I know, lame post, but I wanted to say that Linux gaming has gotten soooo much better, to the point that I honestly think my games are running better than on Windows. I’ve played so many games, but notable ones are Halo: MCC, MS Flight Sim 2020, Satisfactory, Mass Effect Legendary Edition, and right now I’m starting a full playthrough of Dragon Age.
Dragon Age is notorious even on Windows for being a pain because it’s such an old game. You have to install the 4gb patch, and even then it’s a bit rocky. Not on Linux though! I did have to install PhysX but I googled it and saw it was 2 buttons to install on Linux! Now it’s been rock solid and stable, with no crashes.
Linux gaming may have a high bar to learn, but that bar is constantly getting lower! Exciting times!
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It’s gotten to the point that I buy games without looking them up first. I’ve been running Linux as my daily driver for over a decade, and buying a game used to take research. Is there a native version (probably not but it happens once in a while)? What it scoring on ProtonDB? What have the Lutris folks figured out?
Now I just buy the game and play it. Granted I don’t tend to play competitive multiplayer games so I don’t run into cheat prevention system nightmares.
Yeah me too. I only look up aaa stuff because of intrusive anti cheat or other launchers and stuff. But I don’t play much of this anyways atm
This has been the best part of how it’s developed the past few years. I’ve recently bought lies of p, baldur’s gate 3, and sons of the forest (at 1.0) without needing to look up anything. All three simply installed and ran great. So nice not having to fiddle with launch options and stuff.
It’s gotten to the point that I buy games without looking them up first.
Same here. That was how I knew things had changed.
Let’s also not forget that while Elden Ring was waiting for a patch on release day to avoid stuttering on Windows, it never stuttered on Linux due to shader precaching in Proton. I try and tell that story to people on the fence about switching. A lot of people have this idea that Linux is “catching up” – in some sense, it is the opposite, in that I can sometimes get better performance on Linux vs Windows even with Windows binaries.
I recently moved my ASUS ROG Zephyrus entirely over to Linux and it’s been seamless. I’ve been able to play every game without issue. Between my Steam Deck and the laptop, my console days may be numbered.
I have one last windows machine hooked up to my TV, using Steam Big Picture. I’m going to wait until Dragon Age Veilguard just to see a new game how quickly it becomes supported/how difficult it’ll be to set up, but if I can get it working pretty quickly, I think that’ll be off Windows
What I usually do is change every Steam game to use the “Experimental” version of Proton. As soon as I enable that, basically any game in my library becomes installable. Even non-Steam games can be added in and use Proton iirc. My success rate has been pretty good, but some games are still a little rough (mostly lack of controller support, or things like traversing dumb launchers like in GTA).
Oh yeah, the number one issues were with non-steam games, getting EA play to launch by itself. Learned a lot about Lutris and wine for that, DA:O and ME:L were both like that, but got both to work perfectly!
Linux gaming may have a high bar to learn
I disagree. 99% of the time I just click the play button and that’s it. Which is honestly more than I can say for Windows.
I think it depends, you’re right, but if anything goes wrong there’s a large cliff.
Happy path is exactly right, click “compatibility” and then run.
If anything goes wrong it’s incredibly hard to figure out why. protondb is pretty good, but a lot of times it’s like mystical “set
SOMEENVVARIABLE=someweirdthing %command%” and you’re like "Uh… okay… sure…when you Google an error message and the search engine tells you to unleash demons, start a church for Satan, and to kill your mom.
After hours of hair pulling frustration you give up, only to eventually come back and realize you pressed the wrong button
Yesterday I’ve spent an hour to figure out how to make Cities Skylines use my RTX 2070 instead of the integrated one on PopOS. For me this is the main issue I face with games. Is having a dedicated AMD card instead better?
Afaik AMD has always been better supported on Linux.
I don’t think that just by having an AMD card would solve your issue. Granted that with AMD there’s hardly any setup required.
AMD is easier for sure, but not for this. I think you may have to tell proton to use a specific card when starting up, or display. I’d start by googling environment variables with vulkan or proton to tell it which card to use. I think there was something like DEVICE=1 or something like that that you put before your command
I switched to Bazzite about 1/2 a year ago and haven’t looked backed. Better performance, more stable, I can do dev work that I’m used to without WSL and such.
The best part is I have absolutely 0 incentive to play games that come with a kernel-level rootkit anticheat too!
Have tried any VR games? It’s one of the few things I still keep Windows around for
It’s been a while so my info is likely out of date- but my vive worked perfect with Linux, steam VR support was great. Meta/oculus support was non existent.
I have not, although I might. The only HMD I used was a Windows Mixed Reality one, which they just torpedoed support on Windows anyway. I hear it works on Linux, so that might be a weekend project
I’m starting a full playthrough of Dragon Age.
If you gonna play the 3 games I can give some advice and some sadnews.
DAO is the oldest but works quite well on Linux, not a single problem.
DA2 need the fucking EA App crap bullshit to run, even on steam. Because of that crap I had a lot of problems with alt + tab, crashings, resolutions bug. To fix it I need to enable virtual desktop in the wineprefix with my monitor resolution, after that everything went smooth.
DAI again the stupid fuck EA App. If you are in the same situation than me: bought the game on Origin, not on steam, I have some bad news about mods. FrostyMods just doesn’t work and is the EA bullshit problem. With the steam version someone made a patch for linux and looks like it works.
DA2 need the fucking EA App crap bullshit to run
Yo ho.*
*At least on Windows. Not sure about Linux.
Extremely annoying have to pirate a bought game because the pirate version works better.
RIGHT??
I hate it too!
Gaming on Linux has drastically improved. I’m still cautious about buying non-native games and running them via Proton, but I am no longer worried about not having access to cool games! Proton is one of the best innovations that Valve came out with thanks to their Steam Deck. It makes non-native games feel like native titles, most of the time my save data is intact, and I can just pick up where I left off. It’s rare that I can’t use an older save if I am using Proton to play a game.
I have games I play on steam that steam says is a no go on the steam deck. I decided to try it anyways and all but one worked. (it was a MS game so I’m not terribly surprised)
With tweaking, I’m sure most games would be just fine running on the Steam Deck. It’s just a matter of figuring out the right settings.
I find older Windows games have the most issues like Oblivion or Morrowind if you install the stock standard GOTY. However, there’s an open version of Morrowind that can be run via Lutris its just a bitch to get Lutris to work. Persistence is key.
I played flight simulator once and it ran like shit on Linux and kept crashing. This is when I still had a windows boot partition so I tried playing the game in windows and it still ran like shit and kept crashing.
It’s been drop dead easy for me too in the past few years. Almost all of my gaming is through Steam and the Proton mode is like, a few extra clicks. It’s gotten to the point that I don’t even need to consult ProtonDB for runtime options now.
For old games there’s Lutris and its install scripts are a fuckton easier than trying to manually wrangle shit together (no matter what OS you’re on) which is even better
In fact, my completely non technical (and, notably, non programmer) friend noticed what my experience is like and as a result decided to dual boot on his new gaming rig. Mind blown. I didn’t even do any evangelising or shilling, I guess the best evangelism is just practicing what you (would) preach
I think dual GPU situations like laptops are sometimes a bit of a pain in the ass though from what I read.
I’m using a GTX 1080 Ti and nvidia’s legendary fuckery hasn’t impacted me
I’ve been blown away at how much support and effort has been poured into Lutris! Helping people get started who don’t know much
Ehhh.
Yeah, compared to a few years ago, it’s very much improved and a lot of games, especially those on Steam, run pretty good and in rare cases even better than on their native platform, Windows.
But the pretty much broken state of VR support combined with some annoying bugs that are very hard to troubleshoot even for advanced users, the decision by most AAA and even some smaller studios to actively block Linux clients in multiplayer games via anti-cheat measures and the usual Linux fuckery of HDR, VRR (which hopefully will get better now that Wayland is getting there) and some NVIDIA fuckery (which is also getting better) leads to the following conclusions for me:
- Linux Gaming is improving.
- If all you play are some indie titles and/or single-player titles, you may be good.
- If you want to play in VR, most popular multiplayer titles and rely on features such as HDR and VRR, you’ll still need to dual boot into Windows.
I’m very much looking forward to the day when I can fully banish Windows, at least from my private machines. I’m very tolerant towards debugging and living on the bleeding edge, if that is needed. But I don’t see the need for Windows for PC gaming to go away anytime soon for most users and, frankly, writing love letters to Linux Gaming without mentioning even some hurdles can, has and will take new Linux users by surprise and turn them off. Communicating transparently, so the user can make their own informed decisions, is a better strategy.
Linux gaming may have a high bar to learn, but that bar is constantly getting lower! Exciting times!
I’m very aware of the tinkering involved, that’s why I’m not telling people to “just install linux”, but after futzing with Wine for 15 years now, I can finally say it’s in a state where most things are plug and play. Yes, there are outliers that you kindly called out, but I’m very happy with the progress.
PC gamers are not usually averse to tinkering, so Proton might just be right for them
HDR (and VRR) have been working for me for the past few months (Plasma 6, AMD), but I still keep Windows around for some games and yeah there’s no way I’m trying VR on Linux. I think I get noticeably worse performance on Linux as well, I think there’s some issue I need to fix with that.
VR is very niche though, when compared to the bulk of gaming activity.
Niche always takes more time to mature.
Out of curiosity, would you mind sharing the resource you followed to get PhysX to install on Linux?
I’m using Lutris, and Wine is my runner. On my game I could see this button here, for Wine.
Select the arrow and hit “winetricks”. Then in there it’s a bit convoluted, but
- Install an Application
- Cancel
- Install a Windows DLL or Component
- Select physx and go!
Lutris seems really cool. I couldn’t get it to work.
I’m on Arch and I tried both the native package as well as the Flatpak version. None of them worked. Something going wrong when installing some shit in an automated installer, I dunno. I wish I could find a good guide. I’m usually handy with these things but I don’t understand the error messages, so…
I’m in the same boat. I installed Bazzite oh my desktop as well as on my Legion Go. Everything runs out of the box. Except Lutris.
I just don’t get it. 😔
I’ve been using Bazzite for about 2 months now (daily driver for about a month and a half) and Lutris came preinstalled for me. I’ve had zero problems using it, I have battle.net games and EA app (fuck that app BTW) games installed and it just works for me.
Was it not preinstalled with your initial installation of Bazzite?
Nevermind. Found out it was a failure on my part. By default it does not show un-installed games. Because I had no games installed, it always showed no games. And I assumed it was broken.
Trial and error, I feel your pain. I’ve learned a lot since switching and I’m loving it tbh!
Glad you got it figured out!
Yep, all my games just work, to be honest it takes me less time to setup my gaming rig on Linux than windows, and it feels solid as hell. If I have a Linux PC I can get steam in a few seconds and start playing just like that!
What about on NVIDIA?
Nvidia was a pain before when I did it myself, but I did get it to work. I switched to PopOS though, and it made nvidia so. much. easier! There’s just a separate download for it
Interesting… So Pop OS favors NVIDIA?
I wouldn’t say they favor it, but they have a standard build/iso and one that has Nvidia drivers already set up and ready
IIRC it just defaults on Ubuntu’s handling for close source Nvida drivers (though its been a while since I used pop os so that could be out of date)
Next time I build a gaming machine it will be Linux based. 2x GPU’s and I’ll do a IOMMU passthrough to a Windows VM for any games that I still need it for. I have several machines and all but two are linux currently. My recording studio is Windows because I have too much invested in software at this point. And this rig which is my main\gaming pc. And if it wasn’t for some anticheat systems I would wipe this thing right now.
Good luck. My experience with vfio is that it works…ish. There are a lot of compromises still, depending on what kind of setup you really want. I’ve effectively said now that if the game doesn’t work on Linux (which now, like you mentioned, is anti-cheat-related), then it’s not worth playing. Windows Recall was enough to finally break me of this “Windows safety blanket” that I’ve had for 25 years of trying to game on Linux. With Proton and Glorious Eggroll’s ge-proton, everything effectively just works. And one day, all this anti-cheat nonsense will be a thing of the past.
I’ve done it in the past. It’s always a bit of work. But I really only need it for a handful of things at the most.
