There has never been a better time to game on Linux
I've been running Linux full-time pretty much since Valve released Proton. I remember submitting reports to ProtonDB back when it was just a shared Google Sheet! In the years that followed I made it a point to test and report out on different games as new versions of Proton were released and support improved. I thought it important that we have a good data set for what worked and what didn't. Over those years I tested hundreds of games and submitted as many reports to the database.
In thinking back over my gaming in 2023, however, I realized that I fell out of the habit of submitting reports because I'm so used to Proton working that it's stopped occurring to me that it might not.
That doesn't mean that there aren't some games that don't work -- it simply means that the success rate that I used to have (maybe 30-50% on average) has risen high enough that I'm genuinely surprised if something doesn't work (it's probably somewhere around 95% for me now, though that's biased by the types of games that I play). I actually tried to remember the last game that didn't work, and I genuinely couldn't tell you what it was. Everything I've played recently has booted like it's native.
Honestly, I genuinely don't even know which games are native and which run through Proton anymore. I've stopped caring!
I got my Steam Deck halfway through 2022. It was awesome, but it was definitely a bit rough around the edges. There weren't that many compatible games. The OS had some clunkiness. It matured though, and has gotten better. Among my friend group, I'm the only person who cares even a little bit about Linux. If you asked any of them to name three different Linux distributions they'd stare at you blankly because they wouldn't understand the question. Nevertheless, of my friends, SIX of them have Steam Decks and are now gaming regularly on Linux.
There are currently ~4,300 Deck Verified games and ~8,700 Deck Playable games according to Valve. On ProtonDB, ~8,600 games have been verified as working on Linux by at least three users, while ~19,700 games have been verified by at least one user. There is SO much variety available, and the speed with which we've gotten here has been pretty breathtaking.
This was my device breakdown for my Steam Replay for 2023:
- 55% Steam Deck
- 32% Linux
- 10% Virtual Reality
- 4% Windows
The only non-Linux gaming I did was VR and some local multiplayer stuff I have on a Windows machine hooked up to my TV.
I don't want to proselytize too much, but if you have a general interest in gaming, you could probably switch over to Linux full time and be perfectly happy with the variety of games you have available to you. Not too long ago, making the jump felt like a huge sacrifice because you'd be giving up so much -- SO many games were incompatible -- but it no longer feels that way. You can transfer and most of -- probably almost all -- your library will still work! Also, if a particular game doesn't work, there isn't too much sting because, well, there are thousands of others you can give your attention to.
If you have a specific game that you must play, then it's possibly a different story. If you love Destiny 2, for example, then full-time Linux definitely is not for you. The same goes VR -- it's simply not up to snuff on Linux yet. There are other niches too that don't transfer over as well (modding, racing sims, etc.) so, of course, this isn't a blanket recommendation and everyone's situation is different.
But for a prototypical person who's just your sort of general, everyday gamer? It's reached a point where they could be very happy on Linux. In fact, as proven by my friends and their Steam Decks, it's reached a point where people can be gaming on Linux and not even know they're doing that. That's how frictionless it's gotten!
I don't really have a point to this post other than to say it's incredible that we are where we are, and I'm beyond appreciative of all the effort that people have put in to making this possible.
My experiences with gaming on Linux have been far better than I was expecting. I built a new gaming PC back in January 2023 and installed Windows 11 on it since I thought that'd be the go to operating system to install but I quickly found myself not really liking it. While the fresh coat of paint was nice, some of the changes (like the task bar being limited to the bottom or top of the screen) really annoyed me. I found a spare 500GB SSD so I thought I'd try Linux on desktop for the first time since 2014. Initially installed Pop!_OS and to my surprise, I kept the install. The games I was playing like GTA V and BeamNG worked with basically no fiddling. I was also surprised to see Baldur's Gate 3 run basically on Day 1 with no fuss. Just hit install and let Proton handle everything.
I am basically at this point, too.
Though I will say that while it's very much possible to game on Linux and it works much better than expected, I still would not go out of my way to game on Linux unless I'm already there. That is to say, Windows is still easier, better and more reliable for gaming, so unless you're already sitting on a Linux-only system anyways, no reason to game on Linux.
Compared to a lot of tildes users, I'm pretty much a troglodite end user. I can and have used the terminal in Linux (copy pasting stuff fr the web to fix things) and powershell in windows (same vibe mostly), and I've done a tiny bit of coding (forced Matlab in grad school, a bit of diddling with python)... But by no means am I comfortable with bash or any programming language the way most users here are.
Still, I've been daily driving Linux mint on my ThinkPad x230 since 2016 or so. No other OS installed. I've literally never had an issue that required skills beyond what I've described above, and even those could be dimmed down if I weren't trying to do something specific and nerdy for fun. When it comes to browsing the web, managing emails, editing and publishing documents, and even light graphic design, for me, using a modern Linux distro is a non issue. Frankly it's a much better experience than windows. None of the irritating bullshit.
The only coding I do now is markup stuff for typesetting math, and that's done in browser using overleaf. All the standard media (music, videos, web streaming) stuff just works seamlessly. I didn't have to fuss around for wifi drivers or any drivers at all really.
All this is to say that yeah... It's a great time to use Linux. My only complaint is the Microsoft office suite, which seems to always be getting worse, doesn't quite have an equivalent on Linux. Things like Open Office work well for creating documents, but if you're gonna share word files and try to edit or comment on them as a team, it can get very clunky with formatting. But this can be avoided by using a browser based version of office via the web. For me it's an easy call, and I bet a lot of regular users like me would feel the same if they tried it for a few days.
You're not alone! I'm also far from your "average" Linux user. Using Linux for me means that 95% of my time is spent between Firefox, Steam, and LibreOffice. I'm not a coder, and I don't work in tech for a living.
There's a perception that Linux requires extensive technical knowledge that keeps more casual users away, which I think is ironic because it's the casual users with the least intensive use-cases that would be able to use Linux most easily. Standard daily stuff like getting online and playing games is almost entirely frictionless these days.
Also, my Windows machine is definitely not frictionless in comparison. I have constant issues with it. I recently had to do an entire OS refresh from a flash drive because Windows Update simply refused to work for months.
Office 365 accessed via rclone is pretty solid, and you get 1TB of cloud storage plus Office in the cloud. I used abraunegg's OneDrive app and nuked my OneDrive, so I wanted to find something with better safety rails, but was also able to restore my OneDrive in my browser. I'm mostly Windows these days, but also try to analyze/update my non-professional workflows in Linux for cross-platform fluency.
Gonna go against the grain here. I until very recently (i.e. when work decided maybe expensing me a Mac while trying to develop software that they expected to work on their Macs was a good idea) daily drove Linux, and attempted to game on it.
The problem isn't really necessarily anymore that games don't work, because I can safely say any game that is single-player probably works out of the box. The key is stability- games may crash, have some features not working, or similar.
I'd finally caved and bought another SSD to put Windows on to just play games. Which really pains me as I hate Windows, but... the last thing I need after a long day of terminal windows is more terminal windows.
EDIT: I will say a nontrivial part of this is just Nvidia. Nvidia's Linux drivers, despite recent improvements, are awful. For the first half of this year, I was plagued with this lovely issue and had to roll back. https://forums.developer.nvidia.com/t/flickering-at-the-top-of-the-screen/256447
Nvidia is what causes me the most headache on Linux by far. I'd rather never game again than switch back to Windows though, so the solution is just to go for an AMD build.
Yeah, if I could financially justify a GPU upgrade atm I would totally just go AMD.
Honestly, a lot of my issues with Linux come down to drivers. I've daily driven Linux periodically and the driver support just isn't there; things that worked flawlessly in Windows were crippled, at best, in Linux. Not to mention certain functionality in Linux that just wasn't there (changing middle mouse functionality on my Thinkpad) and ended-up needing to be hacked in and reconfigured every time I restarted.
Linux is very nice and I'd love to run it over Windows, but Windows just works for me. Gaming is my hobby, Computers are my job and I don't want to do my job when I want to have my hobby time.
I officially swapped to Linux in late 2019. I had a Ryzen cpu and made the switch over to Radeon to fully eliminate Nvidia soon after.
I have had a higher amount of games behave more stably on Linux than they did on Windows. Yes, a few had a some brick moments, but almost all were fixed within a month (including from large companies you might think wouldn't care, e.g. EA fixing the Mass Effect Legendary Edition Steam bug last July/Aug). The few that weren't have since been fixed, as I checked on them months/years after.
Honestly, I spend about equal times on my work computer (Windows 10) as my home desktop (Arch), and I can say with confidence nothing crashes more often than a "stable" version of Windows that has its updates hand-picked by the IT group to ensure supposed stability and security. I also never understood how if you didn't update Nvidia drivers, somehow the whole universe knew and suddenly every game would run like crap-coated molasses. Maybe that's an Nvidia thing, but I have yet once had an issue because I didn't update a driver as soon as it was out -- and interestingly enough, I have rolled back updates without issues either.
I'm not using any fancy peripherals or anything, so maybe that's why things just work... but ngl, while Linux has not been 100% easy plug and play out of the box, I'm much happier when I'm not forced to update to Version God-Only-Knows-What-They'll-Be-Breaking-Now 27.6a.
Check out Pop!_OS, they go out of their way to make nvidia cards work out of the box with no fiddling required from the end user.
I use Nix (typing from it right now actually- doing some maintenance). The installation is not the tough part; there's only so much Pop!_OS and others can do about how bad the drivers are once they're installed.
I've honestly not experienced most of what you're describing -- generally the games I've played with performance problems on Linux more often than not have had similar performance issues on Windows (and I have an Nvidia graphics card too fwiw). I think this sort of thing is generally very dependent on which genres you prefer and it definitely varies a lot from game to game too.
Hard to give more specific advice than "check protondb because often someone has solved the same problem and posted the solution there". I will say switching to PopOS mostly got rid of my graphics driver issues on Linux, but I'm admittedly rarely pushing my 3070 to its limit with my gaming preferences.
That's sad to hear. I would say: keep an eye on the NVK driver and come back when that has been sorted out (I personally would expect it to take another year or so)
If I were to commit my gaming box fully to Linux (it currently dual boots) I’d absolutely exchange my current 3080 Ti for a Radeon 7000 series card. It’d be a bit painful giving up one of the last cards EVGA made (FTW3) but Nvidia is just too much of a pain in the ass for even day to day desktop usage under Linux, let alone gaming.
I haven't had any issues running Nvidia hardware with Nobara Linux as of yet. Runs everything that's compatible at least.
I’ve had issues with Fedora under Wayland, but surpassingly not in games. Instead, it was VS Code which was a flickery unusable mess with that setup, which was apparently an issue that was distro agnostic.
I agree, I actually daily drove Linux during the pandemic. The gaming experience is very good, especially compared to where it was 5+ years ago, but Windows still offers a better experience. Things like VRR and HDR just work, I don't have to worry about whether a game's anti-cheat is going to cause a problem. I don't have to endure a giant stutter fest while DXVK rebuilds its shader cache after my favorite game gets updated.
I work on a Macbook now, so for my gaming PC I no longer have a good reason to use Linux instead of Windows.
I've been unhappy with changes Microsoft has been making with Windows since 8 obviously, with the new copilot shit being the newest thing I don't really want. I've been thinking for some time (post-steam deck acquisition really) about moving back to linux on the desktop after Win 10 (my current OS) support ends. I've done it before, I've even daily drove linux before, I can do it again and probably have a better experience than ever before.
I guess most of the issues for gamers is around Windows being, primarily, an office based operating system. I don't know the percentages, but I assume it's in the high nineties for being installed in an office environment?
I have often wondered why Microsoft doesn't have a boot option for "gaming mode" which has only the basic services required for running games, perhaps as a boot or reboot option, and has a very limited desktop or even only a dashboard style interface.
Maybe things are just too interconnected to allow for this.
They have that version of windows, running on rhe Xbox.
Except it also has ads on the screen on boot.
Not just boot. But, for all intends and purposes it is the windows version tailored to (mostly) just gaming with a dashboard style interface.
I understand not being happy when existing features are changed or removed, but is a new feature you don't have to use really something worth being upset over?
Mentioning only one thing does not mean I want to go back to Linux over only one thing.
I've had the exact same experience!
I daily drove Linux in ~2015 and ended up switching back to Windows for gaming. I switched back to arch again about 2 years ago and have had minimal issues. The only games I can think of that I just haven't been able to get working are Dead by Daylight and Assetto Corsa
I'm installing a new SSD next week and I was going to go for a fresh install. What distros do people currently recommend for gaming? I am reasonably familiar with Ubuntu from my media server but I don't love their decisions recently.
I've been quite happy with kubunutu. If your favorite version of Windows was v7 then that's your distro. The workflow in KDE is very similar to Windows, except with more and better features hiding under every click menu. Been running it about two years and the only snag I had was having to manually set up a driver for my older logitech game pad, which took me about fifteen minutes of googling. So far it's been through two full distro upgrades without a single issue, which is more than I can say for windows update.
I never was a fan of the ubuntu gnome desktop.
I was always an xfce fan, so I'd suggest xubuntu. Just graphical preference though. I was always a minimalist, which is why I ditched both and now run i3wm.
PopOS is pretty popular and based on Ubuntu. It should be a good starting point. I’d always go with something popular and based on a popular distro. This will help a lot when trying to find out how stuff works or how to fix something.
I personally like Fedora, it’s stable but does get frequent updates to packages. But I don’t use that for gaming.
I’m also interested in Bazzite, but it might be a bit too new.
Pop!_OS or Mint. Especially Mint is basically just Ubuntu from before it got Macish.
You can really use anything you want tbh. I have written a blog post about this very question a while back if you are interested: https://teadrinkingprogrammer.github.io/blog/linux-distributions/
If you have an Nvidia graphics card, get PopOS. Otherwise, look around at various Ubuntu-based distros for something that's your cup of tea -- there's plenty of them.
Linux for me has been quite great, especially with the Steam Deck, however I've had two unfortunate experiences:
I had a Pop_OS Dual Boot which just crashed completely and had some sort of BIOS error, it would never boot up. I created a reddit thread asking about it but unfortunately I nuked the account and I can't recall what it was.
And one that just happened yesterday, Riot implementing Vanguard in League of Legends, which therefore makes the game no longer playable in the coming weeks on Linux. While this is not any fault of Linux, just sucks that there is an incompatibility issue there for me.
Other then that it's fantastic - especially if you only play Single Player games, it's probably just as good of an experience as Windows honestly.
I know. And the worst part is that it's running constantly in the background, not just when you have the game/client open. So as soon as you turn on your PC, Vanguard is running. You can disable it, but if you want to play League again you have to restart your computer.
To be fair, most modern pcs should have these options on anyway. MBR, for instance, is a legacy option on any modern (newer than ~10 years old?) pc. That being said, the fact that this is all check by a game is quite ridiculous.
i tried mint for a solid month until out of nowhere my max desktop framerate got locked to 30 for seemingly no reason, while every program i opened would run at full 144. until that happened it was just... a fine experience. once this happened and an experienced linux friend couldnt solve the problem i just went back to win10 and tore out all the telemetry. its a shame because i know its better for me, but its STILL simply just an inferior experience* than windows to the average user imo. hell, i still cant figure out how the file system even works.
I have heard stories like this quite often. The good news is that there have been many developments over the last year to improve the experience on things to do with screens with something called Wayland. You don't have to know what it is, all you have to know is that Mint sadly hasn't upgraded to it yet sio if you want to try it out you have to use either Gnome or KDE desktops and enable Wayland. I use KDE every day and it works wonderfully. One caviat is that I have an AMD GPU, milage on Nvidia may vary. Intel should work fine.
I will try to summarize the filesystem for you:
You have / which is your root. Everything starts here. The root has some folders for things like system wide configuration and shared libraries (link to a great article on the structure of root. The home folder (/home/username or "~") contains a folder for each user on the OS. This contains pretty much everything you need on a daily basis: documents, data for desktop apps in "/home/username/.local/share", configuration files in .config etc.
I only recently switched six months ago. I've been a Windows user for ~25 years and have tried Linux on and off for most of those. I always went back to Windows due to games or other software but after Windows 11, which was the only version I've downgraded because of, I went back to 10, then back to 11. I eventually got tired of Windows limiting me (can't even move the taskbar), spying on me and other MS failures, I tried EndeavorOS and was really pleased with it. Every one of my games that I tried worked, I've yet to not find the software I need and so I've had no reason to go back to Windows. It's so refreshing to use an OS that isn't trying so hard to make sure you can't control it.
TL:DR
I'm using Linux asmy only desktop OS since around 2008-09. In the last say 5 years gaming on Linux is almost as easy as Windows.
At least for the games that I play. I could have played even before but it could have been a huge pain in the ass to get various games running. Now with Proton (Steam) it is just install -> play for most of them.
I play mainly singleplayer games with some coop (ie. ARMA3) and there are a few gams in my 400+ library that really won't run in Linux no matter what and a few that needed heavy bending to get them to run. But absolute majority is just waiting for files to download...
Many people won't try Linux and many of who do won't switch permanently. I won't be talking them into it. I just know it works perfectly fine.
I've now been using Linux for my daily driver gaming PC for like 2-3 years now, if not longer- previously used Windows 11. While it's not 100% perfect, it's like 95% perfect, and the feeling of not using Windows makes any small pains worth it. Proton has been a godsend. I have such a backlog of games and can play all the ones I want to play currently, and in general, have had very few broken experiences.
(I do play VERY FEW multiplayer/competitive games- Rocket League being about the only one, so YMMV. Anti-cheat and competitive multiplayer stuff doesn't always work on Linux)
I switched to Linux once the Steam Deck was officially announced bc I didn't like Windows 11 and took the Steam Deck's use of Linux as a sign I wouldn't need to worry about gaming (and I do some programming, so it had been on my radar to try it out bc of that). And by and large, that's how it turned out. I almost never even check whether a game is playable on Linux before I buy it because, since I don't play much multiplayer, it almost always is. Very few edge cases even require tinkering (getting Who's Lila to run daemon.exe on Linux was a fun little added challenge lol). The most tinkering I've done to get a game to run was for The Sims 2 -- which requires the same if not more tinkering to run on modern Windows! And it works great!
If you're super into the newest AAA titles on day of release, especially multiplayer, or if you want to use your computer for VR, Linux ain't the best choice. But outside of that the experience is shockingly easy these days. Heck, 99% of the time when I can't play a game in my library on my steam deck, it's due to poor controller support or a game design that just doesn't work without a mouse and keyboard, rather than a Linux thing.
I have just today committed to the purchase of a Radeon video card because after my Windows 10 install runs out of security update support (I am not paying to extend it), I intend to research how to fully commit to switching to Linux full time.
I am thinking of using Kubuntu as my Distro since I'm reasonably familiar with it (though also passingly familiar with Raspbian thanks to my RPi).
My main concern is the installation and usage of Proton and Steam in a Distro that they didn't come "intended for" so to speak. I know PopOS is kinda built for it, but I'd rather use something more utilitarian.
I will also need to look into how to migrate my Plex server data into Linux from my Windows install. I'd like to preserve the config and history as much as possible and that may also be a bit of a headache.
Every time I start putting together the list of things I need to migrate, I get intimidated by the process. Ugh. I keep waffling on it because my Windows 10 works fine right now with minimal tinkering. I know I can do it, it just seems painful to make the jump. So much research and planning to be done ahead of time.
Ya, I have a 10 TB Storage NAS on my network (for Backups and Plex Library storage) and myriad other extra hard drives laying around. No second PC though, and no real space to run one, so I'll just do backups as best I can and try to plan as much ahead as well as possible. Anything I miss is whatever and gets setup fresh.
This might be a great time to dive into Docker!
You can most likely create a Docker compose file that points to your directory with the Plex config and it might just spin up without problems. If you try to run from a backup directory you can't really mess up.
The problem is that in Windows, the Plex "config" is stored in the registry. It's not a file. The library data like play history and metadata are stored in the database file that is easy enough to move. The config being in the registry is the fiddly part. But as long as I document all of my non-default settings, I could re-do those manually in Linux afterwards.
Luckily, migrating your plex installation is fairly straightforward. I've done it a few times myself.
I would be moving from a Windows install to a Linux install, which complicates matters greatly.
I haven't personally done a windows -> linux migration, but I have done a linux -> mac and mac -> linux migration a few times. I managed to copy my play history and metadata without fiddling with the plists, and I would similarly expect you could transfer 90ish% of your settings/metadata/play history without fiddling with the registry. For the most part, it really is as simple as just copying over a few directories from the source install to the target install.
Ya, the play history and metadata are all stored in the database file that is easy enough to move. What is stored in the registry is the settings/config stuff that I would like to move, but I suppose I could spend some time re-doing in Linux if I document all of my non-default settings ahead of time. It's just one more thing to worry about documenting properly ahead of time so I can re-create it with minimal fiddling.
I was interested until this. Modding is probably a third of my enjoyment with PC gaming.
As someone who basically knows nothing about Linux, why don't mods work?
Mods that are problematic are usually those which rely on DLL injection, and this is because Wine searches for DLLs to be linked differently than Windows.
Windows uses a search order that prioritizes the application's working directory before checking the system directory or the known DLLs list in the registry, even for libraries provided by Microsoft themselves. This allows mod makers to distribute their own version of a system dll like dinput.dll which gets linked to, patches the game in memory, then redirects all relevant calls back to the real version of that library.
Wine does not do this. When an app tries to link to a system library that Wine has a built-in implementation of, it always links to that version by default. Users need to manually specify that they want to prioritize a native version of a built-in library over the built-in version. To make matters worse, winecfg's UI for configuring this behavior does so on a per-library basis, and it does so using the library's name rather than it's file name, which are often very different. This leaves users often having no idea what library they need to configure like this to make their mod work.
It can be real frustrating when these mods don't work, as dll injection is often used for mods that fix games which are broken in some way. It's also used for mods like special k and reshade.
Right, it can be worked around by setting that environment variable for each DLL for each game you want to mod. It's yet another layer of friction between me and my games, in an environment where there are lots of other things like this adding their own layers of friction.
And I think it's dumb that Wine still behaves like this. It should default to native and fall back on builtin because that is the behavior of the platform Wine is emulating.
Good to know. I took the original comment to mean modding games on Linux wouldn't work.
What games are you looking to mod?
On Linux you need to use a compatibility layer called Wine that creates a separate environment (with a file system, flags, etc) that the Windows programs run in. It's also what Valve uses for Steam, with some enhancements specific to gaming, which is Proton mentioned by the OP. In part thanks to Valve, Wine has matured much over the past few years, and once you figure it out, you're able to make pretty much anything work in it. I've even been able to run Cyberpunk with mods (which uses custom dlls) on a Mac using GPTK (Apple's equivalent to Proton, also based on Wine).
So in my experience there is always a way to do it, but you sometimes need to tinker a bit. Usually with more popular games someone has already done the tinkering for you, for example for Bethesda games there this you need to download. I've used this for Oblivion and FNV and it works great, and other examples I can think of that I was able to mod without a hitch are X-Plane and Paradox games. Any Steam workshop mods will work out of the box too.
Okay, good to know. The game I'm looking to mod varies, but 95% of the time it's either through the Steam workshop (so thanks for confirming that works) or from Nexus mods. And Bethesda games are some of my favourite to mod.
Have you used Nexus mods in Linux? Do you know if they work?
I'm not the person you asked, but I had success modding Fallout 4 with steamtinkerlaunch (STL). It has a lot of options, but I used it to install the Vortex Mod Manager, and then use Vortex to install Nexus mods.
If I remember correctly Vortex listed all supported games on my local Steam install (so, not only Fallout 4, but also Skyrim, Witcher 3, Cyberpunk, etc.), so I guess other games should work this way, too.
This way modding was very simple and I installed dozens of mods without problems. Only thing that didn't work at the time was the automatic download from Nexus in Vortex, so I had to download the mods via browser, and then simply drag/drop them on the Vortex window. Also, when I used it a few years ago there was some minor tinkering and reading involved to get STL running in the first place. Other than that it worked fine for me.
Great, appreciate the recommendation. I'll check it out.
The simple answer is that most of the modding tools are made to run on Windows, and even if they are cross-platform, they are still all written to expect Windows. Literally all of them will still run just fine when emulated on linux, but the problem is they don't know they are on a linux system. Simple things, like Vortex instantly detecting all your games on Windows, does not work on linux due to the filesystem structure and emulation layer making it difficult for these mod tools to 'just work' and autodetect where for example steam is, where each game is, and where the mods for each game are.
You run into this on Windows as well if you have Steam and your programs installed in non-standard locations like D:\Steam and F:\Games, but it's worse on linux because there's no handy windows 'registry' for the mod tools to just look up all this information and configure themselves correctly. That means that for most Windows-only mod tools, you'll have to go into the mod tool's settings and set a lot of things manually. After that it'll all work fine, but there is an extra bit of setup involved.
Most mod tools have native linux versions, since most are written in cross-platform languages like java and python. It's the Windows-only ones that end up being more of a pain in the ass than you'd expect to set them up. Any that are built on .NET are going to be a big issue on linux, but not many are anymore.
It's really not that hard to work around, and since you only have to do it the one time per game/mod tool it's not really a big deal. It's just a gotcha that can make gaming on linux for the mod-obsessed like me a bit more involved than one might expect up front. Typically, for any game, there will be a thread on protondb that talks about setting up the mod tools for it, that's my first stop every time and I almost never have to google it.
Examples from some of my favorite games include RimPy for Rimworld, Irony Mod Manager for Stellaris, and AML for XCOM-2. I've had zero issues modding these games to ridiculous levels past that first setup, even with large mod sets. I run about 250 Stellaris mods, and 800+ for XCOM2 for example.
Okay great, this is a great response and has helped me understand the issues. Thank you, I appreciate the detailed answer.
I have never modded X-Com 2 but have always wanted to get around to it. I don't need 850 mods... But any really great mods you would recommend starting with?
My full mod collection for X2 is right here along with directions how to set it up in the discussions. It's pretty far from vanilla in almost every way one can imagine but I think it makes for a vastly more interesting game overall.
If you're happy with vanilla, though, the mods you really want are the quality of life fixes that basically patch the bugs and UI issues and other major irritants out of the game. All of those (or versions of others that do the same thing) are part of mine and I would never play without them.
Do NOT use Paradox's own launcher to manage the mods. It's basically junk, does not work, and has never actually worked. You need AML, the Alternative Mod launcher. That one gets all the conflicts and dependencies right.
Beautiful, thank you for this!
Seconded. The only issues I've had are with modding Bethesda games, where the utilities don't quite work, especially for engine modifications like Fallout: New Vegas's 4GB patcher, FOSE or OBSE launching properly after the games' executibles were modified, etc. These are sort of "standard but not" scenarios that I would think we could work past, but also only affect four games and are worked around easily by a mod launcher.
If someone wants to check if their favourite multiplayer game is working on Linux (which is sometimes a problem since some anti-cheat methods don't support Proton) there's this resource: https://areweanticheatyet.com
(I only play singleplayer games and basically everything works for me on Linux in recent years.)
I was going to comment that one area where Linux compatibility is still poor is anti-cheat systems. Nice site; thanks for sharing.
I've been daily driving endeavourOS for a while, before that I was using Nobara but I've never had a great experience with Fedora. The only reason I have windows on a separate drive is for GeForce Now, because the windows and Mac apps are the only apps that support 1440p 120fps. Nvidia really needs to add support for 1440p 120fps to browsers.
I'm not a hardcore gamer, I have a MacBook Pro and like to occasionally play (mostly older) games on it. For my needs a Windows 11 virtual machine gets the job done.
I would love to walk away from Windows and I like the idea of Linux gaming. I could spin up an Ubuntu VM or whatever just as easily as the Windows one I'm using. But what's the current state of ARM compatibility? Since I'm on an M1 Mac I rely on Microsoft's x86 emulation layer in Windows for ARM, which Just Works. Obviously with a performance impact, but again I'm playing older titles and they still run fine this way. As far as I know (which admittedly isn't very far) there's not a comparable Rosetta-type thing for Linux, so you have to acquire native ARM binaries. Are those commonly available in the Linux gaming world these days?
I got a new desktop computer a few months back and was determined to run Linux on it. I loaded it up and booted it… before I learned that Linux doesn't support HDR — at least, not without jumping through a bunch of hoops I'm not really prepared to jump through. If I didn't know about HDR or my display didn't support it, I'd probably be running it right now.
Keep an eye on the developments on that. Wayland HDR support is something that Valve has been pushing and it has been coming along nicely so it might be a matter of weeks/months before this is resolved.
It's coming, but there's a lot of work to do to support it. From what I understand, linux 6.8 is bringing the AMD colour management API necessary to begin the work to carry HDR down the home stretch.
Yeah HDR is definitely still not there yet, but it's looking very promising for the relatively near future.
Also some proprietary codecs like Dolby's dvhe or ec-3 aren't supported on Linux. Unlike HDR10 though it's probably only relevant to a fraction of users.
I'm right there with you my brother or sister in Linux.
Linux Mint + Lutris for me and with the sole exception of trying to get STALKER GAMMA to work (fanmade collection of a couple hundred mods to fully remake the game - technically possible for Linux but a PITA to get running apparently), I have been able to play what I want to.
The reliability of gaming on Linux in general just keeps refining and working better and better. I, too, am quite happy about that.
Whelp, may the source be with you and all that. Peace.
I've been told this for the past five years. Yet last time I tried even live booting from USB, both my external monitor and wireless keyboards failed for lack of drivers right out the gate, and since I keep my laptop in a closed desk space by my knees, it was a bad start right out of the gate compounded by the wifi adapter also refusing to get along, so updating the problems away was a no-go.