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.
Why? He is happy with his operational system. He do not need to pay 100 bucks for a questionable OS . Linux had overcome MacOs as number of users on steam. It is his right to complain. Go sell in windows store if you want be windows exclusive.
Steam VR works fine, but you need a headset that supports Steam VR without needing other software. The main options are the HTC Vive and the Valve Index.
Good point! I was aware of ALVR, specifically that it supported the Quest, but I wasn’t sure how stable it was. I didn’t know it supported those other headsets, that’s cool!
Still… There are anticheats that allow Linux, like EAC, Hyperion and many others… If they choose one that does not allow Linux, or choose one that allow Linux but block it, it’s a dev issue
Virtually no anticheat worked on Linux just a few years ago except maybe Valve and Blizzard in-house solutions. Games that are out and already committed to a specific anticheat can’t do much but to wait, so it is not really on them. Changing the anticheat solution mid-way on a released game would piss off so many people you can’t imagine. On a brand new game though, I would agree that this should be considered.
Indeed. What sucks is that it is off by default, I figure most small-time devs simply need to be told it exists. I definitely wouldn’t excuse the big players though, most AAA game companies can get fucked for all I care.
The entitlement in this whole thread is insane. Is that how linux gamers are? Not to mention that modern gaming require developers to use third-party anti-cheat solution on which they have little control. You’d think the Linux crowd would understand that it makes more sense to please the 98% of players up until anti-cheats get better Linux support.
The funny thing is moat of these anti cheats have built in ways to enable Linux, such as easy anticheat, but Deva stubbornly wont toggle the option to enable.
I believe commonly used engines like UE and Unity also have options to build a game for linux as well.
Even if you’re not using an engine that supports building for linux, nor want to maintain a separate linux codebase. You can just build for windows while targeting proton compatibility.
Exactly this. It's like buying a PlayStation game and being shocked that it doesn't work on your Xbox.
Things like Proton are very much the exception and not the rule. Unless either Valve or the game devs come forward saying that Proton supports this, it shouldn't be an expectation.
Yes. They chose not to support Linux. Would you get pissy because God of War doesn't run on your Xbox?
No one made a promise, implicit or otherwise, that these games would run on Linux. The game devs didn't make this promise by not listing Linux or Proton as supported, and Valve didn't add these games to their list of explicitly supported games for Proton.
Valve said that we're free to piss about and try Proton on other games, and that they'd try to improve compatibility, (and they have done) but that isn't the same as a promise that these games will run.
Proton is just Valve’s fork of Wine. It had a lot of game-specific patches, to make all the Steam games work better.
Wine isn’t meant specifically for games - you can run most Windows applications in it. It’s just translations of Windows syscalls to Linux equivalents, to put it simply.
That’s not Baldurs Gate, it’s Baldurs Gate: Dark Alliance which is a completely different game that was on consoles. It was an Action RPG as opposed to an RPG.
But it was also great fun. Especially with a friend.
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