Wait... what's gaming like? Can you describe it for someone who only ever could play Unreal Tournament back in the day on Linux?
What games are available? Do you use emulators or stuff like Wine?
What games are available? Do you use emulators or stuff like Wine?
Here are some games that have worked pretty well out of the box:
- Factorio
- Arc: Raiders
- Overwatch
- Age of Empires 2 DE
- Abiotic Factor
- Subnautica 2
- Windblown
- Dune Awakening
- Cybperpunk 2077
- Star Citizen (with the community installer to help set it up)
See here for a database: https://www.protondb.com/
The main asterisk is that if you use newer GPUs, you’ll need to use a newer kernel / drivers to get solid support (which is why Arch (& CachyOS) is a popular gaming distro). And certain technologies may not be supported for a while, or take some time to set up (ray tracing, DLSS, frame gen type stuff etc.)
Performance is comparable to windows, and sometimes better because windows is a bloated piece of shit. Lol.
A lot of stuff you can try and it works ok, but the main things that are permanently unsupported are kernel-level anti-cheat (like Valorant) or online games with anticheat that will detect something weird in the setup and ban you. But some competitive games work fine (like overwatch)
Steam/Valve has built Proton, which I believe is a fork of Wine, and put significant resources into it. Steam distributes it on its own but CachyOS distributes even more patched/optimized versions of it in their repositories.
The games I know do NOT work on Linux are usually online multiplayer competitive games which have kernel-level anti-cheat. Notable for me is Fortnite - though I hear that now, there are even options for enabling strong anti-cheat in Linux but Epic chooses not to support it.
I'm not informed on other niche game types like simulators or games requiring special equipment, but chances are if it's not competitive, or it's single player, you can get it running with good performance on Linux with modern hardware.
I think the closest to a AAA game was Anno 1800 and Mount&Blade Bannerlord, both worked fine. All the current popular city builders work fine (eg. Timberborn, Foundation, Manor Lords). A lot of the games I play are early access too, or the pre-release stream.
The one game that didn't work was Bongo Cat, which is free anyway. The devs are working on an X11 version though, and it's practically a whimsical keylogger, so it might not appeal to fans of Linux anyway!
If "works most of the time" is acceptable for you, it's good enough.
If you actually want to be able to play whatever you want to play - instead of what runs - you have to either stay on Windows, or have it as second system.
This has made many old and modern games playable without issues. On Steam or Heroic Launcher, running a game has mostly become as simple clicking install and later play.
That being said, it's not all peachy. There's not really been much progress on native Linux gaming outside of Flatpak/Steam Linux runtime. Many native games run worse or with issues.
And Proton/Wine isn't perfect. Many games need tweaks or may not work without glitches. And games with anticheat don't work more often than they do, on purpose.
Still, depending on what games you play and hardware you own it has become entirely possible to ditch Windows and not suffer for it.
I play a few games (used to stream videogames although not for a living but wasn't a small streamer with 1 or 2 viewers). The one that I've been playing the most is The First Descendant (I'm a Destiny 2 fan and now that there's no more Destiny, I'm trying to find my next game).
I game about 3-4 hours every evening unless I have something to do. My last 300 hours or so have been all in CachyOS. It's super stable and I'm a nitpicky guy (for example, I run Windows still for those kernel level anti cheat games, with Secure Mode on, and although even CachyOS doesn't support it out of the box, `sbctl` is the best solution to enable it and quite easy to do so!)
Performance is comparable, it's basically some Wine bottles or, thanks to the SteamDeck, a Proton environment with GPU passthrough. For The First Descendant, which doesn't work OOTB with Steam's Proton, I installed ProtonGE (not super hard to install, there's a flatpak of a few apps that can do it automatically for you) and that works great. I need to tell it to enable the Linux anti cheat and since TFD uses Easy Anti-cheat, it's an env var away (which you can configure from the Steam settings for that game).
Performance-wise I actually get better framerate. Presumably because nowadays windows comes with so much nonsense running in the background that I bet you the fact they're not running in the Wine bottle is perfect.
Happy to answer any other questions!
But I fully switched to Fedora a while ago because every game I played was either just as performant or ran better on Linux. It’s plug and play, too. I just downloaded Steam and that was it.
I know there are other commenters saying the same thing, but I’m just super excited because of what this means for Linux market share on consumer machines
as mentioned above if you play any competitive games that come with anti-cheat features, then you won't be able to join in the fun. So if you don't care about those games, you'll be fine.
I'd say it's a majority of games that won't work if they require anti-cheat, but some will.