Nearly 90% of Windows Games Now Run on Linux
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The article reports that nearly 90% of Windows games now run on Linux, sparking a discussion on the growing viability of Linux for gaming and the remaining challenges, such as anti-cheat software and hardware support.
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It doesn't hurt that it works for gaming too though, even though I rarely get time to play anything.
NVIDIA is pretty good on Linux lately. Id always wait a week before updating drivers tho.
If games transition to SteamOS/Linux in general, I think this niche is going to be one of the slower ones to move, but never say never.
I do think there's a few hiccups still with Linux support. The shift up to 6.16 kernel has itself resolved many of the issues I'd been having in the past. If you're on an older LTS that hasn't moved, you're likely to see more issues than with a more current distro.
To be fair, anything old that wasn't famous has a decent chance to be broken under WINE too. It might just be a single call to some obscure animation API or something, but it can be enough to break the entire game.
Also, sometimes the original version doesn't work but the GOG version does, or even vice versa. I've seen all sorts of oddities.
This post gives me hope that I can ditch windows forever for all things soon! Games is the only reason I do windows for development these days.
All i want is rocket league :(
At least tf2 works
How did those issues get fixed? Did they abandon the anti cheat, or does the anti cheat now work under proton?
Do you only play offline or something?
Rocket League has literally never been unable to run on GNU/Linux. The full game. Multiplayer, Steam workshop, everything.
I suspect you may be thinking of a different game honestly. Maybe League of Legends? I think they switched to an invasive anti cheat a few years ago that caused it to no longer work on GNU/Linux.
[0] https://www.protondb.com/app/252950
[1] https://heroicgameslauncher.com/
BakkesMod also works, thanks to https://github.com/CrumblyLiquid/BakkesLinux
Rocket League has a platinum rating on ProtonDB: https://www.protondb.com/app/252950
[1] https://www.protondb.com/dashboard
https://support.apple.com/guide/security/direct-memory-acces...
Not so on Linux?
At least I know that Helldivers 2 (GameGuard), DJMax Respect V (XingCode), Fantasy Life I (EAC) do works on Linux.
I wish that if they're happy with non kernel mode anti cheat on Linux, just do the same in Windows... Or just disable them if I don't use public matchmaking
Windows has the same issue, but isn't open source and easy to modify. Still, EA are so paranoid that they require it there.
Now hundreds of hours in, I have nothing interesting to write about it. For me and the games I play it's been a seamless transition.
I remember the days of having to manually install steam in Wine and how only a few games would work like that.
What about market share of play time?
So for me it's better than 90% of all games are playable on Linux, than if a handful of games accounting for 90% of market share were playable.
As a young teen with nothing to do, I probably had some days in Summer where I clocked in 16 hours of gaming.
I can live without that though. I don't think I'll bother setting up a Windows partition on my next PC.
There comes a point were you just don't miss it. The only moments that it is apparent is that disassociation you have when someone else just assumes you run Windows. I don't blame them, I am statistically the odd one there, but that is when you have to figure out things your way.
The real issue isn’t capability but just adoption (IMO): most studios and agencies are chained to Adobe’s ecosystem. If even one major studio publicly switched pipelines to Linux, the floodgates would probably open to actually allow this.
The Year of Linux on the Desktop was near, and wine would surely be a temporary stop-gap.
I think the only game in the last 2 years I haven't been able to run is battlefield 6.
Any game that is reasonably popular has a very good chance of running. Just go to protondb and anything gold and above is generally good to go.
Even if 99% of games worked fine on Linux, a large amount of people spend 50+% of their time in-game in one of those games, so it doesn't end up feeling like 90+% of games work.
Thankfully, the corollary of that is that single-player games pretty much all work, barring some edge cases, like very recent titles that haven't had the kinks ironed out yet.
Besides, the gaming industry keeps shooting themselves in the foot by only supporting Windows (Mac is a thing too). That is slowly changing, but so many game devs are drinking the Microsoft koolaid they don't even consider using another graphics API other than DirectX. Many other decisions like that as well.
It really is impressive how many they are willing to leave behind. A quick check gives about 19% of the market.
Besides, in privately owned servers you were protect via human mods, who were there playing with you. They would bring down the banhammer when a sufficiently suspicious player was deemed as cheating. That is the biggest issue nowadays, one that has brought the bar even higher for anti-cheat solutions. They are now the ONLY line of defense. It really is clear as day that anti-cheat solutions got more and more intrusive as more games stopped allowing third-party servers to exist.
I'm a game dev, I see this, I understand the intentions, I get the consequences. In many ways the intentions weren't bad, it does create a more unified competitive experience. But it made it impossible to not resort to kernel level anti-cheat, even though it is a fruitless effort as so much of the game still needs to be rendered by the end-user's machine (of course, the grim reality is that cloud streaming is the end goal for any competitive game if we continue down this path).
And human mods suck. Really, really suck. They don't have perfect information, and their false positive / negative rate is probably an order of magnitude worse than an anti-cheat. Even a perfectly neutral moderator is bad at judging. And perfectly neutral moderators don't exist. It was not remotely uncommon to be banned from a server for killing the admin too many times.
This is exacerbated by the fact that moderating itself sucks. Moderators are there to play the game. Actually moderating on the side of that is a burden. This leads to the same incentive structure that you see all over the internet, where volunteer moderation mostly attracts people who are interested in power tripping, because otherwise there's very little appeal, and bad actors are more common than people willing to do it out of the goodness of their heart.
There are great points about private server browsers, but it's also just a massive pain to find servers that both have a gameplay configuration you like and also have decent moderation. Improving anti-cheat systems was the obvious way forward rather than relying on humans who are much more fallible. Kernel anti-cheat should fortunately only be a stopgap solution and not something that is here to stay in the industry. Kernel anti-cheat was a result of the failure of Windows to provide sufficient security features themselves. Riot's Vanguard doesn't rely on kernel access for macOS, and Microsoft is actively working on improving the kernel security such that it shouldn't be necessary on Windows in the future either. With any luck we'll be able to forget this era of anti-cheat in a few years.
The gaming industry is thoroughly multi-platform, and many games that are limited to Windows on general-purpose PCs aren't so because the require DirectX, since they've also been developed for Playstation where DirectX isn't a thing.
Support for Mac can be somewhat challenging, partly because the platform (including the hardware) is so different from other general-purpose PCs, and partly because Apple doesn't particularly care about backwards compatibility, and will happily break applications if it suits their interest.
However, a developer that doesn't support Linux does so because they don't want to for whatever reason, not because the technical bar is too high. With the work that has gone into Wine, Proton, and other Windows compatibility libraries these days, there's a good chance that a Windows game will "just work" unless the developer does something to actively inhibit it.
I mentioned DirectX as a clear enough example, but there are other decisions just like it.
Hell, most studios use Unreal nowadays, it already has their own RHI (Rendering Hardware Interface) between them and the graphics API. It really isn't much effort to start new projects targetting Metal or Vulkan.
Some have noticed this section of the market, in which they can grow, like Ubisoft and Capcom (see their games on Mac and iOS) which is why I said it's slowly changing. And that demonstrates it really isn't difficult.
Funny note: Have heard from a bird that Ubisoft's many engines had Vulkan support so their games could run under Google Stadia's servers. As soon as that got killed so did those engine branches. This just shows it isn't difficult at all. And it isn't a surprise they also acknowledged this by now using Metal to reach Apple's users.
If you think game devs are drinking koolaid, do note that there's always loud minority of linux advocates on forums like these, saying 'it works' and when expanding further it turns out they had to do a ton of tweaking and setup. Just look at the comments on getting Overwatch2 to work on linux for an example.
Fact of the matter is most of the game dev's audience is on windows, and for a time it had good tools/documentation for graphics debugging as well. That momentum carried over. It made practical sense to have main development be on windows.
> It makes no sense to leave 19% of the market on the table
What's your source? Steam Hardware Survey says it's 2.68% linux and probably steam deck users.
https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Softw...
For example, this game is on Apple Store (for Mac)⋮
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/resident-evil-village-for-mac/...
Not on Steam:
https://steamcommunity.com/app/1196590/discussions/0/3484123...
Same happens with Ubisoft titles.
But, regarding the source, here you go: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_syste...
I do agree the way these are gathered is not perfect. But closer to reality, or would you assume Mac presence in lower than Linux?
Neither has anyone else, if they bought it directly from EA.
Shame about Battlefield 6, some of my friends are playing that and it would be fun to join them. Oh well. Fortunately they're mostly still playing Helldivers 2 as well, and that works fine.
[1] https://www.protondb.com/app/2507950
Somehow changing the font scaling in Linux caused the game to be scaled by a similiar amount.. so 2x font scaling = full screen is 2x bigger than actual monitor.. and I can only see 1/4th the screen.
1. Go to your library
2. Click the filter button
3. Under "hardware support" you'll see a dropdown "Steam Deck" with 4 options, here's some explanation what they mean:
Verified - Means this game 100% works on Linux (and Deck), which is verified by Valve
Playable - Means this game works on Linux (and Deck) but it might have some tiny issues (e.g. font size)
Untested - Might work, but not tested
So to check if your games would run pretty nicely either filter on "Verified" games or "Verified or playable" games and it filters out everything which will or might not run at all.
You'll be surprised how much games can run on Linux these days -- thanks to the massive effort Valve puts in Proton and some devs (including Valve) publishing native Linux builds of their games on Steam, and even things you might not even consider at all like Skyrim or Oblivion with all your favorite mods (!)
Windows users with my GPU report the same symptoms as I hit, fwiw.
The only game that I had an issue with is The Unfinished Swan which I bought on Steam after having enjoyed playing it on a PS3 (good enough to buy twice). I couldn't get it to work initially with it just going to a blank screen (not the game itself which ironically does start with an all white screen) no matter my tinkering with Proton versions. However, tried it again a few months ago and it worked perfectly with default settings.
Being able to use sane scripting to solve problems, ZFS snapshots to undo bad mod installs, using the same system for development, and so on is no longer something I'm willing to give up. I've also started amassing a small collection of Cloud Init configs that set up game servers inside LXD containers. Some of these have native Linux binaries but a few only have Windows servers. They run perfectly well through Wine.
Anyone here even vaguely interested, I encourage you to just try it. I use Ubuntu and it works great on both AMD and Nvidia cards for me. What have you got to lose?
Shit just works. When it doesn't, changing the proton version usually fixes it.
Way better than Windows.
My stack is so vanilla (nvidia, python, R) I can’t think what the issue is. Maybe hardware.
The graphical environment is neither here nor there for me, I just want to do an update and cuda libraries/nvidia drivers not break and for my OS to boot!
26.04 will be a huge upgrade if you stay
I realize by posting that here on HN I'm tempting people to send me the ProtonDB garbage tier list, but it's true for the types of games I play.
It allows my wife to play Stardew Valley on the TV via game streaming, while not disturbing my work at all on the PC. When she launches the game, I don't even notice it on my PC, meanwhile other solutions like Sunshine or Apollo do not let you use your computer while a gaming session is active on a client. Sadly, Duo is Windows only for now, which sucks.
Does anybody know a alternative for Linux that would work this way?
1. https://github.com/DuoStream/Duo
Racing wheels are still not well supported IMO. Although on Linux you can map a racing wheel to any other peripheral and work this around.
Another thing is that streaming experience is not as good on Linux as it is on Windows. OBS exists but the whole ecosystem around it is largely not.
Still... Linux is my choice of OS.
See how with mac os, games like LoL and Valorant do not need a kernel anticheat because the operating system provides enough security.
What point are you trying to make here?
1. That the raw percentage does not important.
2. That Linux distros do not care about investing in security, (nor to game studios themselves) to be able to get major titles like LoL.
As someone who enjoys older games, I am pleasantly surprised that Wine (with dxvk and cnc-ddraw) lets me run more games in a better way than I was able to on Windows.
I can run some 16-bit games on a 64-bit OS!
Games that rudely switch to fullscreen, I can run in Wine Virtual Desktop. Previously on Windows, I had to configure hacks like DxWnd and it didn't always work.
I only wish Wine also allowed me to zoom 2x or 3x, but this is where Gamescope comes in:
Also there is a potential to use a different Wine configuration (prefix) for every game specifically. So far I haven't had to resort to this.I noticed some Unity games waste disk space with gigabytes of zeroes, Linux lets me run them from inside a compressed SquashFS image, this even makes the game load faster:
I encountered a game that crashes due to multiprocessor system, the fix is simple, restricting it to one CPU:How did you discover that? Is it intentional on Unity's part? Percentage-wise, are we talking 2% of a 100GB game, or 50% of a 4GB game?
I can't find anything about it online.
I like to look inside game files and a .zip archive of 1GB unpacking to ~10GB game made me suspicious.
So it'd be surprising to me if a developer chose to use uncompressed/lightly compressed assets, and compressing them caused performance to increase; because you're intentionally choosing the tradeoff in the opposite direction the developer did
Of course, there are game developers that are less technical and may not have knowingly made that tradeoff in which case all bets are off, but the games made by those developers tend not to be the kind that require beefy machines to run at 60fps+
That’s not a problem with SSDs and most machines have more cores or even dedicated hardware decoders. Of course it’s also more worthwhile to compress since SSD storage is comparatively more expensive.
The office we worked in had really fast internet, but I was fixing things for the users.
Maybe Wine could be ported to Windows :-)
IHaveABanana Is this a thing or are you just now trying to make it a thing?
Either way, I like it :)
That's not all that needs to be removed from Windows, and it's not what they're interested in removing. The old MFC, GDI, COMCTL, COMDLG, Winsock etc. must be a lot higher in their "do delete" list.
Look at Apple Macs, all went from x86 to arm, breaking software and fixing incompatibilities later. Users had no choice but to use m1 macOS if they wanted a new device.
[1] https://reactos.org/
I suppose this might be asset padding or perhaps these are raw textures with full alpha sections? Still, it seems pretty strange. What game, what asset?
[1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/42478186/app-size-on-app...
But so much just works, old games, new games, singleplayer, multiplayer.
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