Gaming on Linux has come a long way
Gaming on Linux has come a long way
TL;DR; tried gaming on Linux again after not having done so for ~10 years and am absolutely blown away by how much improved it is
Today I decided to get some use out of an older/leftover PC that I had laying around after upgrading. My plan was to plug it into the TV in our lounge room so that my 5 year old can play some of the less demanding games she enjoys from my steam library (stuff like Slime Rancher 2).
Originally my plan was to install Windows on it only to discover I couldn't do this due to TPM / secureboot requirements that the older hardware couldn't handle, this was infuriating and felt like I couldn't use my own machine which used to run Windows fine.
To understand where I'm coming from; I've been a Linux user on and off for more than a decade and in the past had been able to play some games using Wine but it was often fiddly or simply wouldn't run the game well enough which is why I generally just dual boot Windows for gaming.
I decided to give Linux a try as I'd heard steam has made gaming on Linux much more approachable than it once was using a proton compatibility layer (which under the hood uses Wine but making it a bit easier to use).
After installing Ubuntu 23, Steam and then enabling the proton compatibility in Steam settings I am absolutely amazed at how easy it was to get most games working!. My daughter has been playing Slime Rancher 2 and it works really well and I've also tested a few other games such as Cult of the Lamb and Dredge and they also worked well. This is such a leap forward to how I remember the state of things back ~10 years ago when I last played games on Linux.
From recent developments it seems like gaming on Linux is really beginning to pick up momentum and I look forward to the day game publishers place great import on releasing native Linux ports but until then am super grateful for the work the good people at Wine have been doing as well as Proton and Steam for making it easier to use.
For real, the world of Linux gaming owes a lot to Valve and to Proton's contributors. The last five years have taken gaming on Linux from a fiddly nightmare to, in many cases, performance as good as native. There has never been a better time to run Linux as your primary operating system.
37I feel people are often not positive enough. I mean, in my experience, I think that in most cases, running games on Linux with Proton is as good as Windows. The exceptions are unsupported and not-enabled-for-Linux anti-cheat engines and some exceptions, like updates to certain non-Steam launchers breaking things.
6
With the success of Steam Deck it will only get better and better.
35As a Linux user, the Steam Deck is an amazing system to work with. I kinda dropped off with gaming in the last few years and the SD really rekindled my desire to game both solo and doing cozy co-op with my partner.
Truly a game changer and I'm so happy it's supporting Linux while doing it
20Haha forreal, my Steam Deck is the primary thing getting me to play through my backlog of single player games. Spent the past 2 weeks playing a ton of Yakuza 0 and will now probably go back and play the rest of the series in order on this thing. What a beautiful device
5
All because some weeb wanted to play Nier: Automata.
2B's bum has been a major contributor to Linux gaming.
29Too be fair it's an excellently modelled bum.
12The game's director seems to agree:
Because of the brouhaha over 2B's butt, there are loads of rude drawings and whatnot being uploaded [online]. And since going around and collecting them is a pain, I'd like it if I could get them sent in a zip file every week.
11
Lmao that's pretty funny, didn't know that's how it started. Jokes aside though, nier automata is an awesome game.
5
Anti cheats one of the more stubborn hurdles left
25Cheating is simply a losing arms race. Client side monitoring may be a deterrent for the lazy cheater but it won't be enough to stop them. Only thing I see actually being viable is server-side machine learning to detect and monitor anomalies and suspicious behavior. (I don't know much about this in actual practice and this is just some wild speculation)
5I think realistically you need both client and server side checks.
If you were updating a password, server would need to check the password meets policy; you might as well check that client-side as well - provides immediate user feedback, but also keeps the load off the server for verifying invalid items. If user hacks their client to submit invalid stuff anyway, then it still doesn't get through.
If it takes three frames minimum (assuming fixed 60fps) to select an item in a menu, then obviously anyone submitting a hundred menu items selections per second is a cheat who has hacked their client, and you can ban them. Client-side check keeps the load off the server, but server must verify. Also, you don't want to instantly ban cheaters, because otherwise they'll know what the limits are and push against them. Waiting for twenty minutes and then making it so that they can only connect to other known cheats strikes me as a suitably ironic hell; go have fun in there.
5
It's honestly gotten to a point where I don't even check ProtonDB anymore unless it's a brand new game. Generally things just work.
22Yeah - I'd narrow that down to brand new AAA game (likely to have Denuvo) or multiplayer, as some anticheats don't work. Basically everything else now? Perfect.
I took the day off work to play Elden Ring when it first came out, and was gutted when it didn't start on Linux. Glorious Eggroll had the fix up about three hours later, after which it's been absolutely perfect.
8
Many games even run better on linux with proton than on windows, due to package bundling and stuff. Though the games I play the most already have native linux support.
18I keep hearing this, but I personally have yet to see it. Definitely most of my games run just as well on linux, but otherwise some of them are still glitchy.
Don’t get me wrong, I'll never go back to Windows, I love Linux, but what are these games that run better on Linux?
6As I understand, it's not common, but when it does happen it's really because vulkan is just that much better than the original directx implementation, even with DXVK working to translate all the system calls.
7top of my head, sekiro.
was on windows getting about 30fps and struggling to run, so I used a ported dxvk dll someone mentioned, it is on github (I'll post the link when I find it)
straight to 60fps, no more frame drops. it was crazy.
edit: I was on an AMD gpu, iirc I don't think people on nvidia had the same problem
update: found the post
6
Not to mention older games run better on Linux because of better compatibility than on Windows.
It is so bad that sometimes certain games even use Wine's DirectX dlls are used to improve performance on these older games, lol
1
I only game on linux and regret nothing.
17It's crazy. I've tried 100s of games on my Steamdeck, and I can't think of a single example where one straight up failed to run. The most I've had to do is change the Proton version after a bit of Googling. Best of all, it doesn't feel compromised - it feels like you're running natively.
(I should say, I don't do much online gaming, so I haven't been thwarted by anti-cheat)
I realised the other day how ubiquitous Linux has become in my life. I have a Steamdeck, I run Mint on my laptop. I have numerous Pis around the house doing various things. For emulation I have a MiSTerFPGA and a Miyoo Mini Plus. My arcade cab runs RetroPie. It all just kind of sneaked up on me...
13I've only had issues with EA's launcher, every time it updates and sometimes just because it feels like it, it doesn't load the game. I squarely put that blame on EA though and not proton. Besides that it's pure witchcraft.
4Yeah the whole EA App thing is so frustrating. When it was still Origin I had issues here and there but nowadays if I don't play Battlefield 4 for a while it just won't launch until I reinstall the EA App smh
4
It's wild to me how native proton feels in so many games. Though, I'll still have a special place in my heart for Super Tux Kart, Warsow, Armagetron Advanced, 0 A.D. et al. Not to mention all the ports Feral Interactive has done over the years.
12I love 0 A.D. - it's fun, and looks incredible for being an open source game. Still seems a bit unfair that it now has to compete with Civilization.
1
Yeah I am currently using my steam deck as a main desktop drive, I was blown away at how good this operating system is. I can't go back. I just can't. The only thing that pisses me off is that I can't use adobe software, but hey my wallet is thanking me.
What really makes me happy, is no ads. No store, no xbox icon, no bloatware, no <activate windows>, no edge being like a jealous gf, no programs to install programs, no windows defender making me paranoid, no firewall, no forced graphics chosen for me by microsoft, no ten ways to do the same action...
Honestly I don't know why I didn't switch. I remember trying to get a computer without windows and my brother advising against it, I want to go back in time and slap him from depriving me from such a well conceived experience.
11Proton is so great that I buy a few games, play them for hours, just to realize there wasn't a native Linux version. I don't even notice.
1010 years, that's a long time ago! It's mostly in the last 3-5 years that things started getting really good with Vulkan becoming a thing and DXVK being made. DXVK is really impressive how fast it got put together and how drastic the improvement is over wined3d.
10It's been a beautiful thing to see. IIRC Proton was announced and usable sometime in 2018. Things were still rough then but it was a good sign.
When DOOM Eternal dropped it didn't work for a while and I'd refresh the GitHub issue page daily until one day it was fixed and has worked perfectly ever since.
Apex Legends was one of the only things keeping me dualbooting Windows, then February last year it comes out that Apex added Proton compatibility for EAC thanks to the work Valve did behind the scenes collaborating with anti-cheat developers, so I nuked my Windows partition and haven't looked back.
We've had some crazy momentum over the past few years and it seems things keep improving a step up every few months. Not to mention projects like GloriousEggroll's proton that has consistently been offering patches to fix certain games earlier than they're released with Valve's upstram Proton Expiremental.
Id periodically gone full-time Linux on and off over the past 6 or 7 years and it was always gaming that pulled me back. Now it's been a good 4 years aside from dualbooting for Apex and with that out of the way I haven't really had a need to touch Windows at all since. This is truly the best time so far to be gaming on Linux :D
9Yeah, when I found out Titanfall+Northstar mod works flawlessly on Linux, it was a pretty good day (the Northstar devs even package the mod as a custom Proton runner just for us Linux users)
3Oh yeah! Earlier this year i bought Titanfall 2 on sale and was so hyped to see how well Northstar worked with it. It's one of my favorite multiplayer games now for just casually hopping in matches here and there. The movement mechanics are so damn satisfying
1
I've almost completely switched over at this point. The only reason I really keep Windows around anymore is because of some specific games that use incompatible anti-cheat systems (like CoD), and for VR (although, I hear the Valve Index works almost perfectly on Linux, and projects like OpenHMD are getting closer to running Oculus on Linux too)
8i got a steam deck a few months ago and am constantly amazed at how well it performs. in fact, assassin's creed 2 plays better on the deck than it does on my seven-year-old gaming rig
needless to say, once windows pulls the plug on 10 i'm fully converting to linux and not looking back
8What fascinates the most about desktop Linux and gaming on Linux that all of that was achieved with limited funding compared to Microsoft. Imagine what could be possible with more market share and more companies investing in the space. The current state is already great, but I believe we are just getting started.
8I started dual booting Linux back when Steam for Linux was reasonably new and Portal 2's native port was on beta. Briefly went back to Windows after building a new, much powerful system for about a year, DXVK & later on Proton happened, and now all the games I care about work flawlessly.
There have been games on my Steam library that I never ran on Windows despite them not officially supporting Linux.
With the deck I seriously hope devs slowly but surely start thinking about native ports as well, but I won't mind waiting another - uhh, 10?! - years for that to happen. I expect Steam Linux Runtime & Flatpak to be the DXVK & Proton of native ports - as in, the thing that will make them "viable" instead of "theoretically possible". Win32 is still the most stable ABI on Linux after all.
7If only Bungie would let me play Destiny 2 on Linux.
7Yeah this is the one thing I still need to keep a Windows install around for :(
3
I only use Windows at work nowadays (I'm forced to), the games I play are all running smoothly enough on Arch until now
6Years ago I moved to Linux and one of the reasons was to not spend as much time gaming. Nowadays if I wanted to do the same I would have to move to BSD.
6IIRC PS5 is BSD based, so don't hold your breath.
2
I was able to play a game that wouldn't run well on my laptop after switching to Linux. It's wild. Never going back
6Yeah thanks to wine developers, valve funding, vulkan and all the projects in the middle, it really has come a long way. Anticheat and drm are just the last brick we missing for a complete support for almost every game.
6Some would say it's a benefit that
spywareanticheat doesn't run on Linux.3
I started using Linux in 2008, and full time in 2011. I remember I could play natively to a bunch of games, like Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup, Neverball, Torcs, Dark Oberon, and others. I enjoyed those games, and I still enjoy some of them today. I think it was in 2013 when Steam announced it was coming to Linux, and native ports came too, like Braid and Dynamite Jack. Now, despite my hardware limitations, I can enjoy GTA IV, Stellaris, Prison Architect, Dwarf Fortress, The Stanley Parable Ultra Deluxe...
Things changed for the better, and thanks to Steam Deck, it'll keep changing.
6I started with Gaming on Linux about 5 years ago and since then it is crazy to see it improving from month to month.
6Yeah games mostly just work, and just as well as in Windows. It's not slow or clunky. Some games require fiddling or won't work at all but the majority are good.
6Glad it worked out for you!
The improvements in the last 5 years or so have been dramatic. When I switched to Linux ~12 years ago I had to give up gaming. Now, we can get the best of both worlds.
5I know I'm super late to this post, but I just bought a brand new gaming laptop that came with w11. Was installing games to play and installed days gone. It refused to launch. Went over to my steam deck, installed it, and it ran flawlessly.
Moral of the story, w11 is so bad that sometimes games work better on Linux! 😂
5Agreed, I installed Ubuntu 22.04 last week to play with stable diffusion. Decided to have a quick look at steam / proton and was blown away with how easily it works. Fallput 76, my primary online game installed and run with almost no hassle. I even managed to get a long time irritation with runaway frame rates fixed.
The only glitch that remains unsolved is a hang on exit. Which is a known issue.
4Valve really has contributed to Linux gaming so heavily. It felt insane playing through GTAV on my steam deck and it ran really well. I honestly don't think anyone expected it to ever get this good. I certainly didn't.
4I've been waiting for such a long time for this. Late 90's I think? I've finally made the switch and it's great to not have to worry about the little annoyances that were always present.
3
Big thank you to all outsourced and Steam developers. Steam is the one of a few companies that most of the time actually do great things for their player base
3Been straight Linux since 2005ish. It's definitely really improved just before COVID - things just work now without fiddling. In the past yeah, I had to fiddle quite a bit to make things work and write up some scripts for installs that would break next patch, but now I'm almost done a Witcher 3 play-through on Linux without even needing to adjust a thing.
3Are nvidia drivers supported natively?
1Yes, you just need to install the drivers according to the instructions for your distro
5No, but I had no major problem gaming with an Nvidia card on Tumbleweed. Just followed the wiki guide and added it to the zypper repos and everything was fine.
2Depends on the distro. On arch and arch derivatives they are in the official repos
3