I used linux in the past, both privately and work-related, but the last time was over 10 years ago, so I’m a bit out of touch. I am in need of a new PC, but it’ll be a good year before I have the funds, so for now I am making due with an i5 7500 and a gtx 1660. I do have 32 GB so there’s that. I finally feel confident enough to make the permanent switch to linux from windows as all of the programs I use are either available on linux or have a good/better equivalent. The only thing I fear will hold me back is games. I know Steam has Proton now which will run most games, but how does it compare? The games I play most are Skyrim (heavily modded) , RDR2, Witcher 3, Transport fever, Civilization, Crusader kings 3 and Cities Skylines (uninstalled atm waiting for 2). I’m on the fence to either wait until I can afford a new PC and dual boot or make the switch now and deal with a few gaming problems. Thing is, what kind of problems may I expect? Anyone able and knowledgeable to give me some advice?
EDIT: Wow, those are a lot of replies; thank you everyone! You really helped me. I will make the switch sooner rather than later.
If a game doesn’t work on linux, I don’t buy/play it until it does. End of story. There is plenty of choice and time is limited, so having an extra filter is just helpful.
Outside the few games like valorant and destiny 2, literally everything else I’ve tried runs just fine on Linux. Wine/Proton has gotten really good these past 2 years. Even on Wayland, which has historically been bad for gaming things just work nowadays.
If all you want to do is to play retrogames and the occasional AAA+ single-player game? It’s perfect and there is no reason to use Windows ever again.
But if you want to play competitive games that require anticheating in order to work…? Then you will gonna have some problems.
Anyone able and knowledgeable to give me some advice?
Duckduckgo “lutris wine dependencies”, install lutris, download the latest lutris wine version via lutris launcher, use said wine ver. in any game you want or fallback to your system one. Thats it.
It’s good now: https://www.protondb.com/
Go with an AMD graphics card, they work right out of the box in Linux so it’s just that much easier.
I started using Linux maybe 5 years ago, just before DXVK and proton became a thing. The difference between now and then for gaming is night and day.
If it’s on steam, there is a pretty good chance it’ll work. If it’s not on steam, it still might work through lutris.
There are some holdouts like Riot games, but I haven’t owned windows in almost two years.
On a very rare occasion do I ever run into a game that doesn’t work on Linux, have completely ditched windows about a month ago and haven’t looked back
I even get significantly better performance in most games, used to just about manage 60-70fps in overwatch on max settings under windows, now it smashed 170 no problem
Overwatch (and probably AMD’s drivers, thinking back) was actually the tipping point for me ditching Windows and fully commiting to Linux. I was getting the dreaded “rendering device lost” crash at least once per gaming session, with a brand new GPU, but have seen it maybe twice since switching. I don’t have quite the same performance gains as you, but Overwatch is definitely more stable and just feels smoother on Linux for me.
It might’ve been because it was so new, think Linux is typically slower to get drivers up and running for newer hardware
Can be pain free but it can also be painful. Some things straight up won’t work because of anti cheat and unsupportive developers. I’d say give it a try. Gotta bump up the market share so Linux support actually matters in developer business cases.
Here’s a list of games I played on Linux:
- Ancestors: athe humankind Odyssey
- Assassin’s Creed syndicate, origins, Odyssey and Valhalla
- Baldur’s gate 3
- Arkham series
- Rimworld
- Stellaris
- Bioshock infinite
- Control
- Cyberpunk 2077
- Days gone
- Death stranding
- Deep rock galactic
- Destroy all humans
- Detroit become human
- Deus Ex: Mankind divided
- Disco Elysium
- Devil may cry 5
- Dishonored 1+2
- Doom
- Dying light 1+2
- Skyrim
- Evil genius 2
- All the fallout games
- Farcry 3, 5
The list goes on and on…
I would be keen to hear back on these. I think you will have no problem with Civilisation, but for Skyrim modding, possibly issues especially if you’re using an ENB mod.
I’ve been meaning to try Skyrim but I’m waiting until total conversion mods Skywind and Skyblivion come out.
Don’t use ENB with my setup, too much of a strain on fps, so that wouldn’t be a setback :)
Have you considered something like a Steam Deck. It’s a full a Linux instance, optimized for gaming but you can also hook up a keyboard+monitor and run traditional apps in desktop mode. I think most of the games mentioned are listed as playable on Deck (though large Skylines games might have issues with 16GB memory).
Skyrim with proton GE will work just fine. Modding will be trickier. Vortex can be setup, with lutris. But I’ve ran into issues when it comes to external programs like resaver, loot, nemesis/fnis.
You could slap in a cheap second drive and see what happens. Compared to 10 years ago, it’s so much better.
Cyberpunk, Baldurs Gate 3, Sims 4, Minecraft (not a shocker, just need Java for modded), it’s been great.
I know multiple people that do Skyrim on linux, at least one heavily modded. Outside of DyndoLOD not working right I can’t really remember any issues they had.
Can you elaborate on the modding? I’m also interested in using Linux for gaming but Skyrim utterly demands mods and particularly I quite like mods like Skyrim script extender (I think that was the name) and I also really liked ENBs for the graphical improvement. And Nemesis was also sooooo much better than the alternative for managing all those mods.
steamtinkerlaunch makes running Skyrim with ModOrganizer2 very simple. Other external programs will probably still be tricky though
If you use lutris you can simply download portable MO2 version and unpack it to your wine prefix with installed skyrim and it’s work perfectly.
Xevil still works.
One of the great things about Linux is picking your distro. However, I’d suggest sticking with the latest version of Ubuntu desktop if you want to game.
Way more users means problems get solved there first (after Steam Deck, of course). File system support is good, and while I don’t use NTFS partitions anymore, they worked fine for me. The user count also means larger communities of support.
If down the road you want to branch out, go for it! But play it safe for now. If you’re used to Windows, install WinTile and Dash-to-Panel extensions in GNOME to make things familiar.
KDE is better than GNOME for Windows familiarity. GNOME feels like it’s trying to emulate the experience of MacOS while KDE feels like it’s trying to give a Windows-like experience.
That is a classical windows mentality. “gnome is cheap macos clone”. Gnome tries just to create a minimal and distraction free and polished DE. KDE tries to bulldose as many features as possible and that sacrifices stability and UX. Analogy would be similar to having a leaky water pipe in the roof. Gnome would fix the leaking pipe meanwhile KDE would give you a bucket and a few towels to clean that up in different ways.
Arch is better for gaming imo.
It depends. Do you play stuff with kernel level anticheat? If no, then the current state of Linux gaming is, by and large as good as, and occasionally better than, Windows - even on games that don’t run natively.
Proton is astounding, and the state of Wine is amazing compared to 10 years ago (and it wasn’t bad then). Get Bottles or Play on Linux going, plus Steam, and there’s very little you can’t do…
Except kernel level anticheat.
(To be 100% transparent, there are other issues. I have a couple games I can’t get to run reliability, but they’re all obscure edge cases. But like 90% of stuff without anticheat just works at this point.)
Edit: proofreading
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I haven’t used proton recently because I replaced my Linux laptop with a Windows one (changed jobs, didn’t need it anymore). But when I did play games with Proton a lot, around 2020, I sometimes had issues with cutscenes not showing at all. Just black screens for cutscenes on some games. Did that get fixed?
This can usually be fixed by using GE-Proton.
To be fair I could not even get Valorant running on Windows. Anti cheat like that is complete and utter bs and will make me never play any game with it. Just like I don’t buy a game until they remove Denuvo.
I wouldn’t buy a game that uses Denuvo even if I was running Windows. That stuff’s basically malware.
EAC works in Proton, as long as the developer takes the time to configure it right.
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Its not exactly a checkbox. Basically, the developer has to choose the right version of the EAC library to include in their build. Older versions didn’t support Linux. And with the new library versions there is the “with Linux support” and “without Linux support” varients.
Some games still build with the older version for compatibility reasons, some will stick with the older version for spite reasons. Some games update to the new version but use the non-linux-support new version.
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