There were huge numbers of people that wouldn’t move to Linux because it didn’t support all of their games. Now it does, and lots of people are moving.
There are lots of people that won’t move to Linux because they have a random bit of hardware that’s not supported, or a highly-specific bit of software they need to do their job that only runs on Windows. The manufacturers wouldn’t support Linux because not enough people used it. Ah, but now we have all the gamers, so there are quite a lot of people using it.
Each domino that falls encourages the rest. Steam Linux users are more than 3x Steam macOS users, and we’re not that far from overtaking it for general desktop usage. In some regions, that’s already the case, and while the Windows 10 exodus can move to Linux easily, they’d need to buy new hardware fo use the Mac operating system. Not many companies would question providing Apple support; once Linux has a comparable share, it would be foolish to leave that out of consideration as well.
Can confirm the viable gaming. Some need fairly annoying workarounds that require some regular fiddling to adjust (looking at you EA/Origin with your silly launcher), but in the end it’s definitely playable.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Funnilly enough plenty (if not most) games which won’t at all run in a more recent Windows like Windows 10 and Windows 11 run just fine in Linux via Wine.
All in all if we consider the full or near full timeframe for “windows games” (say, all the way back to Win95) I wouldn’t be surprised if it turns out that a present day Linux distro can run more “windows games” as Windows 11.
One of the more entertaining (though hardly unexpected) discoveries for me when I moved from Windows to Linux on my gaming machine was that several of the games I owned which I could not get to run in Windows, worked fine in Linux.
I’m trying to get into Linux atm. Working at the kinks and work flow. I will dual boot for the exception that I really want to play that doesn’t run on Linux.
Strangely enough, “Windows always fucking up my dual boot setup” is what caused me to drop Windows for good about a decade ago. And Linux gaming has come on absolutely leaps and bounds since then.
i wonder how these numbers change if you weight by active players. like sure, Shooty Guns 2 (2008) running on linux is a good thing, but if it has a grand total of 5 people in the world playing it, it won’t really do much for linux adoption as long as games like league of legends, apex legends and fortnite still don’t work
(for the record i don’t play any of those games and i’ve been happily daily-driving linux with no windows intervention for the last 4 year)
Can’t seem to find it all I get is either the LA shootings of 1992 or knock off games from itchio. Mind sending me an Internet archive page/ pointer to this franchise?
I’ve yet to find a game that I couldn’t play (though knowing me I probably forgot one or two). It’s mainly mods that I’ve not been able to implement, as some of them require running an exe file.
However I’ve had very helpful people tell me I can do all that in a wine instance or something similar so mainly it’s just my own laziness (and lack of understanding about how to “do it in a wine instance”) that’s holding me back from installing fancy modpacks or playing the latest Stalker gamma version.
Also i don’t play multiplayer stuff so the anti-cheat thing issues don’t usually apply to me. So there’s that.
Lutris for mods. You can point it at the game exe downloaded by steam in many cases (not all), and then run arbitrary exes inside the same wine prefix.
The thing is I swapped, whenever I start using something and I dont want it to become popular because everything somehow gets ruined when it gets popular, it ends up getting popular. Im usually a late “early” adopter.
A bit sceptical of this number. Most popular games have some form of anti cheat which the game not run on Linux. Some other games sometimes have weird bugs that do not occur on windows. - source: I am on Linux 😩
That’s great and all but the two things that hold me back from going 100% Linux are kernel-level anticheat, and lack of graphics card acceleration in virtual environments. Once we have those I’ll be happy.
Visual Basic added to Libre Office would be really nice too, but I get that it’s not particularly feasible.
Why? I have written a lot of custom macros and created forms to assist filling data fields in large spreadsheets. I have written macros that can open a CSV, comb through the contents and pick out the data I need to fill workbooks.
I’m not saying I’m especially tied to VB itself, I actually find it to be a pretty stupid language, but I do miss being able to write my own functions and effectly use Excel as a pre built GUI for whatever I’m trying to do. If there’s an alternative in Libre Office that I’m missing please point it out.
LibreOffice supports python, JavaScript, and beanshell, as well as LibreOffice basic. The latter is similar to VBA and some VB scripts can even run unmodified.
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
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.
I’ve been following this GitHub issue waiting for this change to make it into the next nvidia driver release but still suspect this won’t address HDR. Obviously first world problems for high end hardware but it’s one of the last pieces holding me back from trying Linux on my desktop
Appreciate the info! I had been trying out the new Cosmic DE that ships with pop os and I’m guessing that’s still lacking HDR but did feel very performant. I’ll have to see if switching is worth the trade off once they nvidia driver update gets released
In my personal experience, the only games that don’t work are those that explicitly choose not to :
Fortnite
PUBG
Roblox
Valorant
I’m not much into competitive games myself, so the only one that’s inconvenient in this list to me is Roblox. There are a few really fun games on their platform that I wish I could play on Steam Deck, as used to be possible.
You know about protondb already? Gives a good list of potential fixes if you come across issues, it’s been a godsend on the rare occasions something doesn’t work first try
Have you changed which version of proton it uses? It’s in the compatibility options for the game, sometimes going to an older version solves some issues.
That’s because of the awful spaghetti code that is the basis of Space Engineers. I gave up on that game years ago, because those devs were vibe coding before it was cool, and it shows.
You can play Roblox through Sober. It runs the Android version directly so it’s pretty similar to what an official port would be, in terms of performance
Not too surprisingly, you can add League of Legends (another Riot games title) to the list. While I’m not a fan of kernel level anticheat, I do love most of these games, and it’s really frustrating how I don’t see any change in the future. After more than a year of struggling, I finally managed to get my Mint working (turns out my old mobo was faulty), but it looks like I will still have to keep Windows for basically all multiplayer titles I play.
I’m not going to throw doubt on the 90% number. Statistics are made up and generally don’t mean anything. “90% of games” … In what context? Games on steam? Games ever made? I don’t think I’m going to be playing sierra titles from the 90s… What about Flash based games that used to run in a browser? Do they count?
I don’t know and it doesn’t matter.
The only thing I want to say is that the “10%” that don’t work are usually pretty popular.
I’d like to see this metric based on average player counts. What percentage of gamers, playing games right now, could play on Linux.
IMO, that would give a much more relevant indication of how viable it is for most gamers to switch to Linux.
I’m still using Windows 10 and no, I didn’t buy their extended bullshit. I don’t even run the latest version of Windows 10. I also have an update server setup so I don’t usually get updates often because I need to go approve them. But I also work in IT and I’ve seen every social engineering attack type that’s been used since the 90s and I know when to not click on something. I haven’t needed an anti virus on my personal system in 20 years.
To say I’m not worried about it is an understatement.
The only thing I want to say is that the “10%” that don’t work are usually pretty popular.
Yeah, like I’m glad Linux support is increasing among games, but my main daily driver game (Genshin) still doesn’t support it 🤷 And I don’t think Hoyoverse will be spending work on Linux support when they are raking in so much cash from their millions of players. From what I can see Linux usage hovers around 0.3% in China, and that’s Hoyo’s main market.
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.
Which one? Support varies wildly depending on manufacturer.
gamepad
I have never seen a gamepad that doesn’t work on Linux. You may not be able to update their firmware if they only provide a Windows tool but they work perfectly fine.
VR
Valve Index and HTC Vive work out of the box. SteamVR is pretty rough in Linux and plagued by issues but it works.
For any other headset you will have to depend on community support. Some work, some don’t.
Which ones? They usually use completely proprietary protocols.
Sound Blaster G6
It will work like any other bog-standard sound card has for years. You will lose any features that are custom to the sound card (dialogue mode, virtual surround, equalizer, …) but those are rarely necessary because there is lots of other software that achieves this for every sound card.
I recommend you boot Linux from USB and take a look. No need to install anything, just boot from USB and take a look if your hardware works.
As long as you run the proprietary nvidia drivers, performance is more or less noise for a given driver version. There IS some annoyance with slower releases for drivers to Linux but… nvidia has had much bigger problems with new driver releases over the past year.
The big issue is if you run the open source community drivers. And… if you are spending leather jacket money and then using low performance drivers… you are an idiot. Because Mistah J already has the metrics and money he wants and doesn’t care if you actually use your card after buying it.
I have a 3090ti. Made the switch to Linux last year after reading that most games work. Never had a problem with the card, it works flawlessly out of the box (using the proprietary Nvidia drivers).
It still was a bit of a learning curve for me though… Using steam they work without a hitch. If they are not on steam, I found that the easiest (for me) is to install them using lutris, and then adding them to steam as non-steam games and using Proton to run them.
been running an nvidia gpu since 2019, literally switched from windows right as cyberpunk 2077 was being launched, and trust me, it was possible back then, and it’s even more performant now.
I have a 3090. As long as you have the correct drivers and a quality emulator (I think I use glorious eggroll’s experimental proton branch) quality is quite comparable.
I have a 3090. As long as you have the correct drivers and a quality emulator (I think I use glorious eggroll’s experimental proton branch) quality is quite comparable.
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