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As someone who chiefly plays single player games: yup, that tracks. I’ve played Cyberpunk 2077, Nioh, Yakuza Kiwami 1 & 2, the list goes on. All on Linux, no issues. In fact, over the past two years the only game that absolutely refused to run is an obscure title called DeathSprint 66.
Is that last 10% all about DRM and anti-cheat?
Probably… with many cases of “we could support Linux without any problem but we don’t do because we just don’t want to” included.
Game devs don’t need to do much, or anything. Proton, wine, DXVK ecosystem supports almost everything out of the box.
That’s my point. It would often just run so they go out of their way to not support Linux.
If they run fine, then what is the problem?
I’ve seen native linux ports of games that ran worse than the win/proton version.
Basically yes.
I tried playing the BC Piezophile demo recently but it kept crashing on the main menu.
I’m someone who doesn’t do tinkering. If it doesn’t work then I move on to a different game until it or proton updates.
I would recommend checking protondb once if something isn’t working. Simply using a different proton version or adding a launch parameter that others share can often work. I don’t understand half the stuff I copy paste but it does work well so worth spending a minute to check it.
I don’t have the patience for even that minimal amount of troubleshooting. So I just leave it be until it fixes itself.
But not League of Legends 🫠 Thanks anticheat
Thank god. Now nobody can try to convince me to play it. “You should give it a shot. I think you might like it” “sorry, I use Linux. Can’t do it…oh well”
What’s the best distro for my desktop? I’ve been mucking around with some on an old laptop but haven’t attempted any gaming on it outside of some simple emulation.
Ive had the least trouble with kubuntu. Im running steam vr and it doesnt officially support all wayland distros.
https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/18A4-1E10-8A94-3DDABazzite seems to be the go-to answer for linux gaming.
Though, shouldn’t it not matter? It’s all linux. It should all perform just the same.
It doesn’t all perform the same. The kernel itself is extremely configurable, and some distros tweak it for stability, others for performance. Others again largely just leave it alone. Some distros also apply their own or other third party patches to the kernel.
Linux mint installs easily (to be fair they all do), is familiar to Windows interface and has a big button to install nvidia drivers.
Mint or CachyOS.
CachyOS runs 10% faster but it’s Arch-based so it’s not as easy as Mint.
Good to know, I’m hesitant to go 100% arch on everything until I have a better handle on CLI.
You can either get a usb with ventoy with Fedora, bazzite and Cachy is and try them all out or there’s a website that lets you use any of the distros from your browser, it’s called distrosea
Amazing, thank you!
tbf, data shows that less than 60% valve games release this year runs on linux with no issue and 30% runs with major or minor issues. This stat is stables for years, so we could generalize it; however it do not represents actual gamers experience; very few games represent the majority of gametime, and a lot of them do not run on linux.
Moreover, when the hardware hardly meet the requirements, some people experience crash on linux where stable on windows.
do not represents actual gamers experience
My experience gaming on Linux the past few years is that I have not encountered a single game that hasn’t worked. And 90%+ work with no tinkering whatsoever.
some people experience crash on linux where stable on windows.
FUD much? I’m not saying it’s not true… but like the opposite has to be true too. So without actual data to say it’s significant it’s really just not help much in any way, just creating doubt.
very few games represent the majority of gametime, and a lot of them do not run on linux.
Same, which ones? What’s your dataset?
Top 10 played games on steam :¹
- CS GO : compatible Linux
- Dota 2 : compatible Linux
- Battlefield 6 : not compatible
- ARC Raiders : not compatible
- PUBG: BATTLEGROUNDS : not compatible
- Path of Exile : not compatible
- Rust : not compatible
- R.E.P.O : not compatible
- Banana : compatible Linux
- Bongo Cat : not compatible
So 3/10, and 2 of them are made by valve with an explicit orientation toward Linux. Because I’m unemployed, I computed playtime of those games²:
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- Counter-Strike 2 : 36,07 %
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- Dota 2 : 21,54 %
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- Battlefield™ 6 : 10,46 %
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- ARC Raiders : 8,16 %
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- PUBG: BATTLEGROUNDS : 6,78 %
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- Path of Exile : 4,08 %
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- Rust : 3,93 %
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- Banana : 3,24 %
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- R.E.P.O. : 3,08 %
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- Bongo cat : 2,67 %
Tbf, I didn’t expect that Linux Games represent ~ 50% of playtime of the top 10. This quite impressive, and it does underline an interesting trend. However, I think a lot of people use their personal experience to other, with no regards for the social contexte. I got 3 different computers, I’m used to Linux, and I couldn’t play to almost every games. Because I’m too poor to get the right hardware, because my friends do not play on compatible games, and gaming is a social experience. My point is not that we shall not make FOSS propaganda’ my point is that software need to be produce regarding the need of the people in our diversity in order to make FOSS mainstream. Everybody is not in IT, in the US with a engineer wages.
Links
Arc Raiders is playable in Linux, it got gold in protondb.
Path of Exile also got gold and PoE2 is platinum.
R.E.P.O is platinum.
That should make more than half of the top 10 games compatible in Linux. Unless it needs to be native for compatible, but I don’t have a problem with proton as long as it’s enough to select the latest proton version to be able to play.
