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I've gone over to Linux after using Windows for 25 years.

As someone who enjoys older games, I am pleasantly surprised that Wine (with dxvk and cnc-ddraw) lets me run more games in a better way than I was able to on Windows.

I can run some 16-bit games on a 64-bit OS!

Games that rudely switch to fullscreen, I can run in Wine Virtual Desktop. Previously on Windows, I had to configure hacks like DxWnd and it didn't always work.

I only wish Wine also allowed me to zoom 2x or 3x, but this is where Gamescope comes in:

    gamescope -S integer -F nearest --borderless wine game.exe

I noticed some Unity games waste disk space with gigabytes of zeroes, Linux lets me run them from inside a compressed SquashFS image, this even makes the game load faster:

    mkdir ./game
    squashfuse ./game.squashfs ./game
    pushd ./game
    wine game.exe
    popd
    sleep 1
    umount ./game
    rmdir ./game

    taskset --cpu-list 1 wine game.exe

> Games that rudely switch to fullscreen, I can run in Wine Virtual Desktop. Previously on Windows, I had to configure hacks like DxWnd and it didn't always work.

Maybe Wine could be ported to Windows :-)

There will be a day when Microsoft ships a "Windows" that cuts all legacy compatibility except for an included distribution of Wine.

Microsoft might not do it, but there's always reactos [1]

[1] https://reactos.org/

At this point, that's exactly what Windows needs. As Microsoft only adds new features and doesn't remove almost any, Windows is getting reaaally bloated. And what was Microsoft's response? Everyone should buy a new faster computer to run Windows 11.

Tbh, a better strategy would to slim down Windows again would be to remove all the new user-facing stuff which was added over the last two decades. There have been significant improvements in the kernel and DirectX, but on the surface, Windows somehow managed to remove user-facing features while at the same time adding an incredible amount of bloat in layers above the core operating system. From a usability perspective the Windows desktop UI in Win2k was singnificantly better than anything that came after.

Win2k with WSL without systemd would be so kino

> [...] kino

IHaveABanana Is this a thing or are you just now trying to make it a thing?

Either way, I like it :)

It already is in some form! This is what I used to play Sid Meier's Civnet with my brothers: https://github.com/otya128/winevdm

https://fdossena.com/index.php?p=wined3d/index.frag

This is the proper Wine for Windows but just for DirectX->GL or DirectX-Vulkan.

You can already run it in WSL2, apparently.

Running windows to run linux to run windows is delicious

It was/is unironically a "solution" to some games (eg. Elden Ring) with unfixable stuttering on Windows: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAooLiCy7rE

Can you elaborate on Unity wasting disk space on gigabytes of zeroes?

How did you discover that? Is it intentional on Unity's part? Percentage-wise, are we talking 2% of a 100GB game, or 50% of a 4GB game?

I can't find anything about it online.

I suppose that is an issue how a specific game was made, not inherent to Unity.

I like to look inside game files and a .zip archive of 1GB unpacking to ~10GB game made me suspicious.

My first guess would be it has lots of uncompressed images or badly compressed videos as artifacts.

Same, but games run uncompressed assets as an optimization measure to trade disk usage for CPU usage, depending on which is the bottleneck for their particular game (iiuc)

So it'd be surprising to me if a developer chose to use uncompressed/lightly compressed assets, and compressing them caused performance to increase; because you're intentionally choosing the tradeoff in the opposite direction the developer did

Of course, there are game developers that are less technical and may not have knowingly made that tradeoff in which case all bets are off, but the games made by those developers tend not to be the kind that require beefy machines to run at 60fps+

The right tradeoff for compression ratio can change with just a few years of technological progress, or even quicker if it's a half-assed port from console to a high-end PC. There are similar issues for a game's decision of how many threads to spawn based on the CPU's core count. The developer's assumptions may not have been right to begin with, and even if they were, they're not likely to stay right for long.

Reminds me of the mention of "contiguous zeroes" that used to be in the Apple App Store docs.[1] Which seemed like just a backhanded way to say "we encrypt and then compress so don't expect easy compression."

I suppose this might be asset padding or perhaps these are raw textures with full alpha sections? Still, it seems pretty strange. What game, what asset?

[1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/42478186/app-size-on-app...

Same! Fallout New Vegas runs phenomenally on Linux but struggles on Windows. Same with Call of Duty 2 and even some newer titles like Borderlands 2.

OTVDM (based on Wine) allows you to run 16-bit programs on 64-bit Windows, so it's not just a Linux thing.

Neat. I am in the habit of using the kernel squashfs with privileges. TIL about squashfuse.

I'm never going back. If something changes and the only option is Windows or consoles I'll just stop buying new games or take up another hobby.

Being able to use sane scripting to solve problems, ZFS snapshots to undo bad mod installs, using the same system for development, and so on is no longer something I'm willing to give up. I've also started amassing a small collection of Cloud Init configs that set up game servers inside LXD containers. Some of these have native Linux binaries but a few only have Windows servers. They run perfectly well through Wine.

Anyone here even vaguely interested, I encourage you to just try it. I use Ubuntu and it works great on both AMD and Nvidia cards for me. What have you got to lose?

The only thing that is keeping me from switching on my home PC is Duo [1].

It allows my wife to play Stardew Valley on the TV via game streaming, while not disturbing my work at all on the PC. When she launches the game, I don't even notice it on my PC, meanwhile other solutions like Sunshine or Apollo do not let you use your computer while a gaming session is active on a client. Sadly, Duo is Windows only for now, which sucks.

Does anybody know a alternative for Linux that would work this way?

1. https://github.com/DuoStream/Duo

Tried to play dota 2 on Linux, it has a bad memory leak that made the whole system hang after an hour or two. Plus it seems to get worse fps on Vulcan, but I read that it might just be a bad implementation in my card (6650 xt)

Also tried that, but I did not noticed the memory leak problem, since I only played about 1 hour. There are other minor issues about using Linux, for example, my input method does not work in the Steam chat window, but works everywhere else. Anyway, Linux is much more cleaner than Windows and it is a overall better development environment, I prefer it over Windows now.

I often find that Linux native games (Dota is one such) run worse than Windows games running under Proton. For many of them, you can just force it to play via Proton and go along with your day, but the Valve competitive ones don’t work that way since VAC will cry about it.

Pop OS! With NVIDIA GPU here.

Shit just works. When it doesn't, changing the proton version usually fixes it.

Way better than Windows.

I've stopped even checking protondb before getting a game these days. Pretty much unless they've gone out of their way to make it not work (which is mostly competitive games, so you can tell beforehand), it works.

I realize by posting that here on HN I'm tempting people to send me the ProtonDB garbage tier list, but it's true for the types of games I play.

I must be the one Data Scientist in the world whose PopOS has twice failed to boot after updates. To the point I have give up on it.

My stack is so vanilla (nvidia, python, R) I can’t think what the issue is. Maybe hardware.

Give Fedora a shot. You can run that cosmic desktop on it.

Same setup here, one game setup I've hit but this will be a rare problem, is StarCraft Remastered. Wine has an issue with audio processing which I can't seem to configure my way out of. It pegs all 32 threads and still stutters. Thankfully this game can likely run on an actual potato, so I have a separate mini PC running windows for this when I want to get my ass kicked on battle.net.

Also have the same setup. Very few issues. Been very happy with the switch

After being impressed with my Steam Deck, earlier this year I purchased an RX 9070XT (my first card from team red since the Radeon 9800 Pro) for my gaming PC and switched to linux full time.

Now hundreds of hours in, I have nothing interesting to write about it. For me and the games I play it's been a seamless transition.

I found myself just never using my PC after getting a steamdeck. I had the deck plugged in to my TV most of the time. I recently just installed Bazzite on my PC and moved it to the TV so now I play on that all the time. What Valve has done to make gaming on linux work is remarkable.

I remember the days of having to manually install steam in Wine and how only a few games would work like that.

Ive been yearning for the days when using linux in daily life isnt "interesting" but just something you do. It feels great

I realize this is not evenly distributed across all hardware and distros, but I really think we're here for a lot of use cases.

For gaming. For any somewhat smaller market software it’s not great. I had a look at DJ software and while they all support macOS. Nothing supports Linux and they are bugged out in Wine too.

Final Scratch IIRC runs linux as its core

In case you don't own a Steam Deck and would like to see how much of your library would run on Linux:

1. Go to your library

2. Click the filter button

3. Under "hardware support" you'll see a dropdown "Steam Deck" with 4 options, here's some explanation what they mean:

Verified - Means this game 100% works on Linux (and Deck), which is verified by Valve

Playable - Means this game works on Linux (and Deck) but it might have some tiny issues (e.g. font size)

Untested - Might work, but not tested

So to check if your games would run pretty nicely either filter on "Verified" games or "Verified or playable" games and it filters out everything which will or might not run at all.

You'll be surprised how much games can run on Linux these days -- thanks to the massive effort Valve puts in Proton and some devs (including Valve) publishing native Linux builds of their games on Steam, and even things you might not even consider at all like Skyrim or Oblivion with all your favorite mods (!)

Also in some / many cases even "unsupported" games work out of the box or needs only minimal tweaking. AFAIK most of the issues are with online competitive games which uses anti-cheat.

Or use ProtonDB https://www.protondb.com/explore

I’ve hit more broken games due to GPU firmware bugs than due to Linux compatibility.

Windows users with my GPU report the same symptoms as I hit, fwiw.

To be fair, the Steam Deck support level is a bit arbitrary and some Verified games may work worse than some Untested games.

The only game that I had an issue with is The Unfinished Swan which I bought on Steam after having enjoyed playing it on a PS3 (good enough to buy twice). I couldn't get it to work initially with it just going to a blank screen (not the game itself which ironically does start with an all white screen) no matter my tinkering with Proton versions. However, tried it again a few months ago and it worked perfectly with default settings.

2003 me thought Wine is a dead end project and a waste of developer time. Granted valve put a lot of effort into Proton but they wouldn't even have considered it without the massive amount of work done before, kudus to all the non cynical wine devs

2003 me was optimistic that wine was a dead-end, with games like Neverwinter Nights, and Quake 3 Arena having native linux releases.

The Year of Linux on the Desktop was near, and wine would surely be a temporary stop-gap.

Turns out Linux needed a stable abi for games and Wine provided.

Which amusingly, also serves as a stable API for Windows now too.

for the longest time, no one in linux land cared about API stability or backward compatibility - then app/game developers realised if they could port a portion of Win32 to Linux via WINE, they could just target the win32 API or at least a portion of it and so long as WINE was installed, their app/game would always work. i find it a bit ironic; desktop Linux is being enabled by re-implementing APIs from another OS.

Aside on whether it was going to be useful, I was alway impressed by the Wine developers, extremely knowledgeable hackers, masters of both Windows and Unix.

The real gamechanger (pun intended!) was Vulkan. DXVK is very performant.

What percentage of Windows games runs on Windows? I'm not trying to be funny; it's clearly less than 100%.

I've been personally running Linux on my gaming box for 2-3 years I think. AMD hardware, obviously. BF6 doesn't work (and perhaps never can work) because of its quite invasive anti-cheat, but there are so many games out there that it's not a big deal. Insurgency: Sandstorm is a vastly better game anyway.

I realize that this is probably a big deal for many people, though, but perhaps those people are better off with a Playstation anyway.

And they do run quite well, out of the box.

On Linux, I've been having a good run for years now. Steam's Proton is fantastic, if the thing doesn't work, I just select another Proton version, and try again. Or look at ProtonDB on how others did it.

I have also tried the Heroic Launcher, which is similarly good, and open source even. Just create an entry for a game or software, select the executable, select the Proton / Wine version, and it's good to go. No need for an account or anything.

I also have a Steam Deck now, which natively runs Linux, and Steam, and Proton. I'm sure my game selection also matters, but my experience is that everything just works. Valve did a tremendous job with integration - standing on the Wine giant's shoulder, of course.

Multiplayer, specifically the nasty anti-cheat software is the last remaining bastion, I think. For that, I reboot into my Windows 10 LTSC.

I switched to Slackware in the early oughts, but gaming was hit and miss at best with Wine. The occasional native game (like Neverwinter Nights) was always welcome.

I've dual booted to game for the last seven or eight years because of coworkers and family nagging me to play games with them, but now I don't need to. I haven't come across a game that won't run flawlessly on Linux (through Steam) for a couple of years now. I can enjoy my nightly game of Deep Rock Galactic or Necesse without being part of the botnet.

No further requirement to run Windows!

Nice to see this. Worth noting that a lot of Windows (or DOS) games past may also not run well on current Windows versions. The anti-cheat issue is likely to persist for at lest a few more years... though I think the relative success of the Steam Deck itself has moved the bar significantly in terms of demands for support.

I do think there's a few hiccups still with Linux support. The shift up to 6.16 kernel has itself resolved many of the issues I'd been having in the past. If you're on an older LTS that hasn't moved, you're likely to see more issues than with a more current distro.

> Worth noting that a lot of Windows (or DOS) games past may also not run well on current Windows versions.

To be fair, anything old that wasn't famous has a decent chance to be broken under WINE too. It might just be a single call to some obscure animation API or something, but it can be enough to break the entire game.

I've actually had better experiences with Wine with older games than newer Windows.

Many old games work well. Check out protonDB before trying, but I have had good experience running older GoG games through proton.

If it's on GOG it probably wasn't that obscure.

Also, sometimes the original version doesn't work but the GOG version does, or even vice versa. I've seen all sorts of oddities.

I recently ran into a game where online match making was broken in windows, but worked just fine in Linux. I felt like I was trapped in the upsidedown.

I tried GOG version of Soul Reaver and some polygons and UI kept disappearing depending on the direction the character was facing. On Windows 10. I should try Linux.

I've been happily playing Overwatch 2 on Linux for a couple months now. I need gamescope to get it to play nicely with my multiple monitors, and it crashes maybe once a month, but performance is great and I have no major complaints. I'm never going back to Windows, except for work where it isn't optional :(

Which OS and amd or nvidia? With win10 expired I just might make the switch on my gaming pc

how are you running OW2? I am using steam and proton and it is so rough to play

Windows I get 300fps and on linux ~100 and frequent dips

Ok, maybe I oversold this a little bit. It's running smooth now, getting it to run smooth was not easy. I'm on Ubuntu. I spent a few days in a debug loop. Run steam from the terminal to get a log stream, keep an eye on CPU and GPU utilization and temperature, and futz around in the training range or vs AI bots (more "realistic" than training range). Identify which components of the system aren't performing up to spec. CPU running hot? GPU not being utilized? Steam emitting warning messages? If hardware all looks good, it's probably a software problem somewhere. Identify, then fix. Rinse and repeat until linux performance is in the same league as Windows performance.

Things I'd try:

1. Check in game graphics settings

2. Update graphics drivers to the recommended version (may be non-trivial, I had to update my kernel version)

3. Experiment with different proton versions, including proton GE

4. Experiment with different Direct X versions (in game option)

5. Make sure CPU cooler is running

6. Make sure GPU is being used

7. Use gamescope to configure a virtual monitor that exactly matches the capabilities of your physical monitor

I no longer support Blizz, so can't weigh in specifically, but: have you tried PrtotonGE? The are also the Proton forks, such as CachyOS's one that support wayland directly (which is in WINE, but not Proton yet) - might be xwayland relayed?

Also, try `LD_PRELOAD="" %command%` to disable steaminput, which can cause input stuttering after around 45min on some machines (such as mine).

That means 10% of windows games use invasive anti-cheat?

According to ProtonDB[1], about 7-10% of the top 100 and top 1000 games are "borked", but the actual reason why can be nuanced. However, these days it is almost always anti-cheat.

[1] https://www.protondb.com/dashboard

Another way to look at this is that practically all games work well on Linux, unless the developers try very hard to make it not work on Linux.

Anti-cheat will be basically impossible to overcome until studios specifically cater to linux. I'm not sure to what extent this is even possible given how hackable linux is, and how many variants there are, but it's plausible a blessed distro with a signed kernel (somehow? Not sure if this is a thing) might support it.

Some anticheats like EAC, GameGuard, XingCode do have Linux support that the game has to opt-in. I believe it is not kernel-based and is not Linux-native. Many non-competitive games do allow them.

At least I know that Helldivers 2 (GameGuard), DJMax Respect V (XingCode), Fantasy Life I (EAC) do works on Linux.

I wish that if they're happy with non kernel mode anti cheat on Linux, just do the same in Windows... Or just disable them if I don't use public matchmaking

EAC is owned by Epic, but they won't enable it on their own games, because they don't want to make it easy for people to use Steam. They want Epic Games to used for more than collecting free games and launching Fortnite.

Kernel-based on Linux is pointless unless SacureBoot is used with fixed vendor certs (you can still SB custom kernels on most consumer mobos). I believe that only Microsoft exists in the default certs, so impossible for all intents and purposes. Otherwise you can modify the kernel (or Wine/Proton) and do what you want.

Windows has the same issue, but isn't open source and easy to modify. Still, EA are so paranoid that they require it there.

With a signed kernel and secure boot it should in principle be similiar to Windows 11? But with DMA based hacks on the rise I'm not sure it matters either way.

Peripherals get IOMMU'd on Apple platforms

https://support.apple.com/guide/security/direct-memory-acces...

Not so on Linux?

Which is the same reason that we lock the data centers. If someone has physical access to the hardware, there are so many more breaching vectors.

Anywhere I could read more about the DMA attacks?

You can probably look up DMA cards. They plug into a PCIe slot and get full access to inspect and modify memory.

So, Game Genie for 2025?

Yea, all the really popular online games are gonna be in that 10%.

All i want is rocket league :(

At least tf2 works

Rocket League works just fine for me, via Proton. I have over 4k hours in, each one of them done from Linux.

BakkesMod also works, thanks to https://github.com/CrumblyLiquid/BakkesLinux

Rocket League has a platinum rating on ProtonDB: https://www.protondb.com/app/252950

Does that include multiplayer? As far as i know, multiplayer was killed a couple years ago, which is actually what i meant by “works on Linux”

Yeah I have hundreds of hours or more in Rocket League on Linux, all competitive multiplayer. I use the Heroic launcher: https://heroicgameslauncher.com/

YES! Use the Proton version, not the native Linux version.

Rocket League was native on Linux at one point.

Before Epic Games acquired it...

I was able to get a new install of Rocket League working recently using Heroic Launcher! https://heroicgameslauncher.com/

Perhaps there is an opportunity for an open source reimplementation like OpenMW or OpenRA?

FWIW, Rocket League works just fine on Linux, but you need to set it to the Proton compatibility, not the native Linux client.

I too recall having issues with the anti-cheat last I tried (years ago at this point).

How did those issues get fixed? Did they abandon the anti cheat, or does the anti cheat now work under proton?

Does Rocket League no longer work with Proton? It used to work even better than both the native Linux and Windows versions for me back in the day. If not, what changed?

Now imagine Apple put the same amount of effort and resources into a Proton-like layer for macOS.

The M-series hardware is perfectly fine for most games, overpowered even. What is lacking are the actual games. Very few companies bother with Metal ports of games.

Build a compatibility layer so we can just install any Windows game from Steam and start playing.

What percentage of Windows games still run on current Windows?

I never managed to get anything close to 90% of my library to run on the same windows installation, but I gave up years ago, and just use Linux instead.

Love this so much and do so much of my gaming on Linux now.

I just wish I could run Linux on my MacBook Pro so I could actually play games on this beautiful, portable, power-efficient criminally nerfed masterpiece of a laptop.

I feel like the minority. The few times I’ve tried games on linux with decent hardware (eg radeon vii, rx580, rtx3060?) it was just trash. like straight up stuttering and nonsense.

Maybe the only games I ever tried were in that 10% that aren’t supported or will never be supported (hitman, deus ex, etc).

this led me down the rabbit hole for a while of gpu passthrough w/ vfio / sriov and virtual machines. those worked really well but also had their own problems.

in the end i just bought a damned ps5 pro that rarely gets used. but at least it “just works” when I want it to. which is more than i can say for anything remotely related to using linux for games or even as a decent desktop.

and yes, i tried your distro. the only one perhaps that wasn’t a headache was void.

Did you try before or after Valves push for proton? Both of those are rated Platinum.

fwiw, upgrading from rx580 to rtx5070 solved all of my performance problems (both on windows and Linux) for a number of games.

As someone who only has a windows machine to play games, specifically driving sims, I really wish my hardware worked on Linux.

How deep did you look into it? Don't be misled by maybe your manufacturer not supporting Linux directly. As an example https://github.com/berarma/oversteer helped me to set up my wheel better than any rubbish windows OEM software could have.

There are apparently are some semi-experimental FFB drivers out there for a few wheels... but yeah, most hardware has a zero percent chance of working, because it's a niche of a niche. And then if you're doing online racing, they all(?) have anti-cheat stuff that won't work for you anyway.

If games transition to SteamOS/Linux in general, I think this niche is going to be one of the slower ones to move, but never say never.

Have you actually tried it? Dual sticks (which is not quite as niche as a racing cockpit but still somewhat) via Wine just worked for me with zero effort - actually less than Windows which had joystick ID horrors.

My only limitation to ditch Windows for games is my nvidia card. I wonder if their drivers will become better before I go for an upgrade. I do have a Steam Deck for lower requirement games.

Nvidia drivers are already much better now. How old is your card? I have a 2080ti and once you get through the initial setup it works fine

I run an intel CPU and an NVIDIA 4080. Works great on pop os. I do AI shit, too, without issues.

NVIDIA is pretty good on Linux lately. Id always wait a week before updating drivers tho.

NVidia has probably the best support for Linux. None of the "game" versus "studio" nonsense, either.

Nah amd gpus work best in linux. Official mainline support in the kernel + mesa.

There are lots of niches like that. The other big one is competitive games with invasive anti cheat.

Proton/Wine is so good these days. Rarely have I had an issue running a game in the last 3 or 4 years. Sometimes EA/Ubisoft games that have their own special launchers don't work immediately, but ProtonDB and the Proton GitHub issues are great resources to get them going.

I remember when Cyberpunk 2077 came out it didn't work at first, but the Proton and Glorious Egg Roll devs got it running within a few days. Legends.

Even many games that support native linux run better under wine.

> Even many games that support native linux run better under wine.

The same is often true on macOS, too – running games through CrossOver is often better than the native port. The reality is that there simply aren't enough professional game devs on Linux and macOS platforms to polish that last 20% and make all the difference.

Out of the 150-isg games in my library, the only one I have had any issue with is 'From Dust' released in 2011. This is part because of the Ubisoft launcher and some video codex issues, but even so. Switching the too and from the game a few times seems to get past this.

About a month back, a demo for Lumines Arise came out and it fired up without issue, didn't even think to check ProtonDB because it has become so reliable. I suspect a big part of this is because Steamdeck has been popular enough to have it be targeted for Proton compatibility day 1.

I finally got rid of the last Windows gaming box because Windows 10 started warning me about not getting security updates. So far no compatibility issues under Debian with Steam, but I play mostly single-player or multiplayer strategy.

EDIT: I remember now that Civilization 5 for Linux would crash frequently. I switched to Proton and it's been fine since.

I was seriously irritated with Windows 11 for the past few months. If my PC went to sleep, it would wake up and freeze at the logon screen. The constant updates that would reset some preferences - and worse, reinstall CoPilot and OneDrive - pushed me over. I went and installed Bazzite on the PC I built early this year with a Nvidia RTX 5080, somewhat skeptical that it would work well despite my extremely positive experience with the Steam Deck. The result is outstanding.

I am an avid linux user but never switched my gaming PC to linux, until the Win10 > Win11 debacle which has made me switch.

I am using EndeavorOS, my first Arch flavoured distro, it's excellent. Honestly it has all "just worked". Drivers were auto installed, I pointed Steam to my existing library on an NTFS drive originally used by windows, and it just plays my existing library fine.

Cyberpunk2077, Red Dead 2, Starfield all objectively AAA modern games, working fine. I even get a bit better performance in some areas, comparable in others.

I can swap back to windows and it still runs the same library. I really didn't expect it to work like that.

The only thing I have had to troubleshoot is getting a Quest3 VR headset to work, and an Alpha stage game which others are getting to work, I just haven't bothered to chase it down.

Nice! I'm curious if you experience any difference in IO performance (e.g game loading times)?

Last I tried NTFS on Linux it was stable but not fast, especially for writes. If it's not a notable difference between Windows and Linux then that's a big improvement from those days.

I think you could probably get a decent IO performance boost and reduce loading times by moving the library over to something like ext4 or xfs, at the cost of portability.

I will have to take note next time I play, but I haven't noticed anything so perhaps if it's there it's not too bad. They are SSDs and I do have 32gb of ram and 24gb of vram, so I bet quite a lot of IO bottleneck could be hidden by that.

I'll probably switch to ext4 when I decommission the Windows install entirely.

Almost the same happy story here on my end. I had an Ubuntu home server, but with windows as my main. Then Win 10 --> Win 11 hit. I was already annoyed at MS for many reasons, and then I realized just how much money I would need to spend on getting equivalent functionality, for an OS (Win 11) that I hated and had a dismal preview of at work.

Now I have Mint. With an AI terminal to help guide/teach me, I find myself really enjoying the power and capability the terminal gives me. My computer has been genuinely USEFUL for debugging serious problems with WiFi calling on my phone and other network connectivity issues, and I still get to play games on steam! Sure, there were one or two hiccups on Outward when I first started, but Bannerlord and everything else I've tried so far plays just fine. It just works! Really!

That's awesome! I did look at Mint as well, it looks like a great distro.

I was surprised by some of the extras I got from KDE Plasma just for no extra effort, like KDE Connect is amazing and something super painful on Windows and Mac.

>The only thing I have had to troubleshoot is getting a Quest3 VR headset to work

Very interested in this: what kind of setup do you use for VR? What troubleshooting was required?

(My background: I have a 10gbit fiber network and wifi 6E to stream to my Quest 3, and play VR that way. Running Arch on a gaming laptop as a way to dip my toes in the water, haven't really tried anything to do with VR (my favourite way to play games) because I'd heard it was a nightmare.)

I must admit I haven't finished getting it to work, but others have got it to work and it seems like a pretty well troden path. I think the biggest issue I have is that I use a link cable, not wifi, and even on Windows that has been an issue.

The reason I stopped trying though is because SteamVR/Steam Link has been getting updates targeted at linux and well, I may as well wait for that for a more matured and hassle free VR PC link.

It's been months since I've booted into Windows to play a game. Feels amazing. The only exception I've run into is heavy anticheat titles, like trying to play on Faceit CS2 servers.

I can live without that though. I don't think I'll bother setting up a Windows partition on my next PC.

I think the last time I had Windows installed was right around the release of Proton in 2018. Those initial releases were not great but the trend was very obvious.

There comes a point were you just don't miss it. The only moments that it is apparent is that disassociation you have when someone else just assumes you run Windows. I don't blame them, I am statistically the odd one there, but that is when you have to figure out things your way.

I have been thinking on dropping Windows, that I use only for gaming, but the issue is that I got a Nvidia graphics card and didn't have time to check if the support for it in Linux got better

But after experiencing the new Windows 11 "always-online" model it might make me stick to AMD in the future

While I would like to champion AMD a bit more because Nvidia has been doing some anti consumer shenanigans, I have to say that at this point, the Linux support is good. It is a bit of a myth or perhaps just outdated info that if you want to have a headache-less experience, you need to use AMD. For new hardware, it may even be a bit better than AMD to be honest.

The only difference is that updating is a bit easier on AMD, after all, mesa just updates with your OS. But this is merely a note on convenience.

I have a pc I built when the 2080 TI came out. How is Linux support for the supporting drivers for those cards today? The machine is still more than powerful enough for my needs but I haven't used it in a couple years because Windows really is just complete garbage. I'd like to be able to take advantage of new to moderately old hardware without dealing with Windows.

1070 TI works perfect on Arch for the past ~6 months with latest drivers (better than Debian stable!). This card is old enough that only the closed source drivers are supported, but it seems to work fine.

You will be absolutely fine

If it helps I used to use a gaming laptop for work that had a RTX 2060 mobile version, I was able to run some recent games like Elden Ring (including mods & online play), and some older but still demanding titles like Witcher 3. All of this without tinkering too much on a oob Ubuntu LTS install (I later switched to popOS because I don't like snaps that much).

Someone else recommended PopOSin other comments. I pulled up the page but haven't looked at it extensively. In what ways is it different from a recent Ubuntu LTS install?

I play (and work) exclusively on Linux for 17 years -- most games run fine, yes, except for competitive ones (Rust, League of Legends etc), because they require kernel-level backdoors to spy on the OS kernel-level cheats.

Microsoft is bleeding a large-ish userbase with win 11: the gamers. They’re left with corpo and the laggard users who are aware their computer is not friendly , are not aware they can change OS yet. Soon they could rename it to Corporate Windows

Original source:

https://boilingsteam.com/windows-games-compatibility-on-linu...

As Satya Nadella runs Windows OS and Office into the ground.

I still can get my desktop gaming fix, at least.

Number of games is a weird statistic.

What about market share of play time?

Both metrics have their uses. Personally I'm not all that interested in playing the latest hit AAA games. I am much more likely to play indie games or older games, which probably means I play more titles but the titles I play tend not to have much market share (individually or even in aggregate). You could say I'm an outlier but I feel like a lot of Linux nerds probably have similar gaming habits.

So for me it's better than 90% of all games are playable on Linux, than if a handful of games accounting for 90% of market share were playable.

The latest hit AAA games also tend to work day one these days. The only thing that doesn’t work is competitive online games.

WRT competetive: No reason to state that in absolutes. I play Rocket League, CS2 and Overwatch2 just fine in Linux.

Ignoring the Steam Deck, most Linux gamers are probably going to be older so that they have the funds and/or technical interest to setup a Linux machine. Which is going to remove the younger demographic which likely plays a different genre and has more available total free time for gaming.

As a young teen with nothing to do, I probably had some days in Summer where I clocked in 16 hours of gaming.

yes, but not marketshare played on linux, but rather, how much of the marketshare that's currently played on windows would be playable on linux.

Anecdotally, it's way above 90%.

I think the only game in the last 2 years I haven't been able to run is battlefield 6.

Any game that is reasonably popular has a very good chance of running. Just go to protondb and anything gold and above is generally good to go.

I couldn't run Delta Force [1], due to anti-cheat as far as i can tell.

Shame about Battlefield 6, some of my friends are playing that and it would be fun to join them. Oh well. Fortunately they're mostly still playing Helldivers 2 as well, and that works fine.

[1] https://www.protondb.com/app/2507950

> I think the only game in the last 2 years I haven't been able to run is battlefield 6.

Neither has anyone else, if they bought it directly from EA.

That anecdote goes the other way if you skew towards popular multiplayer games, since those are the ones with anti-cheat. Someone who plays League, Apex, PUBG, and Destiny 2, and was really looking forward to BF6, will be mightily disappointed. You're unlikely to be invested in all of those games, but a pretty large amount of people are very, very invested in at-least one of those, which, unfortunately, makes Linux a non-starter for them.

Even if 99% of games worked fine on Linux, a large amount of people spend 50+% of their time in-game in one of those games, so it doesn't end up feeling like 90+% of games work.

Thankfully, the corollary of that is that single-player games pretty much all work, barring some edge cases, like very recent titles that haven't had the kinks ironed out yet.

The death of a server browser and privately owned servers led to this. The whole anti-cheat situation grew from publishers wanting to control the whole experience.

Besides, the gaming industry keeps shooting themselves in the foot by only supporting Windows (Mac is a thing too). That is slowly changing, but so many game devs are drinking the Microsoft koolaid they don't even consider using another graphics API other than DirectX. Many other decisions like that as well.

It really is impressive how many they are willing to leave behind. A quick check gives about 19% of the market.

> Besides, the gaming industry keeps shooting themselves in the foot by only supporting Windows (Mac is a thing too). That is slowly changing, but so many game devs are drinking the Microsoft koolaid they don't even consider using another graphics API other than DirectX. Many other decisions like that as well.

If you think game devs are drinking koolaid, do note that there's always loud minority of linux advocates on forums like these, saying 'it works' and when expanding further it turns out they had to do a ton of tweaking and setup. Just look at the comments on getting Overwatch2 to work on linux for an example.

Fact of the matter is most of the game dev's audience is on windows, and for a time it had good tools/documentation for graphics debugging as well. That momentum carried over. It made practical sense to have main development be on windows.

> Besides, the gaming industry keeps shooting themselves in the foot by only supporting Windows (Mac is a thing too). That is slowly changing, but so many game devs are drinking the Microsoft koolaid they don't even consider using another graphics API other than DirectX. Many other decisions like that as well.

The gaming industry is thoroughly multi-platform, and many games that are limited to Windows on general-purpose PCs aren't so because the require DirectX, since they've also been developed for Playstation where DirectX isn't a thing.

Support for Mac can be somewhat challenging, partly because the platform (including the hardware) is so different from other general-purpose PCs, and partly because Apple doesn't particularly care about backwards compatibility, and will happily break applications if it suits their interest.

However, a developer that doesn't support Linux does so because they don't want to for whatever reason, not because the technical bar is too high. With the work that has gone into Wine, Proton, and other Windows compatibility libraries these days, there's a good chance that a Windows game will "just work" unless the developer does something to actively inhibit it.

But anti-cheat was first developed in a time where server browsers were the norm. Punkbuster was developed back in 2000 (independently of Valve) for HL1/CS, which had no matchmaking system. So you're just plain wrong about the motivation.

Not really sure why you're trying to draw a connection between private servers and anti-cheat, I understand if that's your pet grievance but they really aren't related. Games were already implementing anti-cheat even when server browsers were the norm. The "anti-cheat situation" grew out of cheaters killing multiplayer games. What are you even trying to imply with "wanting to control the whole experience"? Letting your players actually play the game they paid for is a bad thing now? When cheaters are in the game, you do not get to play it in any meaningful sense, and in short order a literal sense as servers rapidly die off. Note that I'm not endorsing kernel anti-cheat, but you didn't say kernel anti-cheat, but instead went on a polemic against the concept of anti-cheat in general.

My experience was that every game ran.. but also nearly every game had issues with controls being different than Windows(mouse sensitivity was way off), control pad not working, screen or font scaling issues, and full screen wonkyness.

Somehow changing the font scaling in Linux caused the game to be scaled by a similiar amount.. so 2x font scaling = full screen is 2x bigger than actual monitor.. and I can only see 1/4th the screen.

I'm an indie game dev. Which Linux OS do most users typically use? I'm not sure, so I'm asking. Would it be okay to test the game running on Ubuntu?

That's a reasonable baseline, yes. I would also consider trying running it on Arch Linux, because it usually has newer library versions and it's the base of SteamOS.

Created my first account to comment on this post. I'm considering the switch but I use emulators like BlueStacks or MuMu to play mobile games with gpu acceleration. The alternative on Linux is supposed to be Waydroid but I've heard the support for gpu acceleration with Nvidia cards like my 2070 is not there yet. Does anyone have some experiences for this use case?

Dual-boot user here, while this is definitely good to hear, but I think it's even more important that how many players could ditch Windows and switch to Linux for their games.

Suppose I play one of the 10% games that wouldn't work on Linux, I'd still need to keep my Windows installation around, right?

I wish we could have Proton on MacOS...that would be awesome!

Next laptop is probably going to be the quietest PC I can find that still runs linux. I love my Air but I've been eyeballing a new system as my M1 is getting a little long in the tooth

It would be amazing to have data specifically and only for steam games.

This post gives me hope that I can ditch windows forever for all things soon! Games is the only reason I do windows for development these days.

There is ProtonDB: https://www.protondb.com

I keep having issues with Proton (on steamdeck). With that said, these are primarily older games from the 90s. Modern games generally run hassle free.

I think it must be at least four years since I've had to boot into Windows for a game. It's wonderful.

As someone who only plays videogames on Linux I have to say that it is a surprisingly good experience, even with an Nvidia Card. Some things just are unavailable, e.g. the new Battlefield, mostly due to developers wanting to insert very specific Anti-Cheat software.

But so much just works, old games, new games, singleplayer, multiplayer.

It's a bit painful hearing all of the success stories on this page. I ran into endless bugs running games under Wine, eventually gave up and bought a vanilla PC just to run Windows for games, and that still gives me endless bugs with most major games, but somewhat less than Linux does. With my level of hardware fu I should stick to consoles, but mods make games accessible to me.

How long ago was this?

That you say "running games under Wine" is a hint it was a while ago, the modern way to do this is to install Steam and let it handle the compatibility layer.

Keep posting. Comments like yours bring balance to the linux ideologue that everything's all fine and dandy. We need some truth in this.

The last thing we should want is to have an innocent, how-to-pay-rent-on-his-mind, game dev develop for linux thinking it's good only to find out there's a ton more bugs to solve (and having no help for solving them) for 0.01% of his customer base.

I think the difference is that we aren't talking about stock Wine, but Steam+Proton (which uses Wine, but just makes everything seamless).

I uninstalled Windows completely. There are many, many more games that work on my Linux PC than on my Mac.

Similar anecdote, in the past week there have been two separate games that I wanted to try out, and both were nonfunctional on linux. One had a completely black screen, and the other ignored all mouse/keyboard input. For each of them I spent 15 minutes tinkering with winecfg, installing packages, googling error messages, etc. Eventually I gave up and booted back into windows where they worked perfectly.

> eventually gave up and bought a vanilla PC

What were you trying to run games on before you bought the so called "vanilla" PC?

A random assemblage of parts running Ubuntu, upon which most things that weren't Windows games ran fairly reliably for a decade plus. As far as I can tell nothing challenges a computer like games, except games from an alien OS.

nixos on zfs is a fun one, allowing you to tailor specific environments to specific games if you so choose. Not that I've needed to very often. Steam mostly Just Works(tm) now.

Will MS implement some kind of software signing that breaks wine?

This already exists: a TPU and trusted Microsoft signing certs are required with Windows 11 and certain anti-cheat software.

Not impossible but that might be something that would eventually force developers onto tools that don't have that restriction.

A walled garden doesn't just keep people in, but it keeps other out. And once folks jump out they aren't likely to jump back in.

(Windows) Gta v online won't play on (linux) steamdeck due to some battleye anticheat nonsense.

What matters if it will run if anti cheat software then breaks it?

Shame on you Rockstar (although cheating ruined the game on PC there's been enough time to fix it).

Sadly Nucleus Coop us heavily focused on Windows

Outside of Steam, you can use Proton as well. Via Lutris, for example.

The Internet Archive happens to have many game ISOs for some reason.

protontricks and gamemode can be useful too.

In my experience, the only Windows games that don't run on Linux are those with malware-esque anti-cheat that explicitly block Linux. Almost all games I tried worked out of the box.

In terms of compatibility and performance, there is a noticeable increase over the last years since Proton came up.

Racing wheels are still not well supported IMO. Although on Linux you can map a racing wheel to any other peripheral and work this around.

Another thing is that streaming experience is not as good on Linux as it is on Windows. OBS exists but the whole ecosystem around it is largely not.

Still... Linux is my choice of OS.

I have an ordinary logitech G29 (I think). It works uneventfully in all games I tried (including force feedback).

I'll have to retest then, few months ago I had various issues with this.

There's really not many reasons left to not use Linux. With windows 11 it's only going to get better as more refugees switch

If Adobe apps worked on Linux, I'd switch in a heartbeat.

Honestly I feel like this is the last big wall for a lot of creative pros. Affinity Photo is closing in on Photoshop-level capability, and things like Bottles + Wine can actually run older versions of Creative Cloud surprisingly well now.

The real issue isn’t capability but just adoption (IMO): most studios and agencies are chained to Adobe’s ecosystem. If even one major studio publicly switched pipelines to Linux, the floodgates would probably open to actually allow this.

If your choice of OS is the one that can run Adobe products better, they work better on macOS anyways

I generally agree, but it's hard to fault people for either not buying apple hardware or preferring the IBM PC-type OS.

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Am I the only one who finds the linked ProtonDB dashboard hard to understand? https://www.protondb.com/dashboard

It could use some help from a data visualization designer to make it clearer and easier to read.

How are Ubisoft games running on Linux nowadays? I think that is the only thing holding me back honestly.

The launcher is a bit annoying at times but what finally made me commit ot the switch was when I realized that Anno 1800 and the demo for Anno 117 were running flawlessly.

I also recently finished AC Origins for the first time on my Linux machine.

However I don't play multiplayer ever and apparently that's where most issues are.

Was the demo through Steam or through Ubisoft Connect launcher?

I'm a huge Anno fan and I play Anno 1800 like all the time. I own that game on the Ubisoft platform. If Anno 117 runs flawlessly, I maybe will cancel the preorder on ubisoft and get it on Steam...

I think typically the problem with Ubisoft is dealing with their launcher.

You can check individual games via ProtonDB e.g. Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag: https://protondb.com/app/242050

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For some definition of "run". I heard Wine silently stubs some graphics calls.

And proton was found to get better frame rates than native Windows on some games.

Dual booting from 2 SSDs is a pretty solid solution, as some programs are windows only. YMMV =3

I've been full-time Linux again for about 12 months, gaming isn't my main problem anymore. I think the only thing I'm having a bit of difficulty with is trying to get Jedi Knight working without crashing my entire computer.

Biggest problem I'm running into now is replacing all my music mixing tools. It's getting there, but it's a whole process.

> Biggest problem I'm running into now is replacing all my music mixing tools.

What are you finding that works for this? I know there's a couple decent DAWs, but running Windows-only plugins was a nightmare last time I tried.

We need to have a steam os hardware map … or an easy to use linux installation for a hardware path for game playing.

This comment section feels like a circle jerk lol

Funny. About 50% of my steam games do not run on linux and while many can be installed they usually come with all kinds of glitches and issues.

The harsh reality is that until linux requires absolutely zero extra lift for end users, windows will still be the default for the overwhelming majority.

God i hate windows but they are the only company who gives a damn about gaming anymore.

I don't think its Microsoft directly that care about gaming, There are a few factors at play. but every time a game is ported to a Playstation/Switch its being ported to a form of Linux, and in most cases the Graphics APIs are the same. Its the companies making the game have no incentive to port to Linux if the tiny user base is fine with Proton and dealing with its hacks.

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Now look at what percentage of time users spend playing windows game is spent in a game that works on Linux. This raw game count metric is sqeued because everything someone releases a Unity game it will most likely work out of the box. Due to there not being that many game engines actively being used in modern times the scope is not huge. Bigger issues like Linux not having good enough security means that anticheats do not allow it.

See how with mac os, games like LoL and Valorant do not need a kernel anticheat because the operating system provides enough security.

LoL didn't have kernel-level anticheat for the majority of it's lifetime; when it was added to the game, Apple had removed kexts from the OS entirely. And Valorant doesn't support macOS in the first place, presumably because it didn't run Riot's Ring 0 anticheat at-launch.

What point are you trying to make here?

>What point are you trying to make here?

1. That the raw percentage does not important.

2. That Linux distros do not care about investing in security, (nor to game studios themselves) to be able to get major titles like LoL.