Back when you had to install steam in wine and then for a while you would have native steam and wine steam in the same distro install. Now it’s so easy that I figure anyone talking shit about gaming on Linux only plays those rootkit anticheat shooters or hasn’t played games since having kids or something and have become one of those people that are shocked to hear what they thought were current gen consoles are actually really old already.
I actually found an old /home drive of mine this week where I had exactly this setup, so painful.
Trying to find the correct steamapps folder for the particular instance of the game and going through all the dot folders and wine folder structure… that hasn’t actually improved much now that I think about it.
Gaming on Linux in general has improved a lot more than the pollution levels in my town at least.
Unreal Tournament 2k4 on one of the earlier Ubuntus, back when ShipIt was still a thing. Most have been around 2005 or 2006, as I used it in my mom’s flat which I moved out of in 2006.
I also played some games on an old version of Suse Linux back in 2001 or so? Maybe earlier? There was this game where you had to manage public transport in a city. Looked for that game recently but nothing came up. Also Kartoffelknülch back then. I tried to get some distributions running (like Mandrake) but only Suse somewhat worked. Being 14 and English not being your mother tongue doesn’t help with documentation when nobody in your family knows stuff about computers.
It’s not OpenTTD maybe?
Definitely not
The fact that I can’t seem to find traces of this game online makes me think that maybe my memory is wrong? But also hard to find information from back when the internet wasn’t flooded with stuff
I remember playing Minecraft on Ubuntu 14.04, does that count?
yes, it does
Minecraft is the first game I played on Linux
minecraft and team fortress 2 for 3 years.
end of list.
What about xbill? Why is noone mentioning it?
Bunch of kids, the whole lot of them!
10 years ago back in college I mainly ran Ubuntu and did the windows VM with VFIO GPU passthrough to game on a fullscreen windows VM that got full PCI usage of the GPU, was the best of both worlds
Who remembers Cedega. Had a lot of fun on that, both playing and configuring to play. Think I was running Fedora, or was it Mandrake/Mandriva. Man I remember having the drive to distro hop weekly at one point
I don’t get it. Is she excited before proton because it was exciting if something actually ran?
she’s excited because running games before proton was difficult
but your option is also goodSo excited about the challenge, like running the game is a different game than the game?
Wine Souls
I got a manic vibe, like a similar energy to when you’ve been modding a game for 20x longer than you’ve actually played it, except in this case, it’s not a choice.
I never got Proton working on my main distro (Debian), so I probably fall into this category. I did use Wine, but Wine is a lot harder to set up, and never ran games as well as Proton did.
Here is my major gaming history, since I started on Linux in 2007. Yes, I really could focus on a single game for years back then.
- 2007: Starcraft, in Wine
- 2007: Nethack, native
- 2011: Morrowind and Oblivion in Wine
- 2012: Minecraft, native
- 2014: sgt-puzzles, native
- 2016: Steam, got hundreds of native Linux games.
- 2017: Briefly got Steam and Path of Exile working inside a Wine instance.
- 2022: Steam deck, with the specific purpose of being able to run Proton on it.
- 2023: New Ubuntu installation, and Proton finally worked on my PC.
Today, I still prefer native Linux games. I mostly only use Proton when peer pressure for a multiplayer game required it. But I never use Wine any more.
Kids these days don’t even know about TuxRacer?
Loved that game
I still play it on my Android TV.
I bought Tomb Raider 2013 because it was Linux native. Nowadays I recommend people to play the Windows version.
I remember that Unreal Tournament 2003 came with a bootable Linux CD to play the game.
Still have the quake 3 Linux tin box around here somewhere…
I have the original CD release of UT2004, it has a full Linux installer and worked well on a Dell E5400 running Ubuntu back in 2008-2010 when I was attending LAN perties
Return to Castle Wolfenstein also had an official Linux port in 2002-ish.
It was rough. I basically gave up on playing 3D games on Linux for the longest time and used a dualboot. Much less hassle.
What convinced me was when they verified Apex Legends, which was a game I was not expecting to be verified at all. Turns out Proton secretly got really good in all that time.
It’s hit or miss. A gold rated game on protondb performed terrible when I used a keyboard and mouse. Everything was smooth, but looking around was studdery. Even worse, the game failed to properly capture my mouse, so I kept getting stopped when my “cursor” hit the edge of the screen. I literally could not look around.
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The developers, in their infinite wisdom, decided to not make that an option.
You can force it if you use gamescope, solved mouse issues for me in the past.
I tried to get Wine working for STALKER before Proton. Never managed lol
Played WoW when it first came out with WINE. It was miserable. We had to mess with configs, install hacked patches, manually start jobs with scripts. And every patch broke something so you had to start from scratch again.
This was probably 2004/2005?
Yeah I did. God bless WineDB.
Steam before proton was okay for stuff like Fallout 3. Needed some hackery with Wine prefixes and getting the right DLLs in there but eventually worked. Older GoG games like Alpha Centauri were fine with DosBox.
Proton is great. Cyberpunk 2077 on Ultra.
