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fenrasulfr ,
@fenrasulfr@lemmy.world avatar

Wasn’t Playonlinux for the longest time the easiest option to run games under linux?

electromage ,

It was a good way to satisfy common dependencies for Windows games.

summerof69 ,

WoW in 00s, OpenTTD, Tux Kart

kuneho , (edited )
@kuneho@lemmy.world avatar

(Super) Tux Kart just got wild in the past years :O

Ghostbanjo1949 ,

Ah man good times there. I just had classic wow running on my steam deck, hooked up to a custom server. So much fun and surprisingly playable and good since the deck has enough buttons to map everything to.

Jonnsy ,

I played WoW Cataclysm around 2011 with wine. It worked but thats it.

Trail ,

I can relate. I was playing whatever the first expansion was. Karazhan or something. 2007? 2008?

First kubuntu, then opensuse, then arch BTW.

FMT99 ,

No one is mentioning Tux Racer? Blasphemy!

TimeSquirrel , (edited )
@TimeSquirrel@kbin.social avatar

I was playing Quake 3 and Unreal Torunament 2003 in the early 2000s, they had native versions. One of the first mainstream Linux gaming pioneers.

I used to use Second Life on Linux too with a third party client.

parricc ,

The first half of the 2000s was a lot better for Linux gaming than the second half. That time period after game companies stopped releasing anything for Linux but before Wine became realistically usable was very dark.

thehatfox ,
@thehatfox@lemmy.world avatar

Quake 2 also had a Linux port, as did Return to Castle Wolfenstein. iD Software was one of the few early supporters of Linux for commercial games.

Gork ,

I once got The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion to run on Ubuntu, but some strange Bethesda bugs managed to creep into the experience. There was a giant 2D tree taking up a chunk of the skybox that I couldn’t get rid of, so I made it headcannon when I was playing it.

Luckily when I tried it on the Steam Deck not too long ago, this bug was no longer present.

Voroxpete ,

So, what you’re saying is you had an early access build of Elden Ring?

CalcProgrammer1 ,
@CalcProgrammer1@lemmy.ml avatar

I started using Linux with Ubuntu 6.06 and at the time I was really into the game Jedi Academy. It used OpenGL and thus ran fairly well on Wine. I upgraded from an NVIDIA GeForce 4 MX420 to an ATI Radeon X1600Pro and the ATI drivers were absolute garbage so I kinda gave up on Linux gaming for a while. I was set on going NVIDIA on my next PC but around that time AMD bought ATI and opened up their documentation, leading to rapid improvements in the open source AMD drivers. Went with a Radeon HD 5870 and not long after I built that PC I was gaming in Wine again, though poorly on non OpenGL games still. Then Steam for Linux officially released and a lot of native games became available but I was still running Windows Steam in Wine as native Steam didn’t play Windows games. Then the Gallium Nine project offered a way to play DX9 games with significantly improved performance and I played a lot of Skyrim on Linux as well as a lot of other DX9 games. Then Vulkan happened and soon DXVK and Proton and the modern Linux gaming landscape evolved quite rapidly until we got to where we are today.

Limonene ,

I never got Proton working on my main distro (Debian), so I probably fall into this category. I did use Wine, but Wine is a lot harder to set up, and never ran games as well as Proton did.

Here is my major gaming history, since I started on Linux in 2007. Yes, I really could focus on a single game for years back then.

  • 2007: Starcraft, in Wine
  • 2007: Nethack, native
  • 2011: Morrowind and Oblivion in Wine
  • 2012: Minecraft, native
  • 2014: sgt-puzzles, native
  • 2016: Steam, got hundreds of native Linux games.
  • 2017: Briefly got Steam and Path of Exile working inside a Wine instance.
  • 2022: Steam deck, with the specific purpose of being able to run Proton on it.
  • 2023: New Ubuntu installation, and Proton finally worked on my PC.

Today, I still prefer native Linux games. I mostly only use Proton when peer pressure for a multiplayer game required it. But I never use Wine any more.

ILikeBoobies ,

Yeah, it wasn’t anything like the meme

johannesvanderwhales ,

Back in my day, the only thing in /usr/games was fortune, and we liked it.

brotundspiele ,

What about xbill? Why is noone mentioning it?

AnUnusualRelic ,
@AnUnusualRelic@lemmy.world avatar

Bunch of kids, the whole lot of them!

TheFrogThatFlies ,

I was in the beta for the original World of Warcraft and restarted when it officially launched. This was 20 years ago, so memory is fuzzy, but somewhere along the way I was playing it in wine exclusively under Linux. Game updates were common and frequently broke wine, but I kid you not a patch was available within 24h. Yes, this forced me to compile my own wine, but it wasn’t that difficult then. Together with “checkinstall” I could maintain a clean .deb package from the source code.

Some links I found in a quick search showing the challenges:

To be honest, keeping the game running in Linux sometimes felt as a fun side quest!

After that I was mostly able to play all my games in Linux, with some exceptions, obviously, that sometimes required me to install windows.

Lost_Faith ,

Who remembers Cedega. Had a lot of fun on that, both playing and configuring to play. Think I was running Fedora, or was it Mandrake/Mandriva. Man I remember having the drive to distro hop weekly at one point

megabat ,

Oh yeah. Back in the late 90s I played all the games ported by Loki Games. I played the native quakes, portal 1 & 2. And using regular Wine and some winetricks I played about 300 hours of Skyrim and completed Mass Effect 1,2,3.

suzune ,

Yep. Unreal Tournament was also great and Neverwinter Nights.

mipadaitu ,

Played WoW when it first came out with WINE. It was miserable. We had to mess with configs, install hacked patches, manually start jobs with scripts. And every patch broke something so you had to start from scratch again.

This was probably 2004/2005?

RandomStickman ,
@RandomStickman@kbin.run avatar

I tried to get Wine working for STALKER before Proton. Never managed lol

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