- 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
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- 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 him 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 you 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-cheat 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
Valves 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 any developers alike.
But it's also not the silver bullet that it would have been
ten or even five 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 either.
Look at apex legends and new worlds, 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, cross code,
click install, click play and
(Clicks fingers)
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
XOW driver, working.
Valheim 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 LegionTD2, Tower Fall Ascension, faster than light,
slay the Spire, path of exile and rust.
And they all worked perfectly with zero actual effort.
And interestingly enough,
Dota2 and CSGO both had completely game breaking
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 play.
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.
Valves 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 Lutris,
which automates hacky workarounds for newbies
and protonDB,
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 the launch of the steam deck when
100% compatibility is supposedly coming,
which, as of writing this,
just got pushed back by two months,
to February.
- Also Doom eternal 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 and
video driver. Maybe it set a date,
but Manjaro begs 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-Cheat.
Now the game launches and seems to run totally fine.
But while, theoretically, enabling battle I
anti-China in rainbow six-seige is as simple as
Ubisoft reaching out,
doing a little bit of conjiguring and off we go because
BattlEye has supposedly supported Linux for ages.
Ubisoft hasn't done that yet.
Why?
- Well because natively supporting Linux
as seen by some developers
as a somewhat brutal experience.
Ben Golus 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 prelaunch community,
they accounted for less than 0.1% of sales.
Yet they generated more than 20% of auto 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-cheat
enabled games have not confirmed Linux compatibility.
Despite many of the anti-cheat 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 adoption.
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, woo 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 butt-holery.
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 distro.
I don't blame the defs,
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
float plane.
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 managed 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 gotta 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 the rush when Anno 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 lutris page and then I lutrised
Ubisoft connect and installed the game through that
resulting in a version mismatch?
Is it because of some kind of Manjaro firewall nonsense?
The answer ended up being that multiplayer used to work,
which helped Anno 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
re-buy 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 DB.
It only includes steam games.
And while you can use the proton compatibility layer on non
steam games, even considering tools like lutris,
the compatibility picture outside of steam
is not as simple as,
well Proton DB says Linux gaming compatibility is good.
- I mentioned escape from tarkov earlier.
It's been broken for so long, but due to battle state games,
adding anti-cheat
their Linux discord has turned into a matchmaking channel
for other games so they can have some fun while they wait.
Genshin 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 spontaneity
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.
Forza horizon five, for example, amazing,
straight up fantastic that people got it working within just
five days of launch.
But that also means that it wasn't working for five days
after the launch. And if all your friends were playing,
they'll 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 have 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
pinning each other to walls,
in 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 anti-monopoly as anyone.
And I'd hate to see the status quo maintained forever.
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Now that the 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 Linux experience.