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.
this post was submitted on 23 Feb 2025
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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".
Why is the penguin holding it like that??
maybe its ai slop
Have you tried to play with one without thumbs?
I will test this theory and report back
This illustration is triggering me
What about flipping the question. Making modern games available on more platforms?
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.
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.
Meh. Most games, I'd say. Couldn't get Cyberpunk 2077 to run on Mint.
--launcher-skip should 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.
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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 ~~terminal~~ MS-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.
Considering a majority of people use Nvidia on their desktops, they'll be forced to jump through hoops with stuff as minor as setting their desktop session to X instead of Wayland (which is absolutely not ready) to installing a custom vaapi package to get hardware accelerated video playback in Firefox. With games and Nvidia say goodbye to a chunk of DX12 performance Then you have the majority of laptop users that have intel HD graphics laptops, ones made in the past 10 years will be fine for low end stuff, but they will take a hit because i915 shits itself with DX12 games and the new xe driver that handles it better is very new and only available on iGPUs made in the last 3 years or so? It is really only good if you have an AMD GPU which has absolutely pitiful market share, with the Steam Deck probably being the most popular AMD PC device people own.
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.
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Doesn't actually matter with the way Windows performs, these days.
Yes.
I've been gaming on Linux exclusively for 5 years now. I have waited for some games to run better but it's been generally great for me.
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