TL;DR; tried gaming on Linux again after not having done so for ~10 years and am absolutely blown away by how much improved it is
Today I decided to get some use out of an older/leftover PC that I had laying around after upgrading. My plan was to plug it into the TV in our lounge room so that my 5 year old can play some of the less demanding games she enjoys from my steam library (stuff like Slime Rancher 2).
Originally my plan was to install Windows on it only to discover I couldn’t do this due to TPM / secureboot requirements that the older hardware couldn’t handle, this was infuriating and felt like I couldn’t use my own machine which used to run Windows fine.
To understand where I’m coming from; I’ve been a Linux user on and off for more than a decade and in the past had been able to play some games using Wine but it was often fiddly or simply wouldn’t run the game well enough which is why I generally just dual boot Windows for gaming.
I decided to give Linux a try as I’d heard steam has made gaming on Linux much more approachable than it once was using a proton compatibility layer (which under the hood uses Wine but making it a bit easier to use).
After installing Ubuntu 23, Steam and then enabling the proton compatibility in Steam settings I am absolutely amazed at how easy it was to get most games working!. My daughter has been playing Slime Rancher 2 and it works really well and I’ve also tested a few other games such as Cult of the Lamb and Dredge and they also worked well. This is such a leap forward to how I remember the state of things back ~10 years ago when I last played games on Linux.
From recent developments it seems like gaming on Linux is really beginning to pick up momentum and I look forward to the day game publishers place great import on releasing native Linux ports but until then am super grateful for the work the good people at Wine have been doing as well as Proton and Steam for making it easier to use.
It’s been a beautiful thing to see. IIRC Proton was announced and usable sometime in 2018. Things were still rough then but it was a good sign.
When DOOM Eternal dropped it didn’t work for a while and I’d refresh the GitHub issue page daily until one day it was fixed and has worked perfectly ever since.
Apex Legends was one of the only things keeping me dualbooting Windows, then February last year it comes out that Apex added Proton compatibility for EAC thanks to the work Valve did behind the scenes collaborating with anti-cheat developers, so I nuked my Windows partition and haven’t looked back.
We’ve had some crazy momentum over the past few years and it seems things keep improving a step up every few months. Not to mention projects like GloriousEggroll’s proton that has consistently been offering patches to fix certain games earlier than they’re released with Valve’s upstram Proton Expiremental.
Id periodically gone full-time Linux on and off over the past 6 or 7 years and it was always gaming that pulled me back. Now it’s been a good 4 years aside from dualbooting for Apex and with that out of the way I haven’t really had a need to touch Windows at all since. This is truly the best time so far to be gaming on Linux :D
Yeah, when I found out Titanfall+Northstar mod works flawlessly on Linux, it was a pretty good day (the Northstar devs even package the mod as a custom Proton runner just for us Linux users)
Oh yeah! Earlier this year i bought Titanfall 2 on sale and was so hyped to see how well Northstar worked with it. It’s one of my favorite multiplayer games now for just casually hopping in matches here and there. The movement mechanics are so damn satisfying