Playability Test of 100 Humble Bundle Games on Linux | Hacker News Reader

Playability Test of 100 Humble Bundle Games on Linux

blogg.forteller.net

159 pointsunhammer117 comments

Some of these results are off. Shadow Warrior, Shadowrun Dragonfall and Shadowrun Returns are marked as not working, but they definitely work, I just played them on Linux (with an AMD gpu and the free driver). They even worked really well. It seems the author does not have a dedicated gpu, I doubt those games would run well on windows with that laptop.

Some other game that worked for me and marked red there: Spaz, Jamestown and Crayon Physics (I think, might have been another version).

To start those games in window mode is a good way to mimize potential errors resulting from Fullscreen mode, especially in different OSs, and something that many Indie games also do on Windows.

Linux sure is not a perfect gaming platform yet, but this article paints a darker picture than necessary.

Yep.. I just tried a couple of the games marked red and they all worked for me without problems..

That iGPU (HD 4400, 20 EU) is more than enough for most of these games. I guess Intel's Linux driver is more buggy than AMD.

Intel's linux driver isn't necessarily buggy, but doesn't support the same OpenGL version/extensions. If a game needs those, tough luck on Intel.

My brother's laptop has an Intel HD 4xxx (it might be 4440) and it works perfectly. Intel Linux drivers tend to be good in my experience.

There's no such thing as an Intel HD 4440, there's the common 4000 and 4400, and the less common 4200 and 4600. There are no other entries in the 4xxx series of Intel HD as far as I know.

So likely, your brother has a 4400.

I had Sandy Bridge and now I have Skylake CPU. Work fine most of the time, but crash on some games. I don't know why because error messages are usually ambiguous.

I also have Haswell on desktop with Windows, so maybe I can check these games on different systems.

My experience is that Intel cards produce more problems with OpenGL. But not related to Linux, same on Windows. Part of the reason might be that it's not so common for 3D developers to work with Intel cards so those are less tested.

The other side of the coin is that big name GPU manufacturers spend a lot of time working with game developers to fix issues both with the games and with their own drivers. You often see Day 0 driver updates that coincide with major game releases. This kind of constant test and refinement squashes a lot of bugs over the long term.

Intel doesn't do that. You basically get the driver that they originally wrote for your chip and that's it.

My experience has generally been that intel's linux drivers are pretty damn solid and AMDs verge on broken by default. I haven't really gotten a chance to try the new AMD OSS drivers in anger, but I don't have high expectations.

That said, for a long time everyone gushed about nvidia's linux drivers and I found them pretty damn frustrating.

I get much better performance from AMD's open source driver than from their closed-source driver. Ubuntu 16.04 comes with a version of the 4.4 kernel that has the 4.5 driver changes backported.

The driver that ships with Ubuntu is almost certainly old and even though the chip has enough raw computation power to run games the actual support may not be there.

For what it's worth, I've only ever run across one game that didn't work properly in Linux. Eador has badly fubared graphics and apparently the developer doesn't even care. He only did the Linux port to get on a Humble Bundle I think. It's a shame too because it is an interesting game, even if the developer has a somewhat insane notion of how long people are going to want to keep playing a single campaign.

The best Intel iGPU I've found by far is the Intel Iris Pro Graphics 5200, which came onboard my system76 galago pro. Runs perfectly on my Linux system, plays far more games than I could on my previous laptop (Intel HD 4400 as well, I think).

I even managed to play Borderlands Prequel(?) with a manageable frame-rate.

He is marking things as non-playable if they don't install on his version of Ubuntu. A lot of the failures seem to be due to ia32-libs, which was replaced by other packages some time ago.

The current package systems aren't really a great way of distributing software that won't be actively maintained and updated for new distro releases, which is going to be the case for games.

You've really hit the nail on the head with respect to Linux package systems. They're really designed for open source software and have a major blind spot when dealing with projects that are only distributed as binaries and not actively maintained.

I would go so far as to say that they're simply not suitable for binary only distribution unless the owner is willing to maintain the project. Some alternate solution should be used instead--maybe a Docker like solution? Or just Windows/Mac style "pack up all of the dependances, including glibc, and accept that every install is going to be big and bloated".

that's what flatpaks and snaps are

Fair enough, but I've always found it pretty easy to install older versions of whatever libs a game needs. Steam could solve this problem by keeping an up-to-date list of libs a software needs and either installing the older version next to the current one, or alerting the user if they're running a more exotic distro.

I've had hours of fun playing Jamestown on Linux. I think this article reflects a problem the Humble folks have now they've decided that they're a business. Paying customers expect products that work out of the box. Back when the Humble Indie Bundle was a clearly a charity thing it seemed pretty well understood that the Linux ports were done on a shoestring, and I was happy to support the attempt even if I had to muck around with video drivers and potentially hose my X configuration to make things work. Which they usually did and sometimes didn't.

But today, with competition from GoG, Steam, et al., the Humble Bundle is a commercial product with a charity marketing angle, rather than a charitable giving event. Now that it has customers instead of donors, they shouldn't be surprised that they're getting this kind of response.

humble bundle isn't creating the games or porting them to linux AFAIK. Why does their business model matter?

Because it's a business model. It wasn't always. When they started out, they positioned themselves as a charity. That was front and center, everything else was secondary. You were making a donation, and you happened to get some sweet games that might or might not work. Over the years, they've evolved into a business, and now they have customer expectations, instead of donor expectations.

Side remark: The humble bundle actually organized porting games for the bundle, at least in the beginning. And currently they are creating special games for their monthly bundle.

Shadowrun works pretty well until it pops up a control on the screen with the clickable areas way off from what's displayed on the screen. Like, unplayably bad. Was running an AMD GPU as well, so clearly YMMV.

To be honest, the numbers looked about right to me. X-Com looks great, but is painfully slow...

The problem, IME, is that it's so unpredictable as to which games will work, and which wont. I've had games refuse to work that other people say work fine, and vice-versa. The driver/library dependency system for gaming on Linux is a mess, and I think this accurately reflects that.

Sure, some may work better or worse for you, but that's kind of the point.

I agree. It is very nice to buy on steam for that, where you can return the game easily. But it would be a lot nicer if just everything worked.

The driver situation is getting better and better, I think Linux will arrive there. And I hope they find a good solution for the library dependencies, be it snap or static linking or whatever is out there.

> where you can return the game easily.

Is this true now? It's been quite a few years since I've tried, but it was near impossible when I did.

> The driver situation is getting better and better, I think Linux will arrive there.

Agreed. It's not great now, but it is much better than it was 5-10 years ago

Yes, they changed the system. Now you can return games in the first two weeks if not played more than two hours. See http://store.steampowered.com/steam_refunds.

Most of those ports are being done by one lone developer named Ryan C. Gordon who runs icculus.org Here's a talk he did about porting games to Linux with SDL 2.0 during a Steam Dev Days event: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MeMPCSqQ-34 One interesting thing to note is that most of those Linux ports can only be purchased through a Humble Bundle. (Playdead's Limbo is a case in point.) It goes without saying that the grand majority of those ports would have never happened if it weren't for Humble Bundle in the first place.

Yes, some of us still remember Loki Games.

> Playdead's Limbo is a case in point

What do you mean ?　Limbo is on Steam for Linux as well... http://store.steampowered.com/app/48000/

I stand corrected. I last checked 2 or 3 years ago when that was not the case.

And most of the ports that weren't done by icculus were done instead by flibitijibibo (Ethan Lee), who is also pretty amazing.

Distributing binaries in Linux is PITA.

Compiling a game staticaly with all dependencies is nontrivial (couldn't get it to work last time I've tried), and if you leave some libraries dynamicaly linked - in a few years it won't work. I made that mistake by using now abandoned libparagui in my game ~10 years ago. It uses old libsdl, which doesn't work with many modern resolutions, and it doesn't even compile on modern GCC without patches.

Every time I install new system and then want to compile it - I spend a few evenings to get it to run...

A good example is Unreal Tournament (1999). I don't think it's even possible to get the Linux version to run on a modern install of Ubuntu even if you track down all the 32 bit versions of all the libraries it uses. But using WINE the Windows version just works out of the box.

EDIT: Dropped "Classic". Not sure where that came from.

Y'know... I don't think I've ever heard anyone refer to UT99 as UT Classic.

Hm... you're right. Not sure where I got that from. Most people seem to call it UT99 and personally I used to just call it Unreal Tournament (no qualifier). I don't like putting the year on it because it makes me feel so damn old.

EDIT: Hey, fun fact: there's an upcoming free Unreal Tournament game simply called "Unreal Tournament" and apparently it's being developed somewhat openly: https://www.epicgames.com/unrealtournament/ (code is visible on GitHub for Unreal Engine 4 subscribers)

I hate it when people do remakes with the same title.

UT99 is a common abbreviation. Classic was used for "Unreal Classic" as opposed to Unreal - Return To Na Pali.

FWIW, I think the term was used often in e-sports to distinguish between it and 2k3/2k4.

Before the release of 2k3 there was no 99 attached to it and I know quite a few people including me who used the term "UT classic".

If anyone would like to try to get the "original" binary to run, it's available at http://www.liflg.org/?catid=6&gameid=51.

I'd read the write up on what's broken, even if the entire thing is a failure.

Lets hope Snappy changes this situation!

You mean this? https://developer.ubuntu.com/en/snappy/

Interesting.

Yes, that one

A lot of games now simply ship the shared libraries with the game and use LD_LIBRARY_PATH to at least partially fix that issue; it works OK in most cases (as long as you don't have a glibc that's too old).

Yes my problem was with glibc among other things.

The glibc issue is a sticky one though. This is why your typical gamer system on Windows has hundreds of copies of the msvc runtime installed.

Looking at the results, I don't think installing via deb or snap should be a requirement to make a game "recommendable".

In my experience Linux gamers aren't just Linux users and they're quite happy with tarball files and clicking on a executable. All self-contained and without getting all over the place with an installer. List requirements (if any), and it works.

Personally I don't like installing games as root, because the game developer doesn't have the level of trust that my Linux distributor has earned over the years.

Good effort anyway. It is true that Linux support is usually poor. If the game plays OK with WINE I usually don't bother trying the Linux version.

> Personally I don't like installing games as root, because the game developer doesn't have the level of trust that my Linux distributor has earned over the years.

Unfortunately, that's probably a holdover from game dev on Windows. In theory, you're supposed to install to Program Files (or Program Files (x86)) and store any user config data in My Documents. But most games just install with full admin privileges, and dump everything in Program Files.

Many modern games are more than just games too, they come with patchers/installers that may require extra permissions, and they also tend to run extra anti cheat softare in the background that require elevated privileges.

Few games actually need those admin priveleges: Windows since Vista has a feature called VirtualStore which maps underprivileged writes to Program Files to a location inside AppData (which is also where games and apps should save their non-user-facing runtime files - not in My Documents, which is an annoying antipattern).

Your point about patchers is salient - but I know that, say, Steam puts everything in Program Files and does not run itself or games as admin. Other games like League of Legends and World of Tanks work around the issue by installing outside Program Files.

I wasn't aware of Virtual Store, that's actually quite nifty! And I was wrong about My Documents being the preferential place to store it. According to [0] it's AppData, as you say.

I never meant to imply that the elevated features were necessary for the reasons mentioned, but it's _why_ it happens. In general, a company publishing a game isn't going to put it's top engineers on writing the installer. Those engineers will be fixing engine bugs or perf upgrades or have moved on to the next project by the time that point comes around, so chances are the installers are written by not necessarily the best people for it, which exacerbates the issue.

Finally, it doesn't help that gamers are conditioned to granting admin priveleges to their games and installers.

[0] https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/patricka/2010/03/18/where-s...

Steam removes all the security from the folder that holds installed games. Which is... a solution, I suppose.

Regardless of whether my own experience agrees with the author (some of the games he had trouble with I could run more or less trouble-free), I definitely approve independent reviews of playability/ease of installation.

I mostly only buy games on Humble Bundle, GOG or Steam now, with emphasis on the first two because they are less invasive than Steam. I sometimes have to deal with 32 bit libraries or problems with the default installation; it's no big deal for me, but I can see it's a problem for non-power users (then again, some drivers used to cause problems for Windows games a few years ago, I don't know what the situation is now. Didn't console gamers use to argue that they were better than Windows games because of this?).

The positive side is that I can play hundreds of games, some AAA, on Linux. The situation is not dire anymore, in my experience. The downside is that sometimes the games require some tweaking to install or play. Occasionally there's a game I cannot play at all (e.g. I bought but cannot play the Linux remaster of Day of the Tentacle: my dedicated GPU is fried, and the game simply doesn't run on Ubuntu 14.04 with integrated Intel graphics. Go figure).

Again, I approve of this effort to review the difficulties involved. It's helpful to Linux gamers!

Side note: It's a lot less painful with Steam.

graphics drivers sometimes are a problem, depending on your hardware setup. But if it works it works smoothly.

Not in my experience

Most of the games available in the Humble Bundles and the Humble Store come with a Steam key as well. The process for every game is the same: buy game, get Steam key, add game to Steam library, play. It just works.

I have an nvidia card because I naively thought having a proper graphics card would be an advantage. I have to run Steam from the shell with an LD_LIBRARY_PATH env to make it work at all.

A recent steam update for no apparent reason moved the steam folder so I had to manually move my steamapps (i.e. installed games) to the new location. Then I upgraded to Ubuntu 16.04 and Steam wouldn't work anymore at all, so I had to reinstall it using steamcmd (because the regular installer did nothing).

Oh, and some games still cause trouble: Wasteland 2 won't launch if I have Google Chrome open. It's a known issue although it sounds completely made up.

It's less painful but it's certainly not foolproof at any level comparable to the experience on Windows.

That really doesn't sound right. I have an Nvidia card, too. It works flawless without any workarounds..

Also.. the Steamupdate did not move the steam folder.. There are two versions of Steam. The one from the Steam website and the one from Ubuntu. They have different app folder locations. You probably switched one with the other.

Oh, fun. AFAICT I now have three versions of Steam installed.

And I can't even start Steam when I'm not using the nvidia card (and to switch cards I have to log out from Ubuntu and log back in).

Maybe this is just the result of me being an idiot, but either way this proves Steam on Linux does not pass the idiot test either.

My cool trick is:

    find ~/.local/share/Steam/ \( -name "libgcc_s.so*" -o -name "libstdc++.so*" -o -name "libxcb.so*" -o -name "libgpg-error.so*" \) -print -delete

Yeah, Graphics manufacturers are not doing their job well.

I'm currently playing FO4 on windows 8 and there are a lot of hickups as well. Even the computer dies sometimes. Saying that something is less painful on Windows won't do good either.

That's interesting. I wonder what an strace of the crashing Wasteland 2 would show. I'm guessing Chrome tries to take control of some GPU feature for some reason.

AIUI it has something to do with Unity3D and graphics acceleration in Chrome, so I guess you're right.

I agree. Although I know Steam games have DRM, I regularly use it. I figure if Steam ever goes out of business, somebody will break the DRM because there are so many users out there that have games from it.

Steam's DRM is opt-in too, not all games distributed via Steam actually use it.

In my experience (YMMV, I've a long history of gaming), if steam disappears I'll be disappointed to lose my titles, but it won't be the end of the world. Games I've played yesteryear rarely hold up over time - the vast majority I've fired up again feel very dated. And there's always a ton of new, interesting, and cheap games coming forward. Games are somewhat ephemeral/disposable, I find, so the "won't be around in five years" is less of a problem than for other software.

Again, that's my use case, others may differ.

It really depends on the games. The vast majority won't even be interesting after a year, but there's a few gems that are timeless.

Although those are also the games that tend to get regular remakes; while I still have my Final Fantasy VII disks for Playstation 1 I'd rather fire up the Steam port than mess around with an emulator. Or OpenXcom rather than the DOXBox'd original.

People still play Star Craft:Brood War as a profession. And I still like to play Master of Magic or Doom 2 from time to time. GOG.com made business on these kinds of games, so I'm not alone.

DRMs and always-online requirements are sad and I hope they go away.

Yeah, Steam is also not an angel. But right now it gets us something we need deeply: Playing on a free OS. Let's worry about the next step after that one succeeded.

That's because Steam ships a full runtime of what, Ubuntu 12.04 LTS?, and makes the game use those instead of your distribution's.

That isn't really a problem, is it? It means it can also do it all without root privileges. Shipping a local environment is increasingly how it's done.

It is an important but somehow always glossed over argument in the "are snap/flatpack necessary?" debate, if our most successful way of game distribution uses related technologies (with related drawbacks).

It's a huge problem if it's expecting you to use the AMD closed-source drivers but the open-source drivers in the 4.4 kernel you're using perform better.

Results at https://docs.zoho.com/sheet/published.do?rid=nc4und89223056a... (the embed didn't show in my browser)

This page has a poor layout to be showing a spreadsheet in anyway - half the horizontal width is taken up by a big static title/header element.

I call this "the other UX" pattern: Useless Experience

I really think this is an awesome effort. I have completely different results, though. Many of the games listed were played recently on my machine and all worked and installed fine.

My machine has Ubuntu 16.04 64bit with 16gigs of RAM and an nvidia 750ti card.

Just for fun I downloaded Aquaria. I tried the mojo installer, which worked without any problems. I tried the 32bit deb and had no problems, either. The 64bit deb is just the 32bit binaries with an additional ia32-dependency. Since Ubuntu is multiarch now, that won't work.

These packages should be removed by humble to avoid confusion.

EDIT: So far I haven't been able to find a single game on the list, that doesn't work.

The key here is that games on Windows don't target the NT Kernel, they target Windows 7, or Windows 8.1 or Windows 10, which are full distributions.

To have any reasonable chance that this will work, you have to target Ubuntu 16.04, or CentOS 7, not just any random Linux distribution.

But the thing is that a game targeting Windows XP or even Windows 98 still has a good chance of running on Windows 10. On the Linux side, good luck getting binaries made for Ubuntu 14.04 run on Ubuntu 16.04.

Interesting relevant tidbit by Linus Torvalds himself about the packaging and distribution of Linux "desktop apps".

Basically, Linus has made a desktop app, and the website distributes binaries for Windows and OS X, but not for Linux. Link goes to 4:50, relevant rant starts at around 5:58 :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5PmHRSeA2c8&feature=youtu.be...

Only because Microsoft pours a lot of effort into their compatibility modes, emulating older API versions for old programs.

Seriously? This is just wrong. If you pull down a game for Windows on Steam it doesn't matter if you're running Windows 7, 8, or 10, the likelihood that it'll run fine on any of those is high. The PC games market is decidedly not all running just one version of Windows, some folks are still running XP. But the underlying systems are well designed enough to enable games, and apps, to run just fine across those different platforms. If that's your excuse for games not running well on linux, then you need to find another excuse.

This is awesome work! I am extremely pleased to see someone do some QA - since the devs and the humble team obviously aren't doing any.

Also, if you think this is bad you should see their Android games. For example the extremely high profile Android game Desktop Dungeons crashes at start (this is 100% reproducable on Google reference devices) and has been like this since the bundle was sold over a year ago. The bug thread for the game is 300 pages long still the game has not received a single update from humble bundle.

Humble Bundle is not a charity anymore, it is a scam.

Why should Humble Bundle do QA? do you expect gamestop to do QA also?

They rely on what the developer/publisher tells them, if they say it runs on Linux Humble Bundle classifies it as a Linux title.

So HB has zero responsibility for selling stuff that do not work?

Because they sell you the game?

If you go to a store, buy a lamp, and it doesn't work, can they just say "our supplier said it works"?

If something doesn't work you can return it in the case of some of the bundles it might be a bit more problematic since you aren't buying a single product but a bundle and you can pay as little as like 0.01$ for it:

Not a single store verifies any product to be functional prior to selling it, if you have a problem they'll exchange it or refund you, if they have a problematic product which simply does not work they will usually stop selling it (it's not worth dealing with angry customers) and contact the supplier to figure out what's going on.

So I don't know what expectations you have when you go to a store but when I buy a lamp while I do have a general expectation for it to work I don't blame the store for not verifying that it does before selling it to me.

> Not a single store verifies any product to be functional prior to selling it

Bullion stores do. Also, stores that also make the product themselves do, from handmade crafts to factory outlets...

You are being pedantic without reason you understood pretty darn well what I meant.

Plenty of stores verify things before selling to you. Mobile phone stores will usually make sure that the thing works with the sim in it before handing it over, and will often transfer stuff across from your other phone for you. Similarly, plenty of higher end stores test things out before they stock them. A simple example is a restaurant with a curated wine list. Likewise, used car dealers will usually give a vehicle the once-over before selling it on.

I knew what you were getting at (just like you know what the parent was getting at), but it's not really pedantry to counter a gross oversimplification.

Are we now comparing brick and mortar retailers to car dealerships and restaurants? A curated wine list is an expert "advice" I don't expect the guy at the sports store to have tested every running shoe on display when I ask for recommendations.

Car dealerships that sell used cars are effectively responsible for them they not only test drive each car but they do a complete checkup because it's mandated.

As for mobile stores they don't do that to ensure that the phone is working, they do that because they assume most people are too stupid to activate the sim which means they'll come back, and they do a contact/data migration again as a service it has nothing to do with ensuring that the product works.

I can step in buy a packaged PAG phone pay and walk out without anyone testing that it works and you very well know this.

There is no gross oversimplification the truth of the matter is that like it or not 99% of the products you buy of the shelf are never tested by any retailer that stocks them, are there exceptions? sure but these are again exceptions.

I don't expect Gamestop to do curation for me, I don't expect Humble Bundle to do it either.

Not to mention that again every game on that list as far as I can tell runs on Linux (including games that he said do not) he doesn't recommend almost any of those games but that's his opinion. Humble does not sell you an experience, it does tell you that the game will run the fact that he tried to run games on a system that does not meet the minimum requirements which are stated on both the Humble Store, the Steam product page and the vendor website is well his fault. And Humble never argued that playing the game on Linux or even installing it will be an easy, pleasant or consistent experience, no Linux experience is truly easy or consistent the ecosystem is fragmented to hell as for pleasant well that's a subjective opinion some people like to have to recompile the kernel to make their wifi cards work some don't.

When you buy software there are 2 general expectation 1) is that you have a system that meets the software and hardware requirements and 2) that you are generally capable of operating and managing software on the operating system it runs on. He failed to verify point #1 on quite a few titles, infact I am surprised that some titles that should not work on the Intel GPU actually did run (Intel probably have improved their OpenGL minidriver since then) and 2) understanding that running applications on Linux will required ensuring compatibility with dependencies (which may break other applications) and being familiar with the Linux command line and operating system including compiling packages and managing permissions.

I don't fault him at all, and I agree that I would not recommend any of those titles on Linux to anyone who's wants to play, infact if you wish to play games I would not recommend Linux at all not even SteamOS. But that said none of those games are inherently so broken that they will not install or run on Linux if all the hardware and software requirements are met.

Because QA is the service they offer developers who want their games ported.

To be fair, though.. the porters DO keep the games updated, especially if someone lets them know there are problems. Most of the games on the list run fine for me (I have nvidia graphics, though).

They do advertise very specific Linux software and hardware compatibility and requirements as well as the state of the port in the fine print.

Considering how fragmented the Linux ecosystem is there isn't much they can actually do about it.

They have a testing team that gives their porters (or the in-house porters of the game dev) qualified feedback.

Because it's bad for their reputation? If they can find a way that the cost of QA / rejection is less than the cost of returns, then it's a win.

It's not like they need to do detailed QA, just a smoke-test. Does this even run?

Virtually all the games on that list run on Linux, the experience isn't really pleasant the install / run process is fragmented and inconsistent just like the Linux ecosystem itself.

The games might not be recommended to run on Linux by this blog author but it doesn't mean they do not run.

As far as the games the author states will not run at all while I cannot confirm all of the titles on the list I can confirm that 3 are incorrect at the least:

Anomaly 2 which the author claims it doesn't run on Linux. Runs on Ubuntu 16.04 just fine it does seem to not support integrated graphics (like many 3D games on Linux) which is pretty darn clearly specified in the Minimum System requirements for Linux even on the Humble Store.

Botanicula another game that runs on Linux but requires you to install the Adobe Air Runtime (and a to have Geforce card IIRC) which isn't clear if the author even attempted to do.

Dungeon Defenders another game that I can confirm to run on Linux requires again a non integrated card.

I expect gamestop to give me games that run or to take a huge PR hit on top of refunding everyone.

I bought one of the first Humble Bundle and I couldn't make work any of the games. Awful support and unclear (or just wrong) instructions, and because it wasn't that much money and I wanted to support the developers... I let it go.

I won't buy another Humble Bundle though.

These results are from Ubuntu, which afaik is pretty close to best-case scenario for gaming. It'd be interesting to see similar test done on e.g. Fedora or Arch. It also will be interesting to see how well these games will continue to run in future. My guess is that they will eventually bit-rot and we'll end up using ancient versions of Ubuntu in containers to run the games.

I hope that Snappy/Flatpak/etc would make the situation better once the landscape settles down a bit. The idea behind them seems good enough, and I think this post validates their raison d'être which I have seen people question.

Snappy/Flatpak are overly complicated solutions. Easier solution is to distribute using Steam or use an installer (e.g Mojosetup) that will deploy a zip/tar archive with executable, data, dynamic libraries and necessary desktop entries.

I've played the HB Linux versions of Jamestown, Night Sky, VVVVVV, Voxatron, Super Meat Boy, Bit.Trip.Runner, and FTL with no issues on 64-bit Arch, using a 2011 Thinkpad x120e, with zero problems. I remember being disappointed that Crayon Physics and Shank didn't work. The other games in those bundles either didn't work or I wasn't interested enough to try them. (My bar is pretty high as I can't spend a whole lot of time gaming.)

Two games from Humble Bundle that are not on the list and I recommend (and have played on Linux): World of Goo and Crayon Physics Deluxe

I see CPD on there. If WoG works, then agreed, highly recommended

Thanks for the effort. I have a Clevo W650RC running Ubuntu 16, almost the same hardware as the author but with an extra gtx950m gpu. I own 4-5 Humble bundles and claimed all Steam keys, which makes installing those games, installable, playable and therefore recommendable. Sometimes I would run with the Intel gpu, and most of the games still ( I am pretty sure all of them) run, but of course much slower. I also bought an Steam controller and really like the setup, most games would pick up the button mapping. The only thing which sucks donkey balls at the moment is tearing under Nvidia + Linux, either in videos games, browser etc..- Also I want to add, that I own Serious Sam 3, Tomb Raider and Shadow Warrior, and I must say that the ports of these games is just top notch.

SpaceChem, Spaz, and Jamestown all worked fine for me back when I was running way lower specs than he was. Actually, all of the Humble games did, save Psychonauts, because my machine wasn't powerful enough to run it. Yes, it was that bad.

I'd like an explanation of the recommendable column

I was a bit surprised to see FTL not recommended, for example. I would describe it as a very good, very accessible game.

That isn't a "does the author like this game" column. It's a "should you try playing this game on Linux natively" column.

Add "Outside Steam". FTL just works in Steam.

Thanks for clarifying

From the document:

"Anyone should be able to use the games they buy, no matter their technical provess.

That means it has to install via deb or snap, register in the OS menu and package manager and run without any issues."

This skirts a little too close to "2016 Doom doesn't run on my computer (A 12 year old Core Solo with first generation Intel graphics), don't give me a bunch of technical mumbo jumbo, I want to play it now!"

Also, if you want super easy game installs, use Steam. Either suck it up and accept the DRM or teach yourself enough Linux to understand how to deal with all of the myriad weird game installers.

It's not like the Windows versions are any better on the DRM front.

Wine has gotten so good that it's almost not worth bothering trying to run native Linux versions of games.

Yes, it has suffered major improvements, but it still doesn't run everything. Also, online games with frequent updates, break often.

Just my personal experience.

> suffered major improvements

I think I'm going to start using this phrase

Wine is great, but I hate having both native and Wine version of Steam just to access Windows versions of games I have in my library. I wish Steam platform check could be overridden.

I guess that's just one more reason to choose alternatives like GoG, Desura and Itch.io.

Thanks! We work hard on it. If you like Wine and want to support its development financially, the best way is to buy a copy of CrossOver from my employer, even if you don't use it. Our salaries don't come from nowhere ;)

I'm using Kubuntu (just up-ed to 16.04 now), PlayOnLinux seems pretty good at getting things running but straight up WINE, for me, seems to take so much fussing with to get it to run stuff.

Also I read, that e.g. Wine+Tomb Raider blows the native Linux TombRaider out of the water, in regards of performance.

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