My wife (who current away from for a few months) enjoys playing SIMS 3. The only condition she has for installing Linux on her machine is if she can continue playing it there.
Now I know that Steam + Proton allows almost all games to run, but I am currently not in a situation where I can try it out on a laptop. I thought before proceeding, I’d ask the community’s experience / opinion.
Anyone have an issue with the shadows/night rendering very strangely in The Sims 3? My wife has been playing it on Windows 10 lately, and while her UI and well-lit sims or objects are all completely normal, anything in the shadows (especially the grass outside at night) looks like her GPU is fucking up. It’s a mix of purple with grainy red and green textures throughout. Almost like her shadows are only rendering in a 64 bit colour palette.
According to protondb, yes, but you have to tinker a lot and there will be still some visual bugs and issues with saving on Mint. People reported that it works the best about Fedora, Ubuntu, Manjaro. Out of the box or with minimal tweaking
My only concern would be the specs of the machine; Laptops can vary so much in terms of performance and level of support for the components within it. It would probably work easily using Steam+Proton. I play The Sims 3 using Steam+Proton on my Ubuntu Linux Desktop, the performance is pretty good! It only made my processor a warm 63C to 65C, I played on high specs with shadows turned down (shadows are always resource hog). I had a few packs enabled, but not enough to truly test my system.
The worst hurdle is always the initial Vulkan Driver processing. Depending on the quality and heat management of the laptop/PC that will be used, it might overheat during this process. Afterward, she should have a perfectly normal launch experience. One thing I noticed is that attempting to sign in will cause a fatal error and the game will need to be restarted; cloud saves are not enabled for The Sims 3. You’ll naturally have to back up her saves and transfer them to wherever they’ll be going post Mint installation.
My daughter play it every day on Mint 22 (xfce, on a old Core 3 with a GT730 Nvidia card)
It works fine !
I can confirm that it works nicely (well, as nicely as this game can work) on Linuxes. I use the DVD versions but if they run, I have no doubt Steam does.
I’ve played it before on Linux.
In general, you can just check ProtonDB, which will have an entry for the games with status reports.
It has a Gold status.
https://www.protondb.com/app/47890
In 2025, my general take for Steam games isn’t even to check any more. I can list a very few games that I want to play that don’t work – Command: Modern Operations is the most prominent. But it’s pretty rare now.
The main issue that comes up is some low level anticheat stuff used in some multiplayer competitive games, like first person shooter deathmatch games, which doesn’t necessarily like Linux. Not a genre I play any more.
EDIT: For anyone else who is interested in Command: Modern Operations, I’m looking forward to Sea Power: Naval Combat in the Missile Age coming out of Early Access, as it’s probably the closest thing to the above game and does run on Proton. Still has a lot of work left, though – the manual, which is normally quite substantial for milsims like this, is barely a few notes at this point.
If it’s through steam, I wouldn’t expect there to be any issues.
Just make absolute certain you have a backup copy of any save files before deleting your current OS, for the sake of your relationship… I can only imagine how many hours someone might have put into a game that came out in 2009. Definitely not speaking from personal experience haha
Yes it does. My wife plays it on Linux Mint using the Lutris GUI, but I’m sure there are other ways to get it working.
yes, i’ve played it on linux. runs exactly as you’d expect
Idk, but by this point Sim City 3000 should work on ReactOS! My reading mistake learned me a thing!
deleted by creator
