Have you actually tried it? Dual sticks (which is not quite as niche as a racing cockpit but still somewhat) via Wine just worked for me with zero effort - actually less than Windows which had joystick ID horrors.
There are apparently are some semi-experimental FFB drivers out there for a few wheels... but yeah, most hardware has a zero percent chance of working, because it's a niche of a niche. And then if you're doing online racing, they all(?) have anti-cheat stuff that won't work for you anyway.
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.
How deep did you look into it? Don't be misled by maybe your manufacturer not supporting Linux directly. As an example https://github.com/berarma/oversteer helped me to set up my wheel better than any rubbish windows OEM software could have.
I recently ran into a game where online match making was broken in windows, but worked just fine in Linux. I felt like I was trapped in the upsidedown.
Nice to see this. Worth noting that a lot of Windows (or DOS) games past may also not run well on current Windows versions. The anti-cheat issue is likely to persist for at lest a few more years... though I think the relative success of the Steam Deck itself has moved the bar significantly in terms of demands for support.
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.
After being impressed with my Steam Deck, earlier this year I purchased an RX 9070XT (my first card from team red since the Radeon 9800 Pro) for my gaming PC and switched to linux full time.
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.
2025 is the first year I've moved everything over to Linux. I've had no issues at all with my 4090 on Bazzite or CachyOS, but I will be buying an AMD GPU for my next build to ensure future Linux compatibility, along with the rest of my hardware and software.
As someone who only plays videogames on Linux I have to say that it is a surprisingly good experience, even with an Nvidia Card. Some things just are unavailable, e.g. the new Battlefield, mostly due to developers wanting to insert very specific Anti-Cheat software.
But so much just works, old games, new games, singleplayer, multiplayer.
It's been months since I've booted into Windows to play a game. Feels amazing. The only exception I've run into is heavy anticheat titles, like trying to play on Faceit CS2 servers.
I can live without that though. I don't think I'll bother setting up a Windows partition on my next PC.
I think the last time I had Windows installed was right around the release of Proton in 2018. Those initial releases were not great but the trend was very obvious.
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.
2003 me thought Wine is a dead end project and a waste of developer time. Granted valve put a lot of effort into Proton but they wouldn't even have considered it without the massive amount of work done before, kudus to all the non cynical wine devs
I couldn't run Delta Force [1], due to anti-cheat as far as i can tell.
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.
In case you don't own a Steam Deck and would like to see how much of your library would run on Linux:
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 (!)
To be fair, the Steam Deck support level is a bit arbitrary and some Verified games may work worse than some Untested games.
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.
Also in some / many cases even "unsupported" games work out of the box or needs only minimal tweaking. AFAIK most of the issues are with online competitive games which uses anti-cheat.
I'm never going back. If something changes and the only option is Windows or consoles I'll just stop buying new games or take up another hobby.
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?
Tried to play dota 2 on Linux, it has a bad memory leak that made the whole system hang after an hour or two. Plus it seems to get worse fps on Vulcan, but I read that it might just be a bad implementation in my card (6650 xt)
The only thing that is keeping me from switching on my home PC is Duo [1].
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?
Now look at what percentage of time users spend playing windows game is spent in a game that works on Linux. This raw game count metric is sqeued because everything someone releases a Unity game it will most likely work out of the box. Due to there not being that many game engines actively being used in modern times the scope is not huge. Bigger issues like Linux not having good enough security means that anticheats do not allow it.
See how with mac os, games like LoL and Valorant do not need a kernel anticheat because the operating system provides enough security.
LoL didn't have kernel-level anticheat for the majority of it's lifetime; when it was added to the game, Apple had removed kexts from the OS entirely. And Valorant doesn't support macOS in the first place, presumably because it didn't run Riot's Ring 0 anticheat at-launch.
I've gone over to Linux after using Windows for 25 years.
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:
Reminds me of the mention of "contiguous zeroes" that used to be in the Apple App Store docs.[1] Which seemed like just a backhanded way to say "we encrypt and then compress so don't expect easy compression."
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?
> 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 have a pc I built when the 2080 TI came out. How is Linux support for the supporting drivers for those cards today? The machine is still more than powerful enough for my needs but I haven't used it in a couple years because Windows really is just complete garbage. I'd like to be able to take advantage of new to moderately old hardware without dealing with Windows.
If it helps I used to use a gaming laptop for work that had a RTX 2060 mobile version, I was able to run some recent games like Elden Ring (including mods & online play), and some older but still demanding titles like Witcher 3. All of this without tinkering too much on a oob Ubuntu LTS install (I later switched to popOS because I don't like snaps that much).
1070 TI works perfect on Arch for the past ~6 months with latest drivers (better than Debian stable!). This card is old enough that only the closed source drivers are supported, but it seems to work fine.
I've been running a 2080 TI with AMD 5600x on Linux Mint Cinnamon for three months 24/7 with no graphics issues. Previously ran the proprietary nvidia-driver-550 but now use the nouveau open source drivers. There are five choices for Nvida drivers either open source, closed or open kernal (up to 570/580 now). This was a complete switch off Windows 10, which I've only had to boot twice in three months, to transfer some data.
Every game I've tried on Linux was either gold or platinum on ProtonDB and ran fine so far. WINE worked for running a couple non-game apps. Lutris is another way to run programs but I haven't needed it yet.
Definitely try it if you have a machine sitting there. There is so much support for Linux and Mint on the web it was easy to answer any questions I had setting things up.
If it helps I played AC Odyssey w/o issues using Proton GE, the biggest issue for me was that when I launched the game through steam, steam would launch the Ubisoft launcher which then launched the game , so I had to manually close this launcher to prevent having proton running in the bg for too long
It's been a while since I gamed though (2022), but the game ran smoothly on a mobile RTX 2060 card
The launcher is a bit annoying at times but what finally made me commit ot the switch was when I realized that Anno 1800 and the demo for Anno 117 were running flawlessly.
I also recently finished AC Origins for the first time on my Linux machine.
However I don't play multiplayer ever and apparently that's where most issues are.
I've been full-time Linux again for about 12 months, gaming isn't my main problem anymore. I think the only thing I'm having a bit of difficulty with is trying to get Jedi Knight working without crashing my entire computer.
Biggest problem I'm running into now is replacing all my music mixing tools. It's getting there, but it's a whole process.
Yeah, had no luck getting windows tools running. I'm only an amateur mixer thank God, but I found this list a while ago and have been having mixed success here and there https://github.com/alex-tee/lv2-plugins-ultimate-list
Just running these through reaper and it's ok enough.
It's a bit painful hearing all of the success stories on this page. I ran into endless bugs running games under Wine, eventually gave up and bought a vanilla PC just to run Windows for games, and that still gives me endless bugs with most major games, but somewhat less than Linux does. With my level of hardware fu I should stick to consoles, but mods make games accessible to me.
Similar anecdote, in the past week there have been two separate games that I wanted to try out, and both were nonfunctional on linux. One had a completely black screen, and the other ignored all mouse/keyboard input. For each of them I spent 15 minutes tinkering with winecfg, installing packages, googling error messages, etc. Eventually I gave up and booted back into windows where they worked perfectly.
That you say "running games under Wine" is a hint it was a while ago, the modern way to do this is to install Steam and let it handle the compatibility layer.
Keep posting. Comments like yours bring balance to the linux ideologue that everything's all fine and dandy. We need some truth in this.
The last thing we should want is to have an innocent, how-to-pay-rent-on-his-mind, game dev develop for linux thinking it's good only to find out there's a ton more bugs to solve (and having no help for solving them) for 0.01% of his customer base.
Proton/Wine is so good these days. Rarely have I had an issue running a game in the last 3 or 4 years. Sometimes EA/Ubisoft games that have their own special launchers don't work immediately, but ProtonDB and the Proton GitHub issues are great resources to get them going.
I remember when Cyberpunk 2077 came out it didn't work at first, but the Proton and Glorious Egg Roll devs got it running within a few days. Legends.
Even many games that support native linux run better under wine.
> Even many games that support native linux run better under wine.
The same is often true on macOS, too – running games through CrossOver is often better than the native port. The reality is that there simply aren't enough professional game devs on Linux and macOS platforms to polish that last 20% and make all the difference.
Out of the 150-isg games in my library, the only one I have had any issue with is 'From Dust' released in 2011. This is part because of the Ubisoft launcher and some video codex issues, but even so. Switching the too and from the game a few times seems to get past this.
About a month back, a demo for Lumines Arise came out and it fired up without issue, didn't even think to check ProtonDB because it has become so reliable. I suspect a big part of this is because Steamdeck has been popular enough to have it be targeted for Proton compatibility day 1.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 88.7 ms ] threadIf 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.
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.
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.
What about market share of play time?
But so much just works, old games, new games, singleplayer, multiplayer.
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.
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.
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
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 (!)
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.
Windows users with my GPU report the same symptoms as I hit, fwiw.
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?
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?
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 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...
Maybe Wine could be ported to Windows :-)
Also possible using dxwrapper (for DirectX 7-9 games):
https://github.com/elishacloud/dxwrapper
Similarly to dxvk, you drop a few DLLs into the game directory then edit one config file. No need to use a dedicated program.
Every game I've tried on Linux was either gold or platinum on ProtonDB and ran fine so far. WINE worked for running a couple non-game apps. Lutris is another way to run programs but I haven't needed it yet.
Definitely try it if you have a machine sitting there. There is so much support for Linux and Mint on the web it was easy to answer any questions I had setting things up.
I still can get my desktop gaming fix, at least.
It's been a while since I gamed though (2022), but the game ran smoothly on a mobile RTX 2060 card
I also recently finished AC Origins for the first time on my Linux machine.
However I don't play multiplayer ever and apparently that's where most issues are.
You can check individual games via ProtonDB e.g. Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag: https://protondb.com/app/242050
Biggest problem I'm running into now is replacing all my music mixing tools. It's getting there, but it's a whole process.
What are you finding that works for this? I know there's a couple decent DAWs, but running Windows-only plugins was a nightmare last time I tried.
Just running these through reaper and it's ok enough.
That you say "running games under Wine" is a hint it was a while ago, the modern way to do this is to install Steam and let it handle the compatibility layer.
I uninstalled Windows completely. There are many, many more games that work on my Linux PC than on my Mac.
The last thing we should want is to have an innocent, how-to-pay-rent-on-his-mind, game dev develop for linux thinking it's good only to find out there's a ton more bugs to solve (and having no help for solving them) for 0.01% of his customer base.
I remember when Cyberpunk 2077 came out it didn't work at first, but the Proton and Glorious Egg Roll devs got it running within a few days. Legends.
Even many games that support native linux run better under wine.
The same is often true on macOS, too – running games through CrossOver is often better than the native port. The reality is that there simply aren't enough professional game devs on Linux and macOS platforms to polish that last 20% and make all the difference.
About a month back, a demo for Lumines Arise came out and it fired up without issue, didn't even think to check ProtonDB because it has become so reliable. I suspect a big part of this is because Steamdeck has been popular enough to have it be targeted for Proton compatibility day 1.