I used linux in the past, both privately and work-related, but the last time was over 10 years ago, so I’m a bit out of touch. I am in need of a new PC, but it’ll be a good year before I have the funds, so for now I am making due with an i5 7500 and a gtx 1660. I do have 32 GB so there’s that. I finally feel confident enough to make the permanent switch to linux from windows as all of the programs I use are either available on linux or have a good/better equivalent. The only thing I fear will hold me back is games. I know Steam has Proton now which will run most games, but how does it compare? The games I play most are Skyrim (heavily modded) , RDR2, Witcher 3, Transport fever, Civilization, Crusader kings 3 and Cities Skylines (uninstalled atm waiting for 2). I’m on the fence to either wait until I can afford a new PC and dual boot or make the switch now and deal with a few gaming problems. Thing is, what kind of problems may I expect? Anyone able and knowledgeable to give me some advice?
EDIT: Wow, those are a lot of replies; thank you everyone! You really helped me. I will make the switch sooner rather than later.
It’s good now: https://www.protondb.com/
Go with an AMD graphics card, they work right out of the box in Linux so it’s just that much easier.
So I swapped to linux again about a month ago and I’m frankly shocked at how much better it is now, especially for gaming. While I don’t have first hand experience with the games you listed (in linux), based on the games I have played, I have no doubt those games will all work just fine.
Honestly, I don’t see myself going back to Windows at all at this point.
(For the record, I’m on Pop!_OS.)
This, only used windows for one game in a year
On a very rare occasion do I ever run into a game that doesn’t work on Linux, have completely ditched windows about a month ago and haven’t looked back
I even get significantly better performance in most games, used to just about manage 60-70fps in overwatch on max settings under windows, now it smashed 170 no problem
Overwatch (and probably AMD’s drivers, thinking back) was actually the tipping point for me ditching Windows and fully commiting to Linux. I was getting the dreaded “rendering device lost” crash at least once per gaming session, with a brand new GPU, but have seen it maybe twice since switching. I don’t have quite the same performance gains as you, but Overwatch is definitely more stable and just feels smoother on Linux for me.
It might’ve been because it was so new, think Linux is typically slower to get drivers up and running for newer hardware
I turned on Proton Experimental in Steam and now I can install Magic Arena on my Pop!_OS box and it works pretty darn well.
Pop! putting in work.
Try Protontricks to run stuff without steam shitting up your system.
I haven’t had any problems with Steam shitting up my system. Are there particular things you’re concerned about?
it’s just a bloated mess, especially with the new UI.
If I don’t need a launcher taking up system resources in the background I won’t have it.
Oh. Yeah, I use
killall steamsometimes.
Have you heard of ProtonDB? It rates the current state of games and recommended fixes.
Gaming on Linux has improved a lot over the years. It’s typically only multiplayer games with Easy Anti-Cheat (EAC) that you’ll run into major issues with. Mod managers frequently require a fair amount of extra work and reading but I think a lot of Bethesda games have easy work arounds and documentation.
If you never play multiplayer, you’re probably fine. Though the only issue with that is triple A games not letting Anti-Cheats work on Linux for whatever reason.
Other then that, you’ll only run into issues when modding Skyrim for the most part. Here’s a github page with a step-by-step guide on how to do it; although, far as I can tell it’s four years old and might be obsolete.
There’s also this post in the Steam Community forums which is two years old at the earliest.
For Skyrim I’ve had pretty good luck with just adding Vortex mod manager as a non steam game, running it with Proton and using mods that way
Just to add to your comment, steamtinkerlaunch is a compatibility tool that allows you to install any mod manager through a GUI. Pretty handy.
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> Mod managers frequently require a fair amount of extra work and reading
That’s one complaint I *do* have sense switching to linux, I wish that there was a linux version of vortex (or MO2 or what have you) so that modding can be made relatively simple for more than just a few games that have easy workarounds
If all you want to do is to play retrogames and the occasional AAA+ single-player game? It’s perfect and there is no reason to use Windows ever again.
But if you want to play competitive games that require anticheating in order to work…? Then you will gonna have some problems.
Anyone able and knowledgeable to give me some advice?
Duckduckgo “lutris wine dependencies”, install lutris, download the latest lutris wine version via lutris launcher, use said wine ver. in any game you want or fallback to your system one. Thats it.
Check out https://www.protondb.com, to see which games work well on Linux. Games that are platinum should work out of the box, ones that are Gold might need some tinkering. Most games work great, but a lot of multiplayer games aren’t supported.
In general gaming on Linux has been a pretty smooth experience lately. Games on Steam usually just work, but IMO running games outside of Steam is pretty hit or miss. They sometimes need following a guide or trying to fix an obscure issue that only like 2 other people have.
The thing about Linux is that you might have some issues outside of gaming. Things you might not expect like Discord not being able to screenshare audio or that one program you need not working on your distro properly. Also you should know games on an NTFS drive don’t work well on Linux, so you can’t expect your drive full of Windows games to just work if you have them on a 2nd drive. In general I still think you need some patience if you’re going to settle on a Linux desktop, it’s not entirely a bug free experience yet.
A bit of a tangent to the discussion but that issue with screensharing audio could perhaps be worked around, by piping the system output to the browser mic input, given that the mic still works when screensharing. Easy with pipewire and an audio I/O graph tool like helvum.
I did that for a while and it does kinda work if you bring your mic threshold way down, but there is a modded client called “discord-screen-audio” which tricks Discord into almost working properly. The one limitation being that you can only stream your main monitor and not another one, or a specific app. But the audio does work!
Outside of steam, there are community scripts with Lutris and other alternatives.
But sometimes they don’t work well.
There are also ways to play epic games and gog games easily through the Heroic games Launcher and Wine-GE.
(wine and winetricks and 2 other wine components need to be installed).
I’m not the OP, but drat, I didn’t know that bit about the NTFS drive not working nice… that was gonna be my plan for my games so I wouldn’t have to re-download hundreds of gigabytes of games (Battlefield 1, Borderlands, TF2, Genshin, etc…)
Yeah it’s a real pain point. I copied my games to an external drive, reformatted the drive, then put them back and everything worked smoothly then. On the bright side if you can’t do this, Steam makes moving games to your Linux drive pretty easy.
I’m gonna have to try this when I switch then, thanks!
I’m on Nobara currently, but the NTFS thing is an issue with Linux in general.
Oh ok, cool!
NTFS will work, I used it for a few years without even realizing. I eventually switched to EXT4 for my games drive from an old Windows install when I realized ntfs-3g was using a decent amount of CPU and had a small impact on performance.
Oh ok, that’s interesting that there would be a performance impact! But that’s cool that it does work. I’m honestly more worried now about getting Nvidia to work since that’s what my pc has since I’m using sway, but I guess I’ll worry about that when the time comes. Thanks!
Does your EXT4 games drive play nice when trying to run the games in Windows?
I’d like to dual boot but the NTFS / EXT compatibility issue remains a concern for me since I would rather not have to redownload everything only to have it not work on one of the OSes.
I don’t boot into Windows often enough so I just reformatted the drive to ext4. When I did use both though NTFS was perfectly usable for both.
My wife switched to Linux recently and we kept her large data hdd as it was (i.e. ntfs) but within a week she discovered several new files had been corrupted, and could neither be opened or deleted. Seemed to be happening when she was using drag and drop in Thunar, while moving files using copy paste worked better. Didn’t want to take more risks so we backed everything up and reformatted to ext4.
I run this setup right now and it works very well. The key is to disable fast boot in Windows (preferrably before even installing Linux), otherwise it won’t shut down all the way and leave the drive in a dirty state. The ntfs-3g driver will still read and write to it, but games won’t work.
Does disabling fast boot make it so when you tell the computer to shutdown it actually shuts down? I found out that shutdown doesn’t really shutdown after checking Task Manager and seeing the uptime
Yes, that’s what it does.
Oh nice, that’s always irritated me so much. I’m gonna work on disabling that then, thanks!
Can be pain free but it can also be painful. Some things straight up won’t work because of anti cheat and unsupportive developers. I’d say give it a try. Gotta bump up the market share so Linux support actually matters in developer business cases.
The native steam package in most repos seems more than functional(esp with using proton when necessary)
(Archlinux, EndeavourOS, Pop!_OS are ones I’ve tried with success with a GTX 1080(fuck nvidia))just tried to use the flatpak version of steam and it seems to have issues with linking external libraries(disks/partitions) and flatpak steam won’t let you install any Windows games(as of Aug 8, 2023)
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Modded Skyrim isn’t a problem, but mod organizer 2’s ui is very glitchy. Most every game I play works fine mods and all. Just don’t expect everything with anti cheat to work.
Sorry if there’s a lot of technical terms.
My anecdotal experience is that Skyrim modding under Linux worked surprisingly well. Despite that I think I would still say “YMMV”. I have it running under Lutris-GE-Proton8-13.
I used the GOG release because having local access to the installer is a major win. Note that even if you don’t install the AE upgrade it’s the same version number, 1.6.659 so bear this in mind when installing SKSE64 and mods. I think there’s a specific release of SKSE64 for GOG. Many mods label that version as AE only, which isn’t true of the GOG release.
I chose to install in Lutris because of how easy it is to manipulate prefixes. I had issues with the automated scripts, which I expected. So I did it myself.
I downloaded Skyrim from GOG and installed Skyrim using the “Install a Windows game from media” option, then run once from the launcher to ensure everything was initialised before modding.
Inside this prefix I installed MO2 using “Run EXE inside WINE prefix”.
I chose that mod manager because I used it on Windows and it worked just fine. I don’t know a lot about Vortex. There’s a DLL to add support for Epic and GOG installs of Skyrim. I duplicated the Skyrim SE runner and changed the target to ModOrganizer dot exe. There’s a UI bug that makes reordering mods act weird, just click another mod entry if it gets stuck.
The Nemesis issue I had, which appears to be a Linux/WINE problem - the solution given (Extract it to the Data folder then run the executable from MO2 with VFS) worked for me.
TBH my modlist is pretty tame compared to most that I’ve come across so I didn’t expect many problems. LOOT worked as expected so I just let LOOT handle my load order.
There’s probably more to it but this is what I remember. Happy modding!
