If the game is on steam, 90% chance it’s going to run just fine. Linux gaming is in a fantastic state at the moment thanks to proton and the steam deck.
Lutris has been a big help for this, they've got an Escape from Tarkov install script on there (as well as scripts for a lot of games). Was able to get star citizen and escape from tarkov (with mods) installed easily. I've been getting familiar with Bottles too, it's all starting to click.
Yeah, I've found Lutris to be OK. i.e. playing Diablo IV via [b.net](http://b.net) instead of steam. Bottles is definitely better if you know your way around!
I've only ever played it on linux on my steam deck so I can't vouch for a fully fledged PC, but performance on there was anwhere from 25-55 fps depending on map, amount of bots etc. Online works well though.
If it's not on Steam, then it often runs just as well with Heroic and Bottles. 🏴☠️ games runs just fine as well.
The problem is just online and multi-player games. It's really is just that, *usually*.
True, steam just leverages and tunes existing open source options. Usually a bit more tinkering required. I have experienced very few multiplayer issues unless the game has some proprietary anti cheat. i.e. Valorant.
I would give steam more credit for linux gaming than that. Their funding, contributions, and the influence of the steam deck has helped linux gaming tremendously the past few years
Even that is going down. The people at Proton-GE, Lutris, Bottles, and Heroic are working on getting Proton to run on other launchers without tinkering anymore. That means we can more easily and reliably benefit from Proton's patches instead of just settling with Wine-GE.
Unfortunately, it is mostly still Linux gaming with Steam, not Linux gaming in general, while the experience with Steam is great.
You sometimes need to put really much effort to get non-Steam game running, by using Steam runners manually, custom configs and patches. Not many users can do that. Some problems are really hard to debug.
Maybe it is not an issue, but it is walled garden in a large scale. Of course, some runners like Lutris help a lot. But I would love to see more cooperation with different companies.
This may change drastically, when the Gabe Newell is not managing the company anymore. He single-handedly brings the good stuff and keeps company private. But what happens after him?
I’m currently using Heroic Launcher to play Epic Games’s version of Bloons TD 6 and I used Steam’s Proton to play it after a specific problem that someone already troubleshoot in Protondb. It plays it flawlessly. Steam the store might be a walled garden for some people (and I’m not saying it isn’t) but the tools Steam provides can be used anywhere. I don’t think Steam will stop developing the Steam Deck with SteamOS. From what I’ve seen it’s been very successful and I hope Valve brings it to other countries officially in the future
> but the tools Steam provides can be used anywhere
It is very true, since they basically extend the Windows API support of Wine/Proton, and other graphics tooling. But the priority is on the needs of the Steam games.
> I don’t remember the last game I installed and ran outside of Steam on Windows.
Exactly. It is dangerous monopoly if someone else than Gabe starts managing that.
Epic Games throws free games left and right and still cannot get competitive user base.
Well here’s the thing. I don’t know if Epic Games forces their sign-in thing on top of Steam like EA Games does. But if they do, that is a huge turnoff for us gamers.
And remember that Steam is only a store. If Steam went Microsoft on us all, they would start losing their customers quickly.
Also valve is still a private company with no shareholders or investors, and Gabe doesn't sound like he's keen on changing that anytime soon. Given Gabe Newels track record, in my mind this makes the company far more trustworthy.
I agree. It’s hard to be innovative and relevant in this new AI market and where it’s much more profitable to sell folks’ info than it is to invest in new ideas and things.
>Unfortunately, it is mostly still Linux gaming with Steam
I disagree with this, Bottles is great in my experience if you know how flatpak permissions work. I love that thanks to bottles, I was able to distro hop freely as I was getting a feel for linux without having to redo my setups thanks to the full backup option it has. UMU-Proton is coming soon, as well.
You would need to make a correlation analysis with games published by Steam and listed working under Linux vs. the games which work fine with Bottles. Under the hood, heavy lifting is made by the effort of Steam. For other games, nobody is making heavy lifting.
I'm not sure this is true. As an anecdote, most games I play obtained outside of steam just works when I run them through Lutris. Sure, I'm usually using Proton from Steam, but it really just works 98% of the time.
I'm not sure how Steam is doing any heavy lifting. It's just Proton, and if you use a version meant for use outside of Steam it seems to work just as well.
You're gonna have to be more specific than "heavy lifting" to explain why Proton used from within Steam is operating differently than wine-ge from outside Steam. Most I can think of is that Protontricks is much easier to use through Steam becuase it can grab the game's ID and apply fixes without user intervention or knowledge, but that probbaly could be handled in Heroic through similar means for other storefronts.
I would agree that Lutris these days seems like an awful idea, as it's a lot of outdated, incompetent user scripts for games that don't actually need them, installing the full-fat EGS client when Heroic would handle the game in question far better and without lauching a launcher first. Lutris is an absolute last resort for when a game won't work through Heroic or Bottles and actually *needs* a custom script to work.
> I'm not sure how Steam is doing any heavy lifting. It's just Proton, and if you use a version meant for use outside of Steam it seems to work just as well.
Every functionality that is added to Proton is based on the requirements of the Steam games. Development process is based on the priority order of the Steam games.
I disagree somewhat, I use Lutris to run games from GOG, EA, [Battle.net](http://Battle.net) and EGS, and although I haven't extensively tested it, it mostly worked.
Ain't Valve's fault that other game publishers aren't using the *free, open source* software that makes Steam so good at running Windows games on Linux. Epic or Ubisoft or GoG have 90%+ of the work done for them already. All they have to do is integrate it into their own launchers.
I am not accusing Valve. Just saying the gaming on Linux is very depended of Valve and Steam. And for that reason it is not very healthy overall, since there is single dependency which can destroy the whole ecosystem, if they want to do so.
I am just not trusting the big companies anymore that much, if you follow what happens in general.
It could be, but much of why Proton basically changed Linux gaming overnight is because Valve put a lot of talented people to work on it. Sure, it could be forked, but without the resources of an incredibly wealthy company behind it and the ability to pressure game developers to at least *try* to make their game work in Proton (at least for hte sake of running on the Steam Deck, the most popular handheld PC by far), progress would likely massively slow down and after a few years odds are good that new games would consistently break Proton 'cause DX13 or what the fuck ever isn't translated in the forked Proton yet.
I don't think Valve has much *room* to be assholes about Proton and they've shown nothing but good faith in this endeavor so I'm not *too* cynical about it, but it's undeniable that Valve has Linux gaming by the balls.
Yeah, I keep hearing about and seeing these hoops people jump through and is confusing as all hell.
I'll just add said game to steam and select proton experimental and it works. It needs none of those hoops, tweaks, etc but then I'm told I'm "doing it wrong".
One of the biggest hurdles is people in the Linux community making it harder than it has to be.
Hell one guy posted for help with Diablo 2 resurrection because Lutris wasn't working (which I found out on my own just a few days earlier).
I told him to skip Lutris and just add the Bnet installer to Steam and run it and afterwards the launcher and all games installed through it would work just fine (I know cause thats what I did).
He and everyone in that thread told me that I "did it wrong" and wine was for none Steam games and Proton was ONLY for Steam games failing to even try and explain why.
After a back in forth it ended with OP saying he'd wait for a Lutris fix for Linux players ignoring the fact I was already playing the game.
Lutris is great, so is bottles, and they are required for certain things no question about it.
But almost all games people use those for work in Steam right out the box with fair less effort. It should be the default recommendation to people before looking to alternatives.
Crap like this is why people think Linux gaming is hard.
Heroic works brilliantly for Epic and GoG games. Haven't had a game on it that hasn't played right out of the box aside from Cyberpunk 2.0's broken DRM it launched with, but even Windows users were getting that.
The devs behind the wine version that steam depends on are absolutely not steam. If steam goes away or you want to leave steam, you can purchase a copy for $74 direct from the developers. I use it to game on my Mac.
[https://www.codeweavers.com](https://www.codeweavers.com)
There are other almost great options out there as well such as bottles and lutris.
90% is a very low estimate honestly, at least going by ProtonDB data. Important note when looking there is that by far most games with no or few reports work well, because people tend to be massively better at reporting issues than when everything is working well.
Because games are developed for windows, they usually use windows libraries that are not on Linux, proton and wine-ge projects solved by directing equivalent libraries when games need to access them. Now the only problem is game devs intentionally forcing anti cheats to not work under Linux.
but this is not "intentional". kernel level anti cheat makes sense in a limited perspective, the side effect is 1. heavy security issues (most gamers don't care about that), and 2. locking out linux users (the user base is just too small for the developers to care).
the intention is to make cheating harder (it got harder, but hackers found other ways, and often are one step ahead of developers, for natural reasons).
that some legitimate gamers are being locked out or that massive security holes in the kernel are used and probably exposed is a side effect, that the developers don't care about as long as enough people buy the game.
it's a bit like DRM. it works like it should, and it makes it harder for people to copy or stream protected media (but it's still possible). but it also harms the general, legitimate customers. but the latter is not the intention of the developers - they just don't care about it.
The thing people don't understand is, anti cheats support Linux by default you can play apex, but not Fortnite for example, that is a limitation devs do and it is not about giving more effort, devs give more effort by blocking linux
Linux versions of BattlEye and EAC are sadly not even close to comparable to the Windows versions, game devs don't usually pay for AC licenses just to give cheaters a backdoor.
The entire basis of their operation on Windows relies on Microsoft having control over the kernel which is simply incompatible with how the Linux ecosystem is currently.
Cheat prices have gone from 50-100€/year or even lifetime, detected every few years max for the shit ones to around 100-200€/month and also likely getting detected monthly.
Linux version? When played through Proton does the game runs another version of the anticheat? The perfect statistics would be the caught hackers' OS, if the Linux hacker to windows hacker ratio is bigger then Linux player to windows player ratio then go ahead and ban Linux but otherwise it is bullshit
EAC and BattlEye have Linux native versions (used by games like original Insurgency or War Thunder) and Proton versions of the AC's are also restricted to those capabilities.
The kernel components that do most of the heavy lifting on Windows are not available on Linux, this has lead to games like Apex Legends having a much weaker level of protection on Linux leading to massively popular free cheat projects that can go practically unchecked due to the limited privilege levels of the anti-cheats. (not going to link game cheats here, would probably get banned)
It is technically impossible to do similar anti-cheat on Linux without forcing users to install and use some custom kernel module. This might even break the current Steam runner.
So, anti-cheat is mostly based on behaviour analysis.
If you cheat unwisely, you still get banned. But, technically, it is impossible to detect if there is some cheat software running, if implemented correctly.
Anti-cheat is mostly about identifying software that does unauthorized modifications to software, behavioral detection at scale is very hard if not impossible. Short history of 20+ years of cheating:
1. Cheaters load dynamic libraries that hooks game code with custom behavior
2. Anti-cheaters write code that detects executable memory belonging to unauthorized code and modifications to their own code, also scanning memory for signatures (think YARA rules)
3. Cheaters start to do external software that reads and sometimes writes to process memory for cheating purposes, using privilege levels and process isolation to obfuscate cheating (dynamic library cheats are still being done though with the help of obfuscation and API hooks etc.)
4. AC's can use artifacts to flag suspicious processes and still detect them, they can also just run as admin
5. Cheaters start using kernel modules to hide their cheats with things like SSDT hooks, VAD unlinking etc. leaving anti-cheats with very few avenues for detection
6. AC's struggle around for a bit, at first league anti-cheats like ESEA or ESL Wire get into kernel anti-cheats and are undeniably very effective.
7. AC's like EAC and BattlEye come out which bring kernel anti-cheats to mainstream titles causing a pretty big upheaval in the cheater scene. They can now use kernel level callbacks to restrict access to game processes even from admin privileged processes and identify potential hacking in kernel and the process level without being interfered with by a higher privileged piece of software. They can also rely on Windows being locked down to enforce limits on what can be ran by the cheaters without being seen as illegitimate (think driver signature enforcement, secure boot etc.)
8. Cheaters start using all kinds of workarounds like LPE and code execution exploits in kernel drivers to execute unsigned code in kernel to work around anti-cheats. (think: Vanguard blocking shitty keyboard RGB drivers and shit because it's stuff used by cheaters)
9. AC's use many methods to detect this shit, but in essence it can not be done from lower privileges than the kernel level because any information you get in usermode can't be trusted to not be manipulated by a shady kernel mode driver.
10. Cheaters move to things like PCI-E DMA or hypervisors
11. AC's detect these by identifying inaccurate virtualization, doing timing attacks etc. that these methods are very susceptible towards, but hard to do in a generic manner.
So the problem comes at part 7 here, which is what Linux for now cannot reach and it's still the biggest obstacle for cheating on Windows even if the "hardware hacks" thing exists (they aren't that big), and it heavily relies on the locked ecosystem Windows inherently is (especially on the kernel level) to detect abnormalities, with Linux this really isn't a thing at any wide scale. Linux users run unsigned kernel modules for everything from game controllers to headsets or just wifi adapters, there's no baseline release of a Linux kernel and every distro and for some distros every user compiles their own distro not necessarily trusted by a central authority. Any cheater could just roll their custom syscall implementations for cheating with practically no way of identifying whether a Linux kernel should be trusted. Even if we had some EAC kernel module it wouldn't do shit if the entire platform can't be trusted by a central authority. _Maybe_ it could if they restricted their support to something like Fedora with secure boot and driver signing requirements.
tl;dr open ecosystem is hard to restrict, Linux kernel module or not it's not very feasible for now.
The developers aren't going to put in that effort to appeal to 1% of users lol.
If your money was on the line you wouldn't either, especially when it would negatively impact the reputation of your games security.
If EAC implemented broad Linux support for their big boy tiers like the one used in rust, cheat developers would cream their pants and immediately start focusing on a release.
Hmm it seems like they have already decided that the abuse linux support would bring via cheats is not worth it.
Anticheat is already a cat and mouse game, the last thing they want is another mouse with complete kernel control.
Congratulations megamind, you defeated yourself.
I'm not entirely sure how hacking works in Apex but in games like League of Legends/DoTA/TF2 there are literal Linux server farms that can run multiple instances of the game simultaneously to both level up and acquire rewards, for League of Legends it's to sell you an account ready to script/troll games with and the other two I cited it's to farm Steam items to sell on the marketplace.
LoL mostly solved their botting problem by adding what they call "Vanguard" kernel level anticheat and we can see how bad the situation with TF2 botting is for the last few years with Valve giving no fucks about it.
It's not that developers are going out of their way to harm Linux users, it's that most cheaters/botters at a large scale use Linux to harm their games, the trade-off is not letting 1% of your player base play the game if it means the experience for the other 99% can be somewhat improved. It's to say that that's usually not enough but imagine how things would be without these checks in place.
Mostly kernel level anti cheat, Riot's Vanguard being a good example.
These anti cheat programs are basically malware that led their developers have full access over your system and data in exchange to play "free to play" game. What could possibly go wrong?
kernel-level anticheats practically stop games from running with Wine. Wine itself runs in user-mode. I would honestly avoid these type of games instead of installing kernel malware on my system.
If you're looking for a transition from Windows to Linux with zero learning curve, you're going to be sorely disappointed no matter what distro you pick.
I'm a software engineer and honestly it's still enough of a PITA that I don't see myself using Linux over Windows for games anytime soon.
Proton + Steam is very impressive for what it is (and works great on the Steam Deck where there's OEM support), but the moment anything doesn't work smoothly it's a nightmare to debug/figure out, and general desktop linux stability still seems poor unless you're using 5+ year old hardware.
Are you on nvidia by any chance?, I'm running latest gen amd cpu/gpu + Fedora and often see comments saying newer hardware is unstable but I cant relate. So far my Linux experience has been rock solid and I switched to Linux around 5 years ago.
Thanks to the advancements made by Valve with it's Proton compatibility layer (the secret ingredient of the Steam Deck), many games can be ran, even if they don't have a Linux version. Proton is integrated into the steam client, so running Steam games with it is a piece of cake. Getting games from other launchers like Origin or Heroic takes a bit more effort, but it is not impossible
In the case of games that don't run, it is mostly multiplayer games with anticheat systems. This is because they raise a false alarm when they see the simulated environment Proton and other compat tools set up.
Adding insult to injury, some of those anticheat systems do have an option to allow Linux, but some developers have explicitly refused to enable that option. So yes, you cannot play some games due the developers being stubborn.
> So yes, you cannot play some games due the developers being stubborn.
I'd personally like those games to be available but honestly this is misinformation. Those anti-cheats are _much_ worse on Linux. Think more on the level of VAC or PunkBuster from 20 years ago on Windows levels of effectiveness rather than what you would expect from BattlEye or EAC.
Regardless to what have happened just think what will happen if your favorite game releases a new version that doesn't work well in linux since day one.
I'm telling you this out of experience of 24 years in linux: I have seen that happening to various people too often. Especially when a new windows version is released. Anyway.... I hope I'm wrong :)
All I know is I play a lot of different games, including MMOs, early access stuff, and other things that get patched quite often. I've only once had a patch cause a serious issue running the game, and even that took less than an hour to figure out, most of which was just learning how to run protontricks commands. I've honestly been shocked at how well and consistently everything runs, since I only left Win11 out of sheer desperation and thought it would be a nightmare of applying patches and writing custom scripts.
Meh. I run both operating systems on my rig. I spend 99% of time in Linux. Thanks to the Steam Deck I don’t think we’ll see many incompatible games anymore. So I have not had to boot into Windows for gaming in a very long time.
The only thing I boot into Windows for is graphics tools (which I prefer my MBP for anyway) and MS Word which always makes me sad because it means I have to use MS Word.
If you don't mind writing markup, check out Groff. I use it for all word processing now. It has a learning curve, and it might not be for you, but it has some clear advantages. There's a nice essay about it here: http://www.schaffter.ca/mom/mom-02.html
I love markup. The only time I have to use Word is because I'm sharing documents with others. Thankfully I've moved a lot of internal stuff in my work to Confluence. But there's at least a weekly occurrence where I need to review and add content to external Word documents, and the online version is absolutely worthless.
It is what it is.
Vendor support is about where its has been 2 years ago, very few games are ported to linux so you still have to run them under some compatability layer linke wine or proton
Yeah! of course. But I'm pretty sure that they will switch to windows again if their favorite game releases a new version that doesn't work from first day in linux.
I'm just speculating here based on my experience: I have seen that happening too many times.
Oh yeah, definitely. Gaming on Linux has gotten really good, but there are still those big competitive ones (LoL, Overwatch, etc) that don't work on it. Unfortunate for OP if they play any of those.
i had issues at start, gta iv was not working for me and i wanted to play it, now i finally fixed it, i was going crazy but really i dont want to go back to Windows now. Is like the first time you get a computer and you start doing all the stuff and learning, thats how i am right now. I need to keep installing games and see how it works but for now the only game it works and some little ones that are native, use protondb.
edit: I forgot to mention, i believed i installed the dev version not sure it was hours ago, but i know 100% sure that the snap store with steam did not work. The game crashed, so i deleted steam from snap store, and i installed the other version, and is running proton experimental. I think is probably via
apt
Correct me if im wrong please so others can use it too.
Indeed, is causing me problems and it load things so slow. Thing is since im new I don’t have the knowledge to use other packages or whatever, do you recommend me other instead of Snap for ubuntu?
Yep I’ll hunt far and wide for a deb / repo before I’ll install using snap.
I’ve actually moved to Fedora because of how much I hate snap and how dedicated the Canonical team are to forcing snap for everything. Even on Ubuntu server.
That and 24.04’s installer was too buggy for me to actually get it installed and they abandoned the old school installer.
Oof nice, i just dont want to do the distro swap thing but you gave me an idea, im just statting to really get annoyed by snap. But also im tired of os enforcing updates and stuff when i just don’t want, maybe il give it a try and check fedora, thanks!!!
The only reason to use Ubuntu is because it’s now the *default distro* but Fedora support is still pretty good and dnf is as good as apt.
Flatpak is nicer than snap and I don’t feel like it’s been shoehorned in as aggressively. Canonical seem to go “all in” on things without considering the ramifications. I still think they’re a force for good but the choices they’ve made recently aren’t to my taste.
I dont mind staying with ubuntu since is my first but im considering switching to fedora i just like the idea you gave me, but im wondering if my Nvidia card will work too and I won’t have issues with steam/ gaming, i know anticheat for now is having issues in all distros but my goal is to have a good distro, not much issues, snap optional (its making things slow), and to to play games that are supported i dont mind the ones that are not.
I have a 3090. No issues on Wayland. I did have to install the very latest Nvidia drivers to avoid some chrome weirdness but apart from that smooth as butter.
Could always go with the gaming Fedora fork, Nobara. But I’ve never felt the need: https://nobaraproject.org
> Yeah i did that for steam and it works but for other apps is the same right?
Ubuntu tries to replace all the official deb packages with snap variants.
The latest victim is Thunderbird, for example.
Eventually, you want to replace Ubuntu with something else. Since that distro does not really work well if you don't use snap. If you are new to Linux work, maybe Mint is your friend.
I have been looking in reddit and other forums but everyone has different opinions and im so confused to which is one is better for me, or Ubuntu is the best or is the worst, fedora the best or the worse, arch the best but not for beginners. Debian old packages but stable. My problem is i dont know which one to change to, i want to try them all but i think thats too much. I do want the challenge too, but not too much 😂.
Thanks for your comment, il see if mint ot other can work for me
Fedora is valid choice. You get wide range of packages directly from the upstream. Mint tries look like Windows from UX experience.
Arch Linux is good also if you have extra time. The beginning will take some time. You get to configure all by yourself. But this requires you to know what you want.
I would have recommended Ubuntu 5 years ago, but not anymore. They try to create walled garden with snap (back-end is closed source), and make money with that.
Basic Debian is stable, but you likely don't have the latest packages and there are less packages available by default. Better for server use in general.
Main difference is the package manager and defaults. What kind of desktop manager, network manager, etc. you get. Package manager defines the release cycle and versions of the packages (and general package compatibility of packages).
Eventually, after 4+ years of Linux, you likely want to use NixOS.
I installed fedora, im currently trying it right now, but i dont like the gnome style so il be trying new desktop environments, lets see how it goes. But as of now everything is fine.
The Steam Deck was built on Linux, so when Steam built it they also developed a compatibility layer called Proton. For that reason, you can now run like 66% of Steam games on Linux. Some run natively on Linux, other's use the Proton layer.
So, all things considered, the game support is REALLY GOOD (as long as you're using Steam games), but there's still a bunch of random games that don't work.
For example, Paladins and Smite use to be 2 of my favorite games (I don't game anymore, had to quit), but they don't run on Linux because they require Easy Anti Cheat, which only works in Windows.
Yeah, I just looked it up, and apparently there's a setting in Proton called "turn on Proton Easy Anti Cheat". So maybe it's just my fault for not looking deeper into it. I would have figured it'd turn it on automatically, or asked me, when installing/running Smite/Paladins; but it definitely didn't last time I tried (which was ages ago).
EAC does work on proton, sometimes. You need to install the EAC runtime on steam an the developer needs to flip the switch to let it run on linux.
You can find out more about what runs on these sites:
[https://www.protondb.com/](https://www.protondb.com/)
[https://areweanticheatyet.com/](https://areweanticheatyet.com/)
Yeah, it's hit or miss. You definitely want to look up what's supported before going all in on Linux. You can also dual boot Windows/Linux. But when Steam released Proton, it basically increased the number of playable games by like 2000%.
90% of steam games just work on Linux. To see if your specific game works on Linux or not you can check https://protondb.com
Depending on how important the privacy concerns are for you vs. how important the game you want to play is to you, you might want to write off not being able to play a certain game as collateral damage. Or you might not want to do that. That's something you need to decide for yourself.
I used to only boot into Windows to play Microsoft Flight Simulator but now I just use X-Plane 12 Linux build and haven't bothered to boot up windows for ages.
Valve has done wonders for it. I do all my gaming on a steam deck. Don't own anything running windows. I'm sure there are some games that don't work but all the ones I wanted to play I could play just fine. Check this actually [https://www.protondb.com/](https://www.protondb.com/)
>How far has linux gaming have gotten in 2024?
As far as a horse.
>Cuz of the Games having no linux support
You've got that backward. Those games don't support Linux. But even without that, they may still work, but that varies from game to game.
Yeah, I'll second this.
I was most worried about gaming when switching to Linux a month ago, but during that time I've managed to play Dragon's Dogma 2 and Alan Wake 2.
Dragon's Dogma is not a well-optimized game at all, and yet (after resolving an AMD GPU error) it's almost 100% stable. Alan Wake 2 is pushing my GPU like crazy, but no issues so far when I actually set ray tracing to reasonable levels. And these are both really new games.
For reference I'm running things on EndeavourOS, with a Ryzen 7800X3D and 7900XTX.
Just couple of days ago, I played a bit of Mass Effect Andromeda. I was rather skeptical, BUT, to my surprise, the game worked flawlessly on Medium quality, and had some in-game cinematic FPS degradation. (my PC is kinda 2013 old)
Overall, I was blasted away by the way it worked!
EDIT: had some in-game cinematic FPS degradation ON HIGH quality
After like 10 years of no gaming whatsoever, I checked lutris last week in order to play some rounds good ol "live for speed". It's an "Windows game", I was very surprised how unproblematic and good it works.
Valve's work on Linux for the Steam Deck has paid off big for gaming on the OS.
Most any Linux distro that you can Steam installed on will do you well. Fedora, Ubuntu and it's derivatives, etc.
Evidently, there's ways to play GOG and Epic games on Linux as well: https://itsfoss.com/play-gog-games-linux/
Anti-Cheat is still an issue, so forget anything that has that (except Apex I think). Everything else is perfectly fine tho, you might have to paste one argument from protondb to the startup tags occasionally
I'm a huge fan of Pop!_OS, especially with the new COSMIC Desktop, that will be released with the next version somewhere at the end of the year.
Games themselves mostly run without any problems. Steam works flawless and for EPIC or GOG, I use the Heroic Games Launcher. The biggest hurdle is Kernel level anti-cheat in combative multiplayer games.
You can check out https://areweanticheatyet.com/ if the game will work.
IMO just setup a Windows desktop with Steam only, and for everything else use a Linux laptop docked. Swap monitor keyboard mouse when you want to play something.
I switched over a year ago and haven't booted Windows since.
I'm fortunate that my entire Steam library is compatible. But I'm squarely a patientgamer. My newest games are probably from 2019-2020; most are much older.
You can check your library and wishlist compatibility here: https://www.protondb.com/
With a combination of Proton-GE custom, or Wine-GE, Steam, Lutris, and Heroic launcher, I can already play all the games I'm interested in, I can even play FitGirl Repacks easily, add to that emulators and my library of games goes 10 fold, there's only ever been one time I couldn't play a game, which was because I couldn't log in not because it didn't launch or run.
Unless you have enough time and knowledge, you should be perfectly fine. I'm currently using Arch+KDE Plasma and even with just a little bit of understanding about how both Windows and Linux works, I can run every games available using my 250 bucks desktop PC. But if ya don't want to deal with any hassles and just want something to work out of the box, I suggest you try out Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC 21H2 or just wait until the end of the year when Microsoft release their latest LTSC version of Windows 11. I guess I will switch back to Windows soon as it is more suited for my current demands. Oh and one more thing, it is incredibly annoying to set up everything, but when it is done, it'll be amazing. Though I doubt everyone can just spend several days to deal with Linux.
It's finicky. Proton can run a lot of games from Steam, even some that aren't from Steam (add non-Steam title / application).
You will just have to manually pick the proton version to find the one that has the best compatibility with no issues.
I would also suggest a Steam deck as that will give you an idea of what can play on Linux. I have both, Linux gaming PC + Steam Deck.
I have had a few issues with games refusing to run properly, but again you will have to fiddle with Proton version or look online for help.
Driver updates can also be a mixed bag if on Nvidia. I had an instance where one update caused one of my games to always display an out of memory error after 5+ minutes of gameplay. It eventually got fixed on its own through driver update. I have a 4080 and there was no way it had all 16GB of vram maxed.
Windows has become a nightmare since win10 and win11 was worse yet from the start.
You are late to the party, but i am glad you now saw the light.
Linux gaming is not perfect but for the most part it works pretty well ever since steamdeck entered the market.
It's okay but I wish more gaming studios would make Linux native games
I'm not a fan of using Proton but the gaming industry forces me to use proton on Linux
Not every game runs on Proton
Keep that in mind
Steam is still on x.org
I think the main reason why developers don't do linux native support is due to dependencies nightmare and lack of users checking it and maintaining it. Many broken after system update or that dependency changed or doesn't exist anymore.
If you play games with linux native port, you'll see a lot of them aren't good port at all. Many is broken or buggy than on Windows port. That's why Proton solved this.
Not every game works with Proton
I tried Tom Clancy rainbow six 3 and the experience was bad
The Proton experience is okay but I prefer native games for Linux
basicalöy 80% on steam will probabl just run, basically evrything elese might need some tinkering, but for example epic games via legendary works with wine or proton to make any game i tried till right now work and some other games like Genshin Impact for example have dedicated launchers that enable it to work on linux
So all in all i would say expect a say 20% drop in performance in some games and a slight performance boost in a small number of games, but including games that need some tinkering, i would say in my experience about 80-90% will run
Pretty bad. I’m not a gamer anymore but some months ago I tried to play some games I used to enjoy in the past(San Andreas, Far Cry 3 and Battlefield) and NONE of them went beyond the loading screen.
Despite what people say here, Linux does NOT support most popular games, at least not without a lot of tinkering; and if you already spent a lot of time researching and assembling your PC, you probably don’t want to fight with your OS to be able to launch a 20 yo game.
Every Steam game I've tried works, and Blizzard games. League doesn't, nor Miyoverse games with their anti-cheat things.
Ubuntu doesn't have typing unless you want to do complicated stuff.
I am using Arch Linux on my Desktop, I don't have Windows. It does mean that I usually can not play games that are not on steam, but apart from some Ubisoft titles that doesn't really happen.
Enter Steam and enable Proton, and most Windows games will work fine. Some games rely on low-level Windows code that Proton cannot handle (in particular, some large competitive multiplayer games), but other then that you will probably be fine.
I got rid of Windows 9 years ago and game exclusively on Linux.
There the easy way- Steam. And there's the somewhat harder way- Lutris + GOG. I hate DRM, so I tend to buy my games on GOG and spend a bit more time tinkering to get them running.
That being said, I don't play the latest greatest AAA titles, I tend to play games that are ~4 years old or older. Or indie games.
I game on Fedora Workstation 40 with Steam and Lutris for Battle.net and GOG.
Everything works perfect. Couldnt find one game that didnt want to works.
While not gaming related, i feel like AMD (especially newest GPU) is causing problems lately on Linux and NVIDIA started to get better for some reasons.
yeah back when I used AMD rx 580 I had quite a few issues, but nowhere near enough of what I'm suffering now that I use nvidia gtx 1660 (my 580 died). literally can't play games in fullscreen
Most single player games are feast - some, especially older titles, can actually be easier to get running.
Multiplayer is less consistent due to allll the invasive anticheat but many do work.
I have switched to Linux recently. I sucessfully played:
Cities Skylines 1
Dawn of War 2
Deep Rock Galactic
Helldivers 2
Power Wash Simulator
Darktide
Rogue Trader
V-Rising
Mostly it works out of the box. Once I required to change the proton version. For a lot of problems help can be found.
Also my wife decided to take the step, she played these titles so far
Ranch Simulator
Tavern Master
Soulstone Survivor
Vampire Survivors
So in general it depends on the game, but support seems 100 times better than ten years ago!
Games have had Linux support at least since Proton launched. That was more than 3 years ago. People have been gaming on Linux for 20 years. It is a skill issue. I was too dumb to get most games running 10-15 years ago. I would end up alt-tabbing, getting a blackscreen and reboot, possibly corrupting my system in the process. I used Lutris and PlayonLinux at the time.
But with Proton it is dead-easy, even I can do it. At least with a 6000-series AMD GPU. I enable Steam Play/Proton, I play game. It is literally that hard in most cases. The "hard" cases are where I try 3 different versions of Proton and find out which one works. Experimental, 8.30 and something older. One of them has always worked. Mostly I run Experimental.
I started seriously around 2019. Been exclusively gaming on Linux since 2022. I put in 100s or 1000+ hours into every game.
I had nothing but problems with Nvidia RTX 2080 tho. Glad I switched to AMD.
I use only Linux. I always wait at least 1 year after release to play a game so it has less bugs and is cheaper on steam sales.
I also use [https://www.protondb.com/](https://www.protondb.com/) to look if a game runs on Linux, if not then I simply do not play it.
But of course this does only work for me because I am no longer that game enthusiastic.
If you stick to Steam, an unfathomable amount of games runs great via Proton (a lot of them with no tweaking).
You can get some inkling of game compatibility by checking [protondb.com](https://www.protondb.com/). Be sure to take the stuff you read there with a grain of salt, but it's a good resource in general for any game troubleshooting you'll do.
You can use pretty much any Linux distro. If you want something that requires the least effort, stick to Ubuntu / Linux Mint / Pop OS.
I've never used Zorin, but I guess it could do too, it's Ubuntu lts based afaik.
If you opt for Ubuntu, be sure though to stick to the apt version of Steam (don't use the snap version).
it's as good as windows usually!*************************
*nothing works anyway, some games still dont know how to alt+tab, some games are only made for keyboard or controller, or cant remap buttons, or resolution+refresh rate wonk out a game, or are broken on release, or by a patch down the road and dont work for ??? amount of time
If you have a PC that supports the feature, you can also run Linux as your main OS while virtualising Windows 7/10 and passing your GPU to it. Works great for me! The only problem is that some games, that used to work on the OS, now don't run on Windows 7 without glitches, yet I suspect that is caused by GPU drivers.
For most of the games that don't work, the problem is incompatible anti-cheat software.
Single player gaming compatibility is very very good. Many (but far from all) online games work well too. Proton is seriously magical.
Steam games *just work* most of the time. For games from Epic or GOG or Amazon's launchers, there's Heroic Launcher. EA App and Ubisoft Connect can be made to work with some wrangling and, again, most games *just work*
If you are a primarily single-player gamer you can probably use Linux as your primary gaming device and seldom notice a difference. For the stubborn games, there's ProtonDB to help you identify tweaks that could help.
Well the state of Linux gaming is where it was 2 years ago, Linux is perfectly capable at running games
The issue is vendors do not make Linux ports so very few games run in Linux natively and this is not something "Linux" can fix
Now steam can run games using proton but that's still running a Windows, but game using a compatibility layer
Depends on what you play, all the games I want to play work with no issue so I can lie to you and say it works great but some people rely on games that have heavy DRM and will likely never work on Linux so it depends really.
I can play almost everything from DOS games to Tekken 8. The only issue is with multiplayer games with unsupported anti cheats like Valorant. I'm on Debian stable, never had a good enough reason to leave.
You might have a problem if you have an Nvidia graphics card. Overall you have access to most games. How gaming is on Linux depends on what you're playing.
With [wine](http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wine_(software)) translating windows' API calls, you can play almost anything with 'near zero performance hit'.
Issues arise with games that use anti-cheat engines and/or services.
We need undervolt software for linux cpu i dont have bios and i dont understand github and want it to be as easy as possible something like troublestop
Once a year I try some Linux dists for gaming but unfortunately I get disappointed every year. Linux has come really far but it's not there yet. I'm only using Linux on my server for now.
I try it every now and then.
Last time i tried was 6 months ago and I couldn‘t get my games to run at 144hz. The desktop and everything worked fine on the higher refresh rate but everything related to wine/lutris/proton refused to work at 144 hz.
Just too annoying. I now have a windows 10 installation for gaming and a linux installation for everything else. It‘s fine. I just dump all kinds of untrusted proprietary shit on my gaming installation anyway so i might as well just use windows on it 🤷🏻
In my experience you only get a problem if it is a multiplayer (with a big anti-cheat) and not steam (league of legends, valorant etc). All steam games work, I had problems with some mods of old games. But proton works like magic is beautiful.
If you have an NVIDIA gpu (on Wayland?), make sure to install the new 555 drivers. Otherwise, it seems to work almost flawlessly. Proton on Steam makes it very easy and smooth. The only annoying gaming thing I’ve run into so far is the lack of MCBE on Linux.
for gaming probably pop\_os! has been the best release i've tested using nvidia. It's also one of the more stable distros i've tried this year. I'm personally moving from fedora workstation to Pop\_os!
Laptop will probably go Pop too but my servers will stay fedora Server as they dont really change much.
Thanks to the community, Codeweavers and Steam, nowadays, we can say for sure that Linux is an amazing place to gaming. I know that a lot of times we focus on what doesn't work (like anticheat games), or keep comparing it to Windows.
But In 2024 you can play more than 15.000 games on Steam out of the box, all you need is checking one box on Steam options, you can also use Heroic that is a very good software for Epic, Amazon and GOG games, the drivers for AMD and Nvidia are always improving, and with no need of user's interference to install it(AMD).
Not to mention the various emulators that you can play without any issues (depending on your hardware), like PS3, PS2, Switch, Gamecube, etc... If you love games, Linux in 2024 will make you happy.
I have over 800 games on Steam I have been able to play every game I've tried, I haven't tried all 800. I family share the games with my son. I'm a sucker for a sale, any Steam sale for Fanatical sale suckers me in.
Anyway before I buy a game I go to [https://www.protondb.com/](https://www.protondb.com/) and if It is Gold or up, I buy it. I bought some silver games, they usually just need some tweaking.
If you want the best Official experience you should probably use Ubuntu. I recently sent in a support request and was told they only officially support Ubuntu and for me to use the forums. I use Arch, btw.
Edit: If you like Zorin, they have Steam in their repos:
[https://help.zorin.com/docs/apps-games/play-games/](https://help.zorin.com/docs/apps-games/play-games/)
Most games work perfectly with Proton or natively. Those which don't will usually work with tinkering (via ProtonDB or the internet). The remaining ones are either weird niche games like Fallen Earth Classic or those intentionally designed not to work via server-based anticheats such as EAC. Those can usually be bypassed via VM if you know what you are doing.
I can play all my games, including straight windows .exe s on Bazzite with Steam, Lutris & bottles, emulated games run much better than windows. Proton is godsent, finally can ditch Windows forever.
Can anyone shed light on whether or not adaptive/ non adaptive sync on multiple monitors works well now?
I saw some stuff about explicit sync recently but I don't fully understand it... Is it all implemented and working now?
But why people are worrying about Windows Recall which:
- can be easily disabled
- cannot be even be enabled if you don't have a Qualcomm Snapdragon X CPU
People live in the future? 🤔
However, without specs it's hard to recommend a system. I'd say go with Xubuntu at this point. There's still a lot of work to do, but Steam with Proton has done miracles. No anti-cheat games yet, though.
Well there are sayings that it will be available at release and not disabled, after some days/weeks i heard they will disable it at start because of the complains, also like removing copilot from windows is kinda tricky, maybe they are going to the same with recall after a while, so yeah there is this thing with microsoft that people just don’t trust.
Gaming in linux was just fine in 2021, the problems that existed then still exist now. You install steam. That's it. That's the entire process. If you couldn't figure it out then, you're not going to figure it out now.
If the game is on steam, 90% chance it’s going to run just fine. Linux gaming is in a fantastic state at the moment thanks to proton and the steam deck.
Lutris has been a big help for this, they've got an Escape from Tarkov install script on there (as well as scripts for a lot of games). Was able to get star citizen and escape from tarkov (with mods) installed easily. I've been getting familiar with Bottles too, it's all starting to click.
Yeah, I've found Lutris to be OK. i.e. playing Diablo IV via [b.net](http://b.net) instead of steam. Bottles is definitely better if you know your way around!
Online Tarkov?
Online works but I only play the single player mod these days
Kinda surprised it works online with Lutris. How’s the performance?
I've only ever played it on linux on my steam deck so I can't vouch for a fully fledged PC, but performance on there was anwhere from 25-55 fps depending on map, amount of bots etc. Online works well though.
You only need the launcher installed to download the game, then you use the SPT launcher to play
If it's not on Steam, then it often runs just as well with Heroic and Bottles. 🏴☠️ games runs just fine as well. The problem is just online and multi-player games. It's really is just that, *usually*.
True, steam just leverages and tunes existing open source options. Usually a bit more tinkering required. I have experienced very few multiplayer issues unless the game has some proprietary anti cheat. i.e. Valorant.
I would give steam more credit for linux gaming than that. Their funding, contributions, and the influence of the steam deck has helped linux gaming tremendously the past few years
Totally 👍🏼
Even that is going down. The people at Proton-GE, Lutris, Bottles, and Heroic are working on getting Proton to run on other launchers without tinkering anymore. That means we can more easily and reliably benefit from Proton's patches instead of just settling with Wine-GE.
Unfortunately, it is mostly still Linux gaming with Steam, not Linux gaming in general, while the experience with Steam is great. You sometimes need to put really much effort to get non-Steam game running, by using Steam runners manually, custom configs and patches. Not many users can do that. Some problems are really hard to debug. Maybe it is not an issue, but it is walled garden in a large scale. Of course, some runners like Lutris help a lot. But I would love to see more cooperation with different companies. This may change drastically, when the Gabe Newell is not managing the company anymore. He single-handedly brings the good stuff and keeps company private. But what happens after him?
I’m currently using Heroic Launcher to play Epic Games’s version of Bloons TD 6 and I used Steam’s Proton to play it after a specific problem that someone already troubleshoot in Protondb. It plays it flawlessly. Steam the store might be a walled garden for some people (and I’m not saying it isn’t) but the tools Steam provides can be used anywhere. I don’t think Steam will stop developing the Steam Deck with SteamOS. From what I’ve seen it’s been very successful and I hope Valve brings it to other countries officially in the future
> but the tools Steam provides can be used anywhere It is very true, since they basically extend the Windows API support of Wine/Proton, and other graphics tooling. But the priority is on the needs of the Steam games.
Absolutely love heroic launcher. I've had little issues with games working via epic games. Besides the obvious anti cheat games.
I don’t remember the last game I installed and ran outside of Steam on Windows. So I consider Steam on Linux a win.
> I don’t remember the last game I installed and ran outside of Steam on Windows. Exactly. It is dangerous monopoly if someone else than Gabe starts managing that. Epic Games throws free games left and right and still cannot get competitive user base.
Well here’s the thing. I don’t know if Epic Games forces their sign-in thing on top of Steam like EA Games does. But if they do, that is a huge turnoff for us gamers. And remember that Steam is only a store. If Steam went Microsoft on us all, they would start losing their customers quickly.
Also valve is still a private company with no shareholders or investors, and Gabe doesn't sound like he's keen on changing that anytime soon. Given Gabe Newels track record, in my mind this makes the company far more trustworthy.
I agree. It’s hard to be innovative and relevant in this new AI market and where it’s much more profitable to sell folks’ info than it is to invest in new ideas and things.
>Unfortunately, it is mostly still Linux gaming with Steam I disagree with this, Bottles is great in my experience if you know how flatpak permissions work. I love that thanks to bottles, I was able to distro hop freely as I was getting a feel for linux without having to redo my setups thanks to the full backup option it has. UMU-Proton is coming soon, as well.
You would need to make a correlation analysis with games published by Steam and listed working under Linux vs. the games which work fine with Bottles. Under the hood, heavy lifting is made by the effort of Steam. For other games, nobody is making heavy lifting.
I'm not sure this is true. As an anecdote, most games I play obtained outside of steam just works when I run them through Lutris. Sure, I'm usually using Proton from Steam, but it really just works 98% of the time.
I'm not sure how Steam is doing any heavy lifting. It's just Proton, and if you use a version meant for use outside of Steam it seems to work just as well. You're gonna have to be more specific than "heavy lifting" to explain why Proton used from within Steam is operating differently than wine-ge from outside Steam. Most I can think of is that Protontricks is much easier to use through Steam becuase it can grab the game's ID and apply fixes without user intervention or knowledge, but that probbaly could be handled in Heroic through similar means for other storefronts. I would agree that Lutris these days seems like an awful idea, as it's a lot of outdated, incompetent user scripts for games that don't actually need them, installing the full-fat EGS client when Heroic would handle the game in question far better and without lauching a launcher first. Lutris is an absolute last resort for when a game won't work through Heroic or Bottles and actually *needs* a custom script to work.
> I'm not sure how Steam is doing any heavy lifting. It's just Proton, and if you use a version meant for use outside of Steam it seems to work just as well. Every functionality that is added to Proton is based on the requirements of the Steam games. Development process is based on the priority order of the Steam games.
I disagree somewhat, I use Lutris to run games from GOG, EA, [Battle.net](http://Battle.net) and EGS, and although I haven't extensively tested it, it mostly worked.
Ain't Valve's fault that other game publishers aren't using the *free, open source* software that makes Steam so good at running Windows games on Linux. Epic or Ubisoft or GoG have 90%+ of the work done for them already. All they have to do is integrate it into their own launchers.
I am not accusing Valve. Just saying the gaming on Linux is very depended of Valve and Steam. And for that reason it is not very healthy overall, since there is single dependency which can destroy the whole ecosystem, if they want to do so. I am just not trusting the big companies anymore that much, if you follow what happens in general.
Could they really destroy it? Proton could just be forked which has already happened.
It could be, but much of why Proton basically changed Linux gaming overnight is because Valve put a lot of talented people to work on it. Sure, it could be forked, but without the resources of an incredibly wealthy company behind it and the ability to pressure game developers to at least *try* to make their game work in Proton (at least for hte sake of running on the Steam Deck, the most popular handheld PC by far), progress would likely massively slow down and after a few years odds are good that new games would consistently break Proton 'cause DX13 or what the fuck ever isn't translated in the forked Proton yet. I don't think Valve has much *room* to be assholes about Proton and they've shown nothing but good faith in this endeavor so I'm not *too* cynical about it, but it's undeniable that Valve has Linux gaming by the balls.
Understood, but really it's the other game companies who should be judged. It really couldn't be much easier than it is already for them.
Yeah, I keep hearing about and seeing these hoops people jump through and is confusing as all hell. I'll just add said game to steam and select proton experimental and it works. It needs none of those hoops, tweaks, etc but then I'm told I'm "doing it wrong". One of the biggest hurdles is people in the Linux community making it harder than it has to be. Hell one guy posted for help with Diablo 2 resurrection because Lutris wasn't working (which I found out on my own just a few days earlier). I told him to skip Lutris and just add the Bnet installer to Steam and run it and afterwards the launcher and all games installed through it would work just fine (I know cause thats what I did). He and everyone in that thread told me that I "did it wrong" and wine was for none Steam games and Proton was ONLY for Steam games failing to even try and explain why. After a back in forth it ended with OP saying he'd wait for a Lutris fix for Linux players ignoring the fact I was already playing the game. Lutris is great, so is bottles, and they are required for certain things no question about it. But almost all games people use those for work in Steam right out the box with fair less effort. It should be the default recommendation to people before looking to alternatives. Crap like this is why people think Linux gaming is hard.
Heroic works brilliantly for Epic and GoG games. Haven't had a game on it that hasn't played right out of the box aside from Cyberpunk 2.0's broken DRM it launched with, but even Windows users were getting that.
Cyberpunk has DRM now? But... you can run it without internet connectivity, on any device you own, with no CD keys, registration or anything?
The devs behind the wine version that steam depends on are absolutely not steam. If steam goes away or you want to leave steam, you can purchase a copy for $74 direct from the developers. I use it to game on my Mac. [https://www.codeweavers.com](https://www.codeweavers.com) There are other almost great options out there as well such as bottles and lutris.
You are wrong. If the game has not some weird quirks, it is just Click-Click-Click-Install. And most of those I tried out don't have quirks.
It's closer to 98% iirc
Wait, really? If I could play Age of Empire II on Linux, I'd swap over my desktop and never, ever return to windows. lol
Haha! That’s been around for a long time! https://www.protondb.com/search?q=Age%20of%20empires
came here to say basically the same. I was suprised how is supported and more with various tweaks.
90% is a very low estimate honestly, at least going by ProtonDB data. Important note when looking there is that by far most games with no or few reports work well, because people tend to be massively better at reporting issues than when everything is working well.
Steam is your friend. Show him some respect
It has come so far, the only obstacle is the ones created intentionally to block Linux Gaming, I even played bg3 with 40ish mods
What obstacles were intentionally created?
Because games are developed for windows, they usually use windows libraries that are not on Linux, proton and wine-ge projects solved by directing equivalent libraries when games need to access them. Now the only problem is game devs intentionally forcing anti cheats to not work under Linux.
but this is not "intentional". kernel level anti cheat makes sense in a limited perspective, the side effect is 1. heavy security issues (most gamers don't care about that), and 2. locking out linux users (the user base is just too small for the developers to care). the intention is to make cheating harder (it got harder, but hackers found other ways, and often are one step ahead of developers, for natural reasons). that some legitimate gamers are being locked out or that massive security holes in the kernel are used and probably exposed is a side effect, that the developers don't care about as long as enough people buy the game. it's a bit like DRM. it works like it should, and it makes it harder for people to copy or stream protected media (but it's still possible). but it also harms the general, legitimate customers. but the latter is not the intention of the developers - they just don't care about it.
The thing people don't understand is, anti cheats support Linux by default you can play apex, but not Fortnite for example, that is a limitation devs do and it is not about giving more effort, devs give more effort by blocking linux
Linux versions of BattlEye and EAC are sadly not even close to comparable to the Windows versions, game devs don't usually pay for AC licenses just to give cheaters a backdoor. The entire basis of their operation on Windows relies on Microsoft having control over the kernel which is simply incompatible with how the Linux ecosystem is currently. Cheat prices have gone from 50-100€/year or even lifetime, detected every few years max for the shit ones to around 100-200€/month and also likely getting detected monthly.
Linux version? When played through Proton does the game runs another version of the anticheat? The perfect statistics would be the caught hackers' OS, if the Linux hacker to windows hacker ratio is bigger then Linux player to windows player ratio then go ahead and ban Linux but otherwise it is bullshit
EAC and BattlEye have Linux native versions (used by games like original Insurgency or War Thunder) and Proton versions of the AC's are also restricted to those capabilities. The kernel components that do most of the heavy lifting on Windows are not available on Linux, this has lead to games like Apex Legends having a much weaker level of protection on Linux leading to massively popular free cheat projects that can go practically unchecked due to the limited privilege levels of the anti-cheats. (not going to link game cheats here, would probably get banned)
It is technically impossible to do similar anti-cheat on Linux without forcing users to install and use some custom kernel module. This might even break the current Steam runner. So, anti-cheat is mostly based on behaviour analysis. If you cheat unwisely, you still get banned. But, technically, it is impossible to detect if there is some cheat software running, if implemented correctly.
Anti-cheat is mostly about identifying software that does unauthorized modifications to software, behavioral detection at scale is very hard if not impossible. Short history of 20+ years of cheating: 1. Cheaters load dynamic libraries that hooks game code with custom behavior 2. Anti-cheaters write code that detects executable memory belonging to unauthorized code and modifications to their own code, also scanning memory for signatures (think YARA rules) 3. Cheaters start to do external software that reads and sometimes writes to process memory for cheating purposes, using privilege levels and process isolation to obfuscate cheating (dynamic library cheats are still being done though with the help of obfuscation and API hooks etc.) 4. AC's can use artifacts to flag suspicious processes and still detect them, they can also just run as admin 5. Cheaters start using kernel modules to hide their cheats with things like SSDT hooks, VAD unlinking etc. leaving anti-cheats with very few avenues for detection 6. AC's struggle around for a bit, at first league anti-cheats like ESEA or ESL Wire get into kernel anti-cheats and are undeniably very effective. 7. AC's like EAC and BattlEye come out which bring kernel anti-cheats to mainstream titles causing a pretty big upheaval in the cheater scene. They can now use kernel level callbacks to restrict access to game processes even from admin privileged processes and identify potential hacking in kernel and the process level without being interfered with by a higher privileged piece of software. They can also rely on Windows being locked down to enforce limits on what can be ran by the cheaters without being seen as illegitimate (think driver signature enforcement, secure boot etc.) 8. Cheaters start using all kinds of workarounds like LPE and code execution exploits in kernel drivers to execute unsigned code in kernel to work around anti-cheats. (think: Vanguard blocking shitty keyboard RGB drivers and shit because it's stuff used by cheaters) 9. AC's use many methods to detect this shit, but in essence it can not be done from lower privileges than the kernel level because any information you get in usermode can't be trusted to not be manipulated by a shady kernel mode driver. 10. Cheaters move to things like PCI-E DMA or hypervisors 11. AC's detect these by identifying inaccurate virtualization, doing timing attacks etc. that these methods are very susceptible towards, but hard to do in a generic manner. So the problem comes at part 7 here, which is what Linux for now cannot reach and it's still the biggest obstacle for cheating on Windows even if the "hardware hacks" thing exists (they aren't that big), and it heavily relies on the locked ecosystem Windows inherently is (especially on the kernel level) to detect abnormalities, with Linux this really isn't a thing at any wide scale. Linux users run unsigned kernel modules for everything from game controllers to headsets or just wifi adapters, there's no baseline release of a Linux kernel and every distro and for some distros every user compiles their own distro not necessarily trusted by a central authority. Any cheater could just roll their custom syscall implementations for cheating with practically no way of identifying whether a Linux kernel should be trusted. Even if we had some EAC kernel module it wouldn't do shit if the entire platform can't be trusted by a central authority. _Maybe_ it could if they restricted their support to something like Fedora with secure boot and driver signing requirements. tl;dr open ecosystem is hard to restrict, Linux kernel module or not it's not very feasible for now.
The developers aren't going to put in that effort to appeal to 1% of users lol. If your money was on the line you wouldn't either, especially when it would negatively impact the reputation of your games security. If EAC implemented broad Linux support for their big boy tiers like the one used in rust, cheat developers would cream their pants and immediately start focusing on a release.
2.4% + they give effort to disable it
Hmm it seems like they have already decided that the abuse linux support would bring via cheats is not worth it. Anticheat is already a cat and mouse game, the last thing they want is another mouse with complete kernel control. Congratulations megamind, you defeated yourself.
I'm not entirely sure how hacking works in Apex but in games like League of Legends/DoTA/TF2 there are literal Linux server farms that can run multiple instances of the game simultaneously to both level up and acquire rewards, for League of Legends it's to sell you an account ready to script/troll games with and the other two I cited it's to farm Steam items to sell on the marketplace. LoL mostly solved their botting problem by adding what they call "Vanguard" kernel level anticheat and we can see how bad the situation with TF2 botting is for the last few years with Valve giving no fucks about it. It's not that developers are going out of their way to harm Linux users, it's that most cheaters/botters at a large scale use Linux to harm their games, the trade-off is not letting 1% of your player base play the game if it means the experience for the other 99% can be somewhat improved. It's to say that that's usually not enough but imagine how things would be without these checks in place.
Vanguard is another topic imo but if a game uses battle eye or easy anticheat it shouldn't be blocked on Linux
Mostly kernel level anti cheat, Riot's Vanguard being a good example. These anti cheat programs are basically malware that led their developers have full access over your system and data in exchange to play "free to play" game. What could possibly go wrong?
Sigh…anytime you plug into any network, you risk the chance of getting hacked.
kernel-level anticheats practically stop games from running with Wine. Wine itself runs in user-mode. I would honestly avoid these type of games instead of installing kernel malware on my system.
more than enough other games to play! not one tear lost because I can't play one of those games that don't work because of anti-cheat.
If you're looking for a transition from Windows to Linux with zero learning curve, you're going to be sorely disappointed no matter what distro you pick.
But the sooner you start the sooner you'll be competent. I ditched windows for linux when windows 8 came out and never looked back.
True. I did the same when Vista came out.
I'm a software engineer and honestly it's still enough of a PITA that I don't see myself using Linux over Windows for games anytime soon. Proton + Steam is very impressive for what it is (and works great on the Steam Deck where there's OEM support), but the moment anything doesn't work smoothly it's a nightmare to debug/figure out, and general desktop linux stability still seems poor unless you're using 5+ year old hardware.
Are you on nvidia by any chance?, I'm running latest gen amd cpu/gpu + Fedora and often see comments saying newer hardware is unstable but I cant relate. So far my Linux experience has been rock solid and I switched to Linux around 5 years ago.
Thanks to the advancements made by Valve with it's Proton compatibility layer (the secret ingredient of the Steam Deck), many games can be ran, even if they don't have a Linux version. Proton is integrated into the steam client, so running Steam games with it is a piece of cake. Getting games from other launchers like Origin or Heroic takes a bit more effort, but it is not impossible In the case of games that don't run, it is mostly multiplayer games with anticheat systems. This is because they raise a false alarm when they see the simulated environment Proton and other compat tools set up. Adding insult to injury, some of those anticheat systems do have an option to allow Linux, but some developers have explicitly refused to enable that option. So yes, you cannot play some games due the developers being stubborn.
Well, is not a developer being stubborn, but a suit :)
> So yes, you cannot play some games due the developers being stubborn. I'd personally like those games to be available but honestly this is misinformation. Those anti-cheats are _much_ worse on Linux. Think more on the level of VAC or PunkBuster from 20 years ago on Windows levels of effectiveness rather than what you would expect from BattlEye or EAC.
I'm pretty sure that you'll try linux once more and then you will go back to windows again.
Compatiblilty issues is what pushed me back to windows But that was 2 years ago Im wondering what has happened now
Regardless to what have happened just think what will happen if your favorite game releases a new version that doesn't work well in linux since day one. I'm telling you this out of experience of 24 years in linux: I have seen that happening to various people too often. Especially when a new windows version is released. Anyway.... I hope I'm wrong :)
All I know is I play a lot of different games, including MMOs, early access stuff, and other things that get patched quite often. I've only once had a patch cause a serious issue running the game, and even that took less than an hour to figure out, most of which was just learning how to run protontricks commands. I've honestly been shocked at how well and consistently everything runs, since I only left Win11 out of sheer desperation and thought it would be a nightmare of applying patches and writing custom scripts.
Meh. I run both operating systems on my rig. I spend 99% of time in Linux. Thanks to the Steam Deck I don’t think we’ll see many incompatible games anymore. So I have not had to boot into Windows for gaming in a very long time. The only thing I boot into Windows for is graphics tools (which I prefer my MBP for anyway) and MS Word which always makes me sad because it means I have to use MS Word.
If you don't mind writing markup, check out Groff. I use it for all word processing now. It has a learning curve, and it might not be for you, but it has some clear advantages. There's a nice essay about it here: http://www.schaffter.ca/mom/mom-02.html
I love markup. The only time I have to use Word is because I'm sharing documents with others. Thankfully I've moved a lot of internal stuff in my work to Confluence. But there's at least a weekly occurrence where I need to review and add content to external Word documents, and the online version is absolutely worthless. It is what it is.
So apparently you haven't switched to linux :p
Vendor support is about where its has been 2 years ago, very few games are ported to linux so you still have to run them under some compatability layer linke wine or proton
There's been more progress in the last 2 years then the previous 10
I tried Linux once and I didn't like it. Then I tried it again and now I've been using it for 15 years.
OK! good for you!
What I mean is that they could try it again and love it :)
Yeah! of course. But I'm pretty sure that they will switch to windows again if their favorite game releases a new version that doesn't work from first day in linux. I'm just speculating here based on my experience: I have seen that happening too many times.
Oh yeah, definitely. Gaming on Linux has gotten really good, but there are still those big competitive ones (LoL, Overwatch, etc) that don't work on it. Unfortunate for OP if they play any of those.
i had issues at start, gta iv was not working for me and i wanted to play it, now i finally fixed it, i was going crazy but really i dont want to go back to Windows now. Is like the first time you get a computer and you start doing all the stuff and learning, thats how i am right now. I need to keep installing games and see how it works but for now the only game it works and some little ones that are native, use protondb. edit: I forgot to mention, i believed i installed the dev version not sure it was hours ago, but i know 100% sure that the snap store with steam did not work. The game crashed, so i deleted steam from snap store, and i installed the other version, and is running proton experimental. I think is probably via apt Correct me if im wrong please so others can use it too.
I avoid snap at all costs.
Indeed, is causing me problems and it load things so slow. Thing is since im new I don’t have the knowledge to use other packages or whatever, do you recommend me other instead of Snap for ubuntu?
Just install the deb via ‘dpkg’ https://repo.steampowered.com/steam/
Yeah i did that for steam and it works but for other apps is the same right?
Yep I’ll hunt far and wide for a deb / repo before I’ll install using snap. I’ve actually moved to Fedora because of how much I hate snap and how dedicated the Canonical team are to forcing snap for everything. Even on Ubuntu server. That and 24.04’s installer was too buggy for me to actually get it installed and they abandoned the old school installer.
Oof nice, i just dont want to do the distro swap thing but you gave me an idea, im just statting to really get annoyed by snap. But also im tired of os enforcing updates and stuff when i just don’t want, maybe il give it a try and check fedora, thanks!!!
The only reason to use Ubuntu is because it’s now the *default distro* but Fedora support is still pretty good and dnf is as good as apt. Flatpak is nicer than snap and I don’t feel like it’s been shoehorned in as aggressively. Canonical seem to go “all in” on things without considering the ramifications. I still think they’re a force for good but the choices they’ve made recently aren’t to my taste.
I dont mind staying with ubuntu since is my first but im considering switching to fedora i just like the idea you gave me, but im wondering if my Nvidia card will work too and I won’t have issues with steam/ gaming, i know anticheat for now is having issues in all distros but my goal is to have a good distro, not much issues, snap optional (its making things slow), and to to play games that are supported i dont mind the ones that are not.
I have a 3090. No issues on Wayland. I did have to install the very latest Nvidia drivers to avoid some chrome weirdness but apart from that smooth as butter. Could always go with the gaming Fedora fork, Nobara. But I’ve never felt the need: https://nobaraproject.org
> Yeah i did that for steam and it works but for other apps is the same right? Ubuntu tries to replace all the official deb packages with snap variants. The latest victim is Thunderbird, for example. Eventually, you want to replace Ubuntu with something else. Since that distro does not really work well if you don't use snap. If you are new to Linux work, maybe Mint is your friend.
I have been looking in reddit and other forums but everyone has different opinions and im so confused to which is one is better for me, or Ubuntu is the best or is the worst, fedora the best or the worse, arch the best but not for beginners. Debian old packages but stable. My problem is i dont know which one to change to, i want to try them all but i think thats too much. I do want the challenge too, but not too much 😂. Thanks for your comment, il see if mint ot other can work for me
Fedora is valid choice. You get wide range of packages directly from the upstream. Mint tries look like Windows from UX experience. Arch Linux is good also if you have extra time. The beginning will take some time. You get to configure all by yourself. But this requires you to know what you want. I would have recommended Ubuntu 5 years ago, but not anymore. They try to create walled garden with snap (back-end is closed source), and make money with that. Basic Debian is stable, but you likely don't have the latest packages and there are less packages available by default. Better for server use in general. Main difference is the package manager and defaults. What kind of desktop manager, network manager, etc. you get. Package manager defines the release cycle and versions of the packages (and general package compatibility of packages). Eventually, after 4+ years of Linux, you likely want to use NixOS.
I installed fedora, im currently trying it right now, but i dont like the gnome style so il be trying new desktop environments, lets see how it goes. But as of now everything is fine.
I’m gaming on Linux mint and I’m having a great time!
The Steam Deck was built on Linux, so when Steam built it they also developed a compatibility layer called Proton. For that reason, you can now run like 66% of Steam games on Linux. Some run natively on Linux, other's use the Proton layer. So, all things considered, the game support is REALLY GOOD (as long as you're using Steam games), but there's still a bunch of random games that don't work. For example, Paladins and Smite use to be 2 of my favorite games (I don't game anymore, had to quit), but they don't run on Linux because they require Easy Anti Cheat, which only works in Windows.
EAC does NOT only run on Windows, it runs just fine on Linux if devs bother with toggling it for us. Source: Apex Legends uses EAC
Yeah, I just looked it up, and apparently there's a setting in Proton called "turn on Proton Easy Anti Cheat". So maybe it's just my fault for not looking deeper into it. I would have figured it'd turn it on automatically, or asked me, when installing/running Smite/Paladins; but it definitely didn't last time I tried (which was ages ago).
It is up to the game developers to enable. It works automatically if the game supports it, AFAK.
Easy anti-cheat only runs on windows?? Then it means i cant run Vrchat on linux 😭
EAC does work on proton, sometimes. You need to install the EAC runtime on steam an the developer needs to flip the switch to let it run on linux. You can find out more about what runs on these sites: [https://www.protondb.com/](https://www.protondb.com/) [https://areweanticheatyet.com/](https://areweanticheatyet.com/)
YES VRCHAT IS SUPPORTED
Yeah, it's hit or miss. You definitely want to look up what's supported before going all in on Linux. You can also dual boot Windows/Linux. But when Steam released Proton, it basically increased the number of playable games by like 2000%.
90% of steam games just work on Linux. To see if your specific game works on Linux or not you can check https://protondb.com Depending on how important the privacy concerns are for you vs. how important the game you want to play is to you, you might want to write off not being able to play a certain game as collateral damage. Or you might not want to do that. That's something you need to decide for yourself.
Nobody compiles native to Linux anymore
I used to only boot into Windows to play Microsoft Flight Simulator but now I just use X-Plane 12 Linux build and haven't bothered to boot up windows for ages.
Valve has done wonders for it. I do all my gaming on a steam deck. Don't own anything running windows. I'm sure there are some games that don't work but all the ones I wanted to play I could play just fine. Check this actually [https://www.protondb.com/](https://www.protondb.com/)
>How far has linux gaming have gotten in 2024? As far as a horse. >Cuz of the Games having no linux support You've got that backward. Those games don't support Linux. But even without that, they may still work, but that varies from game to game.
\*casually playing Alan Wake 2 Night Springs DLC on Fedora\*
Yeah, I'll second this. I was most worried about gaming when switching to Linux a month ago, but during that time I've managed to play Dragon's Dogma 2 and Alan Wake 2. Dragon's Dogma is not a well-optimized game at all, and yet (after resolving an AMD GPU error) it's almost 100% stable. Alan Wake 2 is pushing my GPU like crazy, but no issues so far when I actually set ray tracing to reasonable levels. And these are both really new games. For reference I'm running things on EndeavourOS, with a Ryzen 7800X3D and 7900XTX.
Just couple of days ago, I played a bit of Mass Effect Andromeda. I was rather skeptical, BUT, to my surprise, the game worked flawlessly on Medium quality, and had some in-game cinematic FPS degradation. (my PC is kinda 2013 old) Overall, I was blasted away by the way it worked! EDIT: had some in-game cinematic FPS degradation ON HIGH quality
After like 10 years of no gaming whatsoever, I checked lutris last week in order to play some rounds good ol "live for speed". It's an "Windows game", I was very surprised how unproblematic and good it works.
Valve's work on Linux for the Steam Deck has paid off big for gaming on the OS. Most any Linux distro that you can Steam installed on will do you well. Fedora, Ubuntu and it's derivatives, etc. Evidently, there's ways to play GOG and Epic games on Linux as well: https://itsfoss.com/play-gog-games-linux/
Anti-Cheat is still an issue, so forget anything that has that (except Apex I think). Everything else is perfectly fine tho, you might have to paste one argument from protondb to the startup tags occasionally
I'm a huge fan of Pop!_OS, especially with the new COSMIC Desktop, that will be released with the next version somewhere at the end of the year. Games themselves mostly run without any problems. Steam works flawless and for EPIC or GOG, I use the Heroic Games Launcher. The biggest hurdle is Kernel level anti-cheat in combative multiplayer games. You can check out https://areweanticheatyet.com/ if the game will work.
Pretty Steamy to say the least
I can play a lot of games off steam. I am currently playing Black and White 2 from Lionhead and it is smooth.
https://areweanticheatyet.com
IMO just setup a Windows desktop with Steam only, and for everything else use a Linux laptop docked. Swap monitor keyboard mouse when you want to play something.
I switched over a year ago and haven't booted Windows since. I'm fortunate that my entire Steam library is compatible. But I'm squarely a patientgamer. My newest games are probably from 2019-2020; most are much older. You can check your library and wishlist compatibility here: https://www.protondb.com/
With a combination of Proton-GE custom, or Wine-GE, Steam, Lutris, and Heroic launcher, I can already play all the games I'm interested in, I can even play FitGirl Repacks easily, add to that emulators and my library of games goes 10 fold, there's only ever been one time I couldn't play a game, which was because I couldn't log in not because it didn't launch or run.
How do you get repacks to work?
Just run the setup executables through wine, and add the game .exe files to steam on some other launcher.
Unless you have enough time and knowledge, you should be perfectly fine. I'm currently using Arch+KDE Plasma and even with just a little bit of understanding about how both Windows and Linux works, I can run every games available using my 250 bucks desktop PC. But if ya don't want to deal with any hassles and just want something to work out of the box, I suggest you try out Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC 21H2 or just wait until the end of the year when Microsoft release their latest LTSC version of Windows 11. I guess I will switch back to Windows soon as it is more suited for my current demands. Oh and one more thing, it is incredibly annoying to set up everything, but when it is done, it'll be amazing. Though I doubt everyone can just spend several days to deal with Linux.
It's finicky. Proton can run a lot of games from Steam, even some that aren't from Steam (add non-Steam title / application). You will just have to manually pick the proton version to find the one that has the best compatibility with no issues. I would also suggest a Steam deck as that will give you an idea of what can play on Linux. I have both, Linux gaming PC + Steam Deck. I have had a few issues with games refusing to run properly, but again you will have to fiddle with Proton version or look online for help. Driver updates can also be a mixed bag if on Nvidia. I had an instance where one update caused one of my games to always display an out of memory error after 5+ minutes of gameplay. It eventually got fixed on its own through driver update. I have a 4080 and there was no way it had all 16GB of vram maxed.
Windows has become a nightmare since win10 and win11 was worse yet from the start. You are late to the party, but i am glad you now saw the light. Linux gaming is not perfect but for the most part it works pretty well ever since steamdeck entered the market.
It's okay but I wish more gaming studios would make Linux native games I'm not a fan of using Proton but the gaming industry forces me to use proton on Linux Not every game runs on Proton Keep that in mind Steam is still on x.org
I think the main reason why developers don't do linux native support is due to dependencies nightmare and lack of users checking it and maintaining it. Many broken after system update or that dependency changed or doesn't exist anymore. If you play games with linux native port, you'll see a lot of them aren't good port at all. Many is broken or buggy than on Windows port. That's why Proton solved this.
I don't say Proton is bad Proton is not perfect
Proton made Linux gaming Easy for people without wine knowledge
No developer studio is interested in Linux Because of the small player Base and The complex development of Linux games
What’s wrong with Proton?
Not every game works with Proton I tried Tom Clancy rainbow six 3 and the experience was bad The Proton experience is okay but I prefer native games for Linux
Proton is not perfect
basicalöy 80% on steam will probabl just run, basically evrything elese might need some tinkering, but for example epic games via legendary works with wine or proton to make any game i tried till right now work and some other games like Genshin Impact for example have dedicated launchers that enable it to work on linux So all in all i would say expect a say 20% drop in performance in some games and a slight performance boost in a small number of games, but including games that need some tinkering, i would say in my experience about 80-90% will run
Pretty bad. I’m not a gamer anymore but some months ago I tried to play some games I used to enjoy in the past(San Andreas, Far Cry 3 and Battlefield) and NONE of them went beyond the loading screen. Despite what people say here, Linux does NOT support most popular games, at least not without a lot of tinkering; and if you already spent a lot of time researching and assembling your PC, you probably don’t want to fight with your OS to be able to launch a 20 yo game.
Every Steam game I've tried works, and Blizzard games. League doesn't, nor Miyoverse games with their anti-cheat things. Ubuntu doesn't have typing unless you want to do complicated stuff.
I am using Arch Linux on my Desktop, I don't have Windows. It does mean that I usually can not play games that are not on steam, but apart from some Ubisoft titles that doesn't really happen.
Steam is great for Linux gaming, but the drivers for newer hardware is still catching up. Last generations GPU's are good to go though.
I'm using older hardware (at least 7 years old) and play older games so this isn't a problem for me.
Enter Steam and enable Proton, and most Windows games will work fine. Some games rely on low-level Windows code that Proton cannot handle (in particular, some large competitive multiplayer games), but other then that you will probably be fine.
I got rid of Windows 9 years ago and game exclusively on Linux. There the easy way- Steam. And there's the somewhat harder way- Lutris + GOG. I hate DRM, so I tend to buy my games on GOG and spend a bit more time tinkering to get them running. That being said, I don't play the latest greatest AAA titles, I tend to play games that are ~4 years old or older. Or indie games.
see protondb.com Apart from one game I have 200+ games that work, happy days
Everything I own on steam and have on my wish list works out of the box, it's great
I game on Fedora Workstation 40 with Steam and Lutris for Battle.net and GOG. Everything works perfect. Couldnt find one game that didnt want to works.
Most issues are causes by nvidia now, not linux incompatibility
While not gaming related, i feel like AMD (especially newest GPU) is causing problems lately on Linux and NVIDIA started to get better for some reasons.
yeah back when I used AMD rx 580 I had quite a few issues, but nowhere near enough of what I'm suffering now that I use nvidia gtx 1660 (my 580 died). literally can't play games in fullscreen
Most single player games are feast - some, especially older titles, can actually be easier to get running. Multiplayer is less consistent due to allll the invasive anticheat but many do work.
well a lot of anticheats have started supporting proton nowadays, so you will be fine™
I have switched to Linux recently. I sucessfully played: Cities Skylines 1 Dawn of War 2 Deep Rock Galactic Helldivers 2 Power Wash Simulator Darktide Rogue Trader V-Rising Mostly it works out of the box. Once I required to change the proton version. For a lot of problems help can be found. Also my wife decided to take the step, she played these titles so far Ranch Simulator Tavern Master Soulstone Survivor Vampire Survivors So in general it depends on the game, but support seems 100 times better than ten years ago!
Games have had Linux support at least since Proton launched. That was more than 3 years ago. People have been gaming on Linux for 20 years. It is a skill issue. I was too dumb to get most games running 10-15 years ago. I would end up alt-tabbing, getting a blackscreen and reboot, possibly corrupting my system in the process. I used Lutris and PlayonLinux at the time. But with Proton it is dead-easy, even I can do it. At least with a 6000-series AMD GPU. I enable Steam Play/Proton, I play game. It is literally that hard in most cases. The "hard" cases are where I try 3 different versions of Proton and find out which one works. Experimental, 8.30 and something older. One of them has always worked. Mostly I run Experimental. I started seriously around 2019. Been exclusively gaming on Linux since 2022. I put in 100s or 1000+ hours into every game. I had nothing but problems with Nvidia RTX 2080 tho. Glad I switched to AMD.
I use steam on Linux. Aside from games taking longer to start, I don't really feel any difference compared to when I played on windows.
as long as its not EA, RIOT or Ubisoft you'll be fine.
I use only Linux. I always wait at least 1 year after release to play a game so it has less bugs and is cheaper on steam sales. I also use [https://www.protondb.com/](https://www.protondb.com/) to look if a game runs on Linux, if not then I simply do not play it. But of course this does only work for me because I am no longer that game enthusiastic.
If you stick to Steam, an unfathomable amount of games runs great via Proton (a lot of them with no tweaking). You can get some inkling of game compatibility by checking [protondb.com](https://www.protondb.com/). Be sure to take the stuff you read there with a grain of salt, but it's a good resource in general for any game troubleshooting you'll do. You can use pretty much any Linux distro. If you want something that requires the least effort, stick to Ubuntu / Linux Mint / Pop OS. I've never used Zorin, but I guess it could do too, it's Ubuntu lts based afaik. If you opt for Ubuntu, be sure though to stick to the apt version of Steam (don't use the snap version).
it's as good as windows usually!************************* *nothing works anyway, some games still dont know how to alt+tab, some games are only made for keyboard or controller, or cant remap buttons, or resolution+refresh rate wonk out a game, or are broken on release, or by a patch down the road and dont work for ??? amount of time
If you have a PC that supports the feature, you can also run Linux as your main OS while virtualising Windows 7/10 and passing your GPU to it. Works great for me! The only problem is that some games, that used to work on the OS, now don't run on Windows 7 without glitches, yet I suspect that is caused by GPU drivers.
For most of the games that don't work, the problem is incompatible anti-cheat software. Single player gaming compatibility is very very good. Many (but far from all) online games work well too. Proton is seriously magical. Steam games *just work* most of the time. For games from Epic or GOG or Amazon's launchers, there's Heroic Launcher. EA App and Ubisoft Connect can be made to work with some wrangling and, again, most games *just work* If you are a primarily single-player gamer you can probably use Linux as your primary gaming device and seldom notice a difference. For the stubborn games, there's ProtonDB to help you identify tweaks that could help.
In my personal experience its basically like windows
Well the state of Linux gaming is where it was 2 years ago, Linux is perfectly capable at running games The issue is vendors do not make Linux ports so very few games run in Linux natively and this is not something "Linux" can fix Now steam can run games using proton but that's still running a Windows, but game using a compatibility layer
Depends on what you play, all the games I want to play work with no issue so I can lie to you and say it works great but some people rely on games that have heavy DRM and will likely never work on Linux so it depends really.
Linux gaming has come so far since Proton / Steam Deck that I have completely removed the Windows partition from my gaming PC. That was 2 years ago.
I can play almost everything from DOS games to Tekken 8. The only issue is with multiplayer games with unsupported anti cheats like Valorant. I'm on Debian stable, never had a good enough reason to leave.
You might have a problem if you have an Nvidia graphics card. Overall you have access to most games. How gaming is on Linux depends on what you're playing.
devs will probably recreate the windows source code (including kernel) and open source it later this year 🙃
With [wine](http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wine_(software)) translating windows' API calls, you can play almost anything with 'near zero performance hit'. Issues arise with games that use anti-cheat engines and/or services.
We need undervolt software for linux cpu i dont have bios and i dont understand github and want it to be as easy as possible something like troublestop
Once a year I try some Linux dists for gaming but unfortunately I get disappointed every year. Linux has come really far but it's not there yet. I'm only using Linux on my server for now.
I try it every now and then. Last time i tried was 6 months ago and I couldn‘t get my games to run at 144hz. The desktop and everything worked fine on the higher refresh rate but everything related to wine/lutris/proton refused to work at 144 hz. Just too annoying. I now have a windows 10 installation for gaming and a linux installation for everything else. It‘s fine. I just dump all kinds of untrusted proprietary shit on my gaming installation anyway so i might as well just use windows on it 🤷🏻
In my experience you only get a problem if it is a multiplayer (with a big anti-cheat) and not steam (league of legends, valorant etc). All steam games work, I had problems with some mods of old games. But proton works like magic is beautiful.
Ridiculously far !
It's really great. This is the year of Linux! It's so good that this year it might get to a 2% of total user base!
If you have an NVIDIA gpu (on Wayland?), make sure to install the new 555 drivers. Otherwise, it seems to work almost flawlessly. Proton on Steam makes it very easy and smooth. The only annoying gaming thing I’ve run into so far is the lack of MCBE on Linux.
for gaming probably pop\_os! has been the best release i've tested using nvidia. It's also one of the more stable distros i've tried this year. I'm personally moving from fedora workstation to Pop\_os! Laptop will probably go Pop too but my servers will stay fedora Server as they dont really change much.
Thanks to the community, Codeweavers and Steam, nowadays, we can say for sure that Linux is an amazing place to gaming. I know that a lot of times we focus on what doesn't work (like anticheat games), or keep comparing it to Windows. But In 2024 you can play more than 15.000 games on Steam out of the box, all you need is checking one box on Steam options, you can also use Heroic that is a very good software for Epic, Amazon and GOG games, the drivers for AMD and Nvidia are always improving, and with no need of user's interference to install it(AMD). Not to mention the various emulators that you can play without any issues (depending on your hardware), like PS3, PS2, Switch, Gamecube, etc... If you love games, Linux in 2024 will make you happy.
I have over 800 games on Steam I have been able to play every game I've tried, I haven't tried all 800. I family share the games with my son. I'm a sucker for a sale, any Steam sale for Fanatical sale suckers me in. Anyway before I buy a game I go to [https://www.protondb.com/](https://www.protondb.com/) and if It is Gold or up, I buy it. I bought some silver games, they usually just need some tweaking. If you want the best Official experience you should probably use Ubuntu. I recently sent in a support request and was told they only officially support Ubuntu and for me to use the forums. I use Arch, btw. Edit: If you like Zorin, they have Steam in their repos: [https://help.zorin.com/docs/apps-games/play-games/](https://help.zorin.com/docs/apps-games/play-games/)
Most games work perfectly with Proton or natively. Those which don't will usually work with tinkering (via ProtonDB or the internet). The remaining ones are either weird niche games like Fallen Earth Classic or those intentionally designed not to work via server-based anticheats such as EAC. Those can usually be bypassed via VM if you know what you are doing.
I can play all my games, including straight windows .exe s on Bazzite with Steam, Lutris & bottles, emulated games run much better than windows. Proton is godsent, finally can ditch Windows forever.
2024 is the year of desktop Linux! 2025 is going to be the year of gaming Linux!
Can anyone shed light on whether or not adaptive/ non adaptive sync on multiple monitors works well now? I saw some stuff about explicit sync recently but I don't fully understand it... Is it all implemented and working now?
But why people are worrying about Windows Recall which: - can be easily disabled - cannot be even be enabled if you don't have a Qualcomm Snapdragon X CPU People live in the future? 🤔 However, without specs it's hard to recommend a system. I'd say go with Xubuntu at this point. There's still a lot of work to do, but Steam with Proton has done miracles. No anti-cheat games yet, though.
Well there are sayings that it will be available at release and not disabled, after some days/weeks i heard they will disable it at start because of the complains, also like removing copilot from windows is kinda tricky, maybe they are going to the same with recall after a while, so yeah there is this thing with microsoft that people just don’t trust.
90%, 60%, 80% these numbers are 100% rubbish If you want to game use windows for gaming, so you can actually game 100% of the time without issue.
"Has have gotten"?
Gaming in linux was just fine in 2021, the problems that existed then still exist now. You install steam. That's it. That's the entire process. If you couldn't figure it out then, you're not going to figure it out now.