Looking at Destiny. Game worked okay on Linux before they integrated Battleye, which HAS Linux support, but Bungie just doesn't want to interact with it.
This is why it’s mainly larger developers that care about their community that implement Linux support. Take valve for example. Wonderful company that cares about their playerbase more than the average game development team. They have Linux support on almost all of their games as far as I am aware. Bungie is a decent company but most of their community doesn’t want to play on Linux anyway, so they won’t bother with it. However most teams that are smaller or care more about money than players won’t do it.
Valve is definitely an exception. I am not sure why, but it is pretty much in the open that Gabe Newell has a bone to pick with Microsoft and he has been throwing money at Linux for over a decade to break their monopoly on gaming. I’d argue that this has nothing to do with their love for the community and more so with Gabe’s personal vendetta against Microsoft.
Reality is that most game devs, most executives and most people in marketing don’t really care about Linux. It is good PR to support Mac and Linux, and some of the geekier developers will go the extra mile to support it, but I think it is common in the industry to assume that Linux users are not gamer, or that they have enough knowledge to install a dual boot. They don’t care in the sense that they don’t even think about it, its not even on the radar for most game companies. Most studios probably never even had a discussion about it. That is how irrelevant Linux has been to gaming. Hence why Proton is such a tour de force.
I respect that as true, but every console other than XBox is either Linux or BSD based; at a certain point learning to work with alternative platforms is just good business practice.
In an ideal world everything would work out, but for some business it is a pretty huge commitment for what was less than 2% of the market just a few months ago. We certainly lost money porting our game in Linux at that last place I worked. It was before Proton though. Obviously each case is different, and some games work on Linux out-the-box due to Photon so this become a non-issue.
Not sure I want to name the game because this would make me very easy to identify from my post history. It’s a game on Steam that sold over 250k copies. My boss promised a Linux version very early on because they thought it would be easy, but we ended up being stuck with that promise.
I find that to be an annoying thing with Japanese software in general, gaming or otherwise: more proprietary garbage than Western software and practically hard-coding it to 100% force you to use the software in the way THEY intend for you to use it, not how YOU want. Makes for worse Linux compatibility at best, if any at all, compared to Western software. Note that I’m purely talking about native or straight Wine Linux compatibility, not Steam/Proton, which works around those issues well.
From my own experience, “not bothering” is definitely the better business practice since chances are you won’t make back the development costs.
Maybe Steam Deck and that porting library have improved things but a decade ago it would have been better business to just give Linux users $20 to not play your game.
I believe the PS5 is partially based off of FreeBSD and I don’t think there is as strong of a gaming scene on BSD (even relative to the size of its userbase). I feel like there would be some rather large leaps going from a tailored console OS to a more widely available alternative OS.
There are plenty of games that are very specifically targeting Proton compatibility at a very minimum thanks to the Steam Deck, so I’m perfectly happy with any game that’s developed with that in mind.
Being verified on Steam Desk is my parameter for deciding if I’ll consider a game or not, even if I don’t have a Steam Deck (yet). I’m perfectly fine with that, not asking for a Linux native version as long as the game works as it should on Proton.
Verified is probably a stricter metric than you need/want. Many games aren’t verified just because of font-size issues and the like on the small screen.
I'm on Linux Mint right now and when I go my library and toggle the "Show only games that run on Linux" button, nothing happens. I don't think Valve cares about the distinction, so long as it runs.
if you have proton enabled the library shows all games as linux compatible. If you disable proton in the steam settings on linux the filter will only show games that run natively
My experience is that all games run on Linux these days. Wine, DXVK and Vulkan are really good. The only games that don’t run are those that explicitly ban Linux users with some creepy anti-cheat.
I’ve recently started gaming on linux with surprisingly little problem, given that the last time I tried was about 15 years ago. I don’t even know what proton is, but I just installed steam and then my games… surprisingly on some slightly older games (tf2, HL2) I get a huge FPS boost in Linux compared to windows. Not sure why that would be.
surprisingly on some slightly older games (tf2, HL2) I get a huge FPS boost in Linux compared to windows
Oh, I remember watching video on youtube on that topic. Short answer: because opensource. Long answer: because developers better understood how to optimize. Same optimizations slightly boosted FPS on windows.
I don’t even know what proton is
Valve games run natively on Linux, so no need in proton.
Proton is basically Wine bundled with other software, like DXVK and VKD3D, to run windows games.
You have to enable it in the Configuration window inside of Steam if you haven’t done that yet. Enabling it is all you have to do and it will be used automatically.
Ah thanks, I don’t think I have enabled it. Will that allow me to try out windows-only games in Linux? That’s crazy… literally no more reasons to go back to Windows…
Yep. You can have a look at ProtonDB to have an ideia of how well a game runs through Proton.
It’s not completely correct as some games marked with lower ratings will work flawlessly, and some with higher ratings will probably give you some trouble, but it’s a really useful resource.
I don’t know some of my favorite projects are open source engine recreations like OpenMW and re3 for example. If they don’t get shut down by the owner of the IP some of them can be in development for years
I had the same with Genshin Impact; it refuses to install on Linux due to “cheating rootkits”, it even refuses to install on a Windows 11 VM in VirtualBox!
How does it do that‽
I've been gaming exclusively on Linux since 2014. Gaming on Linux is so good nowadays, thanks to Proton, there are so many amazing titles available to play. Proton makes it all easy - thanks to it, it's just a matter of hitting install and play on Steam (in most cases).
There are so many of them, If something doesn't run on Linux, I just don't care. My backlog of great games is so big, who cares about some singular titles that are not available.
I've recently been playing Baldurs Gate 3, ARMORED CORE VI, Anno 1800 and Battlebit Remastered on my Ubuntu rig. All run great. Neither need any special tweaks (I own them on Steam).
BG3 and Battlebit Remastered are especially stellar.
I recommend BG3 to anyone who likes true roleplaying games with great writing, reactivity and player agency.
Battlebit Remastered is a great multiplayer title with massive 256 player battles and it sits somewhere between Battlefield and Squad (a mixture of arcade and mil-sim elements).
Modern (post DS2) From Software games tend to run flawlessly on Linux. They are one of the greatest developers now. No bullshit, just greatness all around.
I heard a lot of BG3, although I dont have any doubt that it is a great game, I dont think it suits my taste. Battlebit tho, I’ll check that otu.
It had nothing to do with From Software but Elden Ring actually ran better on Linux than on any other platform shortly after release (there was a silly bug that affected performance on all platforms that Valve fixed within Proton.)
I have i7-7700k, GTX 1070 (nvidia driver version: 535.86.05), 16 GB ram, running the game off an SSD.
The game has been improving in a tremendous manner since release. They've been releasing meaningful patches really often. I've been playing it since the full release, and it's been awesome to witness it improve so quickly in so many aspects.
Since the latest performance updates, I haven't noticed the game dropping below 60 fps (it now sits mostly in the 60-80fps range) at 1080p, high settings, FSR set to off.
I believe that AMD has flipped the script on this in recent years. From what I recall, AMD has been actively releasing a large amount (if not all) of their drivers as open source for integration into the Mesa driver (which I think is the same driver than handles Intel graphics as well). Arguably speaking AMD GPUs work more out-of-the-box now than NVidia do.
That said, I switched to an AMD card about a year ago as an upgrade from an Nvidia. My Nvidia never gave me issues, it was just getting a little long in the tooth (gtx 1050 ti upgraded to a RT 6600)
Isn’t it still true that a Nvidia card is better for gaming with Linux than AMD or Intel?
No. Intel has best drivers, AMD has decent drivers. Both are well-integrated into system. On nvidia there are nouveau and blob. Nouveau supports not every feature, blob just breaks system.
This kind of mentality only works if you don’t play games with other people.
Multiplayer only folk usually have a friend group that plays multiple games. If they don’t work in Linux you’re SOL.
Back when I tried to use Linux and never boot Windows a good 2/3rd of games I couldn’t participate in and was left behind. So while it’s better than it was, it’s still not good.
Who is “they”? Not all game companies can afford to support multiple platforms. You’re not entitled for developers to support your preferred platform nor does it make sense yo give a negative review unless they lied in the product description.
Well, first of all I know multi-platform game exists and in some case it will just work out of the box. If it doesn’t though, not all companies have the money to hire QA for other platforms or devs to look into issues when stuff goes wrong on Linux. Most game companies fail and run out of cash, only the top survives. They don’t have that sort of money laying around to mess around a platform with 2% of users. My previous company certainly loss money on Linux and it was a cause of tension internally.
Secondly, a Minecraft prototype written in c++ and using native OpenGL calls is a terrible example. Even though I understand the dev volunteer his time so money isn’t an issue, it would cost a fortune and take years for your average studio to make a game from scratch like this without a game engine.
A bare bone program with rendering and movement is not a game, it’s a prototype, and this demonstrate nothing about modern game development. Of course a prototype with nothing but rendering and basic inputs coded in c++ is gonna be multi-platform by default. Hell, it is just code on a repo, you don’t even need to build it and test it and deploy it for all platforms as it is up to the user. I don’t think you understand the scope of making a fully-completed game. I had dozens of unfinished prototypes on my computer, some of which I made decades ago, some are multi-platform because of the language and tech. Still, this means nothing. It still cost money to support multiple platforms. Only exception nowadays is if your game happen to be compatible with Proton. But yeah, supporting Mac and a bunch of other platforms? It is not free my dude.
I’m all for Linux but IMO it’s not quite ready for general public yet. Even distros like Mint are buggy and requires multiple restart every day. I would install it on my dad’s computer, but it’s not stable enough yet. But I think it’s a question of a few years, maybe months before it’s there.
EDIT: since people are asking, here are a few bugs that I encounterd over the last week or so. I’m a audio/multimedia worker so obviously I push my computers farther then average user. Still, I’m happy to know many people have manage to get it stable
2 days ago, Ssomething went wrong with cinnamon. At first all the dektop would not appears when waking up from sleep. Had to restart every time or disable sleep. At some point, even restart would bring me a window saying Cinnamon session could not be loaded. I had to reinstall it from Grub. I dont see average users being able to do that. *It’s actually not fixed, sleep will mess up Cinnamon.
yesterday, I tried to get my DAW (Reaper) to work with one of my audio interfaces. Drivers would not work correctly, sound was glitching. I messed up with pulse audio for 2 hours but never got it to work.
this morning, te infamous NVIDIA driver wouldn’t let me turn off the mirror mode (I have a projector connected to the computer), I had to reboot.
This morning also, I discoverd that Timeshift now only launch from the terminal.
Over the past week, I had to completly reinstall mint, because I installed and uninstalled some audio extension and it messed up the OS. Since then many apps that use to ne there dont show up in the software manager, updating the repo doesn’t work, so I had to manually install using terminal.
I’ve been fighting to get Da vinci resolve to work, tho it’s supposed to work natively. Took me around 4-5 hours overall.
I ACTUALLY LOVE LINUX. Indual boot it on my main PC an even installed it on my old 2015 MacBook. I think windows is garbage and full of bloatware, I hate apple but consider macOS a pretty good OS, but I think both are more stable for your average user.
I sincerely wish I could install Mint on my dad’s computer but I’m pretty sure he would me need my help at least twice a week . I dont see him or your average user playing with the terminal to install a basic app. I know it’s getting closer, but IMO it’s not there yet.
I think you might have something wrong with your install. I do some heavy simulations (mostly Thermo and structural stress tests) with old hardware and haven’t had to restart ever.
I’m baffled as to how you can have so many problems.
I respectfully disagree. In my experience, Linux isn’t any buggier than Windows, and hasn’t been for a decent number of years.
The main thing hurting Linux adoption in my opinion is that the best-known beginner distros (Ubuntu and Mint) just aren’t very good compared to most others.
OpenSUSE is the best beginner distro in my opinion, with Fedora as a close second, and LMDE would be the best if it was feature complete.
What do those distros have that Mint doesn’t have? I’m not being rude, it’s just that I recently switched from Windows to Linux Mint on my laptop, and I can’t imagine what features I’m missing. It’s easy to use and does everything I need it to do so far. I haven’t experienced any weird bugs yet, and compared to Windows 10 it’s a much less frustrating experience overall.
Latest kernel (hence driver), mostly. For most people Linux Mint is great distro that mostly works out of the box. However, for gaming, Linux Mint is one of the weakest since they tend to ship old kernel.
We have to understand that gaming in Linux is in very active development right now. Having out of date kernel can make you unable to use some device, or having less performace than those with latest kernel.
Hovewe, if you are happy with Linux Mint and see no problem, it’s okay to stay. It has great community and the developers are awesome.
Mint in my experience is one of the buggiest distros (after Manjaro and on par with Ubuntu).
I guess this is mostly caused by being a distro based on another distro based on another distro.
Mint doesn’t have the manpower to reliably fix bugs in their own distro, so the bugfixes need to be passed from upstream to Debian to Ubuntu to Mint.
Considering I’ve had far fewer problems and frustrations with Mint so far than I had with Windows, this bodes well. I’ll save your comment and plan on giving OpenSUSE a try!
Even distros like Mint are buggy and requires multiple restart every day.
There is something wrong with your installation. Other people just restart to update the kernel often once a week/month. So you might as well tell us what’s making you restart Mint so often.
It seems to me that installing external audio drivers and changing Pulseaudio configurations is messing with the OS. Mint uses fairly old, stable packages. Newer distros have Pipewire for audio now. It’s a Pulseaudio replacement and might be useful in your case. Have you tried a newer distro? You can try Ubuntu 22.04 or Fedora from a USB stick to see if your audio equipment works out of the box. Then you won’t have to fiddle so much with the OS. Fedora Silverblue in particular is immutable and you can reset the OS to any current or previous state with one command, even without Timeshift. Another thing for testing software like DaVinci Resolve is Distrobox containers. You can change whatever you want inside a container and try different distros but you won’t break the underlying OS. Hacker’s dream.
Following this advice that came quite often, I’ve decided to give Fedora a try on my home system. I’ve read that Nobora is optimised for production and gaming so I’ve installed it this morning ,triple booting Mint, Win10 and Nobora. It’s really well done and comes with Gnome and preinstalled video and steam tools. But I’m still facing one significant issue: the multimedia codes wont install properly. I’ve just spent 2 hours on this with no luck so far. That means many games that worked out of the box on mint are not curently working…on a gaming oriented distro… plus video editing doesn’t work in Reaper due to Ffmpeg not working… So yeah, it look quite nice but a lot of troubleshooting required. I’ll see how it goes once problems are fixes.
Indeed I manage to manually install most of the codecs from rpmfusion and got Da vinci studio to work ! No video yet in Reaper but I have a few idea to get it working. After a few tweaks, all 5 games I’ve tried are now working flawless. So far I got one audio interface to work but not another, gonna neee to look into this also. Fedora definitely feels more stable, snappy and workstation oriented than Mint, so I’m probably gonna stick with it in the end. Thanks for recommanding it! Now if I could only get unreal to work with an Oculus Quest 2, I would deleted my windows install and never look back. To might come soon enough. Linux is still a bit challenging, but man, it does rock.
Ok, hear me out. Linux is not an easy platform to develop for because it’s in constant flux where systems and libraries come, change and go constantly. Linux itself is a somewhat slippery concept (if we expand from the kernel) where “works on linux” can really mean it’s been tested on one particular distro. Debian stable and rolling releases are not the same. Unless I am completely mistaken, I can see why major developers are hesitant to support linux, whatever it even is. Is Android linux?
Now, I’m all for this message. Given how OSs have been developing, I advocate for linux adoption and wish people would “vote with their wallet”. Otherwise things just will not change. Well, not for better, if recent history is anything to go by. I just feel that this problem has more prongs than we like to admit, being linux enthusiasts.
Not really the case anymore because of proton, game devs develop for Windows and proton and then it’ll run on anything that can run proton, Linux, android, Mac or otherwise in the future
From what I hear thanks to proton it’s incredibly easy to develop for Linux, as long as you don’t use one of the anticheats that doesn’t support it or intentionally prevent it from running in proton you’re fine
Well, yeah, but I think the issue is that the best way to develop for linux is to make a Windows binary. I don’t like that. Developers actively sabotaging Wine/Proton compatibility is kind of malicious though.
I don’t think the best way to develop for Linux is by making a windows binary, I think the best way for game developers to make a Linux version of a game they otherwise wouldn’t is by making a windows binary compatible with proton
Problem is very few developers actively choose to make a Linux game and windows games if done right run at native speeds on Linux anyway.
I’m gonna be unpopular for saying this but it’s the same thing as using HTML for desktop/mobile apps, sure it’s not optimal performance wise but it’s a hell of a lot better than often nothing at all because companies can’t or won’t justify development time to support smaller groups of people on smaller platforms
If such a time comes that desktop Linux has a large enough market share for large companies to take seriously then I’m sure they’ll start developing native versions of maybe even make Linux-first games but sadly we’re nowhere near that point yet so best we can hope for is good cross compatibility tools
I think the issue is that the best way to develop for linux is to make a Windows binary
If it works, it works. Stop those bureaucratic inquisitions like “Stack Overflow says it’s not best practice” “Code review is not optional” “It’s gonna crash production” yada yada
As a big Linux fan, it makes me said that Wine needs to exist. But, maybe it’s not such a bad thing. Linux is just a kernel, with no associated libraries for app developers. App devs don’t want to manually write system calls, so it’s always been the case thar they lick and choose which set of libraries to target for their Linux apps. A popular low level choice is the GNU standard C library, and a popular high level choice is the GTK/GDK/Gnome stack. But these aren’t the only choices. I mean you can use the MUSL standard C library if you want. You can choose between OpenGL, Vulkan, and WGPU for graphics already.
I see Wine and Proton as just being another set of standard apis to target. Maybe they don’t have the best design, but is traditional Unix really the best design either? Now the Valve and company are supporting Wine, it’s one of the Linux targets with the most actual developers. And of course it has a huge advantage over the glibc + Vulkan stuff: it retains binary compatibility forever.
Yes, Wine and Proton are great and they do actually solve a lot of issues with linux gaming. I don’t exactly begrudge anyone for choosing to go that route because linux is complicated. But I do wish we’d talk more about native linux gaming and didn’t always default to Proton. Valve has done wonders for gaming on linux, but I am not fan of Steam and their DRM policies.
I really appreciate programs like Bottles these days. Back in 2006 or so I beat Deus Ex on Wine and setting it up was a hassle. Today I’m amazed it was even possible back then.
I totally agree. The real problem for Linux gaming tho is that games are almost always distributed as compuled binaries, but Linux is built around open source. It you had a model where you paid for the source code of a game, and then it got compiled for your machine right when you downloaded, Linux gaming would probably work great. You’d have better fps too. (I actually really like this idea, somebody like GOG should make a client that does this).
But why? What libraries are causing problems? Zlib? SDL? Actually SDL better kept dynamically linked because SDL sometimes adds support for new interfaces(wayland, egl).
I’d think so, too. But afaik windows people don’t do so much dynamic linking anyways. Most of the times it’s Linux executables that are few megabytes in size and most windows executables are at least tens of megabytes because people prefer statically link things in that world.
Nobody stops you doing the same thing with linux executables.
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