Yeah I did. God bless WineDB.
Steam before proton was okay for stuff like Fallout 3. Needed some hackery with Wine prefixes and getting the right DLLs in there but eventually worked. Older GoG games like Alpha Centauri were fine with DosBox.
Proton is great. Cyberpunk 2077 on Ultra.
Back when you had to install steam in wine and then for a while you would have native steam and wine steam in the same distro install. Now it’s so easy that I figure anyone talking shit about gaming on Linux only plays those rootkit anticheat shooters or hasn’t played games since having kids or something and have become one of those people that are shocked to hear what they thought were current gen consoles are actually really old already.
I actually found an old /home drive of mine this week where I had exactly this setup, so painful.
Trying to find the correct steamapps folder for the particular instance of the game and going through all the dot folders and wine folder structure… that hasn’t actually improved much now that I think about it.
Gaming on Linux in general has improved a lot more than the pollution levels in my town at least.
My 1999 setup running Slackware while playing Loki’s Civ CTP
How many hard drives you have in that beast? I see enough ribbon cable to wrap a gift
Old story: There was a sale at a big box Electronics store on Seagate Barracuda SCSI-2 Wide 9.1GB drives and I bought 6 of them to give me a 40GB RAID-5 on an old mylex dac960 scsi raid card. Bigtime storage in 1999.
Those fed my 3:1 ratio mp3 sharing site that my uunet bot advertised haha.
That’s insane I absolutely love it. To put that in perspective, 1999 game storage requirements:
- GTA 2, 70 MB
- Quake III Arena, 70 MB
- SimCity 3000, 230 MB
- Everquest, 1 GB
I fished a tower like that out of a dumpster and built my first gaming PC in that and ran Gentoo on it about 2005. Played CS 1.6 and WoW and had better performance in Linux than Windows at the time.
First i thought you had a cat hiding there.
What is that console looking thing in the bottom right corner?
Sylvartas is right, it’s an old flatbed scanner.
Could be a scanner
That’s one tall tower.
My first attempt to switch to Linux for my primary desktop was in 2007, and ended when my attempt to run WoW via WINE mostly worked, but had a weird an completely unfixable audio delay.
Proton (and Valve’s efforts on SteamOS and the Steam Deck more generally) have been an absolute godsend for Linux as a usable daily-driver.
PlayOnLinux was a good friend. Sometimes.
Except for all the bad runability reports made to winehq by its users to the appdb
Isn’t it now?
Since 2012! PlayOnLinux was the closest thing to Proton then.
Actuslly wine was closest thing to proton, play on linux was nothing but a front end for managing wine software
Wine and Cedega back in the early days, I played WiW in the Vanilla days on Suse Linux. My first foray into Linux was 2002 on a system that was decent for the time. I have fond memories of the first time I got my GeForce 3 card actually doing hardware acceleration. glxgears rendered hundreds of FPS.
cedega
Yeah, this definitely makes me feel old. 😅
Me. Minecraft worked just as well under either OS.
Just a fyi. Java edition works just as well under windows, linux and macos.
The newer bedrock edition works only on windows and consoles.
Kids where easier to exploit with a game store then linux users who remember the old days i guess.
For bedrock on Linux I’ve had good luck with mcpe launcher, I use it to play on a friends realm
Interesting, great to hear that it does work for those who want it.
Still wont touch bedrock with it with a 10m pole.
I feel it, I prefer Java but I just go where my people are. for what it’s worth MCPE the store is broken, so it’s subjectively a better experience 😂
My last foray into Linux gaming was back in the early-2010s, and I was mostly just trying to get EVE Online to run unsuccessfully. I was running a laptop that was top if the line (in 2009) and my PCs were cobbled together from old Dells and HPs donated by family and friends or retired and given away by my company IT team.
Steam on Linux was nice, and would show you which games in your library had Linux native versions to install. I held out on that and browser gamed for a while. Played a lot of Runescape and Minecraft. Taught myself to code a bit, but didn’t really get anywhere with that.
Eventually I had money and time to put together a “proper” gaming PC, and of course I put Windows on it since I wanted to get an NVidia graphics card as I’d had so much trouble with the AMD drivers on my laptop.
Ran Windows for gaming and kept Linux on the laptop since then. First PC ran Win7, which i loved. Next one ran Win 8, which I hated. Current one was running Win 10, which was meh, and I’ve only soured on it over time. Made the switch back to Linux last week after I got tired of M$ constantly asking me if I want to try Copilot on /both/ my work and personal PCs.
Proton is fucking great. Never going back. The old laptop is still running strong after 15 years. It’s got BunsenLabs installed at the moment.
Kids these days don’t even know about TuxRacer?
I mean… does Tuxracer and Wesnoth count?
yes, it does
When I was growing up, my dad had a phase where he was experimenting with Linux. He had several installs over the years, Red Hat, Gnome(?), Ubuntu…I remember spending hours playing Tux Racer, SuperTux, Pingus, Chromium BSU…good times.
I’m your father, from a different family.
I have been playing on Linux for years before proton.
WoW, HL, Fallout, Diablo, Quake, RimWorld to name a few.
Yah, I used to WoW on linux when I played. Pissed my guildies off because some patches I’d have to reboot before every boss attempt. But eventually it got pretty bulletproof.
Back in 2008 or so, for a few patches WoW actually ran better under linux than windows because of some bug.
After Steam officially released its native Linux client I played Half Life 1, 2 and “Brutal Legend” because they all had native Linux ports before proton was a thing. Before that I remember playing games like Sauerbraten (quake like fps), Battle for Wesnoth (my wife and I still play this together), Frozen Bubble, LBreakout2 and several other Linux native games.
Quake III Arena also had a native Linux version.
And Quake, Quake 2, Descent, UT, Tribes 2.
I remember that! I had Unreal Tournament 2004 and it technically had a native Linux version but it wasn’t on the CD. You had to extract most of the files from the CD and go download the Linux executable file from the unreal website to drop into the installation folder.
Was not expecting brutal legend to be the game overturning technological norms
I used to play StarCraft II in Wine back in like 2010.
I read this and was like “pffft….starcraft 2 didn’t come out in 2010 , it was waaaay later”
Then I checked and was like “Well fuck me”
Alpha Centauri baby! Still one of my favourite games, I wonder if it still works
Works for me through Heroic Launcher
