I primarily use my pc for gaming, and want to avoid upgrading to Windows 11. Beginning the journey of looking into alternatives.
I am ignorant, trying to be less so. I have a hard time understanding what exactly makes a game not work just because of OS.
First of all, many games can very easily be built and packaged for Linux, devs just don’t target it as often because it’s a fraction of the market share.
But as for Windows-only games… It used to be because functions games were trying to access simply didn’t exist in Linux. Wine is a translation layer that could help with that, but it was both underfunded and had a general focus on all windows apps, not just games.
However these days, thanks in no small part to Valve bankrolling the Proton project – a gaming-specific branch of Wine that has also contributed plenty of improvements back to Wine itself – virtually any game you care to play will run on Linux. At this point, if a game doesn’t run, it’s because the publisher or developer is choosing to not let it run – likely because of specific anti-cheat software. In the case of Easy Anti-Cheat games like Fortnite and Apex Legends, EAC runs fine on Linux, but the devs chose explicitly to turn off Linux support.
By and large, unless you are playing one of a few multiplayer games which require kernel-level anti-cheat schemes, you won’t have issues running Windows games on Linux. Note that kernel-level anti-cheat is also a huge issue in general, for privacy and other reasons, so it’s not really something that should or will be fixed in Linux – it’s up to developers to stop requiring such schemes.
I’ve been a Linux gamer for about 3 years. 3 years ago, I had occasional issues. Now not for a long time. But I play almost entirely single player titles.
Hardware does matter a bit. AMD is extremely Linux friendly and drivers for AMD hardware tends to be in the Linux kernel, so there’s nothing else to load. Nvidia makes things more difficult.
I’d probably go with a “kitchen” metaphor here.
The executable for a program is a list of instructions for the CPU to execute. Windows and Linux gaming machines will usually use x64. Most of the instructions are logic eg. how to add numbers together, what comparisons to make, what to copy from one place to another; and they’re exactly the same on both Windows and Linux, you can run them as-is.
Some instructions ask the operating system to do things, like open a file to read. Windows and Linux do these quite differently, but you know how one works then you can change it to the equivalent ask for the other machine. Making the translation takes a moment, but some things are faster on Linux than Windows, so it’s not very easy to generalise as to whether it’ll be faster overall to do certain things. The really important operating system calls for games tend to be messages to pass to the GPU, and the Proton team have put a lot of work into making these as fast as possible.
If you think of it like following a food recipe, then given the ingredients you’d expect that most people would produce exactly the same meal by following it. Most of the steps will be exactly the same for everyone. However, if a step requires a piece of equipment that you don’t have, then it might take longer to follow the recipe if you’ve got to make do with different stuff. Similarly, you might be able to prepare things quicker if you’ve got a whole pile of restaurant-level gear and can do some of the steps differently.
This is a little offtopic and a Lemmy cliché, but:
Go and try Linux Mint! I was a Windows fanboy for more than a decade, now I’m all team Linux. It doesn’t run all games (I’m not a huge gamer, so no expert) but most stuff i want to play is no problem at all. I edit videos with Davinci, produce music with Bitwig plus there so much great free open source software. Working in Windows nowadays makes me nervous. It’s so predatory and dishonest. Try to get off while you can, it won’t get any better. And it’s so much fun to explore a new OS with an opened mind and some curiosity.Mint is a great general entry point to Linux.
I’d say Pop!OS or Garuda Gaming edition for traditional style, and Bazzite for “Atomic”(harder to accidentally Bork), are better ootb(out of the box) gaming distros. I.e. less downloading and tweaking to get games running, more things installed from first boot.
Anticheats - an inferior piece of software that no one likes.
Anticheat is good. Intrusive anticheat, in this case kernel-level anticheat, is something that’s being made only for windows that will stop you from playing a game on Linux and increase attack surface for your Windows.
https://areweanticheatyet.com/ < the greatest source for info on this.
Put simply, it’s like a translator that knows many of the languages Windows will speak. However, it’s not always fluent in every language it might speak. This is what proton does, it translates system calls into Linux, essentially. It almost always will work, specially with Steam games.
In other cases, it’s game devs making desicisons to disallow use of Linux. Specifically anti cheat. Not all anticheat is disallowed, but game devs could allow it. They just choose not too.
Most games will run just fine on Linux. I’ve switched entirely to Linux and said goodbye to those few online anitcheat games that disallow. Most everything works.
Also to add to this is if windows users understood what kernel level anti-cheat does most people wouldn’t want it on windows ether.
What does it do? Could you explain?
It runs in the kernel of the OS as a driver, which means that it’s basically a trusted malware that has even higher permission than the admin of the computer, and have access to more things than yourself, to closely monitor the whole system in order to find signs of cheating.
And for context, it does this because cheaters are willing to run cheats that run at that kernel level, and the only way to detect and prevent them is if the anticheat is in your kernel first.
Very accurate comment, and to expand on this, things like media codecs, windows dependencies, etc also cause problems. Luckily Proton can play just about any game on Steam.
For example, Marvel Rivals is a new game that just came out and its anti-cheat works with Linux. I play it with ProtonGE, which installs extra codecs that regular proton versions don’t include and it works awesome.
Check out protondb.com to search what specific games work for others on linux.
Does Steam ever deliver Linux-native builds instead of running games through Proton?
Yes. There are some games where the Linux-specific bugs don’t get fixed and it’s better to just run the Windows version thru Proton and take like a 10-20% performance hit so it runs with more stability.
Sometimes the Windows versions just run better than the Linux build because of bad optimization on the Linux build of a given game, as well (OpenGL vs Vulkan drivers, etc etc)
there’s no way it’s a 10-20% performance hit
Is it usually more or less than this?
Way less, even better performance than native windows in some cases
Linux Native builds generally have better performance than Windows builds running on Windows. That’s what I was comparing between
Flightless Mango used to have some good comparisons, but they’re about four years out-of-date, now. Even then, you’d expect between 10% worse and 5% better on Linux. https://flightlessmango.com/benchmarks/
Forbes article here is from this year; expect between 5% worse and 25% better when running on Linux. https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonevangelho/2024/08/21/linux-scores-a-surprising-gaming-victory-against-windows-11/
General experience is that generally there’s no noticeable difference at all; some games that use new features might have bad performance until the new features are implemented. Last game I really had a problem with was Horizon Zero Dawn. Elden Ring had bad performance on launch day, but was fixed the next day I think.
Yes, I’ve run several games native. ProtonDB will indicate if it runs natively (though some people will report using proton on natively supported games out of habit)
EDIT: some games are supported natively, but should use proton for mods. For example, Mount and Blade Warband runs just fine without proton, but if using mods it should be run with proton. This will also be indicated on ProtonDB in my experience
When you see the Windows and Apple icons on a game, that indicates native Windows and MacOS support. The Steam logo is native SteamOS/Linux. You’ll also see a “SteamOS/Linux” section on the system requirements.
To expand on the translation metaphor:
Trying to run a window program on Linux (without proton) is like trying to read a completely alien text. Your have basically 0 in common and no way to understand it
Proton is doing the translator job of helping. And it’s doing a great job for a lot of the alien language. Which is why so many programs and games work on Linux with proton
But even it can’t always be perfect, and if the language is using some weird dialect, it might not understand or misinterpret things, which causes games to be buggy or unplayable on Linux
Ususally, like 99% of the time, it’s absolutely the fault of the game developers and by choice.
Pretty much any game can run on Linux nowadays. Some do even run better than on Windows, but most equally good or a tiny bit worse.
The main problem is (very invasive kernel level) anti cheat.
And sometimes, games work fine on Linux, and then the devs actively lock out Linux users for some ludicrous reasons.
You can visit protondb.com for a very nice overview of which games work and how well they do.
That’s putting a lot of blame on devopers.
Not all games have a ton of contributors on ProtonDB and that’s not the developers fault.
that’s not the developers fault.
Forcing Ring0 spyware on the users IS the developers fault by 100%.
FWIW, it’s actually more the publishers’ fault. Typically as a developer you get told what environment you’re targeting and how the publisher wishes to publish you.
Yeah, don’t let us be too nitpicky here. They intentionally make it not run on Linux because of their spyware. So it’s entirely their fault.
But it actually is mostly the developers fault. There are weird corner cases, yes. But all game engines natively support Linux and even games that are not made for Linux will run there via Proton nearly always.
Exceptions are 95+% of the time due to anti cheat and like 2% due to a self written engine, that does exceptionally cursed stuff even for windows.
I play lots of games regularly that were never meant to be played on Linux but work flawlessly without the developer or “contributors on ProtonDB” (whatever they have to do with that) doing anything.
Different operating systems have their own interfaces to allow user level programs (like games) to communicate with hardware. This is a great-over-simplification, but one OS may understand something like “drawTriangle(x, y, z)” while another may expect “drawPolygon([x, y, z])”.
There are software projects to attempt to translate commands meant for one OS for a different OS (such as “Wine” or Valve’s “Proton”) and those work fairly well in cases that: 1) there’s an analogous command, 2) the analogous commands have been accurately mapped, and 3) the analogous commands operate in user space.
That last point is the primary reason why, despite the best efforts of developers, some games still cannot work across OSs. Operating systems are built on top of different levels with the lowest being the “kernel” (of “kernel level anti-cheat” notoriety) and the highest being the user space (where you interact). Both Windows and Linux have these, but the boundaries around them, what they can and cannot do, and how to interact across those boundaries differs between each system.
So when a Windows game installs a driver to monitor everything that your computer does that driver (kernel level anti-cheat) is tailored very specifically to the extremely powerful, low level, and unique Windows kernel. Linux cannot run that natively. If the game pretends that spying on you is an essential component to launch then the game will not launch. If, however, a game is perfectly happy to just stay in user space where it belongs then it will probably work fine with the available translation layers.
That makes sense, thanks!
So far the only thing that has been an issue has been anticheat
I’d say the anti-cheat has only recently become the “only issue”. It’s not like wine and proton could run everything flawlessly before kernel level stuff came along. The translation was imperfect and incomplete, so shit simply did not work. Lots of hard work on those projects slowly but surely filled in the gaps, and now we are finally at a stage where we can say that if a game doesn’t work it’s by design.
There are certain instances where certain games on Windows run slightly better because the Windows function implementation was possibly written slightly better. However, this is becoming rarer and rarer. I’ve faced it only when playing random 3d indie games.
Same here. Newer versions of Easy Anti-Cheat work fine, but pretty much anything else breaks. Rising Storm 2: Vietnam is an example of a game that uses EAC, but with a version too old to work with Linux
Since it’s ELI5, I’ll try to be as clear as possible. Windows and Linux distros are different operating systems, so their programs are their own. If there isn’t a compatibility layer present (or an emulator) you won’t be able run a program written for the other system. What Steam does on Linux is, it uses a compatibility layer (Proton) to run Windows games. Proton is Valve’s version of WINE with some specific improvements, mostly targeting Steam games. That’s how Steam Deck works. You can think the other way around of this is Microsoft’s WSL (not exactly).
So, because of there needs to be a compatibility layer, it might not always work as intended for some games (though numbers are decreasing with every update). Most of these games are games that use an anti-cheat, though Valve included Linux versions of BattlEye and EasyAntiCheat in Proton, and if a developer uses it, there is no problem for that game. For example, Hell Let Loose works fine because of this. Note that, some games will use kernel level anti-cheat (or currently using), those games won’t run at all.
From what I found, there is also a possibility that you might have a hard time with some older games that use a custom-built engine. I mostly encountered this with some Japanese games. Though, those games usually don’t work on something over Windows 7 too.
Steam pretty much has a translation layer that turns Windows programs run on Linux. Both operating systems execute code in a different manner, so it’s up to the translation layer to turn one into another. Sometimes, a game can call code that the translation layer cannot translate. A well known one of those is kernel-level calls made by some anticheat software.
Most “normal” programs use some “abstraction” libraries, so the programmer doesn’t need to know which platform it is running on. This “platform” is important because it is the layer that actually talks to things like your SSD, RAM, GPU, etc.
Videogames, tho, are very very specific programs that really benefit from very optimized code, so some of these “abstraction” libraries simply will be worked on for a specific operative system.
Thankfully, the people from the WINE project and lots of work from Valve themselves have made it possible to “trick” these libraries into thinking they are talking to Windows. It’s not perfect, tho, so some stuff is still not working, but you’d be surprised how much we’ve got already. Check out the ProtonDB project.
A Windows binary is just plain not compatible with Linux. Everything in the operating system is different.
Compatibility layers like Wine are pretty good, but not perfect.
An analogy is that operating languages speak different languages. And an app built for one operating system doesn’t speak the language of others.
But in the case of Linux, there are lots of really good tools that let Linux understand Windows apps. Steam has those tools built right in.
Where it falls down is that the tools that let Linux understand and run Windows apps aren’t perfect. So things like DRM, anti cheat, propriety drivers etc, can be a challenge.
But currently, if you’re not running games that use kernel level anti cheat, the vast majority of games will work on Linux. The steamdeck uses Linux itself, so it’s a high priority for valve to get as much working as possible.
The ELI5 version is that developers can make a lot of assumptions about what a Windows pc means and what features are available. A while ago if you had videos as part of a game (for example a cutscene) it was actually played through Windows Media Player, which was virtually guaranteed to be present on the user’s computer. Sure you can play that video with other tools like VLC or Quicktime, but you couldn’t guarantee they were installed, so Windows Media Player was a safe bet. Nowadays that’s not how video is handled but the point remains for a few other things. For example if I need to load an image, maybe a background, I would look it up using the windows filesystem, so probably something like C:\Program Files\Steam\common\mygame\images\background.png. That’s not the same in the Linux or another os. Also the piece of software that handles loading images might be different, which means how we execute that load operation is probably different, and so our Windows-focused version of our game just doesn’t work.
Fortunately nowadays that’s a mostly solved problem with Steam investing a lot of time into Proton, what they call a “compatibility layer” that basically translates all of the windows-specific stuff to work in Linux. That’s a very simplified explanation but you get the idea. The games that still won’t run have kernel-level anticheat (Valorant, Helldivers 2) or are so dependent on things only available on Windows that even Proton can’t fix it. Some anti-cheat software doesn’t run properly so then you can’t go online, like Warhammer: Vermintide 2. That’s mostly a commercial decision rather than technical, they could make it work they just choose not to.
