and some older but still demanding titles like Witcher 3. All of this without tinkering too much on a oob Ubuntu LTS install (I later switched to popOS because I don't like snaps that much).
- geuis 1y ago
  Someone else recommended PopOSin other comments. I pulled up the page but haven't looked at it extensively. In what ways is it different from a recent Ubuntu LTS install?
  - ludamn 1y ago
    The two are very similar in a lot of aspects, they both make it very easy to install proprietary nvidia GPU drivers, they both use Debian as base, and the default desktop for them is Gnome. In the past I migrated to PopOS mainly due to these two things: 1. I prefer flatpaks/system packages over snap[1], if you run `sudo apt install firefox` you'll get a snap application in Ubuntu, that for me is an anti-pattern from Canonical to force adoption of snaps. 2. I found some weird performance issues with my laptop when I installed Ubuntu, thankfully I managed to find a fix after hours of tinkering[2], but I was surprised I had to do these workarounds in the first place (I've been running linux as my main OS since I was a teenager and never had to do anything similar) If gaming is your main goal I'd consider using something like Bazzite or CachyOS, these two distros will still serve you if you want to run work/office apps too, they just come preconfigured w/ a lot of gaming goodies (like steam and nvidia drivers oob) but won't get into your way if you plan to install other stuff. [1] https://snapcraft.io/ https://snapcraft.io/ [2] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/1973434/comments/25 https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/1973434...

dottjt 1y ago

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.

nobodyandproud 1y ago

As Satya Nadella runs Windows OS and Office into the ground. I still can get my desktop gaming fix, at least.

rdudek 1y ago

How are Ubisoft games running on Linux nowadays? I think that is the only thing holding me back honestly.

ludamn 1y ago
If it helps I played AC Odyssey w/o issues using Proton GE, the biggest issue for me was that when I launched the game through steam, steam would launch the Ubisoft launcher which then launched the game , so I had to manually close this launcher to prevent having proton running in the bg for too long It's been a while since I gamed though (2022), but the game ran smoothly on a mobile RTX 2060 card
arlcode 1y ago
The launcher is a bit annoying at times but what finally made me commit ot the switch was when I realized that Anno 1800 and the demo for Anno 117 were running flawlessly. I also recently finished AC Origins for the first time on my Linux machine. However I don't play multiplayer ever and apparently that's where most issues are.
- rdudek 1y ago
  Was the demo through Steam or through Ubisoft Connect launcher? I'm a huge Anno fan and I play Anno 1800 like all the time. I own that game on the Ubisoft platform. If Anno 117 runs flawlessly, I maybe will cancel the preorder on ubisoft and get it on Steam...
chrysoprace 1y ago
I think typically the problem with Ubisoft is dealing with their launcher. You can check individual games via ProtonDB e.g. Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag: https://protondb.com/app/242050 https://protondb.com/app/242050

tonfreed 1y ago

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.

smj-edison 1y ago
> Biggest problem I'm running into now is replacing all my music mixing tools. What are you finding that works for this? I know there's a couple decent DAWs, but running Windows-only plugins was a nightmare last time I tried.
- tonfreed 11mo ago
  Yeah, had no luck getting windows tools running. I'm only an amateur mixer thank God, but I found this list a while ago and have been having mixed success here and there https://github.com/alex-tee/lv2-plugins-ultimate-list https://github.com/alex-tee/lv2-plugins-ultimate-list Just running these through reaper and it's ok enough.

delichon 1y ago

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.

bigyabai 1y ago
> eventually gave up and bought a vanilla PC What were you trying to run games on before you bought the so called "vanilla" PC?
- delichon 1y ago
  A random assemblage of parts running Ubuntu, upon which most things that weren't Windows games ran fairly reliably for a decade plus. As far as I can tell nothing challenges a computer like games, except games from an alien OS.
hatthew 1y ago
Similar anecdote, in the past week there have been two separate games that I wanted to try out, and both were nonfunctional on linux. One had a completely black screen, and the other ignored all mouse/keyboard input. For each of them I spent 15 minutes tinkering with winecfg, installing packages, googling error messages, etc. Eventually I gave up and booted back into windows where they worked perfectly.
hamdingers 1y ago
How long ago was this? That you say "running games under Wine" is a hint it was a while ago, the modern way to do this is to install Steam and let it handle the compatibility layer.
stavros 1y ago
I think the difference is that we aren't talking about stock Wine, but Steam+Proton (which uses Wine, but just makes everything seamless). I uninstalled Windows completely. There are many, many more games that work on my Linux PC than on my Mac.

seabombs 1y ago

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.

gilgoomesh 1y ago
> Even many games that support native linux run better under wine. The same is often true on macOS, too – running games through CrossOver is often better than the native port. The reality is that there simply aren't enough professional game devs on Linux and macOS platforms to polish that last 20% and make all the difference.
PeaceTed 1y ago
Out of the 150-isg games in my library, the only one I have had any issue with is 'From Dust' released in 2011. This is part because of the Ubisoft launcher and some video codex issues, but even so. Switching the too and from the game a few times seems to get past this. About a month back, a demo for Lumines Arise came out and it fired up without issue, didn't even think to check ProtonDB because it has become so reliable. I suspect a big part of this is because Steamdeck has been popular enough to have it be targeted for Proton compatibility day 1.

lostmsu 1y ago

For some definition of "run". I heard Wine silently stubs some graphics calls.

Joel_Mckay 1y ago
And proton was found to get better frame rates than native Windows on some games. Dual booting from 2 SSDs is a pretty solid solution, as some programs are windows only. YMMV =3

ngcc_hk 1y ago

We need to have a steam os hardware map … or an easy to use linux installation for a hardware path for game playing.

colonCapitalDee 1y ago

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 :(

omikun 1y ago
Which OS and amd or nvidia? With win10 expired I just might make the switch on my gaming pc
asadawadia 1y ago
how are you running OW2? I am using steam and proton and it is so rough to play Windows I get 300fps and on linux ~100 and frequent dips
- zamalek 1y ago
  I no longer support Blizz, so can't weigh in specifically, but: have you tried PrtotonGE? The are also the Proton forks, such as CachyOS's one that support wayland directly (which is in WINE, but not Proton yet) - might be xwayland relayed? Also, try `LD_PRELOAD="" %command%` to disable steaminput, which can cause input stuttering after around 45min on some machines (such as mine).
- colonCapitalDee 1y ago
  Ok, maybe I oversold this a little bit. It's running smooth now, getting it to run smooth was not easy. I'm on Ubuntu. I spent a few days in a debug loop. Run steam from the terminal to get a log stream, keep an eye on CPU and GPU utilization and temperature, and futz around in the training range or vs AI bots (more "realistic" than training range). Identify which components of the system aren't performing up to spec. CPU running hot? GPU not being utilized? Steam emitting warning messages? If hardware all looks good, it's probably a software problem somewhere. Identify, then fix. Rinse and repeat until linux performance is in the same league as Windows performance. Things I'd try: 1. Check in game graphics settings 2. Update graphics drivers to the recommended version (may be non-trivial, I had to update my kernel version) 3. Experiment with different proton versions, including proton GE 4. Experiment with different Direct X versions (in game option) 5. Make sure CPU cooler is running 6. Make sure GPU is being used 7. Use gamescope to configure a virtual monitor that exactly matches the capabilities of your physical monitor

omoikane 1y ago

Original source: https://boilingsteam.com/windows-games-compatibility-on-linux-is-at-a-all-time-high/ https://boilingsteam.com/windows-games-compatibility-on-linu...

pentagrama 1y ago

Am I the only one who finds the linked ProtonDB dashboard hard to understand? https://www.protondb.com/dashboard https://www.protondb.com/dashboard It could use some help from a data visualization designer to make it clearer and easier to read.

_imnothere 1y ago

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?

benlivengood 1y ago

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.

estimator7292 1y ago

I think it must be at least four years since I've had to boot into Windows for a game. It's wonderful.

rustystump 1y ago

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.

wetpaws 1y ago
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jetbalsa 1y ago
I don't think its Microsoft directly that care about gaming, There are a few factors at play. but every time a game is ported to a Playstation/Switch its being ported to a form of Linux, and in most cases the Graphics APIs are the same. Its the companies making the game have no incentive to port to Linux if the tiny user base is fine with Proton and dealing with its hacks.
godshatter 1y ago
Generally, a lot of games play fine just by selecting Proton Experimental, though some of the games I play do require adding a configuration in the steam menu for the game which I usually crib from the protondb page for the game based on user comments. There are a lot of people that are used to tweaking games on Windows, too, I used to be one of them. Lots of people mod their games and have to run them differently to do so or have to shim them in some way to make them work, lots of people search to find answers to problems they are having. Getting up to date graphics drivers used to be a pain in Windows (haven't had to try for many years), it's part of system updates in Linux for me (even running NVIDIA cards). If anything, getting a game to work that has issues on Windows was harder than getting a game to work on Linux that is having issues thanks to protondb.com, at least for me. So I think there are a lot of people that could just hop over if they wanted to, trading one kind of tech-related problem solving for another kind.

mortsnort 1y ago

Will MS implement some kind of software signing that breaks wine?

PeaceTed 1y ago
Not impossible but that might be something that would eventually force developers onto tools that don't have that restriction. A walled garden doesn't just keep people in, but it keeps other out. And once folks jump out they aren't likely to jump back in.
15155 1y ago
This already exists: a TPU and trusted Microsoft signing certs are required with Windows 11 and certain anti-cheat software.

grugagag 1y ago

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

apatheticonion 1y ago

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.

LennyHenrysNuts 1y ago

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!

ehnto 1y ago

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.

baobun 1y ago
Nice! I'm curious if you experience any difference in IO performance (e.g game loading times)? Last I tried NTFS on Linux it was stable but not fast, especially for writes. If it's not a notable difference between Windows and Linux then that's a big improvement from those days. I think you could probably get a decent IO performance boost and reduce loading times by moving the library over to something like ext4 or xfs, at the cost of portability.
- ehnto 1y ago
  I will have to take note next time I play, but I haven't noticed anything so perhaps if it's there it's not too bad. They are SSDs and I do have 32gb of ram and 24gb of vram, so I bet quite a lot of IO bottleneck could be hidden by that. I'll probably switch to ext4 when I decommission the Windows install entirely.
FaradayRotation 1y ago
Almost the same happy story here on my end. I had an Ubuntu home server, but with windows as my main. Then Win 10 --> Win 11 hit. I was already annoyed at MS for many reasons, and then I realized just how much money I would need to spend on getting equivalent functionality, for an OS (Win 11) that I hated and had a dismal preview of at work. Now I have Mint. With an AI terminal to help guide/teach me, I find myself really enjoying the power and capability the terminal gives me. My computer has been genuinely USEFUL for debugging serious problems with WiFi calling on my phone and other network connectivity issues, and I still get to play games on steam! Sure, there were one or two hiccups on Outward when I first started, but Bannerlord and everything else I've tried so far plays just fine. It just works! Really!

Kim_Bruning 1y ago

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.

EasyMark 1y ago

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

chequoredDaemon 1y ago

(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).

deleted 1y ago

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deepsun 1y ago

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.

hedora 1y ago

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.

not_a_bot_4sho 1y ago

This comment section feels like a circle jerk lol

sharts 1y ago

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.

sussmannbaka 1y ago
Did you try before or after Valves push for proton? Both of those are rated Platinum.
- gradientsrneat 1y ago
  If platinum-rated, should run fine with latest Proton, and maybe also some environment variables on launch to force using the dedicated GPU. Assuming the kernel and drivers are up-to-date.
jryb 1y ago
fwiw, upgrading from rx580 to rtx5070 solved all of my performance problems (both on windows and Linux) for a number of games.
zepearl 1y ago
To fix stuttering I had to disable compositing in the window manager (Xfce on Linux Mint, nVidia proprietary with AMD CPU).
- nmz 1y ago
  And there's also pulseaudio, which I had to run in some games with PULSE_LATENCY_MSEC=90 %command%, other games you can only run in lutris, other games you can't even minimize it or it will mess up with the screen entirely.

Mobius01 1y ago

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.

myfirstacc7234 1y ago

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?

wiredpancake 1y ago

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buyucu 1y ago

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.

vga42 1y ago

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.

29athrowaway 1y ago

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.

hyfgfh 1y ago

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

dannersy 1y ago
While I would like to champion AMD a bit more because Nvidia has been doing some anti consumer shenanigans, I have to say that at this point, the Linux support is good. It is a bit of a myth or perhaps just outdated info that if you want to have a headache-less experience, you need to use AMD. For new hardware, it may even be a bit better than AMD to be honest. The only difference is that updating is a bit easier on AMD, after all, mesa just updates with your OS. But this is merely a note on convenience.

aquir 1y ago

I wish we could have Proton on MacOS...that would be awesome!

ikbr 1y ago
https://www.codeweavers.com/crossover https://www.codeweavers.com/crossover

moonAA 1y ago

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?

Tajnymag 1y ago
That's a reasonable baseline, yes. I would also consider trying running it on Arch Linux, because it usually has newer library versions and it's the base of SteamOS.
- moonAA 1y ago
  Oh, thank you for your reply. I'll check out Arch Linux as well.
tmtvl 1y ago
The Debian derivatives, particularly the Ubuntu line is generally considered the most popular. That said, they tend to be 10 to 20 years behind on versions of various pieces of software so things that work there may not work on something a little more up-to-date, like Fedora; which also means that after a while those things will also stop working on the Debian derivatives. If you're not very interested in keeping on top of changes and maintaining things you're better off just targeting Wine, in which case the distribution you test on doesn't matter very much as Wine is very stable.
- moonAA 1y ago
  Thanks, that makes sense. I’ll start with Ubuntu for now and check other distros later if needed.

npteljes 1y ago

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.

theshrike79 1y ago

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.

decryption 1y ago
Apple did! The Game Porting Toolkit does (I think) what you're talking about and what Steam did for Linux. https://developer.apple.com/games/game-porting-toolkit/ https://developer.apple.com/games/game-porting-toolkit/ Why it hasn't taken off, I have no idea.
- theshrike79 1y ago
  Without even opening the link "porting toolkit" seems like something I need to put effort into. Proton + Steam is pretty much just clicking "Allow Linux" on a dashboard somewhere and then it'll just work.
  - pjmlp 1y ago
    Hence why studios have no reason to bother with GNU/Linux even if they happen to target Android/Linux, let Valve do the work.
    - theshrike79 1y ago
      There was some anecdotal stuff floating around some years ago that smaller studios stopped doing custom Linux builds because Proton+Windows ran faster than their native build =)

commiepatrol 1y ago

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.

wernsey 1y ago

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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2DY3snvH9Xc

drbytes 1y ago

Cachyos here, it just works. I can even do all my .net dev on here without issue and let of some steam on overwatch

valbaca 1y ago

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).

AuthAuth 1y ago
Any modern (last 5 years) amd/nvidia card will do. Intel cards have a few issues in certain games but overall they are fine to. AMD cards are nice and what I prefer because they are plug and play and you dont have to think about drivers as they're baked into the kernel. So really the best card for linux is the card that makes sense for your budget/PC specs/desired target games.
- valbaca 1y ago
  Thank you for the response!

leogout 1y ago

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

SirMaster 1y ago

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.