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Linux gamer for 3+ years now. I rarely, rarely have any issues with anything at all, and most of those are solved by switching to Proton GE or Experimental. Most of the time I think stuff actually runs better than on Windows.
But to be clear, I don’t really play anything multiplayer. The sole exceptions like Civ VI have worked perfectly fine, but my understanding is that a big reason these larger multiplayer games don’t work is their anticheat.
Yep. For games, it is usually some crappy anticheat, for other applications (outside games) it is crappy licence managers. Or really, really inept programmers. Professionally inept programmers.
I’m about a year in. One interesting thing is that older games seem to work better with Proton than they do on Windows. For example, after installing Psychonauts on Windows I had to Google why it wouldn’t load and try a few ini changes until I found what worked. On Linux, I just started it and it worked with no issues.
NVIDIA user or AMD for GPU?
AMD. That was an early switch I made since the nvidia experience on Linux sucks (at least compared to AMD). Minimally it’s the difference between juggling poorly supported drivers and not dealing with drivers at all (since AMD’s are in the kernel), but I’ve gathered that there are many compatibility issues as well.
Ah. NVIDIA is why I haven’t made the commitment to tux yet
nvidia user here, made a “soft switch” to linux some time ago, and got to say the current 555 series drivers made a world of a difference. Most games just work.
Haven’t made a full switch due doubts with music and video production stuff. But, slowly testing my way in and dualbooting between OS’s in the meantime
Does RTX work? I’m running a 3070
yep. Tested GOG version of Cyberpunk and RT, DLSS, and all that work. Other than that, games with RT or DLSS I’ve tested and deemed working: Observer (RT&DLSS), Enshrouded (DLSS), Warframe (DLSS).
I have a 3090.
Hmmm well that is promising… I’ll keep that in mind whenever Microsoft kills windows 10
There’s no reason to, there’s nothing wrong with Nvidia. I game on it without any issues. Most people on Linux use Nvidia.
It is decidedly more work, particularly for those not familiar with Linux. But you’re right that there aren’t necessarily other issues – it all comes down to the particular titles one wants to play. ProtonDB is everyone’s friend.
For me personally, I love the simplicity of the all-AMD approach, and as I’m only a 1080p gamer, I really don’t need the nvidia horsepower anyway.
Ah yes the bias of: “its works for me”….
But to be clear, I don’t really play anything multiplayer.
I tried to avoid such bias by being clearer about what I play. I don’t think it’s biased to suggest single player games are more likely to work without issue.
Likewise, if you’re on nvidia, you’re more likely to have issues.
Did you have a different experience? Or none at all and just assumed it only works for some?
Been gaming on linux for the better part of last couple of decades, can agree its in a muhc better place now and its a rarety to find a title that doesn’t work through proton. There are some but not a massive amount.
Kinda ironic but out of the ones that don’t work for proton, sometimes they work via wine instead
And some games want an older version of Proton (like River City Girls), so it’s not always intuitive what the fix might be, but there’s several options to improve compatibility, these days.
Now that ntsync has been added to the upstream kernel for the next release, it will only get better.
Kinda ironic but out of the ones that don’t work for proton, sometimes they work via wine instead
Kinda weird rather, because Proton is basically wine + a lot of profiled tweaks for the titles. With wine you usually have to manually figure out tweaks or use third party installers, like through Lutris, which often also are somewhat wacky.
Exactly but since it worked, i am not complaining 😅
better part of last couple of decades
You mean like the lock down period
I don’t understand this infographic at all…
I think I got it.
The right side is showing what percentage of games can be played at each level. Platinum is flawless, and borked is… borked. The percentages below that show that 84% of games are super playable, 95% if you’re willing to settle for silver.
The outside ring is the one that shows these percentages.
I’m still unsure of the center rings though.
The rings from top to bottom:
ProtonDB Medals (ProtonDB’s appraisal: How does it play. You may need to tinker.)
ProtonDB Click Play (ProtonDB’s new appraisal: How does it play without any tinkering)
Deck Verified
Chromebook Ready
Damn near anything good works under proton. Cyberpunk 2077 is basically flawless out of the box. No issues with a lot of other newer games.
Ironically some of the older ones like Fallout 3 need a little bit of hackery to get the radio working
Does the RTX and DLSS work in Cyberpunk 2077 on Linux?
As of a couple months ago, the ray tracing also works in Linux when on AMD.
I was able to get it working perfectly fine. It was dicey around a year ago and required some run flags. Now it runs perfectly fine (for me at least)
Proton is like magic. I remember when gaming on Linux only worked for some rather old games. Now you can almost buy anything from Steam and expect it to work on Linux. What surprised me the most was that even Enderal, an excellent total conversion mod for Skyrim, just worked. The same goes for the newest Hitman. I expected that I have to do some tinkering, but no. You click play and that is it. I doubt that any of these games where ever tested on Linux by their developers. That they all work so well shows how good of a job the developers of Proton, DXVK, and Wine are doing.
What software do you use to organize Skyrim mods and profiles on Linux? Asking from absolute ignorance.
I don’t know. I never was much into modded Skyrim. The last time I played Skyrim was around 2012. Enderal installs like any other Steam game and comes with its own launcher. I only played Enderal because it was recommended to me since I really liked Gothic II and story focused games. I now also highly recommend it. This mod is better than at least 90% of games released in the last 10 years.
I use MO2 with quirks. I’m trying to remember what all I did, but I think I renamed MO2 to SkyrimLauncher.exe so steam would open MO2. Then I would launch Skyrim (skse) from there!
The quirks were you couldn’t install inside of MO2 because it wouldn’t connect to Nexus. The other thing was if I was installing a lot of mods or doing a lot of interactions in MO2 it would get slower and slower. Restarting it fixed that.
All that said I put a ton of hours into a 500ish mod game without issues!
You don’t want to count Silver as working well. Still incredible though.
Why? From my experience, many Silver games do work with minor tweaks. Some might have issues, but I wouldn’t discount them all.
By definition Silver means some stuff is broken even with workarounds. Gold is where the performance and functionality works near perfectly after some workarounds. You’re right, some Silver games do work fairly well, and the rating may or may not be accurate. But I wouldn’t count most of them to the total of well supported games.
That’s the definition but in practice silver could mean anything. For example Pico Park is rated silver but has a lot of recent positive ratings.
I was so surprised that I was able to get Genshin running on my steam deck through wine. I remember when the deck came out, everyone was saying that games that use anti cheat software wouldn’t work on the deck. But both Genshin and Elden Ring work on the deck.
I think Genshin removed their anticheat after it was used by ransomware
The anticheat ignores its kernel module fails to load on Wine since v3.8, otherwise the AC is still there. Same goes for ZZZ. The ransomware does not require user to have GI installed to run so GI removing the anticheat would do nothing, MS had to unsign vulnerable driver. Idk if they did.
The ransomware does not require user to have GI installed to run so GI removing the anticheat would do nothing,
True. Maybe MS just doesn’t want to sign their driver anymore.
Oh really? Then why does it still need permission to run on Windows? I thought that was due to the anticheat ?
that use anti cheat software wouldn’t work on the deck
Not all anti cheat mechanisms are the same, but the worst ones are kernel-hooking ones for multiple reasons. Besides security, stability and privacy issues with them they also have compatibility issues with any OS they weren’t built specifically for
Now that’s great to know, I’m not on genshin anymore since they are very cheap with rewards, but I still love Star Rail and been playing ZZZ, was afraid of switching.
I have only tried Genshin, but it runs fairly well. The biggest issue I’ve had is major stuttering when I’m playing on battery. Plugged in, there’s no stuttering. Not sure why.
ZZZ works on Linux. HSR is … complex. If you want more info dm me.
72% platinum and gold, 86% plat, gold and silver. I’m honestly surprised that this isn’t higher because almost everything I play just works (I do have a lot of random games in my account from humble bundles and such, so I don’t even play a good amount of them).
Funny enough what I’ve been playing recently is Minecraft. Downloaded the Prism launcher, linked my account, installed the game and the BetterMC modpack which includes pretty heavy lighting shaders, get an easy 120fps with absolutely zero tinkering besides telling the game to use my systems OpenAL rather than the bundled one, as that was causing a crash. I do have a relatively beefy system so the performance isn’t what I’m impressed by, moreso the fact that this was all up and running in 5 minutes.
A lot of reports on ProtonDB are ancient. I would say literally 99% of games work nowadays out of the box.
5 MINUTES to install and play a game? Including a bug fix? By a knowledgeable person?
That probably translates into an hour for me, if my googling gets lucky, or complete frustration more likely.
Damnit, I was hoping I could move to Linux, I’ve used it before, even had it dual-booting with Windows a couple of times, but I never got comfortable with it.
I just downloaded the .deb and installed it without having to change anything.
But don’t get me started on my problems I had with that f…ing microsoft account to get onto our shared server. Somehow I am too dumb for that (same on the tablet).
The OpenAL issue was actually pretty easy to diagnose and fix. The crash comes with a pretty detailed log indicating the game encountered an issue when OpenAL was trying to load. And, lo and behold, staring at me was a checkbox in Prism Launcher’s options to “Use System OpenAL.” I ticked it and haven’t had a single issue since, my guess is that the launchers bundled version of OpenAL just didn’t play nice with my system.
I’ve even manually added a few mods since installing, still no issues.
I do understand where you’re coming from though, I personally enjoy tinkering and problem solving almost as much as actually using my computer. It’s a learning experience for me and makes my computer really feel like my own at the end of the day. However I totally get that not being everyones cup of tea.
Out of everything i play, the only game holding me back is Destiny 2, which was explicitly refused support for.
Everything else works phenomenally well, and in some rare cases, performs a lot better.
The only struggle point is heavily modded games with tools that assume i’m doing this on windows, but times are changing too
Like The Elder Scrolls? I’ve been paying Oblivion for a while with a ton of mods using a mod manager and I don’t know how to run this in Linux.
https://github.com/rockerbacon/modorganizer2-linux-installer Small caveat at the moment though is that Protontricks is borked and requires a more up to date version than what’s on most repos and flathub. I used the pipx install for Protontricks and that one worked though, but I think the beta branch on Flathub has an updated version now as well, which hopefully goes stable soon. Nexus is also working on a new cross platform compatible mod manager now, but that’s going to be far away.
For a lot of other games r2modman + Thunderstore are also working natively on Linux. Games like Stardew Valley have a native mod manager like Stardrop.
Destiny is garbage.
Yes. It’s so garbage I wrote a master’s thesis on how shit it is. If I didn’t have over 1,000 hours in the game, it would have been substantially harder to do this.
Ooohhh, master’s thesis!
I paid 20 grand to be poor
I don’t recall asking for your input
Welcome to a community post on the Internet! You don’t need to ask.
For me it’s less positive, but still quite impressive!
Does this mean 58% of my games would just work and rest need tinkering or are broken?
From my experience, only “borked” are without hope. (Almost?) All of the silver games work on my deck, I can’t remember the last one that didn’t work. I’ve had one verified game that doesn’t work at all, I believe square enix borked it with a patch (because they released the "hd"version and didn’t want to support the previous one, aka they deliberately broke the working version)
The tier # system will lean towards negative results compared to Plat/Gold etc.
I launched might and magic 9 on my steam deck and it fucking worked straight away. It’s a 2002 game that was barely working even back then. I didn’t have to do anything today get it to work. SHIT JUST WORKS
How do you generate this?
Just link your account at Protondb and go to the dashboard. https://www.protondb.com/dashboard
You just log in with your Steam Account to ProtonDB.
Thank you
Too bad this apparently only counts Steam games. Lately, I’ve been trying to use GOG (because no DRM) whenever possible.
Just use Lutris or Heroic for that.
I’ve had really good luck with Bottles so far! A lot more luck than I had with Lutris which I always had problems with.
Borked is Destiny 2 and Wildstar (whose servers are permanently offline)
I miss Wildstar! I played at launch and loved it, But the bots and issues around launch caused my friends to stop playing after a month or two. I kept going for a while but eventually stopped as well. So much cool lore and world building in that game.
I’m not sure why, but playing Final Fantasy XIV worked better in Linux using Wine than it did on Windows. There’s a joke about net code in the game such that all effects take a half second or so to register, so there’s always a little lag for better or worse.
On Linux, somehow things just registered when they happened on screen. Took getting used to!
