The majority of problems Linux has with gaming are intentional decisions on the part of the studios at this point.
I keep what I think is a pretty healthy gaming diet, which tends to steer me away from the megacorporate shit and into smaller studios and indies, and games just tend to run.
Even AAA games are fine, as long as they don’t have intrusive anticheat. If you’re after SP, non-VR gaming, Linux is ready today. If you want VR, you need to be more flexible with headsets. If you want MP, you need to be really flexible since devs intentionally block Linux for whatever reason.
I can install and play pretty much any single player game I want, even new releases, and I am confident I will be able to play it with no significant/noticable issue… and on the offchance there is one, it will most assuredly be fixed within a couple days with a proton update… and honestly its been like 2 years since that last happened to me.
The only time I even have to think about installing a game, and thus have to check protondb, is when I want to install an MMO or Multiplayer game…and a shocking amount of those work, too. Just not all of them, because of invasive anticheat.
I don’t think you need to be super flexible with Multiplayer as long as they aren’t competitive games. Here’s some multiplayer games I’ve played flawlessly in the last 12 months: Baldur’s Gate III, Webfishing, Deep Rock Galactic, Atlyss and Stardew Valley. It really depends on the genre I think.
Meh. Most games, I’d say. Couldn’t get Cyberpunk 2077 to run on Mint.
--launcher-skipshould fix it, according to ProtonDB.I looked on protondb of course. The issue isn’t the launcher, it does boot into the menu and freezes once I load a game.
Ok, then it’s probably some kind of system resource setting or something. I had an issue with Hogwarts Legacy freezing after an hour or two, and it was fixed by this setting change. Maybe that or a similar tweak is all you need. Or maybe just a GPU driver update.
I haven’t tried that game, but I will say most of the games I’ve tried work fine without any tweaks.
I love that you tried to help though. Thanks anyway.
I’m happy to. If you ever want to give it another try, there are tons of there willing to help as well.
I’d say the peripheral situation could be better too, such as sim racing gear. Logitech support is solid and looks decent with Fanatec at least, but there’s a lot of options out there that are unlikely to have good Linux support.
I tested out Monado recently with the Reverb G2 and it’s coming along nicely. It’s definitely not ready yet, but hopefully it will be within a few years.
Yes.
Why is the penguin holding it like that??
because the pinguin is the linux gaming pc handing you the controler
Nice!
maybe its ai slop
Have you tried to play with one without thumbs?
I will test this theory and report back
I’ve been gaming soley on linux since 2020 or 2021.
Yeah, its definitely ready now, most straggler games are basically massively overproduced and massively MTX exploitative team based shooters using kernel level anti cheat that are designed for children with mom’s credit card.
So what you are saying is “no, linux doesn’t let you play the games you want to play, especially the extremely popular ones”.
You can play most of the games you want to play, with the main caveats being VR and anti-cheat. If it’s SP and on a regular screen, it’ll probably work.
What about flipping the question. Making modern games available on more platforms?
I have no problem playing games on Linux. Currently playing Baldur’s Gate 3. Only thing I had to was turn on compatibility in the steam settings.
Ugh, that’s too much work. I’m going back to Winblows
I’m playing Hogwarts Legacy and needed to tune one system setting to fix occasional crashes. That’s it, and that’s the most trouble I’ve had in a few years.
Which one? Maybe it can help my audio issue who brings random audio glitches
I think it was increasing vm.max_map_count. I had some weird glitches and it would crash after an hour or so, and this seems to have fixed it.
Thanks
I hope that fixes it!
Arch Linux already incremented vm.max count in a recent update, it seems fixed using these launch options:
DXVK_MEMORY_LIMIT_MB=14384 PROTON_ENABLE_NVAPI=1 DXVK_ASYNC=1 PULSE_LATENCY_MSEC=30 gamemoderun %command%With latest Proton-GE
Do you mind me asking you which distro you use? I’ve tried running BG3 on Linux Mint and I can’t seem to get the game to ever load into the world. I get all the way to the in-game menu and into the loading screen after that and then it hangs and crashes. Every time. I’ve tried using a couple different versions of Proton, tried out a few different versions of Nvidia graphics drivers… No luck yet.
It runs fine on Linux Mint Debian under proton for me.
This illustration is triggering me
Gamers on Linux have minimal setup overhead.*
*as long as you stick with Steam. Anything else means going to Lutris, Heroic Games Launcher, etc which is far more hit or miss.
Added the missing qualifier to one of the articles bullet points for them.
In my experience running non-steam games through steam with proton is the best way to play those games too. The only time I’ve ever had to use lutris was when I had to install some DLC for a GOG application on the same prefix as the game because it had a separate exe installer for that DLC. I haven’t been able to figure out a way to do that through steam. But once I got that done I just ran the game through steam and it worked perfectly. The heroic games launcher gets suggested a lot too but I literally have never been able to get it to work for a single game.
With Heroic for what its worth, I have had some luck on difficult games going into the settings for the troublesome game, going to the “other” tab and ticking the box for “Use Steam Runtime”.
Pewdiepie apparently confirms that it is, atleast according to his latest video and his comment in the comment section.
Could you link them? That would give a massive boost in getting more people to sign up for Linux.
For example: https://phtn.app/post/lemmy.ml/26299109
There are a couple of other posts, you’ll find them quickly if you search for Pewdiepie.
Yes
At this point Linux and Windows are more like Xbox and PlayStation back in the the 2000’s, except Linux has a compatibility layer to allow it to run a lot of Windows games.
An article similar to this is posted by itsfoss every week.
Pretty much, yeah. Only thing not 100% yet are some of the more obscure peripherals. Example: Eye and head tracking. While sticks can and do work in Linux, it would be nice if VKB, Virpil, etc had native Linux calibration tools.
Doesn’t actually matter with the way Windows performs, these days.
Not yet, in order to be ready for mainstream gaming, the gaming experience has to be smooth (As in easy to install, Mod & patch)
It’s smoother than Windows gaming was when I started Windows gaming (win 95).
For reference, to play Warcraft 1 multiplayer you joined a chatroom on Battle.net and the chat channel gave everyone a
terminalMS-DOS command that you had to copy/paste into the terminal. If anybody had any network more complicated than computer -> modem then it would fail. If anyone failed to connect your game would crash. I was gaming like this at around 10 years old.Obviously, comparing 2025 Linux to '90s Windows isn’t exactly fair… but gamers are not incapable of dealing with complexity.
Sure, don’t tell your 8 year old cousin to swap from Windows to Linux. But if you’re a smart high school student then you can learn. Like anything, it’ll take some getting used to and you’ll have to deal with frustrations but knowing how to use Linux and, probably more importantly, how to research and solve problems is well worth the effort.
Oh yeah. I remember watching my older brother try to set up that kind of connection. I was never allowed under threat of capital punishment to touch anything of course. Good times.
Haha, yes. It was trying times.
But, if you’re reading this, you’re probably already more than qualified enough to use Linux for gaming. Obviously you’re going to have to learn things but it is very much worth it. Also, the desktop environments look much better imo.
