I’m thinking of installing Linux (think I’m going to use Nobara) on my new budget gaming PC, and my biggest worry is video games compatibility. I have most of my games on Steam and Epic. Some on GOG, and some on Itch. I know a bit about steam compatibility, but not much about the rest. Is this something I need to worry about, or should it just work?
Edit: for anyone that finds this, sounds like the Heroic Launcher is the way to go. Thanks everyone!
Edit 2: I’ve used Heroic Launcher and Steam + Proton for a few days now, works great! I’d recommend it to anyone with a similar question.
I’ve had good experiences launching games from Epic on the Heroic Games Launcher. Most games that don’t have extreme anti-cheats should just work. If compatibility is an issue, you can install Linux as a dual-boot option, so you could switch to Windows for certain games.
Thanks! I’ve heard of that before, but didn’t have a reason to use it on Windows. I’ll try it out.
That title only keeps getting better over time.
It’s an E<p>ic title for sure.
Wow, I swear it wasn’t like that when I originally posted. Weird haha
I’ve read that Epic is severely against Linux.
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Their CEO has gone out of his way to shit talk Linux multiple times on Twitter/X, spreading false information, he is also vehemently against doing the bare minimum to allow their games to work on Linux (enabling EAC support for proton in their games, which by their own words is just a checkbox). They also have no Linux support in their embarrassment of a launcher, which is why everyone recommends Heroic, even when using Windows because it actually has features.
A one time donation of what amounts to an insignificant rounding error for them to try to appease people unhappy with their stance on Linux does not mean they are not “against” Linux.
What I know is that they removed Linux support from Rocket League after they bought it
You can check https://www.protondb.com/, but games by Epic will generally have a bad time
Only games with intrusive anti-cheat should be a problem. Everything else is easily installable with Heroic or Lutris. For anti-cheat look at https://areweanticheatyet.com/.
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You can install Heroic Games launcher, which is an alternative Epic + GOG front-end (it also works on Windows and is apparently better than the real thing). You can use it to manage the compatibility layers similarly to Steam, but in my experience its function is on a game-by-game basis
As another commenter has said, go through ProtonDB and check all the games you can’t live without
Firstly, Epic Games doesn’t officially support Linux. So if anything goes wrong you may be out of luck.
However I have had success playing a handful of games on Lutris under Wine. I would check online sites for reviews of the games that you are most interested in and see how they worked for others. Wine is getting better every day so this will keep improving but I would at least look at the games you currently play and see what is up.
One major concern is games with DRM or anti-cheat. Most of these will not work on Wine, but providers are slowly adding support. But again, looking up the games you are interested in will tell you.
I use Heroic games launcher for Epic and it supports GOG too.
I’'m using Lutris to play games on Epic:
- Create a new wine/proton prefix
- Put the epic launcher installer on C:, set it as the exe to run in the Lutris settings, run it and install.
- Change the executable to the exe of the installed epic launcher. Run the launcher, install and play your game.
I’m using a separate wine/proton prefix for each game. This allows to appy custom proton settings and workarounds per game. The epic launcher is about 250mb so it doesn’t waste that much disk space.
This is excellent! Each step can be Googled but for a quick summary:
A wine or proton prefix is like a small Windows filesystem inside your Linux. This is how you run most games. Steam normally hides this from you, but it does this exact thing: one proton prefix per game.
On Nobara and Fedora, you will not need to worry about duplicating files and wasting space at all: they use a very advanced filesystem which (among other things) does not actually repeat files but just goes “this file is the same as the earlier one, just read that” and saves on disk space that way. You don’t see this in the file explorer, you can just copy a file a hundred times but it will not consume a hundred times the disk space. Very cool stuff. And very useful with proton tricks.
I’ve had the most luck with heroic games launcher for Epic. I guess anti-cheat will be problematic for multiplayer games on epic.
You can look up all your Steam games on protondb.com but I’m not sure how to check Epic Games compatibility beyond just installing the Heroic Games Launcher and trying them out.
Hey your title has unescaped html in. I’m guessing you’re using sync?
This was a bug in this last release when editing titles. It’s fixed for the next release but I thought I’d give you a heads up.
You are very correct. Nice to hear it’s been fixed, thanks!
