I would never have considered gaming on Linux until the Steam Deck came out. When reviews said it’s actually awesome, I became convinced to try it. Basically, the deck pushed me over the edge to ditch Windows altogether. So suck on that, Satya! No wonder MS is trying so hard to stop other OEMs from making Linux handhelds.
For real. I’ve been a pretty steady Linux user all my adult life and gaming was barely ever an option unless the game was built to run in Linux. When proton came out I gave it a shot and was blown away.
Proton got me to dump Windows… NGL Windows 11 and Lemmy did help push me over the edge. I use Ubuntu btw.
Lol u stole the Arch mantra… I use arch btw.
Ubuntu mantra should be something else like “snaps are my homies”
I’ll use snaps if I HAVE to, ex Telegram. AppImages just seem like the same prob with grabbing binaries, in terms of updates. I might jump on the FlatPak train if I didn’t like apt so much. Man, OSX and brew really is so much better then this shit, just works and is always up to date.
Brew sucks. It’s soooo slooooow. Flatpak is awesome, AppImage is weird, and Snaps are kinda there as well I guess.
Brew on Linux, yeah, I don’t even bother. But on OSX it’s a first class citizen, works as well as yum and apt.
I’m using OSX for work and Homebrew is really slow there too. Honestly though that’s really my only complaint. That, and some aesthetic yank caused by it being a bunch of shell and ruby scripts in a trench coat, but that’s not an objective thing.
I there is a setting to have it not check all packages for updates when installing a new one. I forget where. It’s auto update something.
Basically some Source games, Gog’s offerings and Guild Wars in-between rounds of tuxkart
Insert Tuxkart music
I was playing Quake 3 and Unreal Torunament 2003 in the early 2000s, they had native versions. One of the first mainstream Linux gaming pioneers.
I used to use Second Life on Linux too with a third party client.
The first half of the 2000s was a lot better for Linux gaming than the second half. That time period after game companies stopped releasing anything for Linux but before Wine became realistically usable was very dark.
Quake 2 also had a Linux port, as did Return to Castle Wolfenstein. iD Software was one of the few early supporters of Linux for commercial games.
Can you imagine not having depth perception because of your hairstyle?
Or being an anime body
Or existing in 2D
Dink Smallwood
I got NFS Most Wanted (2005) working in Wine, and was somewhat impressed how easy it was at the time. Game worked quite well, and would only crash once in a while with some cryptic errors that I don’t remember. Made me hopeful for the future of linux gaming :)
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 used to play StarCraft II in Wine back in like 2010.
I read this and was like “pffft….starcraft 2 didn’t come out in 2010 , it was waaaay later”
Then I checked and was like “Well fuck me”
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My first attempt to switch to Linux for my primary desktop was in 2007, and ended when my attempt to run WoW via WINE mostly worked, but had a weird an completely unfixable audio delay.
Proton (and Valve’s efforts on SteamOS and the Steam Deck more generally) have been an absolute godsend for Linux as a usable daily-driver.
I liked playing osu! on Linux through Wine since it offered much lower audio and input latency than you could achieve on Windows. Minecraft has also always been a safe bet on Linux (unless you enabled shaders, then it just turned into a visual abomination for just about every shaderpack).
Generally OpenGL games weren’t too bad, DirectX however… the biggest change here was DXVK rather than Proton.
Never thought we’d get to where we are now.
My 1999 setup running Slackware while playing Loki’s Civ CTP
Pure art!
First i thought you had a cat hiding there.
Yep, playing a Loki port of Myth II - Soulblighter on SuSE Linux, iirc 5.3 is one of my earliest memories of gaming on Linux. Must have been around… 25 years ago.
Around that time too, UT99 shipped with Linux binaries on the friggin cd
I fished a tower like that out of a dumpster and built my first gaming PC in that and ran Gentoo on it about 2005. Played CS 1.6 and WoW and had better performance in Linux than Windows at the time.
What is that console looking thing in the bottom right corner?
Could be a scanner
Sylvartas is right, it’s an old flatbed scanner.
How many hard drives you have in that beast? I see enough ribbon cable to wrap a gift
Old story: There was a sale at a big box Electronics store on Seagate Barracuda SCSI-2 Wide 9.1GB drives and I bought 6 of them to give me a 40GB RAID-5 on an old mylex dac960 scsi raid card. Bigtime storage in 1999.
Those fed my 3:1 ratio mp3 sharing site that my uunet bot advertised haha.
That’s insane I absolutely love it. To put that in perspective, 1999 game storage requirements:
- GTA 2, 70 MB
- Quake III Arena, 70 MB
- SimCity 3000, 230 MB
- Everquest, 1 GB
That’s one tall tower.
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.
I hated Windows 8 enough to put up with it at the time. It’s nuts how much things have improved since then.