That’s odd, I installed Nobara as my OS and almost any game is just install and click play and it plays flawlessly. Using both steam to install and Heroic Launcher (which you could try) that has the capabilities to get the games you have on GOG, Epic and Amazon Prime*. Don’t forget that in steam you need to enable Linux/Proton in settings.
Otherwise ProtonDB is a great resource to see what games run on Linux, how well they run and how each person ran the game.
Edit: I do believe getting a dedicated gaming distro does help as it has a lot of necessary tweaks pre-configured. For that I’d recommend, Nobara, Garuda or PopOS!
ProtonDB is great, I did look at it which is why I expected to be able to run those games! Even people on protonDB that had to tinker to get it working seemed to at least be able to start the games, so I couldn’t find anyone with problems matching my case. Thanks for the tip though! If I don’t manage to figure it out with all help in this thread I might try one of the gaming distros :)
I’ve finally decided to make a switch to Fedora, after giving up last time due to almost nothing I needed working.
I still didn’t manage to get Unity working, which I unfortunately really need, and for some reason it’s also not working in a Boxes VM, but I was really surprised with Steam! Not only every game I tried so far is working great (after solving some initial trouble caused by NVIDIA card), I also managed to just run the games I have pirated directly from the Windows drive, without having to reinstall them, by simply adding the .exw to Steam.
The only issue left is to solve missing cutscenes/videos, being replaced by that “TV color test” image. Has anyone managed to solve it? I’ve tried installing various codeks, but it didn’t help.
The only thing I’m missing is Parsec, since I was pretty used to workong remotely through wake on lab and parsec, but I suppose that’s solvable down the line. Oh, and everything being Electron apps, especially since i unfortunately need O365 stack for work. But its not that bad.
So far i love it, and have already set Fedora as my default boot. Only have to switch for Unity, as of now. I’ll see how long it will last.
If anyones looking for a new year resolution, go give your favorite distro a try! And if you have an NVIDIA card and even after following a random guide you get stuttering or lagging text in Electron apps, as i did, try the other repository for the drivers, thats what solved it for me.
I really can’t, for anyone who considers themselves tech savvy. At this point it isn’t “some specific apps run great and the rest is a hassle”, but the other way around: some specific apps are a hassle but the rest runs great. Sure, you should do a bit of research if your usecases are already ‘solved’, if you want to do an all-or-nothing switch. But you can also do a dual boot, if there really ends up being something that isn’t solved on linux.
I just keep getting surprised with how little people apparently care about their privacy.
I think it’s totally fair that people would want to stick with what they know and would find a new operating system intimidating. But, I think some of this push back is kind of warranted since people act like you can’t play any games on Linux or that the Steam Deck is stupid because it has Linux and isn’t compatible with absolutely every game, and I think that’s sort of misguided. An astonishing amount of stuff just works these days, and while I wouldn’t say a Windows user should switch to Linux unless they have a good reason to, I think some people might be doing themselves a disservice if they’re avoiding the Steam Deck because they think it won’t play their games (with caveats about anti-cheat and multiplayer of course!)
I totally get it, even for me, someone who is pretty tech-savy, it took around three attempts in the last three years to switch to Linux, and I’ve always given up until now.
But the issue is the reputation Linux gaming gets. I was convinced that I probably will have to dual-boot to play games, aside from a very small subset of games that may work. Every time I was trying to switch, I didn’t even get to try any games just because I kind of assumed that it’s going to be even bigger struggle than it was to get some of the tools I need to run, so I gave up.
But this time I gave steam a try, and was really surprised that so far, every game I tried running, including some with Easy Anti Cheat, I had almost zero problems, with the only outlier being the cutscenes.
Also, of course it’s not a lot easier to just use Windows and game on it, but you pay the cost of privacy and Windows stuffing ads into your face, using increasingly darker patterns to push their bullshit. So, I’m not looking for an easier way to game, but doing it to not let anyone use my habits and data out of principle. I’m already used to minor inconveniences attachted to it, such as lack of cookies so you have to relog, VPN breaking default language on sites, or some apps not working properly on my phone (GrapheneOS). It’s totally worth it for me, but it’s not for everyone.
So, my point was not to convince everyone that Linux is better for gaming. But to let people like me, who would like to try switching are afraid that they will still have to dualboot for most of the games, know that’s not really the case novadays, and that Linux is perfectly fine for gaming.
In cases like this, because of the simplicity, I suggest installing PopOS! Nvidia ISO. Chances are, with that hardware, that it will just work. Good luck bud.
There are still a lot of games that don’t work for me, even with Proton on Steam. Lutris has just straight up never worked for anything. Managed to get some going with the Heroic Games launcher, but not all. I think it’s either a DirectX problem or something with the drivers. I’m not nearly techie enough to know how to even approach solving the problem, just maybe identifying it. I hope you figure it out so we can all get to playing our favorite games.
I started using Pop OS at the start of the year and have managed to play the vast majority of games including Baldur’s Gate 3. My hardware was similar to yours (though I’ve recently upgraded): 3700X, 1080Ti. Downloaded the version of Pop with the Nvidia drivers and ensured Steam Play was enabled for all games (to automatically utilise Proton).
I’d suggest trying the other Nvidia driver versions, as one of the other ones might work better with your 1070. Seem to recall I accidentally switched to one of the other versions Pop offers and had issues so maybe playing around with them will get some games working
You may have the GPU drivers installed but are they active? Look in "Software & Updates" on the Additional Drivers tab and see which drivers are active.
Installing the drivers is not enough, you have to select them to use them too.
If the latest drivers are active then you may need to think about switching to a legacy version (you have a pretty old CPU and GPU by current standards; newest drivers are not always best). You may also want to look at using older versions of Proton than the latest for similar reasons - there may be features and changes in newer versions that are just not going to work with your set up or your set up just isn't tested to work with.
I’ve played most of those games on Linux and they work out of the box on my EndeavorOS setup with AMD. You may be missing some drivers or libraries specific to your setup.
I’m no help here, but I have been thinking strongly of converting an old windows box to Linux gaming with steam, so I’m hoping someone can help OP and I can pretroubleshoot my own transition. Steam has their own debian-based OS, right? I was planning on falling back to that if proton didn’t work
I don’t know if they support the OG Steam OS anymore, and if they do, it’s not going to be a good experience for regular desktop use. Steam Deck is Arch based, and I think there’s where their efforts are going these days.
That said, if you want something with a nice out of the box experience for gaming, consider Nobara Linux. It’s based on Fedora and maintained by the person who does the Proton-GE releases (Glorious Eggroll), which have fixed that aren’t in the official Steam Proton releases (e.g. fixes for specific games that haven’t landed yet). It should be a pretty good experience.
However, just installing Mint Debian edition should work fine, you’ll just need to make sure you get the right drivers and that’s about it.
Unless you’re trying to play multiplayer games with incompatible anticheat you’ll most likely be just fine. There are obviously edge cases, like OP, where something is just not working right, but I gamed on Linux for hundreds of hours last year with basically no issues at all.
I grew up as a web developer, and one of the things they hammer home to you is to never trust the client. The end user can tweak and modify their web browser and send data that is invalid or even malicious.
Instead, you’re supposed to validate everything the client sent you when you receive it. To always consider the client hostile, and check that what it wants to do is sensible.
It’s a shame to see the opposite of that mindset from these game studios. They want to ensure that the client is as trustworthy as possible using invasive techniques and trying to restrict people’s ability to use their own computers.
Which sounds fine on paper, but doesn’t really work. Until we live in the world that Microsoft wants where we are only allowed to use software officially signed and approved by Microsoft, people can still run arbitrary code on their devices.
Anticheat binaries can be modified and tanpered with to ignore things. Network traffic can be intercepted. The game could run in a virtual machine with a modified cpu.
It’s annoying to me that these big companies have managed to shift the narrative so effectively to what is effectively the PC equivalent to confiscating water bottles at aorports to give the illusion that they are stopping terrorists.
Google actually tried to push an “anticheat” for Chrome (as far as I know they failed because they didn’t have enough market share to force things). This would allow websites to require you to use Chrome with no extendions.
If that had gone through, I wonder how many people would be mad that they wouldn’t be able to play browser shooters on Firefox or other Chromium based browsers? Would we have these same kinds of posts where people were arguing over whether Firefox “has more cheaters”?
The important question to ask isn’t “would Linux allow more cheaters?”, it’s “why isn’t the modern games industry actually doing anything to stop cheaters?”.
TL;DR - Yes, and companies should fix this by catching cheaters on the server, not the game client. Client-side cheat detection will always have gaps.
Server-side cheat detection is a lot harder than integrating an off-the-shelf cheat detection engine since it needs game-specific logic and likely more moderators to determine the difference between a cheater and a high performing player. It also requires more server resources, which also has ongoing costs.
Client-side anti-cheat is “good enough” for most studios, so they can get away with it. It’s also often cheaper to not support a niche platform if the missed sales are likely less than the cost of ongoing support (or the opportunity cost of other lucrative projects).
I think that’s really important to understand, especially when it comes to larger games like Fortnite supporting Linux, especially since most of those potential Linux users are likely already playing on Windows, console, or mobile. The profit is low, and the risks make it a hard business choice to defend. It’s still stupid, but it likely makes sense from a business perspective.
I kinda think they did that because of the Quest since what do you call that if you’re only playing games installed in the headset, not using Quest Link?
Sorry, no I didn’t mean it could play Steam games without Link. I was just saying that there is precedent for calling it a platform of its own because of how Quest works. Sure, on Steam it’s going to be based on the OS running it, but VR is a more unique experience than the OS being the platform.
Most anti-cheats require root access on windows, but not on Linux (even if they did it would be possible to bypass), so in theory it’s easier to bypass them on Linux. That being said, even on windows, client side anti-cheats are “easily” bypassable. Client code is NEVER trustable, even the best anti-cheat can be broken because the binary of the game is at the hand of the would-be hacker, so they can control what it does. Think about it this way, the best anti cheat checks every possible attack and let’s your server know that all is well, someone in control of the game client can make the game always tell the server that all is well regardless of the test, that’s just a matter of insert a goto in the correct address pointing to the correct place, hard to do but very much possible. Even if you had an anti-cheat that controls the entire OS, it’s possible to just use a second computer with computer vision to cheat and inject the movements through a mouse that reports itself as a normal one. This is why it’s impossible for a client side anti-cheats to be infallible, they serve more as a deterrent than anything actually useful, it’s the same as a speed camera that sends the picture to your house for you to send to the authorities to report the infraction.
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