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.
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.
Also, sometimes the original version doesn't work but the GOG version does, or even vice versa. I've seen all sorts of oddities.
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.
All i want is rocket league :(
At least tf2 works
How did those issues get fixed? Did they abandon the anti cheat, or does the anti cheat now work under proton?
BakkesMod also works, thanks to https://github.com/CrumblyLiquid/BakkesLinux
Rocket League has a platinum rating on ProtonDB: https://www.protondb.com/app/252950
https://support.apple.com/guide/security/direct-memory-acces...
Not so on Linux?
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
Windows has the same issue, but isn't open source and easy to modify. Still, EA are so paranoid that they require it there.
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 remember the days of having to manually install steam in Wine and how only a few games would work like that.
What about market share of play time?
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.
As a young teen with nothing to do, I probably had some days in Summer where I clocked in 16 hours of gaming.
But so much just works, old games, new games, singleplayer, multiplayer.
I can live without that though. I don't think I'll bother setting up a Windows partition on my next PC.
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.
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.
The Year of Linux on the Desktop was near, and wine would surely be a temporary stop-gap.
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.
Neither has anyone else, if they bought it directly from EA.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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. 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 (!)
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.
Windows users with my GPU report the same symptoms as I hit, fwiw.
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?
Shit just works. When it doesn't, changing the proton version usually fixes it.
Way better than Windows.
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.
My stack is so vanilla (nvidia, python, R) I can’t think what the issue is. Maybe hardware.
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.
See how with mac os, games like LoL and Valorant do not need a kernel anticheat because the operating system provides enough security.
What point are you trying to make here?
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.exeHow 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 like to look inside game files and a .zip archive of 1GB unpacking to ~10GB game made me suspicious.
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+
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...
Maybe Wine could be ported to Windows :-)
I still can get my desktop gaming fix, at least.
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.
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...
You can check individual games via ProtonDB e.g. Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag: https://protondb.com/app/242050
Biggest problem I'm running into now is replacing all my music mixing tools. It's getting there, but it's a whole process.
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.
What were you trying to run games on before you bought the so called "vanilla" PC?
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.
I uninstalled Windows completely. There are many, many more games that work on my Linux PC than on my Mac.
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.
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.
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.
Dual booting from 2 SSDs is a pretty solid solution, as some programs are windows only. YMMV =3
Windows I get 300fps and on linux ~100 and frequent dips
Also, try `LD_PRELOAD="" %command%` to disable steaminput, which can cause input stuttering after around 45min on some machines (such as mine).
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
https://boilingsteam.com/windows-games-compatibility-on-linu...
It could use some help from a data visualization designer to make it clearer and easier to read.
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?
EDIT: I remember now that Civilization 5 for Linux would crash frequently. I switched to Proton and it's been fine since.
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.
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.
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'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!
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.
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.
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!
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).
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.
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.
youngNed•7h ago
dontlaugh•6h ago
rererereferred•6h ago
qudat•6h ago
ErroneousBosh•5h ago
preisschild•5h ago
chneu•5h ago
NVIDIA is pretty good on Linux lately. Id always wait a week before updating drivers tho.
zamalek•34m ago
mkozlows•29m ago
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.