From time to time I decide to give desktop Linux another try. It’s differently gotten a lot better over the years but I still think it is perhaps the worst choice of platform for gaming. desktop Linux of course, refers to Linux ditsros made for the desktop such as Ubuntu, Debian and anything based on them.

When it comes to turning your PC into an internet machine you really can’t get anything better than Ubtuntu or POP OS. Just about any distribution with the gnome interface is going to do a good job. It is so fast and easy to get a Linux machine ready for the internet. The amount of time it takes me to get Windows setup to how I like it can be up to 2 hours. With Ubuntu it’s about 5 minutes.

Linux loves the internet and networking. What it doesn’t like, is being offline and running closed source software. It’s almost the opposite for Windows. Remember Windows XP? Remember how it would slow down after a while. Have you ever used a Windows machine offline for an extended period of time. When kept offline Windows works about as well as Linux online. This is why my main gaming rig is an offline Windows machine. It stays fast and reliable.


Over time Windows has gotten worse while Linux has gotten better, but I still wouldn’t want to use it as a gaming platform. At this point if Windows gets to a point where I am no longer willing to use it I’d probably just go back to consoles, and use Linux for internet.

I love Linux. I use it mainly for privacy/security reasons and because I like the way it functions and looks a whole lot more than Windows. I've said it before that I love it for everything except gaming. Right now I reinstalled Windows on two of my laptops, but still have Zorin OS on my lower end model. The only reason why I have reinstalled Windows is because of gaming. That's it. I enjoy Pop OS, but have been using Linux Mint MATE more. I cannot for the life of me figure out why POP OS 21.04 can't run a lot of GOG games that were working fine on previous versions. Steam games on the other hand work superbly (mainly because of proton), but since I hate Steam, what else can I do? Linux Mint MATE on the other hand even on the latest version runs a lot of the GOG games that I enjoy playing fine...but of course, not every game. So yeah...have to go back to Windows to get every game running without tweaking a bunch of stuff and going through trial and error with correct dependencies and whatnot. But other than that, Linux all the way. I love how fast it is to set up compared to Windows and how customizable it is. Hopefully one of these days I'll get tired of PC gaming or complete all the games and return to Linux indefinitely.

I'm using Linux on my laptop to run officially supported Linux games here and most of it work fine.

Two pain points for your average user:
- You need to install some packages separately otherwise the games will fail to launch. If you just double-click on the desktop icon, you won't see it. You need to actually launch the game on the command line, see the error message and then googling it to figure out the packages that are missing
- You need to chmod +x the installers on the command line and then run them

The above illustrates everything that is great and bad about Linux.

Linux allows you to do whatever you want and gets the heck out of your way (recently, I've tried to just run a golang binary and install a CA certificat on Macos machines for some of our devs and it felt like pulling teeth... there are layers of "ohhh, this is disabled by default... are you really sure you want to do this?" cr*p).

However, if you're not a competent power user or at the very least, a DIYer who can google stuff (and the overwhelming majority of problems you'll encounter on popular Linux distros do have a solution that can be easily found on Google nowadays) and figure things out, you'll probably get stuck at some point on Linux. It just doesn't have that extra layer of polish yet (maybe it never will).

That being said, Linux might be your best bet, long term (I'm talking decades from now), to play some of those aging Windows titles.

Long after Microsoft will have given up on supporting them, you'll have die-hard communities in the Linux ecosystem working on compatibility layers to keep those older games running. Windows plays practically every game in existence because it has momentum in the desktop world.

Hardware manufacturers and game developers scramble to make sure Windows support is top notch, because this is where the bulk of the user-base lays.

Linux, on the other hand, needs to either content with after-thought proprietary drivers (ex: Nvidia) that usually don't work as well as their Windows counterpart or otherwise have communities create their own open-source ones, sometimes with the blessing and cooperation of the hardware manufacturer, but often without.

Na, what Windows does well is not compatibility. This gets done for it by third parties.

What Windows does really well, beyond exploiting the momentum it already has, is that last little bit of end-user hand-holding that makes for a really seamless experience for the less technically literates among us.

I have completely the opposite opinion/experience of Wine. If you think about it, it's really a pretty amazing piece of software, to allow the user to run games/applications that were designed for a totally different operating system. Most relatively recent Windows games I have tried run very well, with little to no setup or tweaking. The only ones I have had any major problems with generally tend to be older Windows games (mid-to-late 90s) that haven't been restored by the likes of GOG to run on modern systems. But then, it would probably be difficult to get those running in modern Windows too. So, even in those cases, I wouldn't say Wine is any worse.

What games have you had problems recently trying to run in Wine?

No it doesn’t. There’s a lot more involved than just a few dependencies and commands. You really need to take a closer read to my second post which goes into further detail https://www.gog.com/forum/general/my_thoughts_on_linux_2021/post3 Okay STOP! You need to stop doing this. When people talk about the Linux community being uninviting this is what they’re talking about. My point is that Linux lacks the infrastructure to facilitate development of closed source software including games. No amount of ‘terminal know how’ is going to change that. You need the infrastructure. Wrong! Game developers do not scramble over anything. They pick an engine like Unreal, ID Tech, Unity, or the make their own. The whole point of an API is to streamline workflow, so devs don’t have to think about anything other than the game they’re making. Actually I find Ubuntu and it’s derivatives much easier to use than Windows. I argue that Windows is the more complicated OS which requires more technical know how in order to get it working. The gnome interface is especially seamless and nice. Wrong again, I can play a game from 98 called Heart of Darkness in Win 10 without any mods or patches. You can’t do anything like that with anything else. The fact that Microsoft was able to tap into the Console market with the xbox, (despite what you may think of it) proves that they know what they’re doing. When you like at things like Visual Studio Dot Net Direct X you can not deny thing. No sir, Window’s high backwards compatibility is due to the way Microsoft built it. It’s not perfect, but nothing else comes close to it. Except perhaps the xbox.

yep agree
linux needs an easy to use solution to make and release apps for it even with drm

I recently switched from Linux back to Windows. The OC software for Radeon is still subpar on Linux, and I couldn't play the games I wanted to play. It's that simple. I ran RebornOS, which is basically GUI-based Arch.

Even adding the additional boot parameter to enable Radeon overclocking, programs like CoreCtrl and radeon-settings just don't have enough options for overclocking / undervolting Navi. I either had to let the gpu clock itself - which resulted in the fans running at max b/c it was so hot - or massively down-clocking it to 1750mhz (which is the default 'game clock' and can be selected in Radeon settings). I wasn't expecting the full Radeon Software suite on Linux, a default driver app with some basic clock & fan functionality would have been appreciated.

And yes, CoreCtrl only offers 3 sliders for controlling Navi clock speed - 300mhz, 800mhz, or 2000mhz. I want more functionality than that. Already had that argument half a dozen times in various forums with the supposedly-great "Linux community."

Here are some of the games I wanted to play that wouldn't run (or ran poorly):
- Agents of Mayhem (2 fps)
- F1 2014 (crash at launch)
- RAGE (texture corruption)
- Saints Row 2 (crash at launch, native & Proton versions)
- Saints Row 3 (crash at launch, native & Proton versions)
- The Bureau XCOM Declassified (crash at launch)
- Just Cause 2 (crash at launch)
- Empire Total War (crash at launch, native & Proton versions)
- Far Cry Primal (red texture flickering, no sound & low fps)
- Assassin's Creed Brotherhood (failed to request key)


Both Saints Row 2 and 3 ran fine in their GOG versions, but I wanted to run the Steam versions to play co-op with people on Steam (something about CEG drm made them crash? That's what ppl told me). There were some surprising successes - Halo MCC ran perfectly, though only only in mod mode since EAC compatibility wasn't a thing at the time. SMAA actually works in the Linux version of Rise of the Tomb Raider. And Singularity ran perfectly in Proton but needs additional tinkering in Windows.

In the end, Linux wouldn't let me do what I wanted to do. Which for each individual user is all that matters. So goodbye Linux, welcome back Windows.

Not really, not when you consider emulators like Cemu. A free Wii U emulator that runs Wii U games like they were made for the PC. Wine might be free but it gets funding through CodeWeavers. I’m happy for you that you’ve not ran into many struggles but for me I’d rather use anything else. I’ll breakdown for you what I did.

I tested a combination Wine front ends including Crossover, POL, Winetricks and Lutris. I tested the following: Both AAA and indie games new and old. A few games from the high seas (this was done for testing purposes) as well as a few emulators. What I found is that none of them worked 100%. For example I was able to get Dead Space up and running, but I wasn’t able to get the mouse patch to work. Older games had the most trouble which supposed me. Than there’s Doom 2016. At first it didn’t work, than after imaging the system it did work, but had control problems. Darksiders 2 launched but had weird glitchy affects. At this point I concluded that it just wasn’t worth it. More games work on Wine than they did on the virtual machine, but the game that do work on the virtual machine worked fine. Wine is just too random for me.

If I’m going to play games on Linux I’ll either use a linux port that I’m confident will work, or a console emulator like Duckstation.

Duckstation is distributed as an Appimage and works very well. I think all console emulators should be ported to Linux through an Appimage.

As a person that has been doing ALL of his gaming on Linux for the last 3 years, I can definitely guarantee that is an option. There may be jank, you may have to report bugs and wait for some fixes at times, being on the latest version of Wine does sometimes break things completely, but when it does work it works in such a seamless way you forget the games were actually designed for a different OS.

In the end, in this day and age, it's not a matter of "ability" but a matter of taste or what you are willing to put up with. Because Linux is not as user friendly as Windows, that's for sure (see this pic :P).

If that *one game* (or maybe several games :P) that you want to play does not work in Linux, it does not mean Linux is bad for gaming. Let's be serious, not all the games that were designed for Windows work on Windows 10/11 without serious tinkering (some not at all). Try playing 16-bit Windows games on 64-bit Windows (it's possible, but hard to pull off) and compare that experience to how you can play them with Wine in Linux, for example.

I currently have 178 GOG games in my Wine prefix and they all work just fine. Maybe 10-15 of them need workarounds that I, as a Wine user (not a developer), was able to figure out with a search on the WineHQ AppDB or on ProtonDB. Use either Proton or Wine Staging + DXVK for best results. Do you actually know what you are talking about? In terms of already existing games, head over to the Wine forums and you'll see developers dissecting closed source game behavior to replicate what the thing would do with native Windows libraries. In terms of new games, a lot of game engines provide native Linux builds with support for OpenGL/Vulkan. The problem with Linux is that it's not targeted as a gaming platform because not many people are using it as a gaming platform, not because it is bad at it. Ok, so you don't know what you are talking about :P. At least on how Wine operates. There's nothing wrong with that, but if you're making assumptions, as they say, you're making an ass out of you (u) and me. Wine bridges native Windows OS calls to kernel syscalls where it can, so it HAS to re-implement some of those dlls. They are not needed for Wine to work, they are needed for software to work. None of those dlls are native (aka actual Windows) dlls unless you specifically add them as overrides to work around bugs.

There's at least one case, Undertale, where I've found it easier to get it to work under WINE rather than natively.

(This is partly because it requires a specific version of openSSL, which is a library whose API gets frequently changed I believe, and which the game in question has no good reason to need (it doesn't need to do any network communication).)

A number of distributions have incorporated an easy-to-use package managers to upgrade packages and install anything in the public domain within their lists. This does make it 'easier', a lot actually than doing it on windows. Installing OpenOffice being just a sigle line on the commandline.

I use Windows (mostly for games), linux and Cygwin a lot at the moment, and especially writing my own scripts getting things done.

Windows tends to get slower as the registry gets cluttered, and a lot of software will inject stuff and not remove it, leaving it slowly getting larger and larger. Also fragmentation is another thing that slows down windows systems a lot more, though the larger the drive the less likely it's an issue.

Linux tries to give whole sections for full files rather than fragmenting, which will make that probably faster. Though when you're going SSD fragmentation effects is 1/100th the effect that it is with a spinning disc.

I tend to do more programming and side bits, and less games/media, so my linux machines tend to run... fairly simply as servers or machines with a few tasks i give them.

From the end-user point of view, no there isn't. You do the above and it will work.

However, it's not exactly plug and play which will drive a lot of the userbase away.

I read your other post and you're saying because the OS is a moving target and they can't adapt the source code of closed source, it will break.

Fair enough, but Windows also suffer from this problem. The difference is that whoever made the closed source will fall over themselves to bridge the compatibility gap with the latest version of Windows. My verbiage might be a little gruff at times, but it is what it is.

I don't begrudge other people for not sharing my expertize or having zero interest to learn about it.

You can't know everything and its unreasonable to expect people to invest the time to know everything. Making computers usable for the less knowledgeable is a worthwhile endeavor. I try to do it myself all the time with various degrees of success (although as a devops, my audience is usually developers, not the general population so I have more to work with in terms of what I can expect my end-users to know and be willing to learn).

Lets not get extremely politically correct here, to the point where you can't call an apple an apple. We're pursuing truth here, not the labyrinthine half-truths that are required not to offend anyone. I was talking about end users, not software developers.

The main issue with the Linux desktop is that it doesn't cater to enough of them.

If you have the user-base, the software developers will come (because there is a financial incentive to). If you don't, well... They kind of do, if Sony tells Playstation game developers to jump, they do. Same for Xbox games, MacOS/iOS apps, etc, etc.

Its an expertize in itself (learning the specifics of all the various platforms that caters only to part of your potential customer base who expect things to work on whichever platform they have adopted), which myself I never cared much for, but I played that game for a bit earlier in my career.

I learned all about the .NET framework and then learned that my apps would only work in Windows. Then, I worked for a game middleware company that had a library they needed to make work for like 8 different gaming platforms and we had to jump to the needs to all those platforms (the build took like 8 hours to produce a deliverable for all those platforms).

The madness needs to stop somewhere, standards are good, unless of course you're the owner of a closed platform and you're trying to build a walled garden. Sure and there are game engines that support Linux. However, the GPU support is not up to par with Windows (because of GPU manufacturers cathering to the platform most of their user-base is using which is legitimate enough) which is a problem for AAA games. I think the more technically savy you get, the more attractive Linux looks (that certainly was the case for me as I progressed in my career).

However, for the end-user, while most things nowadays are doable via the GUI, occasionally, you'll still have some things that are hard to do outside the command prompt which will drive away a lot of the plug & play "can't my computer just run already" potential userbase.

And I understand their point. They are not creating software or doing crazy power-user stuff on their machines, they are just consuming application layer software. For them, it should just run with as little hassle as possible. No, they should not have to know about obscure configuration x and tweak it on the command prompt. A sensible default should be picked for them so that they never have to know about that and they can focus on what the computer is there for: to solve THEIR application-level problems that lives outside the world of software (ie, the reason the software exists in the first place). Microsoft has high cohensiveness with its products the same way Apple does (well, a little less than Apple): Because its a walled garden.

Everything is controlled by Microsoft. I won't deny that fragmentation is not an issue in the Linux world with all the distos and competing standards. However, they are solving the harder problem of not just having things work cohesively within a single organization, but trying to come up with universal standards across organizations.

However, plenty of legacy things have broken in Windows (including many games, they do break across versions of Windows and some peripherals like my old joystick that not longer works on modern Windows) and developers are scrambling to make it work when it does.

Most of the market for PC end-users is with Windows and they expect their things to work. Whoever has a financial incentive for their things to work well for desktop end-users will make it work with the latest version of Windows, somehow.

You’ve been quoting my posts but I doubt you’ve been reading them.

I never said that Windows compatibility was perfect only that it was the best there is; which it still is.

I’ll just leave this here https://www.gog.com/forum/general/my_thoughts_on_linux_2021/post9

Yes, do you?

I found that with Wine you still need to install Dot Net and and VC++ which put dll files into the system. I should’ve clarified that a bit more, but you’ve just described sounds a lot like emulation.

Yeah that makes a lot of sense. I'm sure if Linux getting better at gaming would be a good thing. On one hand you'd have something other than Windows to play PC games on; but on the other you'll probably end up with the same kind of issues.

Perhaps a repository like googleplay would help. You could also implement a feature similar to apk extract to get DRM free game working. Either way I think that's how it could work.

Mea culpa here entirely, admittedly, but don't do an ad hominem. I always read what I reply to or I simply shut up. This bit was indeed not addressed to you, but rather to Abedsbrother's post.

Fair enough then. And I agree here.

The word "Proton" or "DXVK" does not appear in what you linked, so I have no way of knowing if you actually tried them or not.

Extensively.

No, you do not *need* to install them. As I mentioned before, I have 178 games in my prefix which do not need VC++ or the Windows version of .Net (they are happy using Mono). Some games may need them as workarounds in order to function properly, but that does not exactly make installing them obligatory.

The only "emulation" here is keeping the format of Windows OS APIs which regular applications (including games) are calling - this can not be avoided if you want Windows programs to work. Indeed they need to feel "at home" and be oblivious of the fact they are not running on their native OS. But what goes on behind the calls is re-implemented entirely by the Wine devs in order to optimize things for Linux. As the recursive acronym states, this is not "emulation", as it does not mimic how Windows does things in the backend - it is a compatibility layer.