Gamers on Linux have minimal setup overhead.*
*as long as you stick with Steam. Anything else means going to Lutris, Heroic Games Launcher, etc which is far more hit or miss.
Added the missing qualifier to one of the articles bullet points for them.
In my experience running non-steam games through steam with proton is the best way to play those games too. The only time I’ve ever had to use lutris was when I had to install some DLC for a GOG application on the same prefix as the game because it had a separate exe installer for that DLC. I haven’t been able to figure out a way to do that through steam. But once I got that done I just ran the game through steam and it worked perfectly. The heroic games launcher gets suggested a lot too but I literally have never been able to get it to work for a single game.
With Heroic for what its worth, I have had some luck on difficult games going into the settings for the troublesome game, going to the “other” tab and ticking the box for “Use Steam Runtime”.
Why is the penguin holding it like that??
Have you tried to play with one without thumbs?
I will test this theory and report back
maybe its ai slop
This illustration is triggering me
Considering a majority of people use Nvidia on their desktops, they’ll be forced to jump through hoops with stuff as minor as setting their desktop session to X instead of Wayland (which is absolutely not ready) to installing a custom vaapi package to get hardware accelerated video playback in Firefox. With games and Nvidia say goodbye to a chunk of DX12 performance Then you have the majority of laptop users that have intel HD graphics laptops, ones made in the past 10 years will be fine for low end stuff, but they will take a hit because i915 shits itself with DX12 games and the new xe driver that handles it better is very new and only available on iGPUs made in the last 3 years or so? It is really only good if you have an AMD GPU which has absolutely pitiful market share, with the Steam Deck probably being the most popular AMD PC device people own.
At this point Linux and Windows are more like Xbox and PlayStation back in the the 2000’s, except Linux has a compatibility layer to allow it to run a lot of Windows games.
Yes
No.
What about flipping the question. Making modern games available on more platforms?
An article similar to this is posted by itsfoss every week.
Not yet, in order to be ready for mainstream gaming, the gaming experience has to be smooth (As in easy to install, Mod & patch)
It’s smoother than Windows gaming was when I started Windows gaming (win 95).
For reference, to play Warcraft 1 multiplayer you joined a chatroom on Battle.net and the chat channel gave everyone a
terminalMS-DOS command that you had to copy/paste into the terminal. If anybody had any network more complicated than computer -> modem then it would fail. If anyone failed to connect your game would crash. I was gaming like this at around 10 years old.Obviously, comparing 2025 Linux to '90s Windows isn’t exactly fair… but gamers are not incapable of dealing with complexity.
Sure, don’t tell your 8 year old cousin to swap from Windows to Linux. But if you’re a smart high school student then you can learn. Like anything, it’ll take some getting used to and you’ll have to deal with frustrations but knowing how to use Linux and, probably more importantly, how to research and solve problems is well worth the effort.
Oh yeah. I remember watching my older brother try to set up that kind of connection. I was never allowed under threat of capital punishment to touch anything of course. Good times.
Haha, yes. It was trying times.
But, if you’re reading this, you’re probably already more than qualified enough to use Linux for gaming. Obviously you’re going to have to learn things but it is very much worth it. Also, the desktop environments look much better imo.
Doesn’t actually matter with the way Windows performs, these days.
The majority of problems Linux has with gaming are intentional decisions on the part of the studios at this point.
I keep what I think is a pretty healthy gaming diet, which tends to steer me away from the megacorporate shit and into smaller studios and indies, and games just tend to run.
Even AAA games are fine, as long as they don’t have intrusive anticheat. If you’re after SP, non-VR gaming, Linux is ready today. If you want VR, you need to be more flexible with headsets. If you want MP, you need to be really flexible since devs intentionally block Linux for whatever reason.
Meh. Most games, I’d say. Couldn’t get Cyberpunk 2077 to run on Mint.
--launcher-skipshould fix it, according to ProtonDB.I looked on protondb of course. The issue isn’t the launcher, it does boot into the menu and freezes once I load a game.
Ok, then it’s probably some kind of system resource setting or something. I had an issue with Hogwarts Legacy freezing after an hour or two, and it was fixed by this setting change. Maybe that or a similar tweak is all you need. Or maybe just a GPU driver update.
I haven’t tried that game, but I will say most of the games I’ve tried work fine without any tweaks.
I love that you tried to help though. Thanks anyway.
I’m happy to. If you ever want to give it another try, there are tons of there willing to help as well.
I don’t think you need to be super flexible with Multiplayer as long as they aren’t competitive games. Here’s some multiplayer games I’ve played flawlessly in the last 12 months: Baldur’s Gate III, Webfishing, Deep Rock Galactic, Atlyss and Stardew Valley. It really depends on the genre I think.
I’d say the peripheral situation could be better too, such as sim racing gear. Logitech support is solid and looks decent with Fanatec at least, but there’s a lot of options out there that are unlikely to have good Linux support.
I tested out Monado recently with the Reverb G2 and it’s coming along nicely. It’s definitely not ready yet, but hopefully it will be within a few years.
I can install and play pretty much any single player game I want, even new releases, and I am confident I will be able to play it with no significant/noticable issue… and on the offchance there is one, it will most assuredly be fixed within a couple days with a proton update… and honestly its been like 2 years since that last happened to me.
The only time I even have to think about installing a game, and thus have to check protondb, is when I want to install an MMO or Multiplayer game…and a shocking amount of those work, too. Just not all of them, because of invasive anticheat.
I’ve been gaming soley on linux since 2020 or 2021.
Yeah, its definitely ready now, most straggler games are basically massively overproduced and massively MTX exploitative team based shooters using kernel level anti cheat that are designed for children with mom’s credit card.
So what you are saying is “no, linux doesn’t let you play the games you want to play, especially the extremely popular ones”.
You can play most of the games you want to play, with the main caveats being VR and anti-cheat. If it’s SP and on a regular screen, it’ll probably work.
I’ve been gaming on Linux exclusively for 5 years now. I have waited for some games to run better but it’s been generally great for me.
Which ones in particular? I have this issue on windows 10 as well. I’ve still not touched city skylines 2 and stalker 2. I just tried Jedi survivor, and honestly it was a mistake.
Might sound funny it’s usually the older titles. The longest I have waited for was Spellforce Platinum Edition. It always ran sluggish, now it probably runs better than on Windows. Another one was Agarest, it was kinda playable but with too much hassle. Well, I usually play older stuff anyway. Surprisingly I almost never had problems with new games. Maybe only Hell Let Loose but it was an anti-cheat issue.
That’s also my experience: there’s a certain generation of games, around 10 - 20 years old which have more likelihood of problems running in Linux than both older games and newer games.
I suspect it’s partly to do with the kind of DRM used by AAA publishers back then - for example the Steam Windows version of The Sims 3 will simply not work in Linux but a pirated version will work fine with no tweakings needed whilst other AAA games from that era need a lot of tweaking to get to work in Linux.
Meanwhile the most recent stuff just works with no need for tweaking.
I also noticed that these kind of games usually have problems on newer Windows versions as well. Not sure what causes this though, DRM is usual suspect. For me most of the time it’s some Japanese game that uses a weird custom engine. No problems with the ones that use Unreal Engine or Unity.
Nah I get that, I’m glad that it’s improved so much over the years. I’m excited to build a new PC and never have it touch windows tbh.
Yeah, it’s been great. When Valve release Proton 10 soon, it’ll get even better (Wine 10 is awesome). It’s really cool to owning your system to full extend. With ads and telemetry stuff Windows has, I’m sure they cause your hardware to wear off lot faster. Hell they even require you to buy new hardware just to install their new OS.
No.
This is the same horse-shit conversation that’s been going on since like 96.
Want to prove somebody is a tech fraud? Listen to them rec *nix for anything but what it’s good at.
This is specific to gaming, which it does great at. I’ve been running Ubuntu since late 2023 with no issues.
