I remember when Proton launched it was like magic playing games like Doom and Nier Automata straight from the Linux Steam client with excellent performance. I do not miss the days of having the Windows version of Steam installed separately.
In the time I have been a Linux gamer, it has gone from “here is a list of games that work in Linux” to “here is a list of games that do not work in Linux.” Which some dictionaries define as “progress.”
That’s a perfect way to put it. From constantly relying on ProtonDB to occasionally checking areweanticheatyet.com.
Oh I’d never even heard of that second site haha.
That’s crazy! When I was last trying to run Linux full time in ~2014, you had WINE and then a commercial version of WINE (not by the WINE devs, but because WINE is licensed the way it is and is open source…) that would run a few more things, but I don’t remember what it was called.
So glad to hear it’s progressing this quickly and far.
a commercial version of WINE
That would be CrossOver by CodeWeavers. They’re actually a huge contributor to upstream Wine and have worked with Valve (and I think Collabora?) several times over the past few years. I’m kind of tempted to buy a copy of CrossOver to support them even though I’d never use it, lol
I think that a good chunk of Apple’s GPTK is based on the work that CodeWeavers have done, which has made me tempted to shell out for Crossover too. £60 is a fair old chunk just to play games on my Mac though.
That’s right! That’s what it was. Seemed like WINE with some pre-set tweaks per game, but they were clearly doing a lot more.
I started out in 2014, and pretty much what I did was look to see if there was a Steam logo on the Steam store page to indicate Linux compatibility. With Proton in the last few years, I just don’t really worry about it. I will say my tastes have just about always lined up with the kinds of games, the kinds of studios, that are likely to publish for Linux, the nerd shit like Kerbal Space Program and Factorio. I don’t play Call of Fifa, Modern Fortnite or whatever.
What about Red Theft Autoredemption, or Overwatch of Legends? 😆
In 2003, it was my dream to play FF7 in Linux. In 2019, my dream came true. Thanks Proton, Codeweavers, Wine, Valve, et al for helping me finally put down Sephiroth right.
There’ve been good PlayStation emulators in Linux since long before 2019.
Very true, but the graphics and performance aren’t nearly as good as the PC version.
“Did Loki port it?”, which was a very short list, plus a few exceptions like Quake.
Imagine a completely different OS running software made for your OS better than your actual OS could. This is Microsoft Windows
Not only OS - written using 3D APIs closed source available only for your OS.
Anticheat is about to force this progress backwards years as publishers push drm
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Publishers who do this make shit games anyway.
As someone who really wants to see desktop Linux grow, I try not to think like this because I know others care about these games…but goddammit if I don’t completely agree with you on the inside. I do not understand the obsession with these
gamesproducts, they’re exclusively designed to keep you playing and paying for as long as possible to avoid fomo for digital garbage.There are a tiny handful of non-live service games that still use anti-cheat, and most of those have already enabled support for Proton. Dragon Ball FighterZ is literally the only exception that I can think of, and even that’s playable offline IIRC.
Are we watching a “changing of the guard” where the studios that used to bring out the hits are dying, shedding their talent and new indie projects are blooming in the fallout? I remember Bioward being a fantastic studio during the Mass Effect (and prior) years. They’re a shell of their former selves now. I see this happening with Bethesda now too, although Starfield is not that bad. It’s just nowhere near as epic and fun as Skyrim was. Then you have studios like CDPR that seemed poised to take the crown with CP2077, and although it’s a great game, they certainly fumbled hard at launch. It’s an interesting time in the game industry.
Hey pro tip, if a game isn’t nearly as epic and fun as one that was released like 12 years ago, then its OK to call it a bad game. Cuz that’s certainly not good
To be honest, I think if I were to go back and try Skyrim now, I’d probably feel pretty similarly about it as to how I do about Starfield. I still enjoy gaming, but it doesn’t enthrall me quite the same as it used to. Part of adulthood I suppose.
I would say the same, but only because the standards of current Gen games has definitely gone up since then. There just weren’t games like Elden Ring and TotK around when Skyrim was released
Should I give TotK another chance? I just find the building mechanic very tedious, even with Autobuild. Is the storyline really worth it? I’ve gotten as far as beating the first four temples, if that helps.
It’s not about the storyline at all. If you don’t enjoy the mechanics, you won’t enjoy the game. I’m in the same boat - I’d really like to like it, but I play games mainly to tell a story, BOTW and TOTK don’t deliver on that front.
Try playing Yakuza
Indie Devs haven’t even begun to fully leverage all the new tools offered by recent Blender / Unreal / Godot.
And AAA studios are too big to leverage them effectively.
I think we’re going to see continuing leaps forward in workflow and tools, allowing smaller teams to make whatever they want at any scale. We’re kind of already there honestly, it just about applying it all meaningfully.
I’ve recently picked up CP2077 again and let me tell you the experience is night and day. The gameplay is actually fun now and the story is also enjoyable since they got rid of the game breaking bugs. While the current version does not excuse the extremely subpar launch version I don’t think CD Projekt Red deserves a spot on your list.
A company that definitely fits your criteria is Blizzard. All the people I know that worked there quit and a lot of them told me about a huge brain drain that was happening which judging by what we know about the code of Diablo 4 sounds reasonable. At this point the company only exists because of nostalgia and even the gamer dads are getting more and more frustrated with them.
I still have faith in CDPR, they had one excellent game, one that they fucked up a bit and few relatively unknown but overall good games.
You know, I really do too. I actually had a lot of fun with CP2077 when it came out, but had to quit on the last 1/3 of the game because of a permanent sound glitch. I am very excited to jump back in.
There’s yet to be a good major fps game from an indie studio. Once that happens maybe there’s a chance, but fps games make up a massive portion of the industry
Actually most anticheat now also supports Linux with Proton
And to say that there used to be a time when “Linux gaming” was an oxymoron as it at most meant SuperTuxKart or mindlessly watching
glxgears.Mindlessly watching glxgears is the greatest experience a GPU can render.
They’re so smooth when you buy a high end graphics card.
Windows gamers will never understand the joy that
glxgearsgave us
I remember when Linux gaming meant Nethack.
I mean, Nethack is still great…
Is there something like
vulkangearsnow?vkcubeexists in most repositories I guessEdit: Looks like there is a vkgears too
vulkangears
I know that the vulcan-tools package has
vkcubein it. Someone did make vulkangears as an example, along with some other examples, but I don’t think its a published package in any distro repos so it’d need to be manually compiled to run it.
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Been playing Warcraft 3 / DotA and Counter-Strike on Linux since 2005. Still playing Dota and Counter-Strike. Are there other games worth playing? 😂
True I just moved my gaming PC to Linux and wow!! Almost all of my games run on Linux. Thank you for everyone working so hard.
This is the main reason, other than gog’s lack of support, for not going full Linux.
You can use a launcher like Heroic to play games you have on gog or epic.
Also Lutris. I haven’t actually tried Heroic so I don’t know how they compare, but Lutris is a pretty good launcher.
I buy mostly GOG games (like 90%) and with Heroic it’s quite easy.
But it’s not as good as simply using steam
Nope, not yet. But it’s getting there. And at least for me it’s worth it.
Also thank Valve and buy a Valve game.
Or a Steam Deck. :)
Honestly, if you have the extra money, buy it. It’s just a great device.
I remember using bare wine to play games before proton. You would have to go and find the exact libraries needed to run the game, install them one way or another, pray a bit, and maybe the game will run with acceptable fps. If it ran at all.
And these days its just plug and play. Dont remember the last time I had to install a game dependency with proton, from steam or otherwise.
Freaky to read your account. I switched to ubuntu desktop like 3 weeks ago, bought a gpu, installed steam (ok, I had to reinstall from apr since snap didn’t work well), 2 days ago I installed cyberpunk and it runs at 80 fps mostly high-ultra settings without one crash so far, no special boot parameters. (I had to edit the exe today so it wouldn’t force controller config though)
It’s insane how far linux has come in the last 5 yrs. I hope it goes on like this. In opposition to amd, linux actually is our friend. :)
I was wondering that too. As far as I know, when it comes to Linux, AMD and Intel are the way to go. Nvidia are the ones who generally tend to suck on linux (although I never had problems with my nvidia gpu, its pretty old tho)
In this case, you need to take my comment more literally.
AMD does a lot better than nvidia but amd still makes a lot of business decisions that are not consumer friendly. For example pricing their gpus a lot higher than they used to instead of more competitive to nvidia.
They do good but in opposition to open source, it is still a company and therefore not our „friend“. Open source in contrast is made by us, therefore undeniably more our friend.
It was a figure of speech, not meaning to dump on amd.
I remember back in the day I thought one of my favorite games, Elite: Dangerous, would never run on Linux. I dualbooted for a while just so I could play it. After a while I stopped playing it much and figured I could get rid of Windows, so I did. About a year later the community came out with a complicated setup you could perform to get it running on Linux through wine. It’s just as you said, lots of manually finding and installing libraries, tweaking environments, and eventually got it working (jankily) at a pretty mediocre framerate. I thought that was the best I was going to get. Another two years and it was running seamlessly on proton with no configuration or tweaking at all. It really is incredible what Valve has done for Linux gaming.
most shit was literally click and play
I still remember installing the sims 3 on wine. This was before proton, before the sims 4. I started by looking the game up on winehq - the results were not promising. The rating was not exactly garbage, but still runs with problems. Some brave soul had come up with installation instructions though.
So I try to install the game using those instructions. Took me about 40 minutes of installing things like ms c++ runtimes. Then when I tried to run the game? Crash. Doesn’t work. So I went back to WineHQ and found another instruction (luckily there were multiple ppl that made the game work)
After following it for another hour, the game still didnt work. After googling the error for some time im pretty sure I just downloaded some random dll that was missing from runtimes and put it with the game. Voila, the game ran! Laggy, but playable. Took only about 3 hours of research and tinkering.
Today? I’m pretty sure I can just download the game and it will run, just like that, no config required.
Valve literally went “you know what fuck the profits we need off Windows” and they did what nobody else has done before.
I’m not sure how Valve is seen to forfeit any Windows related profit.
They are still thoroughly supporting Windows. A Windows gaming system will have Steam on it, and most gamers still prefer Steam while on Windows.
When Windows 8 happened with the Microsoft store, Valve saw the writing on the wall for the eventual problems they would face, and did SteamOs and SteamBoxes. However, not much skin off their back, as they didn’t “bet the company” or anything. It then pretty much let those efforts die off when the Microsoft Store wasn’t quite the imminent existential threat it looked to be. However, the Xbox-ification of the Windows ecosystem may prove to be a more imminent and dire threat now that Microsoft realized that “hey, we actually do have a gaming brand that enjoys some popularity and is basically just a Windows box already”.
So Valve saw that the Nintendo Switch was such a hit and extrapolated to PC space. They could have had a horribly awkward device running Windows, which has forever sucked at serving this form factor and is not even vaguely amenable to ‘total controller control’. However they decided to revive the SteamOS efforts since it was moderately close to enable them to actually deliver a pad-first UI for a handheld, with Valve branding front and center rather than Microsoft.
So the closest I can see to that claim is that Steam Deck opted out of supporting a handful of games (that also likely don’t work well on the relatively low end specs anyway) rather than trying to make a Windows hand-held work against all the design points of Windows.
I think the implication is that pursuing Linux development has a high opportunity cost, that, if they just bought into Windows as the foundation, they could’ve used that time to build HL3 or whatever
It’s reinventing the wheel, kinda
What profits did Valve say that to exactly? They were shipping a device that didn’t have an existing OS that worked for it. I know companies have been shipping handheld PCs since the 90s but they never took off because the experience of Windows on a mobile device sucks, full stop.
I’m very happy they did this and it will help lots of things, but it’s about as altruistic as Apple making WebKit open source. A massive boon to the community that did help everyone, but the goal wasn’t altruism. It was to create a software solution where one didn’t exist to improve a for-profit device.
Plus, not having to pay Microsoft for OEM Windows licenses helps too.
You are looking too short term. Valve has been very concerned about Microsoft for a long time (maybe a decade now?). They have traditionally been dependent on the Windows platform while Microsoft has a competing built-in store and the Xbox product line. This means that they are dependent on one of their biggest competitors. If Microsoft wasn’t concerned about anti-competitive legal action they probably would have smited them already.
Especially with macOS dying for gaming and iOS having no third-party stores they have made multiple pushes into Linux as a platform where they don’t depend on Microsoft. While the Steam Deck has been very successful, they have already blown money of failed attempts in the past and running Windows on the Steam Deck would likely not be a huge cost (bulk licenses are cheap and they are spending a lot of money on Linux development).
So whether or not they are making more or less money in the short term doesn’t appear to be Valve’s motivation. Their primary motivation is to unlock themselves from Microsoft, whether or not that is best for profits right now.
being on the hook for any license fees cuts into yacht decor. linux sets them free except required source releases. everyone benefits
https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Compiling_under_Linux
plus, more yacht decor
I agree but I don’t think that contradicts anything I said. This is definitely a long term plan to end up with a gaming focused OS that people can use instead of Windows to reduce their reliance on MIcrosoft. It’s definitely a long term decision.
However in the short term, a Steam Deck with Windows would have been far less exciting. Developing WebKit also was clearly a plan for a much better web landscape too and cost far more than Safari ever generated until it was in iOS.
I only take issue with this being cast as some altruistic act, which it isn’t. It’s just one of those situations where the goals of the community and the company align, because the company is very focused on delivering a good user experience above all else. This is a great move for everyone involved and Valve deserves praise for that. But that’s no reason to be naive to how this greatly benefits them.
Imagine how much else humanity could do if they said that. Even just once more, fuck the profits, let’s give people a 4 day work week with 6 hours per day.
Yeah until you find a game which doesn’t run only because of its dogshit Anti Cheat System Service.
Fuck anti-cheat, the bane of gamers everywhere.
I think they’re a necessary evil, nothing ruins multiplayer more than cheats.
Then multiplayer should be its own app. Making a whole single-player game unplayable just so you can push anticheat cruft into everything.
Punkbuster, VAC and EAC support Linux now.
It’s the truly invasive anti cheats like Vanguard, GameGuard, etc that won’t run.
Proton has better 32 bit compatibility than windows itself
Proton literally got me into PC gaming again. I switched to Linux in 2008, and stopped playing PC games. For a decade, I missed so much. Valve is awesome!
i mean that was your choice i was playing Wow on linux in like 2008
If I as an older person would like to start using linux, where would you recommend to start? Is there an easy guide I can follow on how to use linux?
Linux Mint is often touted as the most similar looking GUI to windows, so if you want Linux, but looking like windows that might be your best bet. You will find many guides for how to install Linux. If you want to just try it out first (and not just overwrite windows), you’ll need to free up some disk space and create an empty partition to install Linux on.
Linux mint is just nice to deal with. I distro-hopped to see what was out there but I came back to mint. It plays my games and runs my AI and works with whatever old garbage i plug in without needing to download shifty drivers from a shifty site like with windows.
Honestly, your question will get a ton of different answers because it’s so open to people’s preferences. It’s like asking “I want to start using a car, which one should I buy?” There will be so many different answers that it’s practically useless, from people recommending a toyota aygo since it’s cheap, easy and reliable to people recommending a Abrams tank “because it can handle everything”.
imo, try Linux Mint or Ubuntu since they are accessable and bring most software out of the box. But it’s up to you, you cannot really lose when picking a distro.
I’ll recommend NobaraOS. It comes with everything set up out-of-the box and you can change interface to Windows or macOS style.
DO NOT SWITCH, until you’ve found that every software you use has a Linux version… Or an alternative which works on Linux as well as for you.
ALSO DO NOT SWITCH if you have the 30 or 40 series NVIDIA cards. Or any NVIDIA card for that matter.
YouTube channel recommendations - The Linux Experiment, Tech Hut, Gardiner Bryant (old videos, he just makes Steam Deck content now)
ALSO DO NOT SWITCH if you have the 30 or 40 series NVIDIA cards. Or any NVIDIA card for that matter.
Why? I’ve got a 3060, and it’s running perfectly under Mint. It’s worked on the half a dozen or so other distros I’ve live booted too.
If I had to guess OP is probably talking about DLSS 3+ which is not supported on Linux at the moment. And what other reason is there to buy an Nvidia 30 or 40 series card if not for that?
Anything that uses CUDA for a start
I had issues with my 4060 on the latest mint, but everything worked fine on Ubuntu 23.04. Everything can be fixed but Ubuntu worked out of the box.
Linux Mint or wait for SteamOS
or wait for SteamOS
good luck with that
As noob, who is not interested in learning the core of linux, but only want it to just work, I would recommend the new openSuse slowroll (based on own experience with tumbleweed which should in theory be less stable than slowroll) and for apps I recommend going for flathubs. I’m not sure if slowroll already released.
If you go down this route, even as a noob, whatever tech issues you may run into, it will likely be easier to find command line interface [CLI] solutions that you can copy and paste into your terminal aka console.
I know it seems extra and harder because it looks like something a hacker would do. But telling someone where to click a mouse over and over again is so much harder than “copy this into a terminal app, and send back the output”
I’m just sad I have an Nvidia GPU 😢
Same. Luckily it’s gtx980 so it’s not I bought it recently. Next gpu shall be amd
I’ve got a GTX980ti, which runs fine with my POP_OS setup, but I’ll be switching to AMD for my next GPU as well. If for no other reason than to not support Nvidia.
What is wrong with Nvidia gpus with regard to Linux? I have no issues with mine.
The nvidia drivers can be a pain, and some distributions don’t care about nVidia’s support schedule and push a kernel update and nVidia will no longer compile.
Also, the fact that a kernel update means the nvidia driver must recompile is a pain.
I’m holding out hope for the open drivers (they basically moved all the proprietary bits to run on the GPU) to eventually mean that the premiere nVidia experience is already integrated at some point in the future.
Oooooor you can use in-tree nvidia driver
Nouveau? I’ve not exactly had a very reliable experience, and as far as I can see Nvidia doesn’t really help to ensure that works in a timely way or a reliable way.
I’d rather shit in my hands and clap for entertainment
It’s trouble is in that it severely lacks features that it have on Windows, especially newest popular stream add-ons like voice and background blurring, troubles with Ray tracing and dlss, and most infamous problem is that Nvidia drivers absolutely would break your system updates eventually, and it can break your whole system Edit: source: i have laptop with Nvidia gpu
Lack of open source drivers and junk support from Nvidia.
I’m talking about the nvidia drivers themselves, not some hacked together drivers by a third party that barely work.
Because Nvidia is a bunch of dicks.
I’m using an Nvidia GPU on my POP!_OS Gaming PC it runs mostly without issue. The few times there has been driver problems, there’s been an easy fix on System76’s homepage soon after
I still remember having to use Ubuntu back in 2007.
To cut a long story short, I used to have a crappy Packard Bell PC that was weirdly partitioned (the main C:\ partition named Programs had 20GB and D:\ named Data had 120GB allocated.)
A (obviously now former) friend at school who thought he was hot-shit with PCs nagged and pressured me into acquiring a copy of Norton PartitionMagic and merging the two partitions. Completely totalled the Windows XP installation and because I didn’t have any recovery media, I was forced to wipe everything and install Linux.
Gaming on Ubuntu back in 2007 was a nightmare. Only thing I managed to run that wasn’t some shitty FOSS game that looked like it was made for the Net Yaroze was WoW, and even then actually installing the damn game was a nightmare where I had to resort to literally copying files from each install CD because actually running the installer from the CD itself resulted in failure by Disc 3. Every other game I tried to run through Wine either refused to boot at all, had bugs that would soft-lock my PC, or put out 0.01 frames per second due to lack of OpenGL support.
Linux has evolved by leaps and bounds but still has some way to go before you could use it as a gaming OS. Hopefully the Steam Deck encourages more developers to support Linux.
Of course, some devs have turned their back on Linux, such as post-Fortnite Epic Games.
but [Linux] still has some way to go before you could use it as a gaming OS
maybe a nitpick, but I think it’s more accurate to say it has some way to go before everyone could use it as a gaming OS. many many people can use it as is right now. All the games I play work great on Linux so far, I removed windows from my gaming PC months ago.
if you’re already into Linux and you don’t care about competitive games with anti cheat, then Linux is ready to be your gaming OS right now imo
Yup. I’ve played everything I’ve wanted to play on Linux with only one minor stumble getting ea launcher to work, and it was literally just selecting a different version of proton than I had as default.
It amazes me how many people come to the Linux communities on lemmy just to tell people that Linux isn’t good enough and we have to still use windows…
It amazes me how many people come to the Linux communities on lemmy just to tell people that Linux isn’t good enough and we have to still use windows…
People, or “People”?
Between the Steam client and the Bottles app (for games not on Steam) I play every game I ever wanted to on Linux. I don’t even have a dual boot setup anymore.
Friends don’t have friends use Norton or McAfee software.
Windows will die if it cannot be pirated.
Ah, good times.
Only thing I managed to run that wasn’t some shitty FOSS game that looked like it was made for the Net Yaroze
I was going to say this feels like supertuxkart slander, but I looked up the release date and realised that it probably wasn’t released yet
Short time? Proton is built around Wine, which is 30 years old. 30 years is not a short time.
Remember the wine days where proton didn’t exist? Barely any game was playable.
We got from unplayable to “download and play” within 5 years
Or you went from hell and back trying to install all the dependencies with winetricks
Warcraft 3 worked better then on win. At that time more then half of games worked (newest aaa-est usually had problems). Just before proton almost all games worked (with some winetricks black magic). Valve did help, but there’s more to the story.
I had the opposite experience. WarCraft III would frequently soft lock my PC forcing a reboot, plus you couldn’t use the mouse to move the camera because the game couldn’t detect the mouse going to the screen edge, forcing you to use the arrow keys.
Some versions of Wine also wouldn’t allow you to connect to Bnet, requiring a rollback to a previous version from months prior.
I put -opengl on the end of it and it worked great. Wasn’t on release, but later when dota was popular.
Of course I would’ve forced OpenGL. DXVK didn’t exist at the time and DirectX 8 or 9 games were unplayably laggy back in 2007. Apparently you could run DirectX apps with near-native performance by sourcing the necessary Windows DLL’s but that would involve piracy?
Guys, actually this stuff was written in C which has been around for 50 years. But yea, this happened quickly.
bullshit, you are either young or you got bad memory
Don’t you people have something better to do than unironically doing the ackchyually meme? Follow the fucking post and its fucking intent, you fucking internet weirdos. You’re not as smart as you think you are.
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Steam Deck is the main reason for this and reasonable WINE emulation of DirectX & other APIs.
I bet the experience outside of Steam Deck depends a lot on the dist, the graphics drivers & card and someone’s personal knowledge & willingness to screw around making everything work. Drivers are the biggest issue by far - open source drivers tend to be more limited, while binary drivers tend to be quite fragile, e.g. breaking after a kernel update & requiring reinstallation.
It’s easier than you think. You can just download an exe, point lutris/steam to it (ie, just paste the path into the gui), and run the game. I have yet to find a game that doesn’t work. Troubleshooting is rare, and in my experience only involves changing proton versions. I have never had to mess with drivers, aside from initial installation when I installed the OS.
open source drivers tend to be more limited, while binary drivers tend to be quite fragile
And thank you for telling everyone what GPU you are using. Most mainstream GPU manufacturers support open-source drivers(AMD, Intel) and for some of them open-source dricers are the only option(Intel).
I bet the experience outside of Steam Deck depends a lot on the dist, graphics drivers and card and someone’s personal knowledge/willingness to screw around making everything work
In my experience, it’s been about the same. Then again, I also use an Arch based distro on my desktop, but I dunno, even when I distrohopped a lot and used other distros and hadn’t replaced some of my specs, gaming wasn’t a pain to setup or do in general unless it was something that specifically didn’t work with Linux (maybe modding was hard at first, but once I found out what worked for me, I was golden).
