I agree that the experience on Linux is quite variable; I set up my Linux installation to play games once 3 years ago (it didn’t take me hours) and my Steam games are plug and play. I don’t play all the games from those lists but RDR2 plays perfectly fine for me. Occasionally, there would be updates that would introduce a regression for some games (DX12 is still a bit hit or miss on some titles) and it would take a few searches to find a workaround, but I can accept that, since I can stay on an OS I trust and would rather use. Rarely, there would be a serious bug or issue that I find difficult to triage because I can’t tell whose fault it is between Proton/Wine, Steam, Nvidia etc. But this happened once in the past few years.
I think what would help is Steam making their own Wiki (with contributors) on gaming on Linux for its own platform for players who just want a streamlined experience.
But communities like /c/linux_gaming (or its orange site equivalence) are ways to get support and help one another. You could even see it as the “friends you make along the way”.
I would say gaming on Linux has come a long way since, but depending on how much time and energy one has for the occasional tinkering, one might need to exercise more patience. Sounds like Windows gives you what you need, and that’s okay.
A+ reply. I totally agree. I’ll say that the platform is NOT the problem, but the approach. What is “Linux” these days? A colleague who’ve been using Windows for all his 35 years asked my yesterday about Linux. “What’s the best Linux-thing (distro) for a noob like me that’s used to Windows?”, was basically his question.
My question then is “Well, do you game?” Of course, he games. He just bought Baldur’s Gate 3. He’s set for “life” (cough 1-6 months?). Anyhow, knowing he’s playing Baldur’s Gate 3, LoL, and WoW (yup), I don’t dare push him on his “linux quest” quite yet.
Also worth noting that the fact that Linux gaming works at all on many “Windows-exclusive” titles is an absolute magnificent feat of engineering. For the longest time we’ve been working to get games working on Linux despite both game developers and engine makers historically expressing anything between disinterest and antagonism towards supporting games on Linux.
But I also get that the final product is still not all that smooth from a user’s perspective. Just be sure to put the blame on where it belongs (definitely not Linux, or Wine who has been bending over backwards for over a decade to swim against the flow).
Wait, but the three games you listed all work great on Linux. I’m confused. I am a few hours into BG3, I play LoL a few times a week, and I know WoW works because I played a ton of Hearthstone and Overwatch a few years back and those were some of the first games working well with DXVK. So I know Battle.net games usually work great.
LoL and WoW basically work perfectly on Linux (platinum rated). As for BG3, it works fine for the most part with Proton-GE / Proton Experimental. But since it’s still very new though, expect bugs, but also expect the compatibility to get even better within the next few weeks.
My question then is “Well, do you game?”
Really though, the question shouldn’t be “do you game”, but "do you like tinkering around, fixing things, troubleshooting, and learning new things, in your free time? ", or, “do you like major changes, and having the patience to make a major change in your life work, or would you rather prefer familiarity and stability, a mindset of ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’?”
If someone has been running Windows for 35 years and hasn’t checked out Linux already in some capacity, I doubt they’re the kind who likes change, the kind of person who likes to experiment and tinker. Personally, I wouldn’t recommend Linux to them based on that reason, unless they’re also the non-tech-savvy kind who have very simple requirements - like my Mum and Dad, who’ve been running Linux for over a decade now without any issues (because their requirements are very simple, so Linux fits their needs perfectly).
I’ve gone through about a dozen distros over the last year since I decided to use Linux exclusively, finally landing on EndeavourOS as my current home distro.
You know what I’ve found? I don’t play games nearly as much, because due to whatever the hell is wrong with my brain, I enjoy the troubleshooting as much or more than the gaming. It’s become an unexpected weekend joy to find some random game from my past have an absolute ball tinkering to make it work only to finally launch the game and say “alright, that was fun” and go to bed.
This is exactly what set me on my career path from my time as a teenager finding games on the seven seas. I found that I enjoyed doing all of the service administration, hacking, tweaking, and troubleshooting to get the games working, managed, and distributed more than actually playing the games.
I spent more time on ripping and copying PlayStation games than I did playing them.
Freedom requires sacrifices. I research if a game will run before buying it. I don’t but the ones that won’t, because freedom is more important to me.
This is why I’ll still use Win 11 as my daily.
I think your goal should be to do the opposite. Run GNU/Linux as your daily and switch to Windows only when you have to. Eventually you will become better at solving issues and will be able to run more games without using Windows. Maybe in a few years you will even decide that you no longer care about those remaining games that don’t run and ditch Windows entirely.
That won’t convince a lot of people
That’s fine. Most people don’t care about freedom, security and privacy, so they aren’t willing to spend the extra effort to get those things. But it also means that publishers don’t have a good reason to stop abusing their users with DRM and spyware, since people will buy those games anyway. They don’t have to publish for GNU/Linux, because people are fine with running Windows and not being in control of their computers.
Yes, high total throughout, but latency would be bad, no? So things like dynamically loading new areas would behave more like a HDD instead of a RAID or local SSD.
Ah I wish I read that sooner, when the ntfs3 driver was released I moved my games to an NTFS partition, i don’t remember precisely but some wouldn’t work, and then unlike my ext4 or btrfs partition which were unbreakable, a lot of things became unreadable and undeletable after a forced shutdown. Probably my fault, but in any case i think it’s not worth the hassle. I only had games on it fortunately so didn’t lose anything significant
…and now I’m planning on making a btrfs partition for my games and using winbtrfs to use it on windows as well, probably another bad idea but I wanna do it so badlybadly
EDIT: Yup, it was a bad idea, sometimes getting blue screens when trying to empty the trash on the btrfs
That’s the NTFS3 driver for you. Corrupter of partitions… I had so many hassles, and it’s still happening to others recently, I don’t know why that thing is included honestly.
I was doing the same with winbtrfs, and it’s pretty good overall but kind of a mixed bag sometimes. The biggest pain is file permissions since winbtrfs isn’t sane and use something like uid 1000. So when you write or alter files or you’ll get file permissions errors on the Linux side. It’s workable just changing the permissions back when in Linux if that happens
Yeah,performance overhead aside, in Windows it reads and writes fine because of that. Anything thqt changes in Windows however will write the uid of that file as the windows SID I believe, either way I was using regularly the chown -Rf commands to reclaim files back in Linux.
It’s mostly a problem with how steam handles updates downloading to temp folders, etc… It’s the sharing of steam libraries that this happens to most often if you’re back and forth between os’s
when the ntfs3 driver was released I moved my games to an NTFS partition, i don’t remember precisely but some wouldn’t work, and then unlike my ext4 or btrfs partition which were unbreakable, a lot of things became unreadable and undeletable after a forced shutdown
Did you symlink the compatdata folder?
now I’m planning on making a btrfs partition for my games and using winbtrfs
I heard that with winbtrfs, you run into permission issues where every time you boot back into Linux, you’d need to chown any files you’d created in Windows, which would be a PITA. Also, I heard winbtrfs in Windows isn’t as stable as ntfs3 in Linux. Neither solution is unfortunately perfect so you may need to try and see what works best for you.
In general though, I believe regardless of what filesystem you choose, it’s recommend to NOT share everything and instead maintain a copy of the library native to each OS, and just share the “common” and maybe the “download” folder, and let Steam discover the existing files when you proceed to install the game.
I heard that with winbtrfs, you run into permission issues where every time you boot back into Linux, you’d need to chown any files you’d created in Windows, which would be a PITA.
You can set up mappings between windows and linux users so that btrfs will automatically set the correct permissions for files created in windows: github.com/maharmstone/btrfs#mappings
Did you symlink the compdqta folder um don’t remember it’s been too long…
Also I heard winbtrfs in windows isn’t as stable as ntfs3 in Linux :(
I’m trying to share stuff between the os because I lack so much space (500 Go for Windows + nixos + my old fedora silverblue parution that still has data I have to clean) fortunately I’m soon upgrading to 1To but I’ll probably fill everything again in a fews months 😅
Winbtrfs has some really funky bugs (some apps like Aseprite will somehow make files which get padded up to a round KiB size on disk which breaks some file formats, even though it doesn’t do that on NTFS or FAT), is way slower on Windows (longer loading times, streaming asset delay, delayed audio on some situations like RPG dialogue, Skyrim mods are especially problematic, blah blah blah), the extra permissions make managing it annoying, and symlimks generally just don’t work on both Linux and Windows at the same time no matter the FS which can occasionally be annoying. I really wouldn’t bother with winbtrfs for games unfortunately
ah too bad, I thought I finally had a solution for the lack of storage… I’ll probably do it anyway just in case I need quick access to one Linux game but the rest of the time I’ll keep them on the ntfs
I love it. It is the best purchase decision I made in years. I am lazy - I prefer to play on Steam Deck than on my gaming laptop.
However, yesterday I tried to play Remnant 2 on Steam Deck. I was not expecting fireworks, but at least decent 30fps. IMO Game is unplayable on SD. Barely reaches 30fps. Fan spins like crazy. It works great on my laptop.
The topic of market share, and ports and lack of them, are nuanced but I highly doubt Linux won’t overtake macOS even more each year unless Apple wakes up. Valve and Linux community are a force to be reckon with. There are other individuals in the scene as well, who are chipping away at improving the gaming ecosystem, such as System76, Redhat and Canonical.
Yeah I want Gimp to be good so bad but I’ve been waiting for like 20 years and it never seems to change…i really want a Photoshop and Lightroom ripoff for Linux.
Darktable is pretty neat, but i only edit photos of my dogs and gatherings of friends and family tbh, so it could lack a lot of what lightroom does and i’d never know.
It’s compatible with adobes .dng so you should be able to get usable raws from almost every digital camera with the dng converter in wine, if your cameras raw format is not supported.
Adobe may never do this. You might have some luck looking into alternative apps to the ones you work with.
There are some very compelling, cross platform, FOSS alternatives to Photoshop (GIMP, Krita), Illustrator (Inkscape), InDesign (Scribus), maybe premier pro (Davinci Resolve isn’t FOSS, but it is cross platform. You can also try shortcut, openshot, kdenlive but they’re not as advanced).
One thing I miss, however, is the interoperability between Adobe apps. Like copying a vector from illustrator into an InDesign document. I couldn’t do the same between Inkscape and Scribus
Abode is an alternative suite being developed by Culture Hustle, the company started by Stuart Semple, and who made the blackest black and pinkest pink paints, aswell as who ported the Pantone catalog after that whole fiasco.
Imagine paying a subscription; use Affinity Photo and Designer as these are very viable alternatives without the subscription. GIMP is not a good alternative despite it being free :(
If you don’t need Photoshop for actual work, then running it under Wine is a viable option. CC 2019 (20.0) works fine for the most part, but you need to install it in Windows first and copy over the installed folder. CC 2023 also works, but there’s no GPU acceleration support (yet).
I have been looking in the steam store hoping it would show up since a lot of other Blizzard games are. Steam makes running games on Linux very easy, what did you do to run it, add battlenet as non steam game?
I’ll find you the guide I used, but in essence yes, you add battle.net as a non steam game. I think there’s a better method than the one I used where you can even have the games separately be added as non steam games as well instead of just the launcher
I don’t like playing with Bluetooth controllers. It’s not necessarily the amount of input latency but the inconsistency of it.
For having fun with friends Bluetooth is fine, but if possible go for a cable instead.
That said, there’s the XBox Wireless Dongle which uses the same protocol as an XBox. The latency is minimal like a cable, and it does support up to 8 XBox Wireless Controller.
Sadly the Linux support isn’t perfect but the xone kernel driver sees regular development.
I think it depends on your computer’s Bluetooth module. I haven’t noticed an input lag problem with my DualShock on either of two computers, but some people with different hardware have reported lag until they switched to a different Bluetooth dongle.
YMMV, though. I have no experience with Rocket League.
I’d started dualbooting with NobaraOS about a year ago, and recently deleted windows entirely. I haven’t run into a game I want to play yet that isn’t compatible.
How is performance compared to windows? After using the Steam Deck for a while I’m interested in making the switch.
I also have concerns how well WakeOnLan works together with remote desktop. I’m currently booting my gaming pc with the click of a button on my phone and then I sit at my laptop with Parsec. If there are good solutions and performance isn’t worse I’m probably taking the leap soon. Nvidia GPU btw.
Performance is usually the same, sometimes even better, and sometimes worse, if any particular game isn’t officially supported/optimised by proton developers (but usually not officially supported games work anyway, except for those with anticheat).
Wake on Lan works with TeamViewer/anydesk but only on xorg so far, but you have Nvidia so you are anyway stuck with xorg
been using dual sense for a long time now, I love using it, but the battery life leads some to be desired. also the gyro scope isn’t nearly as good as the dualshock 4
The early ones had a battery life problem, but I believe they fixed that a year or two ago. Upgrading your firmware might help, if you haven’t already.
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