there are a plethora of reasons to transition your daily driver gaming rig
over to Linux you could be sticking it to the Man or wanting to support the
open source Community maybe you daily drive Linux for work already and all
your games are natively supported anyway or maybe you just want a new and
challenging hobby but if what you want is a simple painless gaming experience
then let this be a cautionary Tale one of Trials tribulations and of course
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below for most of our one month challenge Luke and I avoided
specifically seeking out titles that would either validate the Linux gaming
experience or intentionally make it look bad we just focused on playing the games
that we would normally want to play or at least we tried to because not all the
games that we wanted to play actually worked the very first day I installed
Linux I also tried to play the battlefield 2042 beta the previous day
still on Windows i' owned some noobs with my buddy Joe and we wanted to play
again the next night but that wasn't going to happen due to this challenge it
was reassuring I guess that even more advanced Linux users were also unable to
play but that didn't actually remedy the fact that I couldn't play games with my
friends it's funny because I assumed that this challenge would be more
painful for me than it would be for Luke I mean after all he has years of Linux
experience while I came in with basically none but here's the thing I
game mostly by myself as a way to relax or to hang out with my kids and I am
extremely flexible about what game I'll play if something doesn't work screw it
I'll just play something else Luke on the other hand whose Social Circle is
deeply immersed in gaming culture has so
much more on the line if he can't solve a problem yeah like I literally had a
friend ask hey dude when are you going to be back obviously I had never
actually left but I was a lot more difficult to include as a lot of
competitive games that have anti-che just don't work or it took me so long to
get a lot of games to a satisfactory level that by the time I was ready
everyone else was just done gaming for the night and as a lot of my friends
like to just try random games out for fun this actually happened a lot our
goal is not to spread fud about the state of Linux gaming though so it's
time to get specific about some of our less good experiences first up is steam
or rather not steam valve's goal of
reaching 100% compatibility with the entire steam game library is admirable
actually incredible as noted by this
here Reddit post the steam game library is chock full of amazing gaming
experiences from AAA Studios and Indie developers
alike but it's also not the Silver Bullet that it would have been 10 or
even 5 years ago when nearly every game worth playing was available on Steam
half of twitch's top 20 games at least at the time of filming this are not on
Steam and I know being a popular game to stream doesn't necessarily mean it's
popular with random Gamers out there but
these are all very big name games and being on Steam isn't an automatic win e
look at Apex Legends and New World both
massive games both listed as borked on
proton DB native Linux games are obviously going to be your best bet want
to try one of my personal favorites crosscode click install click play and
as simple as that I mean I was amazed at how painlessly my Xbox One controller
worked though I should note that I stuck with a wired connection rather than
trying to tackle getting the unofficial X driver working Val meanwhile ran
amazingly and immediately demonstrating how even smaller developers can make it
work if they've got the will in addition to that while not necessarily native I
played Legion td2 TowerFall Ascension
faster than light slay the SP Path of Exile and rust and they all worked
perfectly with zero actual effort and interestingly enough Dota 2 and csgo
both had completely gamebreaking problems that weren't isolated to my
system during the challenge they seem to be solved now but it goes to show that
just like with Windows because a piece of software was made for it doesn't mean
it's actually going to be perfect I didn't have any issues running csgo even
got me some kills boys but I did notice
significantly more stutters than I'm used to seeing on this class of Hardware
that could be an NVIDIA driver issue or it could be something else entirely but
for me it worked well enough that I didn't feel like digging any further
into that rabbit hole not when I could be digging for a sweet hoodie like this
one on LTT Store.com instead the next tier is Windows native games that valve
officially lists as Linux capable via steam playay but before we go any
further I just want to say massive respect to the incredible teams who have
worked tirelessly to make running Windows games on Linux possible valve's
proton compatibility layer is amazing
it's forked from wine which has been multiple decades in the making with
about half of its source code written by volunteers that's freaking wild and of
course honorable mentions all around for the dedicated communities that maintain
tools like lutrus which automates hacky workarounds for newbies and proton DB
which serves as both a troubleshooting resource and a reference for which games
work so you won't have to waste your money on a bad experience with all of
that said in spite of all of that work
we're honestly just not there yet and
we're mere months from from the launch of the steam deck when 100%
compatibility is supposedly coming which
as of writing this just got pushed back by 2 months to February also Doom
maternal reported great performance on my system over 200 frames per second
using the included tool I'm kind of reminded of the issues that we used to
see in Old SLI configurations where the actual perceived animation smoothness is
substantially less than what the Benchmark seems to suggest it should be
again I thought maybe this is an issue with my proprietary NVIDIA driver maybe
it's at a date but Manjaro begged to differ apparently I am up to date so
your mileage may vary another problem that's been a thorn in the side of the
Linux Community for years is anti-che
now the game launches and seems to run totally fine but while theoretically
enabling battle eye anti-che in rainbow six Siege is as simple as Ubisoft
reaching out doing a little bit of figuring and off we go cuz battle ey has
supposedly supported Linux for ages Ubisoft hasn't done that yet why well
because natively supporting Linux is seen by some developers as a somewhat
brutal experience Ben GIS has a rather
enlightening Thread about this on Twitter he goes on to explain that while
Linux Gamers were a very vocal part of
their pre-launch Community they accounted for less than 0.1% % of sales
yet they generated more than 20% of autor reported crashes and support
tickets he also stated that near the end of his time there nearly 100% of tickets
were still Linux related despite Linux
receiving the majority of the engineering effort meaning the company
likely spent hundreds of thousands of dollars supporting a community that made
them a few hundred in sales revenue and
this isn't the only version of this story and every time problems like these
happen it's just more ammo for developers that would rather spend zero
time working on Linux versions of their products I believe that is why over 65%
of reported anti-che enabled games have not confirmed Linux compatibility
despite many of the anti-che developers getting on board and as much as everyone
already knows it it Bears repeating the fragmentation problem continues to be
desktop Linux's greatest obstacle to widespread ad option Take It Takes Two
For example this is a gold rated Windows native origin game that I got running
effortlessly though I did buy it through Steam and I did launch it through Steam
at least it was effortless until I wanted to have two controllers running
at the same time kind of a requirement for this particular game if I want to
play it with the wife that sent me on a quest to proton DB to see if anyone else
had had the same problem and no not really everyone else's
problems are basically random so guess we're not playing that game for now one
of my other favorite games Supreme Commander forged Alliance was as simple
to run as clicking install and enabling a couple of launch Flags awesome but if
you want to play multiplayer ohoo boy here's the story when gas powered
games went under a small community arranged to preserve multiplayer support
for the game by building their own launcher it is an amazing example of the
way that the PC gaming Community can come together to preserve experiences
that would otherwise be completely lost due to corporate butth H holdery
unfortunately every guide I could find to get the forged Alliance forever
launcher working on Linux was either hopelessly out of date or not applicable
to my particular drro I don't blame the devs really
nothing but love for you guys but Linux Gamers and more broadly the Linux
Community needs to understand that until the burden of supporting Linux is
reduced significantly this is always
going to be a problem we actually live streamed trying to work through the
forge Alliance issues on Floatplane subscribe by the way there were more
than a few comments in the chat criticizing us for choosing to play that
particular game because it's old it's
just some crappy Java game it's it's obscure or because it's not fair to
Linux or whatever but the bottom line is that none of that matters what matters
is that we like it and we wanted to play it but instead of doing that we played
terminal command simulator and honestly
I've gone through enough of that over the last month that it has sucked a lot
of the enjoyment out of using my computer like I have a pretty busy life
and when I manag to salvage an hour to relax and play video games that is what
I want to do and it's really opened my eyes to why so many people choose to
play on Console instead of on PC like this has got to be how a not super
computer savvy user feels about updating a driver or fixing a firewall setting
every time they just want to play a bloody game to be clear I would never
say that just because some old game doesn't run it means that Linux sucks in
fact I've permanently switched my laptop over to Linux because there are a lot of
things it just does really well even for someone more on the noob side of things
like me what it does mean is that gaming on Linux can kind of suck it's not that
I don't enjoy tinkering with PCS as a hobby I mean man the rush when 1800
launched after spending a bunch of time fighting with it it was phenomenal I
felt like the king but then the next 45 minutes of
okay why isn't multiplayer connecting completely destroyed that Vibe you know
is it because Luke installed the game through the script on the lutrus page
and then I lutrus Ubisoft connect and installed the game through that
resulting in a version mismatch is it because of some kind of mangaro firewall
nonsense the answer ended up being being that multiplayer used to work which
helped ano 1800 get a gold rating on proton DB but now it does not which
isn't to say it won't ever work again if
you're a Linux developer wizard you might be able to fix it yourself or you
might end up just needing to wait for the community to patch it but anything
that relies on an external service that updates independently of your computer
can just unexpectedly break and that's a
lot of games these days so you always need to make sure that you
read especially the recent comments rather than just relying on the rating
on proton DB another prime example of this is Minecraft dungeons works great
apparently well as long as you happen to own it through Steam rather than through
Microsoft directly with the old launcher because in that case apparently you can
make it work but for most people I think it's safe to say that you're just going
to have to Reby the game so I haven't been able to play that with my kids in a
month that ended up being an ongoing theme of
this challenge proton DB again respect for all the work that you do it can save
you a lot of time but it won't just automatically fix all your problems gold
to me should mean a pretty typical gamer can do it so while the rating system
makes for a very impressive story on the homepage did you know fellow Gamers that
78% of the top 100 games are gold or
better on Linux wow the truth is a lot less Rosy and there's
another big problem with proton DV it only includes Steam games and while you
can use the proton compatibility layer on non- Steam games even considering
tools like lutrus the compatibility picture outside of steam is not as
simple as well proton DB says Linux
gaming compatibility is good I mentioned escape from tarov earlier it's been
broken for so long that due to battle state games adding anti-che their Linux
Discord has turned into a matchmaking channel for other games so they can have
some fun while they wait genin impact
kind of a huge game right now no Linux
compatibility and while I did manage to find a honestly really great Russian
guide from penguin gang that I could probably follow it illustrates a point
that I haven't really talked about much yet being on Linux can take a lot of the
spont out of gaming you can't just be like oh
cool that game looks neat and expect to be playing it in just a few minutes I
also hope you're not necessarily a fan of playing games right on launch for of
horizon 5 for example amazing straight
up fantastic that people got it working within just 5 days of launch but that
also means that it wasn't working for 5
days after the launch and if all your friends were playing they now have sick
cars and you're stuck trudging through the swamps for a barn find to be clear I
don't want this to take away from some of the great experiences that I've had
gaming on Linux in the last month after an extremely short setup my daughter was
happily hanging out in a Discord voice Channel with her siblings playing
Minecraft Java Edition and had no idea she was on a completely different
platform that's freaking amazing Luke and I had some awesome Don't Starve
Together sessions totally stable no crashes and more recently my son and
Luke and I had a blast pin each other to walls and TowerFall using remote play
together which worked great on Linux
overall I'm really happy I did the challenge I learned a lot and it gave me
a lot of Hope for the future and I will absolutely be trying to stick with Linux
when the steam Deck shows up sometime next year but to summarize the question
that we set out to answer is this the year of the Linux desktop for gamers the
answer is no I'm sorry and the more
Niche your use case gets you know maybe you're super into modding or the racing
or flight Sim scenes or maybe you're a big VR lover the more resounding that no
gets and if I'm being honest I'm in the same camp but something has given me a
lot of Hope and that's how much positivity we've seen from the Linux
community in spite of our concerns because even if I'm not ready to convert
my gaming rig just yet it gives me hope that one day the meme will end and the
year of the Linux desktop will come I'm as antimonopoly as anyone and I'd hate
to see the status quo maintained forever I know what I don't hate is our sponsor
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challenge is over it's time to go back and watch the previous Parts because while the overall conclusion was no
there's a lot to really like about the L experience