All the comments about Linux gaming make me want to give my $0.02. I've been gaming on Linux, with no Windows installed anywhere, for around 6 years. In the first 3 years, it was a massive pain. Games like S.T.A.L.K.E.R. would consistently have issues with mouse input, weird acceleration, a lot of games wouldn't run at all. This is NO LONGER the case at all. Things run very well out of the box.
All games I want to play run very well and mostly the process is just "install -> play".
If a game has an aggressive anticheat, like Battlefield 6 or Valorant, it will not work and you can forget about it.
Controllers work fine, so do some wheels and other peripherals, but a good number of wheels, pedals, joysticks, VR headsets, and other wild and wacky input devices might not work that well or not at all. It mostly depends on whether the software for them runs on Linux, runs in Wine, or is needed at all. Not sure about VR, but I know it was a bit dire 1-2 years ago.
If you don't play hardcore simulator games, and don't play one of the competitive shooters with aggressive anticheat (e.g. CS2 and other competitive shooters run perfectly well), you can just install Linux, install Steam or one of the other launchers, and just hit play.
If you're not sure, you can check the status on https://protondb.com.
Well actually I've been technically playing all the games that are protected by these aggressive anticheats on linux since I've decided to switch.
My setup is a custom version of the linux kernel that 'backdoors' itself and exposes host information to the windows vm making all the anticheats happy enough to work out of the box. Have not gotten banned in any of the games either. Custom VMM and EDK builds are required to block blanket detections of virtualized hardware.
I repurposed lookingglass to instead stream all the wdm buffers as seperate applications that I can open directly in linux like they're native applications. The neat part is that I forward all the installed applications to KRunner which talks to the windows vm and launches the application there and spawns a looking glass instance for that applications assigned path.
The only downside that this is a two GPU solution and you have to run any GPU intensive applications in windows.
Care to write it up somewhere? Would be a fascinating read!
Unfortunately doing something like that will simply make anticheats respond as they have in the past and make it increasingly difficult to do so.
I did contemplate playing this cat and mouse game and making anticheats accept that it's easier to just support linux instead of fighting it.
What about in regards to streaming separate applications through looking glass?
If you have to run a Windows VM anyway, why not just reboot into Windows?
Because I would have to reboot into windows including any active applications I have? That also means I would have to maintain TWO operating systems instead of just one.
Now I have a form of WSL (LSW heh). There is a reason why everyone on windows uses WSL these days, same concept applies for LSW, but for games.
> Because I would have to reboot into windows including any active applications I have?
In a gaming-only setup, Windows requires virtually no maintenance. Plus gaming itself is a monotasking activity.
I actually find it positive having to reboot, so I start with a gaming session, and I only play, and when I'm done I'm done. I get the appeal of everything-in-Linux (it was my setup) but it's also a hassle.
> In a gaming-only setup, Windows requires virtually no maintenance.
This is not remotely true anymore with Windows updates automatically restarting computers, windows updates pushing breaking changes especially in regards to GPU drivers, and more anticheats requiring secure boot.
These points are not (all) technically correct; for example, Windows does not restart "automatically" - it gives multiple options (this is important for dual booting).
Besides that, the root discussion is having a dual boot vs a virtualized windows; maintenance applies the same to both, it doesn't disappear when virtualizing Windows - the different is (the value one places) to context switching.
Do you have anything on your LSW because i have a handful of software that i do not want to miss on Linux.
So you dont need to run Windows all the time, I guess?
If you reboot you don't need to run Windows all the time, either.
I guess installing windows is more work than running a VM
... and more invasive
More work than using custom builds of everything on the Linux host?
It’s just the kernel and virtualization stack that are custom. Dual booting is annoying as you lose access to your entire desktop environment. Want to tab out of your game and check your email client? Well you can’t unless you maintain another email on the Windows partition that you only want to use for running a game anyway. If you spend any significant amount of time gaming you just end up getting dragged away from Linux where you want to be. I was dual booting for a while and it was fine for a focused Skyrim session here and there but when I started playing an mmo that I was in and out of constantly it was very inconvenient to not have access to my Linux desktop environment while I was idling in the city for hours.
With lookingglass nowadays it practically feels like just running a windows game on Linux. I used a vfio setup for years before Linux gaming support was good and I had to switch monitors inputs and toggle my kvm whenever I launched a game and it was still better than dual booting. There wasn’t kernel anticheat back then though so i didn’t have to muck with the kernel and uefi.
>It’s just the kernel and virtualization stack that are custom.
That "just" is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Maintaining a customized system is hardly zero effort. Speaking for myself, there's no way I'd ever consider something like this, because I know sooner or later a system update is going to do something weird that I'll have to figure out how to fix. I'd rather just buy a second computer just to run those specific games. The other person admits they need a second GPU to support this use case anyway, so it's not even like you're saving that much money.
>Want to tab out of your game and check your email client?
I have a phone, and a tablet, and a laptop (besides the desktop). I'm not exactly hurting for ways to check my messages or look something up quickly.
Yeah that’s fine, i personally didn’t spend many hours tweaking my dotfiles in Linux just to spend half my time in an operating system that i hate that spies on me and doesnt have my stuff in it. I wouldn’t maintain my own custom kernel either just to bypass anticheat, i don’t buy those games.
Not sure if it's still the case in the 2020's, but back in the 2010's I had no end of issues with Windows deciding to either fuck up the dualboot so nothing would load or overwrite it entirely and leave it as Windows only.
I think I probably switched off dual booting to vfio around 2015. Before that for dual boot I had just followed the arch wiki and used two separate drives, using grub for booting both windows and arch. I don’t remember having issues with dual boot but setting up vfio for gaming was still very fresh at the time and was not trivial for me.
EDIT: looks like it was 2016 i stopped dual booting and switched to vfio because I built a new computer for it a year later https://imgur.com/gallery/battlestation-4BuoZ Ironically reading that back I have just recently started getting into film photography.
I used vfio in the past, and it's not true that setups like vfio or custom kernel/virtualization "just" work. For starters, custom setups need management. There are even latest generation GPUs whose drivers are not fully VFIO compatible.
VFIO had a host of problems that are rarely mentioned, because VFIO "just" works: power management, card driver, compatibility, audio passthrough or maybe not, USB passthrough or maybe not, stuttering, and so on.
VFIO is in a significantly better place than it was 10 years ago though. Proper IOMMU groups are more common on motherboards, flashing gpu bios less necessary, etc. and most importantly the community is bigger and older so there is a more knowledge about parts compatibility and vfio setup.
That said it’s almost entirely unnecessary with the state of Linux gaming now.
Better or not, even the latest generation AMD GPUs don't automatically guarantee a very stable VFIO, which makes the technology still immature.
Sure, in 10 years we’ve gone from bleeding edge, with server/workstation motherboards being necessary, to immature, with having to do a little homework on which consumer hardware to buy. It’s not like VFIO is something for the general public anyway.
With the Windows VM are you doing GPU pass through to get native performance? Is there still a relatively minimal overhead doing it that way? I would be interested in running applications in their own Windows VM(one at a time at least) but the VM is essentially invisible and only application window is available?
That is honestly amazing and impressive. Probably a bit too much tweaking for the common gamer though, but glad it is possible!
I've been messing with kernel-mode anticheats for 3 to 4 years so yah, not something a typical gamer can do. But I have been contempating on making this publically available for everyone to use wrapped in a neat little package!
You definitely should! Even just a blog post about it would be great. I won't be doing it myself, but my son would for sure.
Out of curiosity do you run the backdoored kernel in your day to day computing or only when gaming? Any concerns about incidental security issues?
It's only backdoored within the virtual machines and require kernelmode within the virtual machine.
Any untrusted virtual machines don't run on my machine to begin with so it's alright.
All games I want to play run very well and mostly the process is just "install -> play".
This is largely true for games running directly through Steam, it can get pretty annoying for games that exist outside Steam.
Especially when you have to do things like apply an ".msi" style patch to a game .
It's doable, but the number of steps and tools you may have to pull in (such as protontricks) does get to be a bit of a pain at times.
The trick I have is that I add the game and all related windows exes to steam in the same file system. When you run a game on proton through steam, it makes this virtual file system thats matches a game appid, or a uuid. So youll get a folder somewhere thats like 12345566778. You can add that file to an override for a different application, and have it run on that application file system. So if you add a patcher, mod tool etc, you can use it just like its in windows.
For example: Add Diablo 2 exe to Steam. Run Diablo 2 in proton. This creates a folder like 123455 /home/user/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/compatdata/123455/. Then Add LOD to Steam, add this to the system launch STEAM_COMPAT_DATA_PATH=/home/user/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/compatdata/123455/ and you can run the installer on the older file data. Do the same for a mod patcher, etc.
Agreed, but people should definitely try Lutris. It's nearly as painless as Steam now for GOG and many other stores.
I haven't tried out Lutris yet as I'm trying to avoid having too many layers of platform dependencies just to get games to run, but I'm sure I will at some point.
I recently switched to Lutris, so my son can install games without me. It just works. Great stuff.
No issues with other stores. Gog, Epic, etc
Lutris recipes often work out of the box as well. It's as simple as hitting "install" on the Lutris app.
Lutris solves that
Related: Wine 11 rewrites how Linux runs Windows games at kernel with massive speed gains https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47507150
Yep, my casual Steam games run well out of the box. I don’t even use a gaming-focused distro like Bazzite, just EndeavourOS. Helldivers 2, No Rest For The Wicked, Slay The Spire 2, even modded Lethal Company with friends using r2modman (also worked OOTB). And of course Discord works, including streaming when friends want to watch
If I really want to play Apex or Battlefield I’ll fire up my dual drive dual boot Windows, and in the meantime, no more Microsoft spying on me, forced Windows updates and reboots at random times, ads in my Start menu, Xbox apps and other bloatware, etc
why even use custom ones like Endeavor? steam works fine on basic fedora and arch -- have tried on both.
I did consider Fedora, just was intrigued by EndeavourOS, being Arch-based but with default settings that work totally fine for a casual like me, not having to fuss about setting up a DE or WM+addons, firewall, WiFi, Nvidia GPU worked out of the box, etc
For me the biggest surprise was that old ps2 usb racing sim wheel+pedals just worked instantly with linux, and I could use it in dirt rally without any pains. It felt amazing. oculus quest 2 also works very well with alvr, even wirelessly.
I got a Quest 2 recently and Steam Link would not connect, ALVR would crash after a while, but WiVRn work perfectly on my Arch Linux with a AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT. It's nice that we have multiple options.
I assembled a PC last year from used parts specifically to try gaming on Linux after two decades with only the occasional FreeCiv or MineTest, and the experience with Steam is mostly painless. Impressive!
> Games like S.T.A.L.K.E.R.
The old stalker games run on the X-Ray engine (the mods on a modified OSS version of it). In my experience they've always worked pretty well, though the games are quirky in general.
Good hunting stalker.
Time is money, get talking!
Yes, last time (recently) I tried, the original games ran very well, with no (Linux specific) issues!
No wonder it's classified informally as "eurojank".
We still can't compete with Bethesda on that front, though...
Well, modded Stalker is ways better than most of the USAjank that typicall can't offer something other yet another blockbuster.
Even vanilla STALKER is still a timeless classic.
My concern has long been, what happens when I want to do something weird?
I have a projector that supports stereoscopic 3D. Sometimes I use things like HelixMod to add 3D to games. What would that look like on Linux?
Sometimes I use GPU driver settings to force games to use higher render resolutions (above my monitor's resolution), or better anisotropic filtering. What does that look like?
> Things run very well out of the box.
> a good number of wheels, pedals, joysticks, VR headsets, and other wild and wacky input devices might not work that well or not at all
> If a game has an aggressive anticheat, like Battlefield 6 or Valorant, it will not work and you can forget about it
> Not sure about VR, but I know it was a bit dire 1-2 years ago
The determination of the average Linux user to ignore the faults of Linux is something to behold
The deterimination of some people to hate on Linux is also something to behold. It's not perfect (nothing is, not even Windows), but it's a lot better than most people (who I don't think have actually tried) seem to think it is.
The majority of people don't use fancy wheels that require custom software to work. Many people do use anti-cheat, but plenty of people don't need it.
> to ignore the faults of Linux
When someone brings up issues related to Linux themselves, that’s clearly not “ignoring” them. It would be a true case of ignoring them if they simply kept quiet about them.
>> If a game has an aggressive anticheat
> the faults of Linux
And besides, as far as I know (well, maybe I'm missing something?), anti-cheat issues aren’t a fault of Linux itself.
And besides, as far as I know (well, maybe I'm missing something?), anti-cheat issues aren’t a fault of Linux itself.
Issues with anti-cheat aren't Linux's fault (the one to blame), but they are a fault (undesired attribute) of Linux.
There's Windows games that don't work on Windows 11 but do on Linux (e.g., Red Alert 2). There's wacky gaming peripherals that work on Linux but not on Windows 11 (Try an OG Xbox controller for example). Hell, MS has even removed support for a bunch of VR headsets when they nixed support for Windows Mixed Reality.
Why do Windows users ignore the faults of Windows?
Why do Windows users ignore the faults of Windows?
How many people care about support for Red Alert 2 and OG Xbox controllers on Windows 11 (assuming either of these truly don't work) versus people who care about the ability to play games like Fortnite?
So really the conversation should come down to how well Linux plays Fortnite then. And bringing up games that 'no one plays' is irrelevant.
You can't have it both ways. Either it's only relevant that Linux plays the big games that are on steam, or people can bring up edge cases where windows doesn't do so well.
Edge cases? There's a long history of brand new triple A games running poorly or not at all on Windows. Evstablished games have plenty of problems. There are millions on millions of support pages, forums, and the deep dark recesses of discord stacked with Windows gaming problems. Just because some folks don't have problems with Windows doesn't mean the problems don't exist. The windows user base is so vast it's easy to think there's no problem just because an individual doesn't see it in their little corner of the world.
I don't disagree but when the conversation is about red alert 2 and steering wheels and the response is nobody uses those, then it isn't valid to use the argument that Linux is useless when it runs everything.
> don't work on Windows 11 but do on Linux (e.g., Red Alert 2).
Huh? But I do play Red Alert 2 on Windows 11 and it works just fine. Also can play online through CNCnet.
Is this something about a particular version not working, or some copy protection issue?
It can be made to work with patches like those provided by CNCnet, but in my experience just installing it doesn't tend to work.
Aggressive anticheat not supporting Linux is not a fault of Linux. It is a fault of the aggressive anticheat and the games that decide to use it.
It doesn't matter whose fault it is, I go where the games actually work and are playable, which is still Windows today for many games.
Its a matter of language. When non-technical people here "Linux doesn't support anticheat", that's a lot different than when they hear "anticheat chooses to block Linux".
It doesn't matter to you, but other people care about false accusations.
Who is accusing Linux as the cause of anticheat not working? I haven't ever seen that, I see people blaming the anticheat creators for not supporting Linux, they know Linux is not the one at fault yet they still want to play games therefore they use Windows instead.
You didn't read the thread? It's the comment I was replying to: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47718255
They quote "If a game has an aggressive anticheat" and then state "The determination of the average Linux user to ignore the faults of Linux", which is accusing Linux of being at fault for the aggressive anticheat not working.
I did not read that to mean that Linux is at fault, I usually would use "X's faults" colloquially to mean drawbacks, not literally, X is at fault and therefore responsibility for this.
Ah well then we have a slightly different interpretation. I would read "the faults of <x>" as "the flaws of <x>", which would then imply a flaw of Linux is why aggressive anticheat doesn't work when it is just companies deciding it isn't worth their time.
FWIW, I am not alone in that interpretation since this commenter reached the same conclusion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47718389
But I don't think we can conclusively say either one of our interpretations is correct.
These aren't faults of Linux, they are faults of hardware vendors. There is nothing(!!) Linux or the community can do if the hardware vendors decide to not support Linux at all.
I know that's not what you meant, but to less technical folks, it will read like you meant that it's somehow something Linux can fix.
How is Linux fault that some strange peripherals/input devices don't work?
I assume the use of the word "fault" in this context was referring to the "downside" meaning instead of "assign blame" meaning.
I have been running Steam on a Fedora Sway spin on a ThinkCentre M75q Gen 5 for nearly two years now, playing Hades or Hollow Knight. Before that, I ran Steam on Debian on a ThinkPad T14/P14s to play Cities Skylines. I usually use an Xbox or PlayStation 3 controller. It works great!
Playing Linux or Windows native games, because that is the whole issue, it is hardly any different than asserting there are Linux games when they are actually Amiga games running with UAE.
Those games running on Proton are still produced on a Windows factory.
I wonder if there actually are any native modern Linux games, I don't recall any.
There are a suprising number of games with a native Linux version, like ArmA 3 (which is an ancient, broken, outdated port, but it exists and used to install by default), or Minecraft, and plenty of other games have native linux versions that aren't advertised anywhere. Vintage Story is native and runs super well.
Due to a lack of testing on all parts of that pipeline, it's usually better for performance and stability to run the Windows version via Proton anyway.
Slay the Spire 1 (Java) and 2 (Godot). Ironically, StS1 ran better under wine than natively.
Anyhow, there are plenty of native games, we just don't notice, because running them tends to not be any harder than running Windows games these days.
Loki Entertainment in the good old days, anything Android NDK, which uses OpenGL ES/Vulkan/OpenSL/Open MAX.
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I have 3 4k monitors. Windows drives them without a problem. Linux still can't. I tried for a whole day and eventually gave up.
Is there a performance hit for cs 2 compared to windows with an rtx card? That‘s pretty much the only thing holding me back.
CS2 has first class linux support. I'm on cachyos specifically, and on my machine it has better performance than on Windows (I made the comparison a couple of months ago, so pretty recent)
It works better lol.
That being said CS2 runs substantially worse than CSGO. It at least kicked my addiction when it released, since it no longer ran at acceptable framerates on my laptop ahaha
It depends what are your expectations.
I thought it was fine, until a competitive player, friend of mine who has a machine comparable to mine saw the game running on mine and noticed a lot of stuttering and framerate loss. I don't believe it is a machine performance issue (Threadripper Pro 3XXX with a 3080p), and I was running a pretty standard Gnome Fedora 43 with NVIDIA drivers.
So if you are into competitive gaming, I guess it is debatable.
Within the past month or so there was a fix for rtx cards that should unlock a massive performance increase for certain games. Only applies to rtx 30xx, 40xx, and 50xx. Search terms are "vulkan descriptor heap" if you would like to know more. It's very fresh so you'll need an up to date distro.
This is a pretty interesting topic.
For GO, switching to Linux (with an AMD card) was a free performance boost. I gained like 30fps.
For early CS2, the performance on Linux was terrible.
Now, the peak fps is slightly worse, but the frame pacing is much more stable. Eg: you get less fps, but also less fps drops.
I have been a happy user of the Bazzite distro (which used proton) for several years at this point. Very happy as well.
I think Marvel Rivals works fine so its not all Competitive Shooters ä.
> If a game has an aggressive anticheat, like Battlefield 6 or Valorant, it will not work and you can forget about it.
Yeah this is why I stick with Windows. Unlike it seems a lot of people on HN I don't really see any issues with it that would want to make me move away, especially as I already have WSL if I do need Linux, as WSL has GPU passthrough.
> I don't really see any issues with it that would want to make me move away
If you don't care about privacy issues or ads in your face, then yeah Windows is pretty good. I care a lot about that (and open source in general) so for me it's way worth it. But everyone is different and that's ok
I don't, no (otherwise I wouldn't use Google and their ecosystem either). I also don't see any ads people talk about either, I run ad blockers everywhere so maybe that's why.
Vague concerns about privacy are not strong enough reasons for me and most others, based on OS market share, to move away when the concrete reality is we can simply play more games on Windows. The only reason Linux gaming is getting good is because of Valve funding it heavily in the past few years for their own products like the Steam Deck, and to move away from an OS they have no control over in Windows, not because of privacy concerns which I guarantee you 99% of Steam Deck users don't give a shit about, they just want to play their games.
> the concrete reality is we can simply play more games on Windows
If you play older games, particularly DOS/Win95 era titles, the concrete reality is that DOSBox and Wine have better compatibility.
Even some recent games, eg. Elden Ring, have unfixed stuttering issues on Windows that were fixed on-release in Proton. I'm willing to give Windows it's due because I don't think it's a terrible gaming environment, but it's a direct downgrade for a lot of the games I enjoy playing.
I should've said games which came out this century, perhaps I thought that was implied when we're discussing modern anti-cheat. The number of games which work better on Linux over Windows is small.
I'll take your word for it. I haven't used Windows since Windows 10, maybe Win11 fixed Bethesda's alt-tab crashing errors and reduced memory consumption - I'd never know.
> not because of privacy concerns which I guarantee you 99% of Steam Deck users don't give a shit about, they just want to play their games.
I actually agree with everything you said except the above. Valve (and their employees) do actually care about privacy concerns, regardless whether their users do or not. I agree that's not the primary reason they did it (it was because of Windows control as you said), but it isn't a non-zero factor.
And importantly, older games now tend to work better in Linux than they do in Windows.
The DB lists popular games, what about indie games coming out every day?
If they are built on Godot, Unity, Unreal, or are built with SDL+OpenGL or SDL+DirectX or C# MonoGame any kind of combination that is reasonably common in the last 20 years, it'll run well
These are often in the database as well. Indie games also have a very good chance of working without any changes in Proton, IME. They usually aren't very "high tech" and I suspect that at least some of their creators test them with Proton.
VR works quite well these days.
