I am and always was a casual gamer, I like playing puzzles, strategy and builder games, sometimes I play with friends some 7 days to die or AoE2. I am on Linux Mint for more than a year now and was surprised how easy gaming was. From time to time I had problems with weird DirectX error messages, but all in all everything just worked.
My setup:
- AMD Ryzen 5 3600
- GeForce GTX 1660 Super
- 32 GB DDR4 RAM
So last week my girlfriend worked on my computer (we are not living together), she wrote some bills for customers and did some table stuff in calc. When I asked her at the end of the day how it was to work on Linux, she shrugged and said “Oh I didn’t notice” lol (using Cinnamon as DE btw).
Today she bought Until Dawn the remake on Steam while she is here and because she really wanted to play she downloaded it to my PC. She just started to play and everything was great. I wondered again if I should say something like “you see how great you can game in Linux”, but then it came to my mind - she doesn’t care and she didn’t even question it! The Linux Desktop got so mature, that non-tech people just don’t notice!
I think the biggest “problem” with Linux adoption is that it does not come preinstalled on computers, and this kind of proves my point I guess.
Yeah that’s all, I just wanted to share this with you guys.
P.S.: There were some bugs btw. but it turned out they have nothing to do with the OS.
Compared to when I started with Linux 21 years ago, we are absolutely spoiled with games that work well today.
Gaming on Linux wasn’t really that much worse back then. This is just reaction to Proton propaganda. Proton didn’t even fix the frame timing issues that caused rhythm games to be near unplayable or racing games with time trials to be unbeatable (imagine spending hours on an impossible to beat track). -Wine devs fixed that so very recently that many probably aren’t even on that fix yet!
And Microsoft is constantly coming out with newer technologies that Linux will never keep up with or come out with on their own from ‘volunteers’.
If you want to play modern games, there’s no reason to not use Windows. There are reasons to not use Linux.
It was DXVK that really made thinks work, not Proton.
Yes, first developed by Philip “doitsujin” Rebohle. It’s a shame that Linux evangelists constantly praise Valve / Proton when the groundwork was laid out by others over decades.
It’s no wonder there’s a large history of FOSS developers quitting and selling out.
Tbf Valve definitely plays a part in simplifying the entire process. I’m sorry but without Steam even with Lutris and basic ass Wine the process of getting games to run is a fucking pain in the ass. At least Valve is what convinced people due to the nature of “Just download and run” on the Steam Deck. Plus verified games.
I don’t disagree with you but Valve does deserve some credit.
You must be misremembering things to the extreme.
Gaming in Linux was utter shit in 2005, and improvements were only crawling forward. When we checked WineHQ for compatibility the average score was bronze “unplayable”.
Although the Play On Linux program helped a lot and came out in 2008, Linux gaming didn’t improve much until after the Steam Client for Linux was released in 2013.
I dual booted Windows the first couple of years where Linux was my main OS, ONLY to be able to play games. After a few years I got tired of dual booting and ditched Windows completely. The result was that I gamed very little, and when I did, it was retro gaming.
Things improved a lot with DXVK, but that did no come out until 2018. Up until then you could almost only play games made with OpenGL, and even that was hit and miss.
I haven’t seen any Proton propaganda, and fortunately a lot of progress on Proton goes back to Wine, so Wine is also a lot better today even without Proton.
So Proton does not deserve all the credit, a lot of work has been done before and outside Proton. But Proton does make it dead easy with the Steam client, but today it may not be necessary if you use other tools to mange the Wine configuration on a per game basis. Or if you are an enthusiast that like to do it manually.
But 21 years ago, even an expert had very little luck except with very few games.
Everyone’s experience is different. It’s how I remember it. -But I consulted an AI, and it agrees with you. -Thanks for the insight!
I’m glad you had much better luck than I did, because playing games with Wine always worked like shit in my experience. It was occasionally an option that made the game playable at all, and very occasionally it would work flawlessly and all would be astounded, but the vast majority of the time I had little to no success. Maybe I just sucked.
Whereas these days I hit the play button on Steam and it works 100% of the time, in my experience. I basically only ever play games with friends online, and none of them even knew that I’d switched from Windows to Linux at some point in the middle.
I think we’re different kinds of gamers, though, because you said Wine recently fixed a frame timing issue that made rhythm games and racing games playable after they’d been unplayable forever… but I don’t care about that at all. I don’t play those games, and those were never the problems I had in the dark ages, but I’m glad you’re all good now too!
Absolutely, any semi decent game that was playable, even if it had some glitches, was AMAZING.
Not everyone uses Steam, and Steam does a lot of stuff that Proton does not.
Proton is made by Valve for playing Windows games on Steam and Steam Deck.
It seems logical that it works best for the platform it was designed for.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proton_(software)
I mean most of the games I’ve run in the past few months I couldn’t run at all 3 years ago which was my last attempt at Linux. And all my searching last time basically came up with other people having the same question as me and the answers always being “someday…” Well, someday is here because I’ve had no issues this go with Linux. I’ve literally never gone so long without windows until this install of mint.
Good for you, but how much playing do you do vs fiddling with the OS? I got far enough to see texture issues, frame timing issues making games unbeatable half way through, issues with rhythm games, and anti-cheat issues. The main reason to even PC game is for mods, and modding sucks on linux.
I’ve literally clicked the button for proton and that’s it. You seem like you’re just trying to invent reasons to hate Linux. Have you even used it in the last 10 years? Because everything you’re saying isn’t a thing anymore.
Anecdote