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.
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.
Okay I can definitely back up the second claim. World of Warships, a DirectX only game, runs and loads better on Linux with Proton. I tested both on SSD and HDD, and in both scenarios the game runs at a higher FPS and loads faster. I legitimately have no idea why.
I originally tested on HDD and guessed that ext4 was just much better with the IO speeds because NTFS would fragment like hell. But then it also was the same with an SSD and now I’m not sure.
King Torvalds would be so proud.
Hi, I used a Linux PC 10 years ago and have been waffling on getting a Linux build now that Windows is essentially started coming with pre-packaged adware and Spyware. What’s Proton?
There is a software called “wine” that is used for running windows apps on linux. Proton is a version of Wine that specializes in running video games.
The only think keeping me from wiping Windows from my machine is Ubisoft anthicheat lol
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.”
“Did Loki port it?”, which was a very short list, plus a few exceptions like Quake.
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.
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.
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.
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? 😆
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
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 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.
I’m just sad I have an Nvidia GPU 😢
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
What is wrong with Nvidia gpus with regard to Linux? I have no issues with mine.
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.
I talk not about hacked together drivers(GPL-shim) by a third party(Nvidia) that barely works too
Nouveau drivers are not made by Nvida? What are you even talking about? They are third party drivers that are not even fully functional because Nvida will not open source their own drivers for linux.
I am saying that Nvidia here is third party. Nvidia is not kernel developer.
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
I’d rather shit in my hands and clap for entertainment
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.
Because Nvidia is a bunch of dicks.
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.
I have to stick to windows only because of VR, once performance and UX improves I will nuke windows out of my PC but I still absolutely love linux, been hopping around distros like a madman almost 2 years ago until I settled on arch, couldn’t leave the damn thing.
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.
Linux Mint or wait for SteamOS
or wait for SteamOS
good luck with that
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.
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”
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.
As a fellow older gamer who is also technical, I’m using Fedora with KDE, and I install the Steam client and the Bottles app for non-Steam games.
If you’re not technical, then I would suggest something like Linux Mint or Ubuntu, but KDE gives you the closest experience to a Windows desktop regardless of which version of Linux you’re using (vs Gnome).
But as others have said, it doesn’t really matter (for the most part) which version of Linux you use, it really comes down to using Steam and Bottles for the game support.
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.
I’ve gradually gone from being peeved at Proton for not being able to support certain brands of anti-cheat, to actively avoiding games with anti-cheat solutions that are fundamentally incompatible with Proton.
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.
And I honestly love valve for taking wine which is an impressive project on it’s own and making it even better.
Absolutely! I play mainly two games. DayZ and Eve Online. Both run way faster on my Debian 12 rig compared to running on Windows 11.
Granted, it took a while to figure out how to self-sign the Nvidia driver (secure boot). But once that was sorted it was smooth sailing.
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.
I’ve overall had a decent experience playing games on my Steam Deck. A lot of incompatible games but the ones that not only do work but are verified have shocked me greatly.
Valve have single handedly evolved Linux gaming by leaps and bounds.
Windows will die if it cannot be pirated.
Ah, good times.
Friends don’t have friends use Norton or McAfee software.
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
Was more Tux Racer slander than anything else.
Also, Frets on Fire, which was a much shittier attempt at creating a freeware clone of Guitar Hero. Thankfully Clone Hero came out over a decade later.
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
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?
bullshit, you are either young or you got bad memory
Guys, actually this stuff was written in C which has been around for 50 years. But yea, this happened quickly.
Or you went from hell and back trying to install all the dependencies with winetricks
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.
You just provided my daily dose of sanity, thanks
