Another Linux gamer. I seriously don't miss windows anymore.
At this point I'm not worried about compatibility, but rather shitty game companies banning you the second they figure out you're playing on linux.
This is especially an issue in PvE heavy games that have only small PvP elements. Looking at you Destiny 2.
I really wish companies stopped their draconian policies about Linux gaming. Or at the very least just restricted PvP game play when Linux was detected. Heck I'd manually go in and press a button certifying that I'm a Linux player and I understand that I won't have access to every portion of the game if that's what they need me to do.
But these limitations have also pushed me to explore more indie, or small publishing games that are multi-player. Shout out to Northgard and Deep Rock Galactic (even though it doesn't support Linux natively) for making an awesome cooperative experience that I can have with my friends on Linux.
Also, for developers making games out there. PLEASE test your game with the steam runtime OS thing, not with Ubuntu or a specific distro. The steam runtime is open source and can easily be bootstrspped for any game, even outside of steam. It also ensures optimal compatibility with every distro out there.
I was seriously considering adding Linux support for my game, that already has turn-based multiplayer, and this thread was the last thing I needed to convince myself it could work.
Performance may be an issue. I wonder if people would be ok with electron games sold on steam running on linux...
I think their policies have more to do with support costs than anything else. As much as I love playing on Linux and wine, you have to admit there are more technical issues with Linux. People who have low tolerance for glitches and problem solving to get their games working would be up in arms. The last example is Hyper Light Drifter. No matter which forum, the latest threads include several about Linux specific problems. And that's a game with native support.
Another game I played recently - an ancient puzzle game "Riven" - seemed to have bad looking problems. I bought it from GOG because I didn't notice it only officially supports Windows and Mac. Very near the end of the installation, you have to click through a couple of errors that say the game didn't install properly (it did well enough). When launching the game, you get a nasty error if you run Riven.exe instead of Launcher_Riven.exe . During the actual gameplay, there is only one rare crash every few hundred attempts at brute forcing one particular puzzle.
If a game dev team thinks they can stop people from gaining an unfair advantage from just preventing people from running Linux they are morons. Even if you were in Windows you have to do is setup an inverse Linux VM to operate on the local host network in which case it would essentially be a daemon. Even with cigwin and a few other tools, you can use strace to inject system calls and override values right into the PID of the game
I'm kind of worried we've peaked on Linux compatibility however. We've seen some of the big franchises that supported it in Valve's initial push (Hitman, Football Manager being the two I'm aware of) back away from it in future iterations and Valve themselves now have Epic as a more immediate threat than the Windows store.
While I do share your frustration on linux gaming I thought to give sound to the opposing side who simply had this coming oit of a risk analysis.
TL;DR - it's indeed much easier to cheat on linux
After decades of fighting wars with crackers/reversers and all anti-debug/anti-cheat methods proven unusable against russian teenagers, AAA companies reached out to microsoft to get their undocumented binary "drivers" into the system which you cannot inspect from userspace.
With linux coming into the party, even if with the amazing work by Wine you do manage to get the desired anti-debug behaviour on the emulated userspace app, linux people can make arbitrary hooks on their kernels.
So instead of risking major reddit shitstorms over that 1% players that can cause 3% profit loss, it's better to ditch that 1%
Gaming on Linux has been so fucking good. I switched from Windows to Linux a month ago and literally haven’t found a game I can’t play. Even Red Dead Redemption 2, Hades, Fallen Jedi, Ghostrunner...
Oh the really icing on the cake is just how easy it all is. You literally just install the Windows version and things “just work.” Its amazing.
I’ve said this a lot of times now but it’s pretty amazing to write code and play games on the same machine. Truly, I don’t think I’ll ever have a bare metal install of Windows again. I don’t even have a VM with it right now even.
Agreed, however after months of being "Linux only" (Manjaro KDE + Proton), just this weekend I broke and installed a Windows as a dual-boot option.
90% of games with Proton "just work" like you said. It is amazing.
But then there's that one game that doesn't work, or works but with half the fps... for me, it was Death Stranding. It runs at 60+ fps at 1440p on Windows, but runs at half that on Proton, with horrible artifacts/frametime on Linux + Proton (even the community mod "GloriousEggroll" Proton version).
If CyberPunk is any good, I'm going to buy it and want the best experience... for now, that probably means Windows, unless by some miracle it works on Proton with no issues.
Something else that works super nice for gaming on Linux: GPU passthrough (gaming on a VM that has direct access to the GPU).
I've been doing this since 2017. Back then I had built my first desktop computer powered by ryzen 1700 + 2 GPUs.
Creating this setup had some challenges, but after the initial hurdle everything has been working perfectly (I imagine things must be easier nowadays).
Created a windows 10 VM, assigned 4 of my 8 cores, 16 GB of RAM (got 64 on the host) and a GTX 1070. This setup is enough to play pretty much any AAA game with max settings on full HD.
Besides having every game working perfectly, I get another nice side effect: sandboxing. No games (mostly proprietary software) have access to my personal/work files.
I thoroughly agree, Linux KVM and GPU passthrough is amazing.
I was disappointed with USB for guests though, I found it impossible to restore my iPhone via iTunes on a Windows VM, because the USB device wouldn't automatically bind to the VM. Which is something even VirtualBox can do well. But maybe the tech has progressed, or there's a better solution to that issue now.
Do you run two gpus? Or can you handoff to the VM when it boots and back when you shut down? Mind sharing your libvirt xml or qemu script? I've been meaning to give this a try!
It's seriously astonishing how much progress has been made in the past few years regarding gaming on Linux. When I first made the jump to using Linux as a daily driver circa 2016, I had to keep a Windows partition to be able to play any game in the Steam library that wasn't native on Linux. With steady improvements to Wine and Valve's release of Proton however, I can play most games out of the box or with a minimal amount of tweaking.
However, the games industry is still largely hostile to gaming on Linux. I've always had the best experiences with indie games or FOSS projects, and the only trouble I've had is with newly released AAA titles. I wouldn't even bother with newer multiplayer-only games or MMOs, as anti-cheat on Linux is a pretty reliable way to be falsely detected and instantly banned (not to mention requiring kernel-level access, which is utterly ridiculous).
I only play two games at the moment and neither of them are viable on Linux. Call of Duty Black Ops Cold War is a non-starter even with Proton. Assetto Corsa Competizione will work, but not with my Thrustmaster wheel.
Both of these are deal breakers on their own, but the real deal breaker is the uncertainty that comes with running Linux as a gamer. For example Cyberpunk 2077 comes out this week. Will it work? I have no idea. With my Windows machine I don't even need to check - of course it will.
I switched back from Pop!_OS about a month ago, after nearly a year of using it exclusively.
My previous laptop broke, so I got a new one. Of course I immediately created a Pop! partition and started installing stuff. I tried Doom Eternal... and it was running extremely slow for what you'd expect from a RTX 2080. Surely enough, I switched to my Windows 10 partition and the game ran smooth like butter over there. I spent some time looking at the issue but couldn't figure it out.
I decided to love back to Windows for the time being, enjoy the laptop and try again later on.
Gaming on steam works on Centos/RHEL as well as Ubuntu too. While most folks would not think of Centos as a desktop OS, we end up using it for our dev workstations as it matches up nicely with production servers. Christmas time last year, ended up having a bunch of vacation time to burn through and set out on a quest to get a game running on my work rig.
The planets aligned with Centos 8, Steam, and AMD drivers somewhere around late January. Things went from crazy difficult to just working.
Over the Spring/Summer/Fall I've seen significant progress on what worked on Windows vs Proton vs native Linux. A significant chunk of my Steam library now plays on my primary box. When the day comes where I actually get my hands on a new CPU/video card... those will actually go into my workstation.
I've been using Linux as my main (and, really, only) personal OS since Windows 7 went EOL.
I have an HTC Vive. There are many VR games that don't work at all even with Proton. There are many games that do work though.
The only game that doesn't work that I truly miss is Planetside 2.
But your typical big name games do work, even ones that aren't on Steam. Doom, Factorio, Kerbal Space Program, EVE Online -- these all work wonderfully. Space Engineers works "okay" -- it has an issue where the process threads will linger in the background even after you exit.
Blizzard's Battle.net games also work great -- you just have to start it with Lutris and do some magic to enable Vulkan. WoW and Diablo III work beautifully.
If I have one complaint about Steam is that clicking the blue button to tell Steam to kill a game doesn't work. Space Engineers and World of Warships both have to be manually killed sometimes and it would be real nice if Steam would do it so I don't have to open a terminal and find the relevant Wine garbage to do it myself.
As many folks said, VR on linux is niche within a niche.
My biggest pain is that video drivers really suck when it comes to VR. On windows you have stuff like async reprojection, on linux you have frequent lags and fps spikes, and nvidia does not seem to be interested enough to fix this.
Funnily enough, one of my most played games on Linux is Age of Empires 2: Definitive Edition, a Microsoft game. No rendering/frame issues and got the multiplayer working (manual steps needed [0]). Less and less reasons to boot on Windows!
as i understand it the big roadblock for multiplayer AAA titles is anticheat, and dont see anyway that changes until linux eats into the MS marketshare (but it should.. linux is a joy!)
Getting just EAC (Easy Anti-Cheat) to work on Linux would immediately make so many titles work flawlessly. Too many games are literally unable to run on Linux/Wine because EAC won't let them. For example, Apex Legends.
Can confirm it can run crysis, though the video files are laggy.
Also runs vrchat, this is on a 960M mobile chip on ubuntu 18.04.
I couldn't get ubuntu 20 to have proper vsync for the main desktop so I downgraded to 18. The nvidia drivers were causing problems, such as the main desktop not having vsync and not enabling vsync settings even if set manually, until an ubuntu system update automatically pushed update 455 to me and fixed everything. A number of nvidia tutorials or suggestions online are entirely out of date.
Hmm, I'd like to see a macOS version of this..... with x86 translation via Rosetta2 !! :D
disclaimer: yes I know I'm asking for a free version of Crossover. Though not entirely "free" since I've already paid quite a bit of money to Valve over the years for games that no longer work on macOS Catalina. (And also for Steam Link hardware.)
I really need Steam to add a "Might work in Linux, worth your time to try, but not guaranteed" icon along with the usuals. Because there's a bunch of stuff I'd like to play but I refuse to purchase if I'd have to fire up another machine for it.
Get Blizzard games (WoW especially) to work perfectly all the time with minimal effort, and I'm down to switch for good. I tried VFIO (lots of effort), and it worked great for Blizzard games, but showed massive frame loss in games like Jedi: Fallen Order.
Apparently Falcon BMS works on Proton too - for those unfamiliar it's an extremely detailed (study-) sim of the F-16, combined with a dynamic campaign in which the quality of your virtual piloting affects the surrounding war rather than just missions like DCS.
As soon as DCS actually knows what threads are we're in business.
Holy cow, I use a Mac, Linux, PlayStation and Switch, literally all the major platforms FS2020 does not run on. I was this ->-<- close to getting an Xbox (when it's out) or a Windows machine just for that.
[+] [-] aaomidi|5 years ago|reply
At this point I'm not worried about compatibility, but rather shitty game companies banning you the second they figure out you're playing on linux.
This is especially an issue in PvE heavy games that have only small PvP elements. Looking at you Destiny 2.
I really wish companies stopped their draconian policies about Linux gaming. Or at the very least just restricted PvP game play when Linux was detected. Heck I'd manually go in and press a button certifying that I'm a Linux player and I understand that I won't have access to every portion of the game if that's what they need me to do.
But these limitations have also pushed me to explore more indie, or small publishing games that are multi-player. Shout out to Northgard and Deep Rock Galactic (even though it doesn't support Linux natively) for making an awesome cooperative experience that I can have with my friends on Linux.
Also, for developers making games out there. PLEASE test your game with the steam runtime OS thing, not with Ubuntu or a specific distro. The steam runtime is open source and can easily be bootstrspped for any game, even outside of steam. It also ensures optimal compatibility with every distro out there.
[+] [-] ldd|5 years ago|reply
Performance may be an issue. I wonder if people would be ok with electron games sold on steam running on linux...
[+] [-] marchenko|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] b0rsuk|5 years ago|reply
Another game I played recently - an ancient puzzle game "Riven" - seemed to have bad looking problems. I bought it from GOG because I didn't notice it only officially supports Windows and Mac. Very near the end of the installation, you have to click through a couple of errors that say the game didn't install properly (it did well enough). When launching the game, you get a nasty error if you run Riven.exe instead of Launcher_Riven.exe . During the actual gameplay, there is only one rare crash every few hundred attempts at brute forcing one particular puzzle.
[+] [-] qudat|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] technofiend|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] suifbwish|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Macha|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] comfyinnernet|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] qwerty456127|5 years ago|reply
WTF? Why?
[+] [-] techelite|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shuringai|5 years ago|reply
TL;DR - it's indeed much easier to cheat on linux
After decades of fighting wars with crackers/reversers and all anti-debug/anti-cheat methods proven unusable against russian teenagers, AAA companies reached out to microsoft to get their undocumented binary "drivers" into the system which you cannot inspect from userspace.
With linux coming into the party, even if with the amazing work by Wine you do manage to get the desired anti-debug behaviour on the emulated userspace app, linux people can make arbitrary hooks on their kernels.
So instead of risking major reddit shitstorms over that 1% players that can cause 3% profit loss, it's better to ditch that 1%
[+] [-] jorvi|5 years ago|reply
About half of Destiny’s active playerbase PvPs. In content drought times, it’s pretty much what keeps the game alive. So yeah, simply false.
[+] [-] rubyn00bie|5 years ago|reply
Oh the really icing on the cake is just how easy it all is. You literally just install the Windows version and things “just work.” Its amazing.
I’ve said this a lot of times now but it’s pretty amazing to write code and play games on the same machine. Truly, I don’t think I’ll ever have a bare metal install of Windows again. I don’t even have a VM with it right now even.
[+] [-] 2bitencryption|5 years ago|reply
90% of games with Proton "just work" like you said. It is amazing.
But then there's that one game that doesn't work, or works but with half the fps... for me, it was Death Stranding. It runs at 60+ fps at 1440p on Windows, but runs at half that on Proton, with horrible artifacts/frametime on Linux + Proton (even the community mod "GloriousEggroll" Proton version).
If CyberPunk is any good, I'm going to buy it and want the best experience... for now, that probably means Windows, unless by some miracle it works on Proton with no issues.
[+] [-] fartcannon|5 years ago|reply
Thank you, Valve. You guys are my low key hero's.
[+] [-] tarruda|5 years ago|reply
I've been doing this since 2017. Back then I had built my first desktop computer powered by ryzen 1700 + 2 GPUs.
Creating this setup had some challenges, but after the initial hurdle everything has been working perfectly (I imagine things must be easier nowadays).
Created a windows 10 VM, assigned 4 of my 8 cores, 16 GB of RAM (got 64 on the host) and a GTX 1070. This setup is enough to play pretty much any AAA game with max settings on full HD.
Besides having every game working perfectly, I get another nice side effect: sandboxing. No games (mostly proprietary software) have access to my personal/work files.
[+] [-] zymhan|5 years ago|reply
I was disappointed with USB for guests though, I found it impossible to restore my iPhone via iTunes on a Windows VM, because the USB device wouldn't automatically bind to the VM. Which is something even VirtualBox can do well. But maybe the tech has progressed, or there's a better solution to that issue now.
[+] [-] moondev|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] m463|5 years ago|reply
I've been wanting to try out linux gaming and this makes it more interesting.
I've also been thinking about videoconferencing/etc on linux running in the same manner.
[+] [-] _peeley|5 years ago|reply
However, the games industry is still largely hostile to gaming on Linux. I've always had the best experiences with indie games or FOSS projects, and the only trouble I've had is with newly released AAA titles. I wouldn't even bother with newer multiplayer-only games or MMOs, as anti-cheat on Linux is a pretty reliable way to be falsely detected and instantly banned (not to mention requiring kernel-level access, which is utterly ridiculous).
[+] [-] mdoms|5 years ago|reply
Both of these are deal breakers on their own, but the real deal breaker is the uncertainty that comes with running Linux as a gamer. For example Cyberpunk 2077 comes out this week. Will it work? I have no idea. With my Windows machine I don't even need to check - of course it will.
[+] [-] bozzcl|5 years ago|reply
My previous laptop broke, so I got a new one. Of course I immediately created a Pop! partition and started installing stuff. I tried Doom Eternal... and it was running extremely slow for what you'd expect from a RTX 2080. Surely enough, I switched to my Windows 10 partition and the game ran smooth like butter over there. I spent some time looking at the issue but couldn't figure it out.
I decided to love back to Windows for the time being, enjoy the laptop and try again later on.
[+] [-] offtop5|5 years ago|reply
The issue ends up being support cost vs sales.
If 1% of your fan base runs Ubuntu, but they're 50% of your big reports, it's cheaper to not worry about them.
[+] [-] heelix|5 years ago|reply
The planets aligned with Centos 8, Steam, and AMD drivers somewhere around late January. Things went from crazy difficult to just working.
Over the Spring/Summer/Fall I've seen significant progress on what worked on Windows vs Proton vs native Linux. A significant chunk of my Steam library now plays on my primary box. When the day comes where I actually get my hands on a new CPU/video card... those will actually go into my workstation.
[+] [-] inetknght|5 years ago|reply
I have an HTC Vive. There are many VR games that don't work at all even with Proton. There are many games that do work though.
The only game that doesn't work that I truly miss is Planetside 2.
But your typical big name games do work, even ones that aren't on Steam. Doom, Factorio, Kerbal Space Program, EVE Online -- these all work wonderfully. Space Engineers works "okay" -- it has an issue where the process threads will linger in the background even after you exit.
Blizzard's Battle.net games also work great -- you just have to start it with Lutris and do some magic to enable Vulkan. WoW and Diablo III work beautifully.
If I have one complaint about Steam is that clicking the blue button to tell Steam to kill a game doesn't work. Space Engineers and World of Warships both have to be manually killed sometimes and it would be real nice if Steam would do it so I don't have to open a terminal and find the relevant Wine garbage to do it myself.
[+] [-] wetpaws|5 years ago|reply
My biggest pain is that video drivers really suck when it comes to VR. On windows you have stuff like async reprojection, on linux you have frequent lags and fps spikes, and nvidia does not seem to be interested enough to fix this.
[+] [-] pojntfx|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Zardoz84|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] keraf|5 years ago|reply
[0] https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/issues/3189#issuecom...
[+] [-] anewguy9000|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] owaislone|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] devwastaken|5 years ago|reply
Also runs vrchat, this is on a 960M mobile chip on ubuntu 18.04.
I couldn't get ubuntu 20 to have proper vsync for the main desktop so I downgraded to 18. The nvidia drivers were causing problems, such as the main desktop not having vsync and not enabling vsync settings even if set manually, until an ubuntu system update automatically pushed update 455 to me and fixed everything. A number of nvidia tutorials or suggestions online are entirely out of date.
[+] [-] mmcdermott|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] drunner|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] musicale|5 years ago|reply
disclaimer: yes I know I'm asking for a free version of Crossover. Though not entirely "free" since I've already paid quite a bit of money to Valve over the years for games that no longer work on macOS Catalina. (And also for Steam Link hardware.)
[+] [-] ekianjo|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brnt|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] myself248|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] latexr|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] morsch|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ulkesh|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nunodonato|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mhh__|5 years ago|reply
As soon as DCS actually knows what threads are we're in business.
[+] [-] Toutouxc|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gamedna|5 years ago|reply