There were huge numbers of people that wouldn’t move to Linux because it didn’t support all of their games. Now it does, and lots of people are moving.
There are lots of people that won’t move to Linux because they have a random bit of hardware that’s not supported, or a highly-specific bit of software they need to do their job that only runs on Windows. The manufacturers wouldn’t support Linux because not enough people used it. Ah, but now we have all the gamers, so there are quite a lot of people using it.
Each domino that falls encourages the rest. Steam Linux users are more than 3x Steam macOS users, and we’re not that far from overtaking it for general desktop usage. In some regions, that’s already the case, and while the Windows 10 exodus can move to Linux easily, they’d need to buy new hardware fo use the Mac operating system. Not many companies would question providing Apple support; once Linux has a comparable share, it would be foolish to leave that out of consideration as well.
The problem is that he biggest networked games, I.e. those with the most players online, won’t work on linux. Until fortnite or apex legends or LoL allow linux machines, people will be stuck on windows so they can still play with their friends. The same thing happens with most of the sports games except those players are almost entirely on console, and they are locked in there.
It’s great that the number of games playable on Linux is rising. But the lack of mods is stopping me from switching. I tried to play Civilization 6 and it’s hard to play it without many quality of life improvement mods.
It’s definitely doable but I won’t pretend it’s a pleasant process compared to what people are used to with Windows modding, and Wine overhead can mean a large unoptimised mess of Stardew Valley/Rimworld/Skyrim mods are going to perform worse.
Can confirm the viable gaming. Some need fairly annoying workarounds that require some regular fiddling to adjust (looking at you EA/Origin with your silly launcher), but in the end it’s definitely playable.
I’ve converted all my gaming to linux including vr and couldn’t be happier! Even hardware works flawlessly these days with the exception of VR at times. I’m still struggling to get No Man’s Sky to work on my quest 3 and linux VR and thats really the only thing I’m missing but it seems close to working just needs more fiddling.
Highly recommend Bazzite for people looking for a linux gaming distribution. It’s immutable which can complicate some things but it’s mostly plug and play and impossible to ruin due to immutable nature.
Cachy does everything bazzite does but better less complicated and more friendly to new users coming from windows.
Immutable distros just add endless headache for new users and are a pain in the ass to look things up for if you don’t explicitly understand what your os is.
I use cachy on my laptop but I wouldn’t call friendly an arch based distro that during setup asks the user “which of those 19 desktop environment do you want? Choose wisely only one”
It doesn’t even have a gui to install new software (at least, I am not an expert, I chose hyprland and it didn’t install that, and when I manually installed KDE Discover and the GNOME software manager, they only show and install flatpak apps - but because I’m not an expert I might have messed something up)
Immutable distros just add endless headache for new users
I disagree here. Sure it makes copy/paste computing a bit harder but it also prevents newbies from working themselves into a dysfunctional operating system which happens way more often than you’d think. People open a port or set some system variable for one thing and never set it back breaking everything else. With immutable system new users are forced into sustainable, reversible and transparent solutions.
The issue is that immutable linux is still pretty new so some mutable solutions aren’t adapted in immutable ways yet but if you’re just gaming you should never be on that side of the bleeding edge anyway.
It is a perfect baseline OS. It gets people connected to Steam faster and easier to Windows, which is the main access to most games.
Biggest obstacles to venturing out in Linux is the documentation for everything is not built or assuming normie users. The default assumption of competancy does not exist in Windows manuals.
But even so using Homebrew in Bazzite is no more complex than in Windows.
Been a while since I used windows but afaik docs are much worse on that side of things. At least on Linux you find some command or smt that could fix your issue, many windows problems are unsolvable and completely undocumented. There isn’t even a centralized log system like journalctl on windows so every error is just an alert pop up that says nothing or just complete silence.
I’ve installed Bazzite myself. What do you mean by immutable?
I ran into an issue trying to install VPN the other night. Something about the fs being read only. I’m still yet to look into it.
That’s what immutable means in this case. You can’t modify outside of your user directory, at least not directly, on immutable distros. The files outside of your ~ home path are read-only. You can override that a few different ways, however. If your VPN has a flatpak, that’s the easiest way to get it up and running. If you don’t care about more space (minimal, if you only do it for your VPN) being used, you may be able to follow your VPN’s fedora instructions, replacing dnf with rpm-ostree. That will likely allow you to install as you can in other distros.
Feel free to ask any questions if you have any, I’m happy to help.
Thanks mate. I’m very new to Linux and still have the 101’s to learn. I’m going to see if I can find a CLI cheat sheet somewhere to memorise 😜
Oh and it was a run file that I downloaded for the VPN.
Ah, yeah, if your VPN only provides a run script you may need to try it in distrobox and see if it works there. It’s probably trying to put libraries in immutable portions of the install. Good work figuring Linux out, I know it can be a bit daunting at first but you’ll get the hang of it!
I spent 2 hours trying to work it out last night lol Eventually tried the method of downloading PIA config file and adding new VPN connection in settings and even that didn’t work. It was stuck on need authorisation when connecting. I got tired and gave up, I’ll go back to it again haha
Hmm, strange that the config file didn’t work - that’s actually how I do it (but with Mullvad and wireguard). No installation necessary if you can figure out why it’s not working.
Yeah I don’t think I’m going to worry about the app installation now. I’ll look into why the config file didn’t work. All I changed was my VPN login credentials.
The end user is seen as nothing but an exploitable resource. If a few thousand nerds don’t like it, they don’t give a shit. Until the general public wakes up to the shitfuckery, nothing will change. Just ask your mom, what she thinks about Microsoft’s data collection.
To be fair it’s not just Microsoft doing that. I was looking at gym equipment the other day and some idiots were trying to sell a fucking home gym with AI. Everyone wants to sell it, nobody wants to buy it.
In my personal experience, the only games that don’t work are those that explicitly choose not to :
Fortnite
PUBG
Roblox
Valorant
I’m not much into competitive games myself, so the only one that’s inconvenient in this list to me is Roblox. There are a few really fun games on their platform that I wish I could play on Steam Deck, as used to be possible.
Not too surprisingly, you can add League of Legends (another Riot games title) to the list. While I’m not a fan of kernel level anticheat, I do love most of these games, and it’s really frustrating how I don’t see any change in the future. After more than a year of struggling, I finally managed to get my Mint working (turns out my old mobo was faulty), but it looks like I will still have to keep Windows for basically all multiplayer titles I play.
Thanks for the tip, I should give it a try. I’m not sure I still have the energy to invest months until I start to understand stuff while sucking and losing all the time, but I will get there eventually.
The distro really matters as far as Roblox goes. I tried Arch, Manjaro, Garuda and couldn’t get it working. Ended up back at Ubuntu and it works fine now
Had to install it twice because it first installed the linux native, Proton version runs fine might need to give it an input to get past the welcome screen which was blacked out for me.
Try wine bottles, Im using that for games on Linux Mint, havent found any issues yet. You may also need flat seal to make it accessible outside the flatpak environment.
You can play Roblox through Sober. It runs the Android version directly so it’s pretty similar to what an official port would be, in terms of performance
Have you changed which version of proton it uses? It’s in the compatibility options for the game, sometimes going to an older version solves some issues.
You know about protondb already? Gives a good list of potential fixes if you come across issues, it’s been a godsend on the rare occasions something doesn’t work first try
Fair, good luck with it. Just had to figure out that a drive from a windows install was causing huge permissions issues and any game installed on it wasn’t executing. Sometimes the problems can be really obtuse.
That’s because of the awful spaghetti code that is the basis of Space Engineers. I gave up on that game years ago, because those devs were vibe coding before it was cool, and it shows.
I’ve been following this GitHub issue waiting for this change to make it into the next nvidia driver release but still suspect this won’t address HDR. Obviously first world problems for high end hardware but it’s one of the last pieces holding me back from trying Linux on my desktop
Appreciate the info! I had been trying out the new Cosmic DE that ships with pop os and I’m guessing that’s still lacking HDR but did feel very performant. I’ll have to see if switching is worth the trade off once they nvidia driver update gets released
There is like a good chunk of an entire decade’s worth of games that can’t be played on PC legitimately due to either expired licenses for music (e.g. EA Trax) or lack of support for older, disc-based DRM (SecuROM etc.).
That’s before factoring older titles that no longer work due to arbitrary changes to DirectX and the Windows kernel, which break backwards compatibility.
It wasn’t on proton but there’s a very old entry on wine. Looks like my boy Jeff’s last entry was quite recent in 2023, he rated it a silver. There’s a known bug from some graphical glitch during certain events like the protagonist meeting himself back in time and others which may prevent completion. I wonder how it works now, tempted to test it out.
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There are still lots of reasons that stop people from jumping 100% into Linux. Gaming is less and less one of them.
True, but network effects are important to that.
There were huge numbers of people that wouldn’t move to Linux because it didn’t support all of their games. Now it does, and lots of people are moving.
There are lots of people that won’t move to Linux because they have a random bit of hardware that’s not supported, or a highly-specific bit of software they need to do their job that only runs on Windows. The manufacturers wouldn’t support Linux because not enough people used it. Ah, but now we have all the gamers, so there are quite a lot of people using it.
Each domino that falls encourages the rest. Steam Linux users are more than 3x Steam macOS users, and we’re not that far from overtaking it for general desktop usage. In some regions, that’s already the case, and while the Windows 10 exodus can move to Linux easily, they’d need to buy new hardware fo use the Mac operating system. Not many companies would question providing Apple support; once Linux has a comparable share, it would be foolish to leave that out of consideration as well.
The problem is that he biggest networked games, I.e. those with the most players online, won’t work on linux. Until fortnite or apex legends or LoL allow linux machines, people will be stuck on windows so they can still play with their friends. The same thing happens with most of the sports games except those players are almost entirely on console, and they are locked in there.
I love to hear it, but only about 70% of mine work on Linux, so I’m stuck with a dual boot. 99% Linux is better than no Linux, at least.
Have you tried wine bottles? I had real problems getting anything to work right till I found that app.
Yeah, I’ve tried all of the compatibility programs.
Some will run using those, but in a very, very sluggish way.
Does anyone know if it’s possible to run VR games on Linux? I’d love t ditch Windows for the gaming pc…
It’s great that the number of games playable on Linux is rising. But the lack of mods is stopping me from switching. I tried to play Civilization 6 and it’s hard to play it without many quality of life improvement mods.
You can mod games on Linux though, some just need a bit of fiddling, just look it up. Never tried Civ 6 but people say it’s possible.
It’s definitely doable but I won’t pretend it’s a pleasant process compared to what people are used to with Windows modding, and Wine overhead can mean a large unoptimised mess of Stardew Valley/Rimworld/Skyrim mods are going to perform worse.
Let’s see some benchmarks.
Can confirm the viable gaming. Some need fairly annoying workarounds that require some regular fiddling to adjust (looking at you EA/Origin with your silly launcher), but in the end it’s definitely playable.
I’ve converted all my gaming to linux including vr and couldn’t be happier! Even hardware works flawlessly these days with the exception of VR at times. I’m still struggling to get No Man’s Sky to work on my quest 3 and linux VR and thats really the only thing I’m missing but it seems close to working just needs more fiddling.
Highly recommend Bazzite for people looking for a linux gaming distribution. It’s immutable which can complicate some things but it’s mostly plug and play and impossible to ruin due to immutable nature.
Cachy does everything bazzite does but better less complicated and more friendly to new users coming from windows.
Immutable distros just add endless headache for new users and are a pain in the ass to look things up for if you don’t explicitly understand what your os is.
I use cachy on my laptop but I wouldn’t call friendly an arch based distro that during setup asks the user “which of those 19 desktop environment do you want? Choose wisely only one”
It doesn’t even have a gui to install new software (at least, I am not an expert, I chose hyprland and it didn’t install that, and when I manually installed KDE Discover and the GNOME software manager, they only show and install flatpak apps - but because I’m not an expert I might have messed something up)
I disagree here. Sure it makes copy/paste computing a bit harder but it also prevents newbies from working themselves into a dysfunctional operating system which happens way more often than you’d think. People open a port or set some system variable for one thing and never set it back breaking everything else. With immutable system new users are forced into sustainable, reversible and transparent solutions.
The issue is that immutable linux is still pretty new so some mutable solutions aren’t adapted in immutable ways yet but if you’re just gaming you should never be on that side of the bleeding edge anyway.
It is a perfect baseline OS. It gets people connected to Steam faster and easier to Windows, which is the main access to most games.
Biggest obstacles to venturing out in Linux is the documentation for everything is not built or assuming normie users. The default assumption of competancy does not exist in Windows manuals.
But even so using Homebrew in Bazzite is no more complex than in Windows.
Been a while since I used windows but afaik docs are much worse on that side of things. At least on Linux you find some command or smt that could fix your issue, many windows problems are unsolvable and completely undocumented. There isn’t even a centralized log system like journalctl on windows so every error is just an alert pop up that says nothing or just complete silence.
I’ve installed Bazzite myself. What do you mean by immutable? I ran into an issue trying to install VPN the other night. Something about the fs being read only. I’m still yet to look into it.
That’s what immutable means in this case. You can’t modify outside of your user directory, at least not directly, on immutable distros. The files outside of your
~home path are read-only. You can override that a few different ways, however. If your VPN has a flatpak, that’s the easiest way to get it up and running. If you don’t care about more space (minimal, if you only do it for your VPN) being used, you may be able to follow your VPN’s fedora instructions, replacingdnfwithrpm-ostree. That will likely allow you to install as you can in other distros.Feel free to ask any questions if you have any, I’m happy to help.
Thanks mate. I’m very new to Linux and still have the 101’s to learn. I’m going to see if I can find a CLI cheat sheet somewhere to memorise 😜 Oh and it was a run file that I downloaded for the VPN.
Ah, yeah, if your VPN only provides a run script you may need to try it in distrobox and see if it works there. It’s probably trying to put libraries in immutable portions of the install. Good work figuring Linux out, I know it can be a bit daunting at first but you’ll get the hang of it!
I spent 2 hours trying to work it out last night lol Eventually tried the method of downloading PIA config file and adding new VPN connection in settings and even that didn’t work. It was stuck on need authorisation when connecting. I got tired and gave up, I’ll go back to it again haha
Hmm, strange that the config file didn’t work - that’s actually how I do it (but with Mullvad and wireguard). No installation necessary if you can figure out why it’s not working.
Yeah I don’t think I’m going to worry about the app installation now. I’ll look into why the config file didn’t work. All I changed was my VPN login credentials.
Meanwhile nearly 60% of Windows Games now run on Windows.
I can’t wait to be banned for playing online from linux
nice
trying to force AI into windows 11 isnt helping MS.
I can not understand why they made that decision.
The end user is seen as nothing but an exploitable resource. If a few thousand nerds don’t like it, they don’t give a shit. Until the general public wakes up to the shitfuckery, nothing will change. Just ask your mom, what she thinks about Microsoft’s data collection.
They think line won’t go up if they don’t shove it down every user’s throat. They’ve put most of their eggs in that basket.
To be fair it’s not just Microsoft doing that. I was looking at gym equipment the other day and some idiots were trying to sell a fucking home gym with AI. Everyone wants to sell it, nobody wants to buy it.
Because it allows them to collect and process more data, which can be used or sold, increasing their profits.
–> $ <–
🫱( ‿ $ ‿ )🫲
( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
In my personal experience, the only games that don’t work are those that explicitly choose not to :
I’m not much into competitive games myself, so the only one that’s inconvenient in this list to me is Roblox. There are a few really fun games on their platform that I wish I could play on Steam Deck, as used to be possible.
Not too surprisingly, you can add League of Legends (another Riot games title) to the list. While I’m not a fan of kernel level anticheat, I do love most of these games, and it’s really frustrating how I don’t see any change in the future. After more than a year of struggling, I finally managed to get my Mint working (turns out my old mobo was faulty), but it looks like I will still have to keep Windows for basically all multiplayer titles I play.
really sucks that League doesn’t work . . . I know some people who play and the fact that it used to work just sours the pain.
I guess, at least Dota 2 works? I know they are very different, but I’d say similar enough and worth a shot so long as one isn’t too tied to LoL.
Thanks for the tip, I should give it a try. I’m not sure I still have the energy to invest months until I start to understand stuff while sucking and losing all the time, but I will get there eventually.
The distro really matters as far as Roblox goes. I tried Arch, Manjaro, Garuda and couldn’t get it working. Ended up back at Ubuntu and it works fine now
For Roblox you have to use Sober
Rocket League as well; it’s the only reason I haven’t gone full Linux for gaming.
…you’d think after 8+ years of playing I’d be bored, but it’s just fun.
I would have thought that, as I have played closer to 8 hours, and I am bored with it 😂 glad it’s still fun for you though 😊
I played Rocket League yesterday on Bazzite through Steam without issues
Whaaaaaat
Bazzite here I come
Heroic Launcher (frontend for Epic Games Launcher) also worked for me on arch linux
Rocket League works on linux? Unless something changed recently, because I used to play it on my Steam Deck all the time.
https://www.protondb.com/app/252950
Rocket league is inside fortnight now.
Basically they want fortnite to be a complete (malware) gaming package with every game inside it sp youre tied to epic.
Fortunately it’s still up on Steam for us (few) legacy players
Had to install it twice because it first installed the linux native, Proton version runs fine might need to give it an input to get past the welcome screen which was blacked out for me.
Try wine bottles, Im using that for games on Linux Mint, havent found any issues yet. You may also need flat seal to make it accessible outside the flatpak environment.
You can play Roblox through Sober. It runs the Android version directly so it’s pretty similar to what an official port would be, in terms of performance
Sober is awesome, and I can actually have Roblox LAN parties with my son thanks to it.
I believe Destiny 2 also doesn’t work. I just don’t play it anymore lol
I play a lot of Space Engineers, and it randomly crashes… No idea what’s causing it.
And Space Engineers 2 just doesn’t launch for me.
There’s likely a config option that could fix things, but I don’t know it.
Every other game I play is fine.
Have you changed which version of proton it uses? It’s in the compatibility options for the game, sometimes going to an older version solves some issues.
For SE2, it’s likely a version issue. But that game is under active development, so I’m waiting on it.
For SE1, well that one is a bit of a mystery… It probably isn’t. I have a few mods.
You know about protondb already? Gives a good list of potential fixes if you come across issues, it’s been a godsend on the rare occasions something doesn’t work first try
I know. Tried a few things from that site, but no luck on SE, and SE2 is under active development so I’m waiting on it for a bit.
Fair, good luck with it. Just had to figure out that a drive from a windows install was causing huge permissions issues and any game installed on it wasn’t executing. Sometimes the problems can be really obtuse.
Check the Lutris website, there may be a custom install script there
That’s because of the awful spaghetti code that is the basis of Space Engineers. I gave up on that game years ago, because those devs were vibe coding before it was cool, and it shows.
I will say, the game is remarkably stable compared to what it was a few years ago. Especially pistons and rotors.
But yes, it still crashes randomly. About once or twice an hour.
And I got SE2 running. No crashes there, but I don’t like creative mode, so play SE2 much less.
I am excited for the upcoming SE2 survival mode
dfsdfsdfsdf
Rip Microsoft
Has support for DP 2.1 or HDR in Wayland made any improvements yet? I tried Pop_OS and had lots of issues with this
https://github.com/NVIDIA/open-gpu-kernel-modules/issues/816
I’ve been following this GitHub issue waiting for this change to make it into the next nvidia driver release but still suspect this won’t address HDR. Obviously first world problems for high end hardware but it’s one of the last pieces holding me back from trying Linux on my desktop
HDR works on KDE and GNOME desktop environments. KDE is currently the better choice if HDR support is important.
As for software:
Can’t speak for DP 2.1 since I have an AMD GPU and no hardware that uses DP 2.1 (yet).
Appreciate the info! I had been trying out the new Cosmic DE that ships with pop os and I’m guessing that’s still lacking HDR but did feel very performant. I’ll have to see if switching is worth the trade off once they nvidia driver update gets released
FYI: That’s more Windows games than run in Windows!
WTF? Why? Because a lot of older games don’t run in newer versions of Windows than when they were made! They still run great in Linux though 👍
There is like a good chunk of an entire decade’s worth of games that can’t be played on PC legitimately due to either expired licenses for music (e.g. EA Trax) or lack of support for older, disc-based DRM (SecuROM etc.).
That’s before factoring older titles that no longer work due to arbitrary changes to DirectX and the Windows kernel, which break backwards compatibility.
Huh wonder whether shadows of destiny pc port works on proton.
Might be worth checking ProtonDB, or WineDB if it’s not on steam.
It wasn’t on proton but there’s a very old entry on wine. Looks like my boy Jeff’s last entry was quite recent in 2023, he rated it a silver. There’s a known bug from some graphical glitch during certain events like the protagonist meeting himself back in time and others which may prevent completion. I wonder how it works now, tempted to test it out.