Yeah I did. God bless WineDB.
Steam before proton was okay for stuff like Fallout 3. Needed some hackery with Wine prefixes and getting the right DLLs in there but eventually worked. Older GoG games like Alpha Centauri were fine with DosBox.
Proton is great. Cyberpunk 2077 on Ultra.
It was rough. I basically gave up on playing 3D games on Linux for the longest time and used a dualboot. Much less hassle.
What convinced me was when they verified Apex Legends, which was a game I was not expecting to be verified at all. Turns out Proton secretly got really good in all that time.
It’s hit or miss. A gold rated game on protondb performed terrible when I used a keyboard and mouse. Everything was smooth, but looking around was studdery. Even worse, the game failed to properly capture my mouse, so I kept getting stopped when my “cursor” hit the edge of the screen. I literally could not look around.
the stutter has to do with mouse capture too.
on my side changing to exclusive fullscreen helps, hope it helps you too!
The developers, in their infinite wisdom, decided to not make that an option.
You can force it if you use gamescope, solved mouse issues for me in the past.
Back when you had to install steam in wine and then for a while you would have native steam and wine steam in the same distro install. Now it’s so easy that I figure anyone talking shit about gaming on Linux only plays those rootkit anticheat shooters or hasn’t played games since having kids or something and have become one of those people that are shocked to hear what they thought were current gen consoles are actually really old already.
I actually found an old /home drive of mine this week where I had exactly this setup, so painful.
Trying to find the correct steamapps folder for the particular instance of the game and going through all the dot folders and wine folder structure… that hasn’t actually improved much now that I think about it.
Gaming on Linux in general has improved a lot more than the pollution levels in my town at least.
My 1999 setup running Slackware while playing Loki’s Civ CTP
How many hard drives you have in that beast? I see enough ribbon cable to wrap a gift
Old story: There was a sale at a big box Electronics store on Seagate Barracuda SCSI-2 Wide 9.1GB drives and I bought 6 of them to give me a 40GB RAID-5 on an old mylex dac960 scsi raid card. Bigtime storage in 1999.
Those fed my 3:1 ratio mp3 sharing site that my uunet bot advertised haha.
That’s insane I absolutely love it. To put that in perspective, 1999 game storage requirements:
- GTA 2, 70 MB
- Quake III Arena, 70 MB
- SimCity 3000, 230 MB
- Everquest, 1 GB
Yep, playing a Loki port of Myth II - Soulblighter on SuSE Linux, iirc 5.3 is one of my earliest memories of gaming on Linux. Must have been around… 25 years ago.
Around that time too, UT99 shipped with Linux binaries on the friggin cd
First i thought you had a cat hiding there.
I fished a tower like that out of a dumpster and built my first gaming PC in that and ran Gentoo on it about 2005. Played CS 1.6 and WoW and had better performance in Linux than Windows at the time.
What is that console looking thing in the bottom right corner?
Sylvartas is right, it’s an old flatbed scanner.
Could be a scanner
That’s one tall tower.
Pure art!
My first attempt to switch to Linux for my primary desktop was in 2007, and ended when my attempt to run WoW via WINE mostly worked, but had a weird an completely unfixable audio delay.
Proton (and Valve’s efforts on SteamOS and the Steam Deck more generally) have been an absolute godsend for Linux as a usable daily-driver.
I would never have considered gaming on Linux until the Steam Deck came out. When reviews said it’s actually awesome, I became convinced to try it. Basically, the deck pushed me over the edge to ditch Windows altogether. So suck on that, Satya! No wonder MS is trying so hard to stop other OEMs from making Linux handhelds.
Proton got me to dump Windows… NGL Windows 11 and Lemmy did help push me over the edge. I use Ubuntu btw.
Lol u stole the Arch mantra… I use arch btw.
Ubuntu mantra should be something else like “snaps are my homies”
I’ll use snaps if I HAVE to, ex Telegram. AppImages just seem like the same prob with grabbing binaries, in terms of updates. I might jump on the FlatPak train if I didn’t like apt so much. Man, OSX and brew really is so much better then this shit, just works and is always up to date.
Brew sucks. It’s soooo slooooow. Flatpak is awesome, AppImage is weird, and Snaps are kinda there as well I guess.
Brew on Linux, yeah, I don’t even bother. But on OSX it’s a first class citizen, works as well as yum and apt.
I’m using OSX for work and Homebrew is really slow there too. Honestly though that’s really my only complaint. That, and some aesthetic yank caused by it being a bunch of shell and ruby scripts in a trench coat, but that’s not an objective thing.
I there is a setting to have it not check all packages for updates when installing a new one. I forget where. It’s auto update something.
For real. I’ve been a pretty steady Linux user all my adult life and gaming was barely ever an option unless the game was built to run in Linux. When proton came out I gave it a shot and was blown away.
PlayOnLinux was a good friend. Sometimes.
Except for all the bad runability reports made to winehq by its users to the appdb
Isn’t it now?
Wine and Cedega back in the early days, I played WiW in the Vanilla days on Suse Linux. My first foray into Linux was 2002 on a system that was decent for the time. I have fond memories of the first time I got my GeForce 3 card actually doing hardware acceleration. glxgears rendered hundreds of FPS.
cedega
Yeah, this definitely makes me feel old. 😅
Since 2012! PlayOnLinux was the closest thing to Proton then.
Actuslly wine was closest thing to proton, play on linux was nothing but a front end for managing wine software
Me. Minecraft worked just as well under either OS.
Just a fyi. Java edition works just as well under windows, linux and macos.
The newer bedrock edition works only on windows and consoles.
Kids where easier to exploit with a game store then linux users who remember the old days i guess.
For bedrock on Linux I’ve had good luck with mcpe launcher, I use it to play on a friends realm
Interesting, great to hear that it does work for those who want it.
Still wont touch bedrock with it with a 10m pole.
I feel it, I prefer Java but I just go where my people are. for what it’s worth MCPE the store is broken, so it’s subjectively a better experience 😂
Kids these days don’t even know about TuxRacer?
Loved that game
I still play it on my Android TV.
I bought Tomb Raider 2013 because it was Linux native. Nowadays I recommend people to play the Windows version.
I remember that Unreal Tournament 2003 came with a bootable Linux CD to play the game.
I have the original CD release of UT2004, it has a full Linux installer and worked well on a Dell E5400 running Ubuntu back in 2008-2010 when I was attending LAN perties
Return to Castle Wolfenstein also had an official Linux port in 2002-ish.
Still have the quake 3 Linux tin box around here somewhere…
My last foray into Linux gaming was back in the early-2010s, and I was mostly just trying to get EVE Online to run unsuccessfully. I was running a laptop that was top if the line (in 2009) and my PCs were cobbled together from old Dells and HPs donated by family and friends or retired and given away by my company IT team.
Steam on Linux was nice, and would show you which games in your library had Linux native versions to install. I held out on that and browser gamed for a while. Played a lot of Runescape and Minecraft. Taught myself to code a bit, but didn’t really get anywhere with that.
Eventually I had money and time to put together a “proper” gaming PC, and of course I put Windows on it since I wanted to get an NVidia graphics card as I’d had so much trouble with the AMD drivers on my laptop.
Ran Windows for gaming and kept Linux on the laptop since then. First PC ran Win7, which i loved. Next one ran Win 8, which I hated. Current one was running Win 10, which was meh, and I’ve only soured on it over time. Made the switch back to Linux last week after I got tired of M$ constantly asking me if I want to try Copilot on /both/ my work and personal PCs.
Proton is fucking great. Never going back. The old laptop is still running strong after 15 years. It’s got BunsenLabs installed at the moment.
I mean… does Tuxracer and Wesnoth count?
yes, it does
When I was growing up, my dad had a phase where he was experimenting with Linux. He had several installs over the years, Red Hat, Gnome(?), Ubuntu…I remember spending hours playing Tux Racer, SuperTux, Pingus, Chromium BSU…good times.
I’m your father, from a different family.
I have been playing on Linux for years before proton.
WoW, HL, Fallout, Diablo, Quake, RimWorld to name a few.
Yah, I used to WoW on linux when I played. Pissed my guildies off because some patches I’d have to reboot before every boss attempt. But eventually it got pretty bulletproof.
Back in 2008 or so, for a few patches WoW actually ran better under linux than windows because of some bug.
