At the same time the small amount of games that don’t support Linux also happen to be some of the biggest and most popular ones.
Good même but you can very much run lol on Linux. It’s weird around the edges especially in the launcher but it’s definitely playable.
Didn’t they transition it to the same kernel-level antichest that Valorant uses? IIRC, that anticheat absolutely refuses to let you run it on Linux.
AFAIK there is a work around to run MacOS in a VM and run the Mac client which doesn’t have kernel anti cheat, but meh, why bother?
Yeah, but it is a PITA to setup a MacOS VM. Even if you get it working, it will probably be unsupported in a year or 2 because of Apple Silicon. All that effort just to play league lmao
Couldn’t you just run windows in a vm at that point?
They switched the ac to use the vanguard kernel level ac so the workaround doesn’t work anymore.
Since when?
As far as I can tell without direct intervention through anti-cheats or other means you can run anything on linux.
Joke’s on you, I play Dota.
🤮
Good thing I don’t play mtx/fomo games.
It’s more competitive ones. And yes, I know they come with that shit too but not all FOMO games are pvp games and Linux has plenty of working multiplayer games with that shit.
What competitive ones? Counterstrike and quake are on Linux just fine. R6 siege is cool, but the only reason you can’t run it on Linux is because the publisher is specifically blocking that.
Obviously not Valve titles. lol I don’t even know why you’re asking though, you know full well which games we’re talking about.
Nope. I don’t. You bring it up like there’s a competitive game that matters we’re missing out on. Is it the new Tribes?
Oh please save me the bad faith crap. Just look over at Epic. And next you say “they don’t matter”, to which I say “none of them matter”, since it is a purely subjective opinion to have.
LMAO!!!
There are far better wrong answers, and you raced straight to the bottom. 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
Yeah, I won’t be looking over at epic.
Tbh neither do I, Debian runs all the games I personally want. My point is its not for everyone.
Oh noes, my lootboxes!
Frankly the only game I haven’t been able to play (besides a couple of old MMO private servers I couldn’t get running) has been Fortnite, and there’s frankly no reason it shouldn’t run on Linux already, Epic just sucks
It doesn’t run because Tim Sweeny is a salty jerk who had one negative interaction with a Linux user (the Linux user just posted a rice and he was pissed he couldn’t do that on Windows)
Yeah, he’s a shithead. “We just don’t have enough developers” my ass
Linux users: please release your software on Linux
Tim Sweeny: we don’t have enough developers
The over 800 employees Tim Sweeny fired:
It doesn’t run because Tim Sweeny is a salty jerk who had one negative interaction with a Linux user (the Linux user just posted a rice and he was pissed he couldn’t do that on Windows)
It wasn’t even a rice, just panel on the left side.
At the same time the small amount of games that don’t support Linux also happen to be some of the biggest and most popular ones.
Minecraft? CS2? Dota 2?
I’m honestly at a loss as to why they are so popular. I barely remember the last time I enjoyed a AAA game. The only notable exceptions would probably be Baldur’s Gate 3 and Dishonored, which both work. Personally I haven’t run into any games that wouldn’t work and as much as I’d love to dismiss those (fucking atrocious) games, I get your point about it preventing popular adoption. Sadly it’s not something Linux can easily fix, as long as companies insist on using windows specific versions of anti cheat software (despite Linux versions of the same stuff existing) just so they can have kernel access to your machine.
Lots of people really enjoy competitive games. Competitive multi-player games attract the most cheaters, resulting in the strictest anti-cheat measures (which still barely work, honestly).
Linux gamer for 3+ years now. I rarely, rarely have any issues with anything at all, and most of those are solved by switching to Proton GE or Experimental. Most of the time I think stuff actually runs better than on Windows.
But to be clear, I don’t really play anything multiplayer. The sole exceptions like Civ VI have worked perfectly fine, but my understanding is that a big reason these larger multiplayer games don’t work is their anticheat.
Yep. For games, it is usually some crappy anticheat, for other applications (outside games) it is crappy licence managers. Or really, really inept programmers. Professionally inept programmers.
I’m about a year in. One interesting thing is that older games seem to work better with Proton than they do on Windows. For example, after installing Psychonauts on Windows I had to Google why it wouldn’t load and try a few ini changes until I found what worked. On Linux, I just started it and it worked with no issues.
NVIDIA user or AMD for GPU?
AMD. That was an early switch I made since the nvidia experience on Linux sucks (at least compared to AMD). Minimally it’s the difference between juggling poorly supported drivers and not dealing with drivers at all (since AMD’s are in the kernel), but I’ve gathered that there are many compatibility issues as well.
Ah. NVIDIA is why I haven’t made the commitment to tux yet
nvidia user here, made a “soft switch” to linux some time ago, and got to say the current 555 series drivers made a world of a difference. Most games just work.
Haven’t made a full switch due doubts with music and video production stuff. But, slowly testing my way in and dualbooting between OS’s in the meantime
Does RTX work? I’m running a 3070
yep. Tested GOG version of Cyberpunk and RT, DLSS, and all that work. Other than that, games with RT or DLSS I’ve tested and deemed working: Observer (RT&DLSS), Enshrouded (DLSS), Warframe (DLSS).
I have a 3090.
Hmmm well that is promising… I’ll keep that in mind whenever Microsoft kills windows 10
There’s no reason to, there’s nothing wrong with Nvidia. I game on it without any issues. Most people on Linux use Nvidia.
It is decidedly more work, particularly for those not familiar with Linux. But you’re right that there aren’t necessarily other issues – it all comes down to the particular titles one wants to play. ProtonDB is everyone’s friend.
For me personally, I love the simplicity of the all-AMD approach, and as I’m only a 1080p gamer, I really don’t need the nvidia horsepower anyway.
Ah yes the bias of: “its works for me”….
But to be clear, I don’t really play anything multiplayer.
I tried to avoid such bias by being clearer about what I play. I don’t think it’s biased to suggest single player games are more likely to work without issue.
Likewise, if you’re on nvidia, you’re more likely to have issues.
Did you have a different experience? Or none at all and just assumed it only works for some?
Been gaming on linux for the better part of last couple of decades, can agree its in a muhc better place now and its a rarety to find a title that doesn’t work through proton. There are some but not a massive amount.
Kinda ironic but out of the ones that don’t work for proton, sometimes they work via wine instead
And some games want an older version of Proton (like River City Girls), so it’s not always intuitive what the fix might be, but there’s several options to improve compatibility, these days.
Now that ntsync has been added to the upstream kernel for the next release, it will only get better.
better part of last couple of decades
You mean like the lock down period
Kinda ironic but out of the ones that don’t work for proton, sometimes they work via wine instead
Kinda weird rather, because Proton is basically wine + a lot of profiled tweaks for the titles. With wine you usually have to manually figure out tweaks or use third party installers, like through Lutris, which often also are somewhat wacky.
Exactly but since it worked, i am not complaining 😅
Damn near anything good works under proton. Cyberpunk 2077 is basically flawless out of the box. No issues with a lot of other newer games.
Ironically some of the older ones like Fallout 3 need a little bit of hackery to get the radio working
Does the RTX and DLSS work in Cyberpunk 2077 on Linux?
As of a couple months ago, the ray tracing also works in Linux when on AMD.
I was able to get it working perfectly fine. It was dicey around a year ago and required some run flags. Now it runs perfectly fine (for me at least)
I don’t understand this infographic at all…
I think I got it.
The right side is showing what percentage of games can be played at each level. Platinum is flawless, and borked is… borked. The percentages below that show that 84% of games are super playable, 95% if you’re willing to settle for silver.
The outside ring is the one that shows these percentages.
I’m still unsure of the center rings though.
The rings from top to bottom:
ProtonDB Medals (ProtonDB’s appraisal: How does it play. You may need to tinker.)
ProtonDB Click Play (ProtonDB’s new appraisal: How does it play without any tinkering)
Deck Verified
Chromebook Ready
Proton is like magic. I remember when gaming on Linux only worked for some rather old games. Now you can almost buy anything from Steam and expect it to work on Linux. What surprised me the most was that even Enderal, an excellent total conversion mod for Skyrim, just worked. The same goes for the newest Hitman. I expected that I have to do some tinkering, but no. You click play and that is it. I doubt that any of these games where ever tested on Linux by their developers. That they all work so well shows how good of a job the developers of Proton, DXVK, and Wine are doing.
What software do you use to organize Skyrim mods and profiles on Linux? Asking from absolute ignorance.
I don’t know. I never was much into modded Skyrim. The last time I played Skyrim was around 2012. Enderal installs like any other Steam game and comes with its own launcher. I only played Enderal because it was recommended to me since I really liked Gothic II and story focused games. I now also highly recommend it. This mod is better than at least 90% of games released in the last 10 years.
I use MO2 with quirks. I’m trying to remember what all I did, but I think I renamed MO2 to SkyrimLauncher.exe so steam would open MO2. Then I would launch Skyrim (skse) from there!
The quirks were you couldn’t install inside of MO2 because it wouldn’t connect to Nexus. The other thing was if I was installing a lot of mods or doing a lot of interactions in MO2 it would get slower and slower. Restarting it fixed that.
All that said I put a ton of hours into a 500ish mod game without issues!
You don’t want to count Silver as working well. Still incredible though.
Why? From my experience, many Silver games do work with minor tweaks. Some might have issues, but I wouldn’t discount them all.
By definition Silver means some stuff is broken even with workarounds. Gold is where the performance and functionality works near perfectly after some workarounds. You’re right, some Silver games do work fairly well, and the rating may or may not be accurate. But I wouldn’t count most of them to the total of well supported games.
That’s the definition but in practice silver could mean anything. For example Pico Park is rated silver but has a lot of recent positive ratings.
Out of everything i play, the only game holding me back is Destiny 2, which was explicitly refused support for.
Everything else works phenomenally well, and in some rare cases, performs a lot better.
The only struggle point is heavily modded games with tools that assume i’m doing this on windows, but times are changing too
Like The Elder Scrolls? I’ve been paying Oblivion for a while with a ton of mods using a mod manager and I don’t know how to run this in Linux.
https://github.com/rockerbacon/modorganizer2-linux-installer Small caveat at the moment though is that Protontricks is borked and requires a more up to date version than what’s on most repos and flathub. I used the pipx install for Protontricks and that one worked though, but I think the beta branch on Flathub has an updated version now as well, which hopefully goes stable soon. Nexus is also working on a new cross platform compatible mod manager now, but that’s going to be far away.
For a lot of other games r2modman + Thunderstore are also working natively on Linux. Games like Stardew Valley have a native mod manager like Stardrop.
Destiny is garbage.
Yes. It’s so garbage I wrote a master’s thesis on how shit it is. If I didn’t have over 1,000 hours in the game, it would have been substantially harder to do this.
Ooohhh, master’s thesis!
I paid 20 grand to be poor
I don’t recall asking for your input
Welcome to a community post on the Internet! You don’t need to ask.
72% platinum and gold, 86% plat, gold and silver. I’m honestly surprised that this isn’t higher because almost everything I play just works (I do have a lot of random games in my account from humble bundles and such, so I don’t even play a good amount of them).
Funny enough what I’ve been playing recently is Minecraft. Downloaded the Prism launcher, linked my account, installed the game and the BetterMC modpack which includes pretty heavy lighting shaders, get an easy 120fps with absolutely zero tinkering besides telling the game to use my systems OpenAL rather than the bundled one, as that was causing a crash. I do have a relatively beefy system so the performance isn’t what I’m impressed by, moreso the fact that this was all up and running in 5 minutes.
Ok, Minecraft is in Java though, cross-platform per default.
Yes of course this is a huge factor, but modding games in general tends to be a sticking point. The fact that I immediately had a heavily modded game up and running via a third party launcher with only one minor issue, which was fixed via a single checkbox, was just a really nice experience.
A lot of reports on ProtonDB are ancient. I would say literally 99% of games work nowadays out of the box.
5 MINUTES to install and play a game? Including a bug fix? By a knowledgeable person?
That probably translates into an hour for me, if my googling gets lucky, or complete frustration more likely.
Damnit, I was hoping I could move to Linux, I’ve used it before, even had it dual-booting with Windows a couple of times, but I never got comfortable with it.
I just downloaded the .deb and installed it without having to change anything.
But don’t get me started on my problems I had with that f…ing microsoft account to get onto our shared server. Somehow I am too dumb for that (same on the tablet).
Oh my god don’t get me started, the last time I tried that, it took me over two fucking hours to get the Microsoft account to recognize that I owned Minecraft. Apparently I bought the game so long ago that it failed to unify my accounts correctly so the separate “enter your password” screen just failed to load? I had to reset my account and open an entire new outlook.com email address just to link my purchase to the account I already have.
Fuck those losers who succeeded only in making the game worse to encourage platform lock in so they can replace Java with Bedrock.
Make it comfortable?
I’m not trying to be antagonistic.
I guess when the pain of Windows becomes high enough that it’s worth the need to understand more about your computer, it’s parts, and it’s functioning I’ll have to transition. I don’t like having to “make things work.” I had difficulty getting Radar, Sonarr, Docker, and Overseerr to run in Windows. It’s still not configured right.
What the hell chance will a guy like me have to not be frustrated working in a Linux environment? I’m willing to try hard things. But it doesn’t come naturally.
If you got those running in windows, given they’re built for a Linux environment (I guess you either used docker or windows subsystem for Linux), then you’re eminently ready to move to Linux.
Oops, yes that entirely true lol
I’ll be honest, I’m still screwing around trying to get a working *arr stack on my pi4b, but then I’m also looking for more stuff on there and having it deployed as a network device automatically with dimension hosting, DNS, DHCP and stuff like that with a glutun VPN securing it all… So yeah :-D
The OpenAL issue was actually pretty easy to diagnose and fix. The crash comes with a pretty detailed log indicating the game encountered an issue when OpenAL was trying to load. And, lo and behold, staring at me was a checkbox in Prism Launcher’s options to “Use System OpenAL.” I ticked it and haven’t had a single issue since, my guess is that the launchers bundled version of OpenAL just didn’t play nice with my system.
I’ve even manually added a few mods since installing, still no issues.
I do understand where you’re coming from though, I personally enjoy tinkering and problem solving almost as much as actually using my computer. It’s a learning experience for me and makes my computer really feel like my own at the end of the day. However I totally get that not being everyones cup of tea.
I was so surprised that I was able to get Genshin running on my steam deck through wine. I remember when the deck came out, everyone was saying that games that use anti cheat software wouldn’t work on the deck. But both Genshin and Elden Ring work on the deck.
I think Genshin removed their anticheat after it was used by ransomware
The anticheat ignores its kernel module fails to load on Wine since v3.8, otherwise the AC is still there. Same goes for ZZZ. The ransomware does not require user to have GI installed to run so GI removing the anticheat would do nothing, MS had to unsign vulnerable driver. Idk if they did.
The ransomware does not require user to have GI installed to run so GI removing the anticheat would do nothing,
True. Maybe MS just doesn’t want to sign their driver anymore.
Oh really? Then why does it still need permission to run on Windows? I thought that was due to the anticheat ?
that use anti cheat software wouldn’t work on the deck
Not all anti cheat mechanisms are the same, but the worst ones are kernel-hooking ones for multiple reasons. Besides security, stability and privacy issues with them they also have compatibility issues with any OS they weren’t built specifically for
Now that’s great to know, I’m not on genshin anymore since they are very cheap with rewards, but I still love Star Rail and been playing ZZZ, was afraid of switching.
I have only tried Genshin, but it runs fairly well. The biggest issue I’ve had is major stuttering when I’m playing on battery. Plugged in, there’s no stuttering. Not sure why.
ZZZ works on Linux. HSR is … complex. If you want more info dm me.
For me it’s less positive, but still quite impressive!
Does this mean 58% of my games would just work and rest need tinkering or are broken?
From my experience, only “borked” are without hope. (Almost?) All of the silver games work on my deck, I can’t remember the last one that didn’t work. I’ve had one verified game that doesn’t work at all, I believe square enix borked it with a patch (because they released the "hd"version and didn’t want to support the previous one, aka they deliberately broke the working version)
Lot of indies and linux compatibility is high in my priorities.
The tier # system will lean towards negative results compared to Plat/Gold etc.
How do you generate this?
Just link your account at Protondb and go to the dashboard. https://www.protondb.com/dashboard
You just log in with your Steam Account to ProtonDB.
Thank you
I’m not sure why, but playing Final Fantasy XIV worked better in Linux using Wine than it did on Windows. There’s a joke about net code in the game such that all effects take a half second or so to register, so there’s always a little lag for better or worse.
On Linux, somehow things just registered when they happened on screen. Took getting used to!
I launched might and magic 9 on my steam deck and it fucking worked straight away. It’s a 2002 game that was barely working even back then. I didn’t have to do anything today get it to work. SHIT JUST WORKS
Borked is Destiny 2 and Wildstar (whose servers are permanently offline)
I miss Wildstar! I played at launch and loved it, But the bots and issues around launch caused my friends to stop playing after a month or two. I kept going for a while but eventually stopped as well. So much cool lore and world building in that game.
Destiny 2 is my only hangup at this point.
