Ok so a little background first. I’m an older millennial. I started using Linux when I was in college back in 2001. It was Mandrake Linux back then. I had an Asus V6800 DDR Deluxe graphics card with 3D shutter glasses and video-in for video capture.
The kernel module for my graphics card was limited and the shutter glasses didn’t work in Linux. For the video capture, I actually had to download an open source kernel module from some enthusiast. Then I had to literally recompile the kernel with the NVidia and video capture kernel modules to support my graphics card. And when I finally got this to work, I could finally play 3D OpenGL games in Linux. Except there weren’t that many.
If you wanted to run a Windows application, there was Wine, but it took a lot of technical knowhow and a lot of troubleshooting just to get something as simple as freakin’ NOTEPAD to run. Let alone a whole god damn game!
Over time Linux improved quite a bit and received more support from NVidia, but it was still a bit complicated until Ubuntu provided some repos with pre-built modules you could install. Wine was still a pain in the butt and it was mostly used to run MS Office anyways.
When I heard Steam was working on a Linux-based console and that they were working with a pimped up version of Wine, I was a bit skeptical. I was certain there wouldn’t be any support for advanced graphics stuff like ray tracing and DLSS.
On my home PC I have a dual-boot setup with Win 10 and Ubuntu. I’ve been spending most of my time in Win 10 for gaming and entertainment and just the simplicity of it.
Since a couple of years I’ve been hearing more and more about Windows 11 and how everything was going to be tied to your Microsoft account and how much they were going to collect information on your usage and how your privacy was simply gone in that new OS. Also the user interface looked horrible. I love the Win 10 UI. It’s flat, square, the start button is easy to click, the start menu has huge tiles that can be organized in groups making it really simple and quick. I mean, the ergonomics of the UI in Win 10 is the best I’ve ever had. Win 11 is a fucking downgrade. And this week I had to upgrade my work laptop to Win 11 and it’s fucking horrible! Microsoft really screwed up the ergonomics.
Knowing that one day it will be inevitable and that I’ll have to upgrade from my beloved Win10, I decided to give gaming in Linux a go since the gaming part is basically the only thing keeping me from switching entirely to Linux. So booted in Ubuntu, installed the Steam Linux client and started reading on how to take advantage of Proton to run Windows games in compatibility mode.
I went ahead and set it up and installed Ghostrunner. I immediately ran into some problems, but I was expecting this. However, they were simple error messages and within 5 mins of Googling I found out I only had to add some command line parameters to set some environment variables. The game launched! And holy shit! It ran flawlessly! There were no issues with the graphics! I could enable all the NVidia RTX options! Everything worked practically out of the box! I was blown away.
We went from a time where you had to rebuild your fucking kernel to get your graphics card to work and fucking around with Wine to get to a point where you nearly throw your PC out the window until you can get a little app to run to simply running apt install nvidia-driver-xxx and clicking on a button to make a Windows game run in Linux.
You guys. This changes everything.
I think my dream is coming true. I think I might finally go 100% Linux on my PC. I never thought I’d see the day!
Holy shit!
+1 to everything you said. Another funny thing I noticed: I looked at my steam catalog on a family member’s Macbook. Many of the games aren’t available on Mac, plus they dropped 32 bit executable support.
I never thought that only ~15 years later (from when I first tried Linux) we would start booting into linux from a mainstream OS for gaming. How the times have changed.
Yup. I occasionally play games on macOS because that’s what I use for work, but I have to be careful because most games don’t work at all, and some run like utter crap. My main PC runs Linux and I can run pretty much everything in my library.
Can you imagine if Mac computers could run the same catalog of games than on PC?
Yeah I’m a grey-beard, my first experience was Slackware in the nineties. I’ve been using Linux since but usually on servers and in VMs only. Recently I’ve been able to go 100% thanks to Proton. I really enjoy the progress made with tech such as systemd, wayland, btrfs, proton and flatpak. Though a lot of grey-beards are very resentful of these I feel they represent real positive progress. There’s also support for kb backlight and other features of my laptop.
I’m also really enjoying PRIME rendering on my laptop, using Intel and Nvidia at the same time for different things. It works beautifully/seamlessly and even more so that I can just type “yay” and get a new Nvidia driver or a matching driver if there’s a kernel update without having to do any babysitting manually.
I do everything on Linux now, Office work, Rustdev and I play games like BG3/Guildwars2 simply by launching them from Steam.
The only pain is that I have to configure each application manually to use Wayland, that’s a bother.
I’ve never had to do anything special to get games to work with Wayland. Do you mind elaborating on that a bit?
There are still a lot of games that expect some XWindows stuff. I’ve run into it, but not too frequently.
Generally, the fix is setting an environment variable that tells a library backend to expect Wayland - something they could do in code with minimal effort. It kinda makes me wonder if there’s some common ‘port your game to steam/Linux!’ tutorial that they’re following.
Is that for Linux native games? I’ve found I get better results for games by just using the Proton version
there are a few of us still bodging around out here.
I’m curious if anyone has experience with this stuff with an AMD card.
If I could finally ditch my windows gaming rig I would be a happy man.
I’m 100% Linux on a 5950x and a 5700xt. I’ve had pretty much no trouble at all. The GPU works out of the box, and with the exception of enabling Proton for non-verified games, I’ve only ever had to click install and play. To be fair though, I only play single-player/non-competitive games, so I don’t worry about anticheat at all.
These days Windows games give me less grief on Linux than they ever did on Windows.
I’ve run an rx580 and am currently running a 7900xtx. I have very few issues. Every once in a while a few games will break when I update Mesa, but I’m on a rolling release distro, so that’d probably happen less often on something like Ubuntu. Honestly I probably have fewer issues on Linux than I did on windows.
I’m team red on Linux all the way. Ryzen 5 2600 (soon upgraded) + 6750XT. Mesa works out of the box and hasn’t broken yet. The only thing that caught me off-guard is having to manually enable VKD3D for newer DX12 games – I recommend using a launcher like Heroic (very easy, Steam-like front-end for several stores) or Lutris (universal, exposes more advanced options) to manage your games. You should also look at ProtonDB for compatibility and tweaking tips, and Lutris install scripts in case a game needs a specific framework to be installed.
Recently switched myself. I keep giggling like a coked-up chipmunk every time I download something on Steam and it just fucking works. No to minor fucking about.
Right??? Like how cool is that? Not even Mac’s have games like Linux does now!
We went from a time where you had to rebuild your fucking kernel to get your graphics card to work and fucking around with Wine to get to a point where you nearly throw your PC out the window until you can get a little app to run to simply running apt install nvidia-driver-xxx and clicking on a button to make a Windows game run in Linux.
I have fond memories of getting World of Warcraft working on Linux back in ~2008 only to realize it had an OpenGL mode that ran better than the DirectX mode I was trying - and failing - to get working.
You aren’t wrong about kernel and driver shenanigans.
The Steam Deck itself is also a great Gateway Linux platform. I’m advanced computer literate but havent really worked up the motivation to fuck around with Linux before since like you said, it was generally understood that Microsoft was the way to go for gaming. Microsoft has been pissing me off more and more since 8 though and now that I have a steam deck I know my next tower is going to be linux as well. The deck is great for turn on and game with its gaming mode, and then when I want to do something a little more advanced I just boot desktop mode on and tinker with linux, quickly getting more familiarity with its quirks and differences
