I remember when Proton launched it was like magic playing games like Doom and Nier Automata straight from the Linux Steam client with excellent performance. I do not miss the days of having the Windows version of Steam installed separately.
In the time I have been a Linux gamer, it has gone from “here is a list of games that work in Linux” to “here is a list of games that do not work in Linux.” Which some dictionaries define as “progress.”
That’s a perfect way to put it. From constantly relying on ProtonDB to occasionally checking areweanticheatyet.com.
Oh I’d never even heard of that second site haha.
That’s crazy! When I was last trying to run Linux full time in ~2014, you had WINE and then a commercial version of WINE (not by the WINE devs, but because WINE is licensed the way it is and is open source…) that would run a few more things, but I don’t remember what it was called.
So glad to hear it’s progressing this quickly and far.
a commercial version of WINE
That would be CrossOver by CodeWeavers. They’re actually a huge contributor to upstream Wine and have worked with Valve (and I think Collabora?) several times over the past few years. I’m kind of tempted to buy a copy of CrossOver to support them even though I’d never use it, lol
I think that a good chunk of Apple’s GPTK is based on the work that CodeWeavers have done, which has made me tempted to shell out for Crossover too. £60 is a fair old chunk just to play games on my Mac though.
That’s right! That’s what it was. Seemed like WINE with some pre-set tweaks per game, but they were clearly doing a lot more.
I started out in 2014, and pretty much what I did was look to see if there was a Steam logo on the Steam store page to indicate Linux compatibility. With Proton in the last few years, I just don’t really worry about it. I will say my tastes have just about always lined up with the kinds of games, the kinds of studios, that are likely to publish for Linux, the nerd shit like Kerbal Space Program and Factorio. I don’t play Call of Fifa, Modern Fortnite or whatever.
What about Red Theft Autoredemption, or Overwatch of Legends? 😆
In 2003, it was my dream to play FF7 in Linux. In 2019, my dream came true. Thanks Proton, Codeweavers, Wine, Valve, et al for helping me finally put down Sephiroth right.
There’ve been good PlayStation emulators in Linux since long before 2019.
Very true, but the graphics and performance aren’t nearly as good as the PC version.
“Did Loki port it?”, which was a very short list, plus a few exceptions like Quake.
Imagine a completely different OS running software made for your OS better than your actual OS could. This is Microsoft Windows
Not only OS - written using 3D APIs closed source available only for your OS.
Anticheat is about to force this progress backwards years as publishers push drm
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Publishers who do this make shit games anyway.
As someone who really wants to see desktop Linux grow, I try not to think like this because I know others care about these games…but goddammit if I don’t completely agree with you on the inside. I do not understand the obsession with these
gamesproducts, they’re exclusively designed to keep you playing and paying for as long as possible to avoid fomo for digital garbage.There are a tiny handful of non-live service games that still use anti-cheat, and most of those have already enabled support for Proton. Dragon Ball FighterZ is literally the only exception that I can think of, and even that’s playable offline IIRC.
Are we watching a “changing of the guard” where the studios that used to bring out the hits are dying, shedding their talent and new indie projects are blooming in the fallout? I remember Bioward being a fantastic studio during the Mass Effect (and prior) years. They’re a shell of their former selves now. I see this happening with Bethesda now too, although Starfield is not that bad. It’s just nowhere near as epic and fun as Skyrim was. Then you have studios like CDPR that seemed poised to take the crown with CP2077, and although it’s a great game, they certainly fumbled hard at launch. It’s an interesting time in the game industry.
Hey pro tip, if a game isn’t nearly as epic and fun as one that was released like 12 years ago, then its OK to call it a bad game. Cuz that’s certainly not good
To be honest, I think if I were to go back and try Skyrim now, I’d probably feel pretty similarly about it as to how I do about Starfield. I still enjoy gaming, but it doesn’t enthrall me quite the same as it used to. Part of adulthood I suppose.
Try playing Yakuza
Indie Devs haven’t even begun to fully leverage all the new tools offered by recent Blender / Unreal / Godot.
And AAA studios are too big to leverage them effectively.
I think we’re going to see continuing leaps forward in workflow and tools, allowing smaller teams to make whatever they want at any scale. We’re kind of already there honestly, it just about applying it all meaningfully.
I still have faith in CDPR, they had one excellent game, one that they fucked up a bit and few relatively unknown but overall good games.
You know, I really do too. I actually had a lot of fun with CP2077 when it came out, but had to quit on the last 1/3 of the game because of a permanent sound glitch. I am very excited to jump back in.
There’s yet to be a good major fps game from an indie studio. Once that happens maybe there’s a chance, but fps games make up a massive portion of the industry
Actually most anticheat now also supports Linux with Proton
Windows too busy using those cpu cycles to gather your usage metrics for sale to third parties.
Somewhat true, but the truth is that the CPU scheduler on Windows is just awful. It literally wastes performance because it doesn’t optimize instructions as efficiently as schedulers on other OSes.
Without going into details, we ported an application that I worked with that did complex scientific calculations to Linux. All the calculations code was done in C and C++ so it was 99.9% OS agnostic. We consistently got at least a 50% performance increase when running on Linux as opposed to Windows. We tested just about every edition of Windows from Windows 8/Server 2013 to Windows 10/Server 2019. The version of Windows that did best was Windows 7 and Linux was 50% faster. All the other editions were slower.
And the distro of Linux didn’t matter much. A few percent difference here and there, but all of them were astonishingly faster than Windows.
The only similar issue I faced seemed to be due to multithreading. I don’t know enough about the underlying architecture to point my finger at a specific ‘thing’ but I was beating my head against the wall seeing the same 50% drop in performance. The one way I was able to get comparable performance was if I limited the cores on the machine to 1. Windows was only a couple percent slower in that case. When I upped the cores windows couldn’t keep up. The weird part is that the utilization in task manager looked like all the cores were being utilized but the performance certainly didn’t reflect that. I was finally able to get the program manager off my ass but how they handled the situation really soured me on staying with the company so I left, feel bad for the next person to get hit with “get this application off Linux so we can be a 100% windows client shop” garbage.
They contracted the companies developers at over 600k for six months of support, I was dedicated to the effort for a year, and the CIO apparently instructed a PM that nothing else mattered and if it didn’t work I was personally responsible. Like MFers, I didn’t design the hardware, operating system, or the application, I’m doing everything I know how, how exactly is this shit my fault?!
Surely Microsoft knows this.I guess that is why they have gaming mode.
Oh they do, but I don’t know what the real reason it stays that way. The only things I could come up with is that they simply don’t care, backwards compatibility (that one doesn’t really make sense to me), or finally that they can’t come up with a better version due to the mathematically good ones already exist in Unix and Linux systems under the GPL.
I’ll be honest, I can’t see that last reason stopping them, but who knows.
This article really shows the differences:
https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/hpc/POV-ray-on-Quad-Xeon-and-Opteron-579/
It’s a bit old now, but the point still stands. I’m sure the schedulers across all systems have improved since, but it’s a fact the Unix/Linux systems are still better and more efficient.
And to say that there used to be a time when “Linux gaming” was an oxymoron as it at most meant SuperTuxKart or mindlessly watching
glxgears.Mindlessly watching glxgears is the greatest experience a GPU can render.
They’re so smooth when you buy a high end graphics card.
Windows gamers will never understand the joy that
glxgearsgave us
I remember when Linux gaming meant Nethack.
I mean, Nethack is still great…
Is there something like
vulkangearsnow?vkcubeexists in most repositories I guessEdit: Looks like there is a vkgears too
vulkangears
I know that the vulcan-tools package has
vkcubein it. Someone did make vulkangears as an example, along with some other examples, but I don’t think its a published package in any distro repos so it’d need to be manually compiled to run it.
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Been playing Warcraft 3 / DotA and Counter-Strike on Linux since 2005. Still playing Dota and Counter-Strike. Are there other games worth playing? 😂
True I just moved my gaming PC to Linux and wow!! Almost all of my games run on Linux. Thank you for everyone working so hard.
This is the main reason, other than gog’s lack of support, for not going full Linux.
You can use a launcher like Heroic to play games you have on gog or epic.
Also Lutris. I haven’t actually tried Heroic so I don’t know how they compare, but Lutris is a pretty good launcher.
I buy mostly GOG games (like 90%) and with Heroic it’s quite easy.
But it’s not as good as simply using steam
Also thank Valve and buy a Valve game.
Or a Steam Deck. :)
Honestly, if you have the extra money, buy it. It’s just a great device.
Valve literally went “you know what fuck the profits we need off Windows” and they did what nobody else has done before.
I’m not sure how Valve is seen to forfeit any Windows related profit.
They are still thoroughly supporting Windows. A Windows gaming system will have Steam on it, and most gamers still prefer Steam while on Windows.
When Windows 8 happened with the Microsoft store, Valve saw the writing on the wall for the eventual problems they would face, and did SteamOs and SteamBoxes. However, not much skin off their back, as they didn’t “bet the company” or anything. It then pretty much let those efforts die off when the Microsoft Store wasn’t quite the imminent existential threat it looked to be. However, the Xbox-ification of the Windows ecosystem may prove to be a more imminent and dire threat now that Microsoft realized that “hey, we actually do have a gaming brand that enjoys some popularity and is basically just a Windows box already”.
So Valve saw that the Nintendo Switch was such a hit and extrapolated to PC space. They could have had a horribly awkward device running Windows, which has forever sucked at serving this form factor and is not even vaguely amenable to ‘total controller control’. However they decided to revive the SteamOS efforts since it was moderately close to enable them to actually deliver a pad-first UI for a handheld, with Valve branding front and center rather than Microsoft.
So the closest I can see to that claim is that Steam Deck opted out of supporting a handful of games (that also likely don’t work well on the relatively low end specs anyway) rather than trying to make a Windows hand-held work against all the design points of Windows.
I think the implication is that pursuing Linux development has a high opportunity cost, that, if they just bought into Windows as the foundation, they could’ve used that time to build HL3 or whatever
It’s reinventing the wheel, kinda
Then you’d have a windows based steam deck. Valve got themselves into the mobile market by doing this. I imagine the Linux ecosystem will prove better for continuing mobile gaming in the long run.
Also, there are multiple scripts for HL3 and Portal3. They have all been rejected, considered not up to par as a third game in each series.
What profits did Valve say that to exactly? They were shipping a device that didn’t have an existing OS that worked for it. I know companies have been shipping handheld PCs since the 90s but they never took off because the experience of Windows on a mobile device sucks, full stop.
I’m very happy they did this and it will help lots of things, but it’s about as altruistic as Apple making WebKit open source. A massive boon to the community that did help everyone, but the goal wasn’t altruism. It was to create a software solution where one didn’t exist to improve a for-profit device.
Plus, not having to pay Microsoft for OEM Windows licenses helps too.
You are looking too short term. Valve has been very concerned about Microsoft for a long time (maybe a decade now?). They have traditionally been dependent on the Windows platform while Microsoft has a competing built-in store and the Xbox product line. This means that they are dependent on one of their biggest competitors. If Microsoft wasn’t concerned about anti-competitive legal action they probably would have smited them already.
Especially with macOS dying for gaming and iOS having no third-party stores they have made multiple pushes into Linux as a platform where they don’t depend on Microsoft. While the Steam Deck has been very successful, they have already blown money of failed attempts in the past and running Windows on the Steam Deck would likely not be a huge cost (bulk licenses are cheap and they are spending a lot of money on Linux development).
So whether or not they are making more or less money in the short term doesn’t appear to be Valve’s motivation. Their primary motivation is to unlock themselves from Microsoft, whether or not that is best for profits right now.
being on the hook for any license fees cuts into yacht decor. linux sets them free except required source releases. everyone benefits
https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Compiling_under_Linux
plus, more yacht decor
I agree but I don’t think that contradicts anything I said. This is definitely a long term plan to end up with a gaming focused OS that people can use instead of Windows to reduce their reliance on MIcrosoft. It’s definitely a long term decision.
However in the short term, a Steam Deck with Windows would have been far less exciting. Developing WebKit also was clearly a plan for a much better web landscape too and cost far more than Safari ever generated until it was in iOS.
I only take issue with this being cast as some altruistic act, which it isn’t. It’s just one of those situations where the goals of the community and the company align, because the company is very focused on delivering a good user experience above all else. This is a great move for everyone involved and Valve deserves praise for that. But that’s no reason to be naive to how this greatly benefits them.
Imagine how much else humanity could do if they said that. Even just once more, fuck the profits, let’s give people a 4 day work week with 6 hours per day.
Proton has better 32 bit compatibility than windows itself
Proton literally got me into PC gaming again. I switched to Linux in 2008, and stopped playing PC games. For a decade, I missed so much. Valve is awesome!
i mean that was your choice i was playing Wow on linux in like 2008
Yeah until you find a game which doesn’t run only because of its dogshit Anti Cheat System Service.
I remember using bare wine to play games before proton. You would have to go and find the exact libraries needed to run the game, install them one way or another, pray a bit, and maybe the game will run with acceptable fps. If it ran at all.
And these days its just plug and play. Dont remember the last time I had to install a game dependency with proton, from steam or otherwise.
Freaky to read your account. I switched to ubuntu desktop like 3 weeks ago, bought a gpu, installed steam (ok, I had to reinstall from apr since snap didn’t work well), 2 days ago I installed cyberpunk and it runs at 80 fps mostly high-ultra settings without one crash so far, no special boot parameters. (I had to edit the exe today so it wouldn’t force controller config though)
It’s insane how far linux has come in the last 5 yrs. I hope it goes on like this. In opposition to amd, linux actually is our friend. :)
In this case, you need to take my comment more literally.
AMD does a lot better than nvidia but amd still makes a lot of business decisions that are not consumer friendly. For example pricing their gpus a lot higher than they used to instead of more competitive to nvidia.
They do good but in opposition to open source, it is still a company and therefore not our „friend“. Open source in contrast is made by us, therefore undeniably more our friend.
It was a figure of speech, not meaning to dump on amd.
I was wondering that too. As far as I know, when it comes to Linux, AMD and Intel are the way to go. Nvidia are the ones who generally tend to suck on linux (although I never had problems with my nvidia gpu, its pretty old tho)
I remember back in the day I thought one of my favorite games, Elite: Dangerous, would never run on Linux. I dualbooted for a while just so I could play it. After a while I stopped playing it much and figured I could get rid of Windows, so I did. About a year later the community came out with a complicated setup you could perform to get it running on Linux through wine. It’s just as you said, lots of manually finding and installing libraries, tweaking environments, and eventually got it working (jankily) at a pretty mediocre framerate. I thought that was the best I was going to get. Another two years and it was running seamlessly on proton with no configuration or tweaking at all. It really is incredible what Valve has done for Linux gaming.
most shit was literally click and play
I still remember installing the sims 3 on wine. This was before proton, before the sims 4. I started by looking the game up on winehq - the results were not promising. The rating was not exactly garbage, but still runs with problems. Some brave soul had come up with installation instructions though.
So I try to install the game using those instructions. Took me about 40 minutes of installing things like ms c++ runtimes. Then when I tried to run the game? Crash. Doesn’t work. So I went back to WineHQ and found another instruction (luckily there were multiple ppl that made the game work)
After following it for another hour, the game still didnt work. After googling the error for some time im pretty sure I just downloaded some random dll that was missing from runtimes and put it with the game. Voila, the game ran! Laggy, but playable. Took only about 3 hours of research and tinkering.
Today? I’m pretty sure I can just download the game and it will run, just like that, no config required.
If I as an older person would like to start using linux, where would you recommend to start? Is there an easy guide I can follow on how to use linux?
Linux Mint is often touted as the most similar looking GUI to windows, so if you want Linux, but looking like windows that might be your best bet. You will find many guides for how to install Linux. If you want to just try it out first (and not just overwrite windows), you’ll need to free up some disk space and create an empty partition to install Linux on.
Linux mint is just nice to deal with. I distro-hopped to see what was out there but I came back to mint. It plays my games and runs my AI and works with whatever old garbage i plug in without needing to download shifty drivers from a shifty site like with windows.
Honestly, your question will get a ton of different answers because it’s so open to people’s preferences. It’s like asking “I want to start using a car, which one should I buy?” There will be so many different answers that it’s practically useless, from people recommending a toyota aygo since it’s cheap, easy and reliable to people recommending a Abrams tank “because it can handle everything”.
imo, try Linux Mint or Ubuntu since they are accessable and bring most software out of the box. But it’s up to you, you cannot really lose when picking a distro.
I’ll recommend NobaraOS. It comes with everything set up out-of-the box and you can change interface to Windows or macOS style.
DO NOT SWITCH, until you’ve found that every software you use has a Linux version… Or an alternative which works on Linux as well as for you.
ALSO DO NOT SWITCH if you have the 30 or 40 series NVIDIA cards. Or any NVIDIA card for that matter.
YouTube channel recommendations - The Linux Experiment, Tech Hut, Gardiner Bryant (old videos, he just makes Steam Deck content now)
ALSO DO NOT SWITCH if you have the 30 or 40 series NVIDIA cards. Or any NVIDIA card for that matter.
Why? I’ve got a 3060, and it’s running perfectly under Mint. It’s worked on the half a dozen or so other distros I’ve live booted too.
If I had to guess OP is probably talking about DLSS 3+ which is not supported on Linux at the moment. And what other reason is there to buy an Nvidia 30 or 40 series card if not for that?
Anything that uses CUDA for a start
I had issues with my 4060 on the latest mint, but everything worked fine on Ubuntu 23.04. Everything can be fixed but Ubuntu worked out of the box.
As noob, who is not interested in learning the core of linux, but only want it to just work, I would recommend the new openSuse slowroll (based on own experience with tumbleweed which should in theory be less stable than slowroll) and for apps I recommend going for flathubs. I’m not sure if slowroll already released.
Linux Mint or wait for SteamOS
or wait for SteamOS
good luck with that
If you go down this route, even as a noob, whatever tech issues you may run into, it will likely be easier to find command line interface [CLI] solutions that you can copy and paste into your terminal aka console.
I know it seems extra and harder because it looks like something a hacker would do. But telling someone where to click a mouse over and over again is so much harder than “copy this into a terminal app, and send back the output”
As a fellow older gamer who is also technical, I’m using Fedora with KDE, and I install the Steam client and the Bottles app for non-Steam games.
If you’re not technical, then I would suggest something like Linux Mint or Ubuntu, but KDE gives you the closest experience to a Windows desktop regardless of which version of Linux you’re using (vs Gnome).
But as others have said, it doesn’t really matter (for the most part) which version of Linux you use, it really comes down to using Steam and Bottles for the game support.
Good, ditching windows entirely is in my near future.
Finally did it a few days ago. Not only gaming (and emulation in general) is more fluid, but the sheer amount of customization available makes me never want to go back to Windows.
The steam deck inspired me to finally ditch Windows for good. I have dealt with it for the past 15+ years professional and I grew so damn tired of it. Built myself a nice little gaming PC running pop is and I’m quite pleased!
Mac as a laptop, steamdeck for gaming. There is a Win 11 VM on my unraid server for the occasional poke at something but I can’t say I miss windows in any way…
Same on the laptop and Unraid server actually, lol. But I don’t run any VMs on it at all. Hardware is a bit old so I don’t know how much it could run effectively.
Steam Deck is the main reason for this and reasonable WINE emulation of DirectX & other APIs.
I bet the experience outside of Steam Deck depends a lot on the dist, the graphics drivers & card and someone’s personal knowledge & willingness to screw around making everything work. Drivers are the biggest issue by far - open source drivers tend to be more limited, while binary drivers tend to be quite fragile, e.g. breaking after a kernel update & requiring reinstallation.
It’s easier than you think. You can just download an exe, point lutris/steam to it (ie, just paste the path into the gui), and run the game. I have yet to find a game that doesn’t work. Troubleshooting is rare, and in my experience only involves changing proton versions. I have never had to mess with drivers, aside from initial installation when I installed the OS.
I bet the experience outside of Steam Deck depends a lot on the dist, graphics drivers and card and someone’s personal knowledge/willingness to screw around making everything work
In my experience, it’s been about the same. Then again, I also use an Arch based distro on my desktop, but I dunno, even when I distrohopped a lot and used other distros and hadn’t replaced some of my specs, gaming wasn’t a pain to setup or do in general unless it was something that specifically didn’t work with Linux (maybe modding was hard at first, but once I found out what worked for me, I was golden).
open source drivers tend to be more limited, while binary drivers tend to be quite fragile
And thank you for telling everyone what GPU you are using. Most mainstream GPU manufacturers support open-source drivers(AMD, Intel) and for some of them open-source dricers are the only option(Intel).
