FYI: That’s more Windows games than run in Windows!
WTF? Why? Because a lot of older games don’t run in newer versions of Windows than when they were made! They still run great in Linux though 👍
There is like a good chunk of an entire decade’s worth of games that can’t be played on PC legitimately due to either expired licenses for music (e.g. EA Trax) or lack of support for older, disc-based DRM (SecuROM etc.).
That’s before factoring older titles that no longer work due to arbitrary changes to DirectX and the Windows kernel, which break backwards compatibility.
Huh wonder whether shadows of destiny pc port works on proton.
Just made the switch, surprised how smooth the transition went so far.
Ooooh, what distro did you go with?
I went full AMD and Fedora. Couldn’t be happier. All games I’ve tested work. It’s been a while since I’ve had a gaming pc so I don’t have a reference point, but everything is as smooth as I’d want to. Some games may need a library or so as stated in protonDB but, I’m so impressed. Now I have desktop running KDE, steam deck has KDE too and my laptop also with fedora.
For real, full AMD on Fedora is incredibly stable and smooth.
Hey! This is also my setup!
Mint, I need my emotional support windows xp.
Omg saaammeeeee
😂
For a while I never made the switch because of gaming. I did 3 years ago and never looked back. Proton is a game changer
The only ones that wouldn’t work are probably the ones with kernel level anti cheat. Maybe if I would be much younger, I might have had different opinion, but, as of today, I believe that all these games that wont run on Linux due to anti-cheat are cancer anyway.
Kernel level anti-cheat is what’s probably going to keep me on Windows for a while. I get those games aren’t for everyone, but I like them well enough, and that’s what my friend group plays. Warzone, DMZ, and going to try RedSec tomorrow. Kind of a shame. Otherwise I’d love to make the jump. As it is I’ll probably see about dual booting when I get my next PC in a year or two.
You have thousand of other games you can play that don’t require kernel level anti cheat, don’t be a fool
I respect where you’re coming from, but a) “fool” is literally in my name. And b) you’re saying “there are other good games, leave those games you’re enjoying.” But you’re also saying “there are other people, leave your friends and family that you play with.” And that’s a little different.
More like Jeffcool
You should try to strengthen your relationship so that they don’t spin around a specific videogame. What happens if you get banned or the requirements for playing the game becomes even more stupid?
You can run them alternative ways usually. Fortnite works with mouse and keyboard through gamepass, although gamepass is a shit deal just for fortnite.
I know a lot of people dual boot or use a virtual machine with windows on it too.
Fortnite works with mouse and keyboard through gamepass
Only local streaming from an Xbox. Streaming from their website requires a controller and I’ve never been able to get a controller to work with a browser on Linux. Well, on Bazzite at least.
I use a Microsoft Xbox One controller I use to play game pass games on Edge. I use Debian, but it was recognized and worked when I paired it in Bluetooth
I tried Floorp and Ungoogled Chromium, and I could only get them to detect my controller if I plugged it in while on the page. If I already had it plugged in, it just wouldn’t work. Tried some online HID testers and determined it wasn’t specific to the website. IDK.
That’s strange. I definitely figured bazzite would have much better device support for game controllers out of the box.
Yeah, idk. I tried both a PS4 and Xbox One controller, too, but it was all the same.
Ive literally done it, but thats not to say it might not work all the time or under all configurations. I was using I think librefox.
Done what? Used mouse+keyboard for streaming without a console at xbox.com/play? If so, I dunno what to say, I tried on both Windows and Linux under two Firefox browsers on Windows and Firefox and Chromium on Linux. Booting any game presents me with a console UI and doesn’t respond to any keyboard input.
It only worked for fortnite, I thought I made that explicit but if I didnt, my bad. For some reason fortnite console version allows mouse and keyboard, at least thats why I think it works.
In my experience AAA games from around 2000s and early 2010s often have problems running in Linux, especially if they have DRM.
In some cases a pirated version will run just fine whilst the official one won’t.
2026 will be the year of the Linux desktop!
The time is near
Every year
I am a PC gamer and I exclusively use Linux. It’s completely viable for gaming, I can say for a fact.
How is device support? Direct drive steering wheels, gamepad, VR, status LED or info displays (ie. Making your keyboard glow red on low health) and bunch of other things like my Sound Blaster G6
Hit and miss since those tend to not have actual standards and generally do their own thing. If it’s popular, there’s a decent chance someone has reverse engineered it and there’s at least partial support (mostly applies to simpler things like steering wheels), but there will be concessions to make until device manufacturers officially support Linux.
If you’re willing to replace equipment, there’s something that works for most of those categories, if not all.
I can’t say for certain if steering wheels or LEDs work, but I know gamepads work better than on Windows, especially Sony ones. DuelSense works perfect. It only works if plugged in but as far as I’m aware that’s how it works on Windows.
Me since 2017 when I stopped dual booting. Never looked back thank goodness
I have you beat by a few years.
I kept a dual boot windows 7 around for a loooong time. I booted it up like once every 2 years or something.
me since dec 2024, i usually use Linux for gaming(thank you Valve for Proton) but i may still spin up a Windows VM to flash roms to my Samsung Phone(grimlers fork sucks).
apps are also pretty alright on Linux but would love this area see some improvement.
i also feel like FOSS works the best on Linux cause duh Linux itself is foss, incl apps.
trying to force AI into windows 11 isnt helping MS.
I can not understand why they made that decision.
They think line won’t go up if they don’t shove it down every user’s throat. They’ve put most of their eggs in that basket.
Because it allows them to collect and process more data, which can be used or sold, increasing their profits.
The end user is seen as nothing but an exploitable resource. If a few thousand nerds don’t like it, they don’t give a shit. Until the general public wakes up to the shitfuckery, nothing will change. Just ask your mom, what she thinks about Microsoft’s data collection.
To be fair it’s not just Microsoft doing that. I was looking at gym equipment the other day and some idiots were trying to sell a fucking home gym with AI. Everyone wants to sell it, nobody wants to buy it.
Linux doesnt have games that install kernel-level spyware under the guise of anti-cheat. Hopefully never will, but I don’t underestimate gamers who love think spyware is a good idea. Stay away from linux if you want kernel anti cheat please, its ruining computers
Breaking News:
This just in new game requires sudoers access to play!
What’s hilarious is that is par the course on windows to run Steam as an admin. In fact that fixes a ton of bugs for people, so any executable the steam process spawns, like game executables, has admin rights as well.
You are not in the sudoers file, this incident WILL BE REPORTED. ಠ_ಠ
I mean companies could probably already create perfectly good kernel level anticheat on Linux if they really wanted to through eBPF programs.
That would not require permanent changes to the Kernel and games would only need root rights at install time. (Like most software already does)
I wouldn’t even have a problem with that kind if a solution.
I’m confused, first you say that Linux doesn’t have anti-cheat, and then you say you should stay away from Linux if you want anti cheat.
Kernel level anticheat. There’s very effective anticheat that is not kernel level and therefore works fine on Linux.
Ah thanks!
No worries buddy 👍
Linux doesn’t have kernel level anti cheat and I hope it remains that way, but I fear my opinion will be in the minority soon if not already.
Who would be against that? And why?
I’m installing Mint for the first time at this very moment. So far, it’s easier than I anticipated. Fuck You Microsoft.
Edit: bro, firstly, what the fuck and where did all this performance come from?!?! I vastly underestimated how many resources windows was hogging. I downloaded Steam (easy-peasy) and then Project Zomboid just as a test. This game runs like butter now. I was having major problems with it before. To the point I basically stopped playing. I know its just one example but I haven’t had my machine run this well in several years, I feel. Also, got Spotify running. Super easy. I need to figure out how to get my VPN set up (ProtonVPN) but so far, I’m kind of in shock. I can’t wait to actually dig in and see what I can do with this new setup.
https://flathub.org/en/apps/com.protonvpn.www You are welcome :)
That did it! Thank you so much!
It’s honestly surprising how bloated Windows has become, and for no clear reason either. Even with all of the obvious bloat disabled and resource-intensive features turned off there’s still a significant overhead, it’s just so constant that you don’t notice it. Then you load up Linux on the same hardware and realize what you’ve been missing.
If you have a look at phoronix.com (probably the best linux news site) you can find loads of articles on linux gaining 0.2% of performance in some superspecific workload.
The Linux performance is what happens when thousands of people do these kinds of micro improvements for decades.
In comparison Windows is what happens if everyone follows the new cool trend and tries to lamd the next big thing.
Windows 10 did that to us. My work workstation and my wife’s laptop suffered with W10, so I searched alternate OS and found Linux. Luckily our CAD software had a Linux version and I got productivity back.
My wife’s 2010 laptop on w10 was not usable. Its super fast with Linux. Faster than my work issued brand-new Lenovo laptop with W11. The only performance problem would be rendering video or other hardcore tasks.
This is just how I felt when I first switched, also to Mint. I’ve experienced it a couple other times too when switching from some proprietary application to the FOSS option.
I like to describe it as feeling the different priorities of the teams working on each project. When one is made by passionate users who care about it being good software for its purpose, and the other is designed by a committee to hit as many different corporate metrics as possible, it shows.
hit as many different corporate metrics as possible
ah yes. product roadmaps where every stakeholder gets their share except the users
Well yeah their business isn’t to “serve users.” It’s to “farm consumers.”
That’s why I’m glad I do embedded systems in a niche industry. I’m not trying to drive engagement across the globe. I’m just making a device that serves the needs of a user who has other important work to worry about.
Protonvpn has a flatpack. Check your distro’s app store for it.
BASH will be your best friend for any Linux distro.
Ill definitely look into this.
Yeah, once you get the basics of BASH down Linux becomes really easy.
Open up your Console/Shell/Terminal and type “help” it will give you the list of standard commands that let you navigate the shell.
- cd = change directory
- mkdir = make directory
- nano = edit file
- rm = remove file
- rmdir = remove directory
- sudo = run command as administrator/root privileges
And once you get that going you’ll eventually get the options for each command, for example
rm -rfis remove a file forcefully (the -f option), if you apply that command to directories it will remove anything within those directories with recursion (the -r option).You also don’t need to cd into a directory if you want to edit a file in it. For example
nano /home/user/Desktop/SomeRandomFile.conf
Meanwhile nearly 60% of Windows Games now run on Windows.
One of the most frequently suggested beginner distros is Linux mint. It’s great, it’s stable, it’s what I use and while it’s not exactly cutting edge, or necessary the prettiest distro, it’s great for beginners and will feel pretty familiar coming from windows.
Pop_os! And bazzite are more “gaming focused” if that’s more your style, but I’ve never had an issue gaming with Linux mint.
Ultimately, it doesn’t really matter terribly much. Pick one, install it to a new drive and try it out. If you don’t like it, pick another one.
And how many run on linux via a well documented way?
I’ve been playing around with bazzite a bit, and for sure, i can run a lot of games on it, but you often end up googling which launcher to use, which settings to use, … And then even if you find something, it doesn’t always work.
Linux is making good progress in this regard, but this title feels a bit over optimistic (or at least, users who take it at face value will quickly be disappointed when they can’t get 90% of their games to work).
I’ve been playing around with bazzite a bit, and for sure, i can run a lot of games on it, but you often end up googling which launcher to use, which settings to use, … And then even if you find something, it doesn’t always work.
Here’s a step-by-step guide:
- Launch Steam.
- Install game.
- Hit Play.
Zero issues.
To add to this-
One of the biggest traps for new linux users since forever has been to jump straight into the deep end- tweaking any and every tunable- then when that inevitably all breaks, blaming Linux and moving back.
For anyone reading- You don’t need Arch as your first distro, you don’t want to on the bleeding edge unless you’re prepared to bleed. You don’t need things like Golden Eggroll Proton or any external launchers.
Just keep it simple to start- Something like Mint, SuSE or plain Fedora with Steam using the built-in Proton.
Bazzite gets… let say ‘advertised’ a lot and it’s got a lot of good ideas - but if you’re coming from Windows I think it’s just too much - it’s an immutable system* with containers for everything. That’s an ocean away from Windows unless you were comfortable with Sandboxie beforehand (if you were, dive right in)
*\the system is read only, you cannot change anything in the default image, ie. imagine if you were never allowed to add files to c:\windows
Edit: For the newbs, an ancient meme- https://www.shlomifish.org/humour/by-others/funroll-loops/Gentoo-is-Rice.html
I know its not important, but it is actually Glorious Eggroll.
- Block the game from the Internet so it can’t collect data on you or go offline for a while and it may or may not still work.
#4 is the main reason I’m hesitant to install games from Steam instead of alternative versions of the game that don’t have this limitation. But then installing games on Linux often becomes a time-consuming feat of trial and error.
- Launch Steam.
- Game isn’t available on Steam.
- No ‘Play’ button
There are Issues.
You think you’re describing a problem with Linux, but you’re just describing a problem with the game. If it’s not on steam it would be the same way on Windows. It will most likely be in a different, less popular and barely supported launcher. By then it is the publisher who is screwing you up, not Linux.
I was simply offering a case where steam isn’t the simple solution to gaming on Linux, as described by the post above.
I never said I was describing a ‘problem with Linux’ or a ‘problem with the game’.
Not all games are available on Steam or will work with steams proton/wine/whatever.
Game publishers have the right to choose how and where they publish their games. If I can’t install and play them on my machine I simply won’t. AS there is already an endless list of great games I haven’t played.
If you only play new popular games, and buy them on steam (and not GOG which is a platform that’s far more aligned with the linux way of thinking), sure. But i’ve got plenty of old steam games that have issues, or require me to muck around with custom control stuff, have warnings that they might not be fully supported, …
I love that we’re all moving to linux to be free, and then be using steam iso GOG XD.
Step by step guide for GOG (or Epic):
- Install Heroic Games Launcher
- Log in to your GOG account.
- Install game and hit play.
(Heroic will use Proton or Wine for the compatibility layer and you will (most of the time) have zero issues with playing games)
Please let me know if you find good documentation. I want to make the jump off of windows, but honestly I’m scared it will just cause a ton of frustration
Honestly, check https://www.protondb.com/ and look for the games you want to play, it will let you know how well they work out of the box by just installing them on steam and hitting play. The reality is that it very much depends on what games you want to play, if you like CoD and other competitive multiplayer you’re unfortunately in the missing 10%, but for most cases you should be fairly well covered.
thing is, not even protondb is reliable. There’s been many times I’ve tried running a game, and encountered an error not posted anywhere, nor protondb, reddit or steam forums. All the comments on protondb will say, “works great out of the box!”, and I’m just left digging through random forums at that point.
The ONLY issue I’ve had like this was related to me having a dual monitor setup.
well, I have a dual monitor setup, and can concur, have had many issues related to it, but I blame that more on linux/wayland than proton/wine.
As if that’s an acceptable explanation.
Why the fuck is that breaking games… Reminds me of when i was playing around with linux 15 years ago, and i saw how poor multimonitor support was compared to windows back then. And they’re still managing to have stupid issues like this in 2025…
This is why the linux desktop keeps failing “i want to play a game but it doesn’t work because i have 2 monitors”… Who wants to use that as an OS??
Multi monitor also breaks some games on Windows. Why would anyone want to use that OS?
It’s very strange.
Most games will just launch, no problems. But then you’ll get one title like the above poster has, that just refuses to launch no matter what you do.
Most of the times there’s a work around on ProtonDB that will get you running in a few minutes. But sometimes it feels like, or is the case, where the developers actively prevent the game from launching on Linux.
Yeah but the same happens on windows, often times with no way at all to play the title without a VM
In my experience that has been extremely rare in recent years (or more like decades now).
I previously played with just Steam and there’s basically one setting to enable - allowing the install of non-native games - and then (for supported games) it’s pretty much the same as Windows. In some cases you need to select the Proton version but generally using “latest” does the trick. There are games that require Proton-GE to work. These were essentially ones where Valve’s Proton version doesn’t have workarounds for various DRM etc (likely because doing so would get them in trouble). On Steam Deck this is done by pretty much going into the local Appstore in “desktop mode” to install. Other distros may vary.
For non-Steam games it’s a bit more of a pain, and can vary widely by game. I’ve installed a ton either just by running the Windows installer from Wine or scripts provided by Lutris.
Honestly if you’ve got the cash and want to try things, grab a Deck and give that a shot. If it works for you, take the leap to Linux on PC. Alternatively on PC, add/resize a disk and go dual-boot. The guided installers on Ubuntu variants generally make this pretty easy.
protondb
I think you’ve gotten some good replies here.
My comment isn’t meant to scare away people, but to keep our feet on the ground. Linux gaming has made amazing progress. If you play recent, mainstream games, it’ll be very well documented, and most things will work, unless they’re explicitly made to not work (such as certain anti cheat systems).
If you play lesser known indie games, really old games, or more specific things (not sure how good VR support is?), you’ll quickly encounter issues that may or may not be well documented. Also, in another reply thread to my post, someone commented a game not working because he has multiple monitors on linux. Stuff like that is also still happening.
So it can be really decent, but know that you might encounter issues. Give it a try and see if it works for the games that are the most important for you :).
Games still crash on windows for multiple monitors, or launching in full screen for the first time, and more. Often without an error message without digging into event viewer or game logs.
And TBH, once you learn how to troubleshoot on Linux, it’s actually quite informative. For instance, I resolved a cryptic error message being returned by steam on game launch by launching steam from the CLI and then used the steam gui to launch the game and was given live event stream logging.
Once there’s better GUI tooling and and more passionate techs with a design/UX passion join the community, I can only imagine how seamless things will get.
I am genuinely interested in helping here, can you list a few titles here?
Also the whole compatibility statistic is a misnomer, not accounting for windows games and applications that are now only supported with Wine and Proton. Windows 11 doesn’t have 100% windows compatibility either.
It’s just my experience when playing around with bazzite on my legion go.
But look at the other replies, there are people mentioning issues they encounter (like one guy replying a game not working because he’s using multiple monitors. If that’s breaking games on linux… that’s a far better description of the current state than the title of this thread).
And some of the other replies here are “launch steam, press play”…
- why are we all running to steam when we’re using linux to have freedom of software? I’d expect more GOG love in a thread like this.
- steam is indeed nice, but we also have lutris, and heroic, and i’m probably missing some other launchers here.
And i’ll give you a quick example of what i encountered: i thought of giving visual pinball a go on my legion go. It’s a free project, not on steam. Checked lutris, it was on there, but an ancient version, not kept up to date. But since the latest version, they have an actual linux build, gave that one a go, and had to manually tinker with it expecting a symlink for a certain dll to exist, but bazzite is fedora based, and uses a different convention for that dll than other distros, so had to manually make a symlink so the game could find it.
I’m a programmer, the above is an hour of frustration until i have solved it, i can manage. But that’s an example of what i encounter. I’ve got some older games in my steam library that have warnings that there are controller issues with them, …
And that is just the linux experience. Wrong distro? it might not work. Multiple screens? It might not work. The latest hardware? You’ll never guess it, but it might not work. It’s tuesday? It might not work… I’m amazed with proton etc… how much progress linux gaming has made, but we have to keep our feet on the ground, and be honest with ourselves. If we act as if we’re already there, while we’re not. How will we actually get where we need to get if everyone acts as if it’s good enough already?
Gaming on Linux is like gaming on Windows 20 years ago when you spent more time just trying to get the fucking game to run than actually playing the game.
I got an error trying to launch a BF2 expansion that told me to contact the nearest rendering developer.
I think you’ve gotten some good replies here.
My comment isn’t meant to scare away people, but to keep our feet on the ground. Linux gaming has made amazing progress. If you play recent, mainstream games, it’ll be very well documented, and most things will work, unless they’re explicitly made to not work (such as certain anti cheat systems).
If you play lesser known indie games, really old games, or more specific things (not sure how good VR support is?), you’ll quickly encounter issues that may or may not be well documented. Also, in another reply thread to my post, someone commented a game not working because he has multiple monitors on linux. Stuff like that is also still happening.
So it can be really decent, but know that you might encounter issues. Give it a try and see if it works for the games that are the most important for you :).
But what percentage of games that use anticheat?
Seems about 40% working, I personally only have one game that doesn’t jive with Linux. If the game you’re playing doesn’t work that’s the fault of the specific anti-cheat developers because it’s obviously possible to do it right.
Sure, but from the end user perspective, it doesn’t matter whose fault it is - the result is you can’t play a game you otherwise just can in Windows. We know it’s their fault.
If you never play any games with anticheat that’s fine, but all it takes is one game, and then later another, and then later another, to make Linux a dealbreaker for many gamers. These are not unpopular games.
It can be the whole difference between someone sticking with Windows but itching to make the switch, and someone actually making the switch.
What good is 90% of games working if you have 3 games that you really want to play that don’t work?
What good are those 3 games you want to play if they don’t work on the OS you want to use?
It’s just a matter of priority, about 8 years ago, I just made the decision to not play a game if it doesn’t work on Linux.
The fomo is real
I 100% get what you are saying. But I’m also 100% fine with voting with my wallet by not supporting game developers that demand kernel-level access to my machine.
Think about the EA stuff. You install one of their games, and now Saudi Arabia and Jared Kushner* have kernel-level access to your machine. Why, why the hell is that worth it for just a game?
*I wish I was joking
Those are likely shit games.
I used to be huge into Battlefield. Even on Linux, I played the shit out of BF4. But I will never be sad about avoiding kernel level anticheat. I don’t even feel like I’m missing out, quite the opposite really, especially after Saudi Arabia bought out EA. Why would I ever want kernel level anything from them? They’d have to pay me.
I guess that’s all to say that I just don’t play those games, and I’m better off for it. I think we should be educating other gamers on what they’re sacrificing to play these games for little reduction in cheaters (BF6 has them, I’ve seen videos of it). Is it really worth it to have a Saudi rootkit on your computer to play that game? Are they willing to sacrifice their security, privacy, and digital freedoms so they can play a game for a couple of hours a day or week? If so, that’s fine, but games that use kernel level anticheat tend to try to mask the risks of running them, which is fucked.
I mean, you get what you pay for with games that have anti cheat software mandatory.
The rust entry is kinda wrong. Linux friendly community servers do run they just need more active players to be fun
Had a quick look into this, this is the best related info I could find on the situation with Rust.
Well, I’m 90% proud of Linux!
I made the switch almost a year ago when they started announcing all the spyware coming to win11. The distro you choose matters a LOT. After several that were buggy and frustrating I landed on Garuda dragonized. Setup was easy with their assistant finding the drivers I needed and I have yet to have any system breaking updates. Better track record than windows TBH. Performance is great, and steam integrates so well with proton that my experience is honestly just as good as windows native. I should probably go make a donation to the Garuda project, now that I’m thinking about it.
Aside from Nvidia, what drivers?
Most accessories are plug and play these days, so Nvidia may have actually been the only one. Not all distros can detect the best Nvidia drivers automatically, and finding and installing the right one can be a pain. Which makes it borderline impossible for a low tech person looking to make the jump to Linux.
Notably, it’s also entirely possible that the issues I dealt with were more to do with poor Wayland implementations than drivers. Either way, Garuda has worked beautifully and easily.
Linux Mint here. I have had only 1 issue with a game on Linux and honestly, it was an easier fix then getting some games working on Windows which I have experienced plenty of as well. Linux really is just as easy as “Install from Steam, play”.
Drivers are easy now today too, just like Windows. Honestly, if you gamed on Windows, you have all you need to game on Linux.
