Okay, but how far back does this go? It can’t really be that all games in existence that ran on Windows is being counted. Is it?
First paragraph indicates that it’s pulling from ProtonDB’s list of games:
However, the most recent stats from ProtonDB (via Boiling Steam) highlight that we are edging towards a magnificent milestone. The latest distilled data shows that almost 90% of Windows games now run on Linux.
You completely glossed over the question he was asking.
90% of Windows games…but, from how far back? Are we talking 1988 with Windows 1.0? Are we talking 1995 onwards with Windows 95? Are we talking modern Windows with Windows 10 onwards? Are we strictly talking Windows 11?
There are a lot of logical jumping off points for where you can start measuring, each with a logical arguement with why you start there, but also with multiple logical arguements for why thats a bad idea.
There’s a missing implied knowledge they forgot to mention: ProtonDB tracks games on Steam. So it’s 90% of windows games available on Steam (without a native Linux build)
Strangely, the search page for ProtonDB shows the ‘proton rating’ for games which have a ‘native but abandoned / broken’ native Linux build, whereas the actual page for the game just shows ‘native’ and I can’t see the button to show the rest of the information. I’m sure it used to be there; they’ve started hiding a lot of stuff in favour of making the ‘steam deck’ results more prominent. But in some cases, ‘proton rating even with a native Linux build’ is quite important.
eg. Dawn of War 2 Chaos Rising.
- search page shows ‘gold’
- actual page says ‘native’, but ‘loads of rendering issues, really slow, broken on multi-monitor setup, use proton instead’.
Mark of the Ninja: Remastered:
- search page says ‘platinum’
- actual page says ‘native’, but ‘frequent deadlocking issues makes game unplayable, use proton instead’.
Yeah and it’s also bizarre that these companies released a native version, then… not test it? Why even bother?
When you go far enough back less games work on windows then Linux just because you need emulation and compatibility software anyways for both of them.
And they tend to be better support on Linux.
Which is always a fun time.
…Wine Is Not an Emulator
The chart is based on ProtonDB, which covers all Steam games.
if i cant run something at linux i’ll just do without it. Might try virtual machine if its something really crucial but might not care to even bother. Fortunately any games i know that will not run are kind of games that i wouldnt want to touch anyway.
This is great but my MSI laptop wasn’t very compatible with Linux.
Like how? You may need some proprietary firmwares.
Linux Mint here. I have had only 1 issue with a game on Linux and honestly, it was an easier fix then getting some games working on Windows which I have experienced plenty of as well. Linux really is just as easy as “Install from Steam, play”.
Drivers are easy now today too, just like Windows. Honestly, if you gamed on Windows, you have all you need to game on Linux.
I’ve found Bazzite and Arch-based distros like SteamOS tend to fare better when it comes to gaming (probably due to their different update model compared to Mint), but if what you’re after is stability and familiarity and don’t play super new games, Mint’s awesome. Glad you’re having fun with it :)
Tried switching to Mint yesterday, it’s a struggle as the guide kinda failed to mention some detail that i have to google a bit, and the result is it fail to boot(not a bootable drive error). Might try again tonight or this weekend. Honestly i can’t see mass adoption if it’s this PITA to get it working(not plug and play like windows), unless it’s provided by the manufacturer.
Edit: so one of a few struggle i have is the guide failed to mention i need to create an efi partition, i have to google that for the recommended size.
Another is the “primary” and “logical” partition. I have no idea which to chose so i put everything on primary, not sure if this cause the issue.
Then another one is what should i mount my “rest of the partition” with, i googled it and all the answer given is “you should probably read on what is all this about to get a sense what you should do” when i just want some simple answer to what should i do with that, like in Windows, C is for the OS, and you put everything on D or something like that. It’s akin to asking me to read the whole physics chapter when i just wanna know what speed a horse could run.
Then the final nail in the coffin for the session is “not a bootable drive”. Then i just plug in my windows ssd and go on with my day.
Theres literally an option in the linux mint installer to just wipe the drive and install, and it creates all partitions for you, if you dont understand what a partition is. You literally dont have to do anything except click the bubble and choose next.
Idk what was your problem, but mine was not reading on filesystems when the choice occured and not knowing how awesome BTRFS is with incrimental backups.
There was not an option to autopartition the drive you picked? Having to manually make efi partition sounds suspect to me.
The only thing you should need is to be able to identify what is a partition and what is a drive. Then pick the drive you want. Then the wizard should ask if you wanna wipe it and autopartition it.
Regarding the ‘logical partition’ stuff: Unless you are using a legacy bios system, rather than UEFI, you can change the drives partitioning scheme to GPT instead of MBR, before partitioning it. Then you should not be dealing with logical partitions any more. Then everything will just be called partition.
You can do that from inside windows or from a bootable linux stick.
Who knows why your drive is set to use MBR. Maybe your drive was used in an old computer or windows set it for compatability reasons.
Worth mentioning is that your uefi might have a legacy compatability setting sometimes called CSM. Sometimes called legacy bios. If it is turned on it may be expecting MBR disks. I would turn it off and only use it if really needed.
I tried installing it on a new ssd so to separate window and linux stuff(and also upgrade from a bunch of very old hdd), the guide recommend me to select “something else” and create the partition accordingly. I follow their official guide here
https://linuxmint-installation-guide.readthedocs.io/en/latest/install.html
At the time i’m installing, i still have my old drive plugged in so in fear of messed thing up badly and had my whole data erased, i chose to manage the partition myself. Should i unplug everything other than the new drive, and have the installer do it automatically?
Go ahead and unplug the drive - having it in doesn’t really help so why not give yourself the peace of mind?
Yeah, i should totally done that.
Yea! If in doubt, unplug every other drive. It’s a good practice.
going with the ‘something else’ option is the option you wanna do if you have something special in mind. It kinda requires that you know what you are doing. It’s not that hard to learn. But you might need a little patience to read up on to get confidence. Since you have an entire drive for the purpose, having the wizard do it for you is just easier. The windows installer have similar options.
I see, i’ll have to try that tonight
Should i unplug everything other than the new drive, and have the installer do it automatically?
This is what I did. Made the installer mostly a bunch of hitting ‘next’.
Plus, I don’t trust Windows to not fuck up my Linux drive, so when I used to dual boot, I would only have one or the other in the computer. Though, haven’t booted into the Windows drive for months now.
Yeah, my plan is to isolate both OS so it doesn’t interact at all. Was thinking about wiping out the old drive after backing up after installing mint, doesn’t seems to work out lol.
The windows installer is exactly as complicated and even uses the same termino of primary and logical etc.
You literally just click the next button like 7 times. Ignore everything and it sets it all up correctly by default.
Why would you screw with advanced options for your first go. You would have the exact same problems if you did that on windows.
This just sounds like you purposefully made it harder for yourself so you could bitch.
Do you have anything else to add? Because being unhelpful doesn’t solve my issue, but to inflate your ego. Others tried, and i acknowledged my problem and will try other way to see if it helped. And you’re here to bitch about my unsuccessful attempt.
There’s some information missing. What is saying “not bootable drive”? You should make a primary partition on the target drive.
Also, even if you don’t have tpm, you may have some sort of secure boot preventing non-windows drives from booting.
What is saying “not bootable drive”? You should make a primary partition on the target drive.
When booting, after the bios screen it give me a black screen with that message, and refuse to boot.
Also, even if you don’t have tpm, you may have some sort of secure boot preventing non-windows drives from booting.
How do i navigate this? My machine is build around 2012-14 so not sure what its in. I had someone build it for me so i’m not sure what’s in it.
You will likely have to enter the bios/uefi setup with Del, F12 or something similar during boot and then search for the secure boot option and turn it off. Alternatively you may need to just properly set up the boot sequence and target the drive you want to actually boot from as the first boot option in the list.
Did you already install Linux Mint on a drive and your computer is now refusing to boot from it? Or are you actually at the step where you’ve made a bootable usb with the live iso and that’s what is not booting?
Balena Etcher work pretty well on windows to create a bootable USB live iso.
Did you already install Linux Mint on a drive and your computer is now refusing to boot from it?
This. I already tried setting the bios to boot from that particular drive and it gave me this message. Might have to try let the installer decide the partition like another comment suggested to rule it out, and try turning off secure boot if that fail.
nice
In my personal experience, the only games that don’t work are those that explicitly choose not to :
- Fortnite
- PUBG
- Roblox
- Valorant
I’m not much into competitive games myself, so the only one that’s inconvenient in this list to me is Roblox. There are a few really fun games on their platform that I wish I could play on Steam Deck, as used to be possible.
I believe Destiny 2 also doesn’t work. I just don’t play it anymore lol
Rocket League as well; it’s the only reason I haven’t gone full Linux for gaming.
…you’d think after 8+ years of playing I’d be bored, but it’s just fun.
I would have thought that, as I have played closer to 8 hours, and I am bored with it 😂 glad it’s still fun for you though 😊
Rocket League works on linux? Unless something changed recently, because I used to play it on my Steam Deck all the time.
Rocket league is inside fortnight now.
Basically they want fortnite to be a complete (malware) gaming package with every game inside it sp youre tied to epic.
Fortunately it’s still up on Steam for us (few) legacy players
Had to install it twice because it first installed the linux native, Proton version runs fine might need to give it an input to get past the welcome screen which was blacked out for me.
Try wine bottles, Im using that for games on Linux Mint, havent found any issues yet. You may also need flat seal to make it accessible outside the flatpak environment.
I played Rocket League yesterday on Bazzite through Steam without issues
Whaaaaaat
Bazzite here I come
Heroic Launcher (frontend for Epic Games Launcher) also worked for me on arch linux
You can play Roblox through Sober. It runs the Android version directly so it’s pretty similar to what an official port would be, in terms of performance
Sober is awesome, and I can actually have Roblox LAN parties with my son thanks to it.
I play a lot of Space Engineers, and it randomly crashes… No idea what’s causing it.
And Space Engineers 2 just doesn’t launch for me.
There’s likely a config option that could fix things, but I don’t know it.
Every other game I play is fine.
Check the Lutris website, there may be a custom install script there
You know about protondb already? Gives a good list of potential fixes if you come across issues, it’s been a godsend on the rare occasions something doesn’t work first try
I know. Tried a few things from that site, but no luck on SE, and SE2 is under active development so I’m waiting on it for a bit.
Fair, good luck with it. Just had to figure out that a drive from a windows install was causing huge permissions issues and any game installed on it wasn’t executing. Sometimes the problems can be really obtuse.
That’s because of the awful spaghetti code that is the basis of Space Engineers. I gave up on that game years ago, because those devs were vibe coding before it was cool, and it shows.
I will say, the game is remarkably stable compared to what it was a few years ago. Especially pistons and rotors.
But yes, it still crashes randomly. About once or twice an hour.
And I got SE2 running. No crashes there, but I don’t like creative mode, so play SE2 much less.
I am excited for the upcoming SE2 survival mode
Have you changed which version of proton it uses? It’s in the compatibility options for the game, sometimes going to an older version solves some issues.
For SE2, it’s likely a version issue. But that game is under active development, so I’m waiting on it.
For SE1, well that one is a bit of a mystery… It probably isn’t. I have a few mods.
The distro really matters as far as Roblox goes. I tried Arch, Manjaro, Garuda and couldn’t get it working. Ended up back at Ubuntu and it works fine now
For Roblox you have to use Sober
Not too surprisingly, you can add League of Legends (another Riot games title) to the list. While I’m not a fan of kernel level anticheat, I do love most of these games, and it’s really frustrating how I don’t see any change in the future. After more than a year of struggling, I finally managed to get my Mint working (turns out my old mobo was faulty), but it looks like I will still have to keep Windows for basically all multiplayer titles I play.
really sucks that League doesn’t work . . . I know some people who play and the fact that it used to work just sours the pain.
I guess, at least Dota 2 works? I know they are very different, but I’d say similar enough and worth a shot so long as one isn’t too tied to LoL.
Thanks for the tip, I should give it a try. I’m not sure I still have the energy to invest months until I start to understand stuff while sucking and losing all the time, but I will get there eventually.
Linux doesnt have games that install kernel-level spyware under the guise of anti-cheat. Hopefully never will, but I don’t underestimate gamers who love think spyware is a good idea. Stay away from linux if you want kernel anti cheat please, its ruining computers
I mean companies could probably already create perfectly good kernel level anticheat on Linux if they really wanted to through eBPF programs.
That would not require permanent changes to the Kernel and games would only need root rights at install time. (Like most software already does)
I wouldn’t even have a problem with that kind if a solution.
Breaking News:
This just in new game requires sudoers access to play!
What’s hilarious is that is par the course on windows to run Steam as an admin. In fact that fixes a ton of bugs for people, so any executable the steam process spawns, like game executables, has admin rights as well.
You are not in the sudoers file, this incident WILL BE REPORTED. ಠ_ಠ
I’m confused, first you say that Linux doesn’t have anti-cheat, and then you say you should stay away from Linux if you want anti cheat.
No I think you got the message of what they were saying correct. Linux doesn’t have kernel level anti-cheat at the moment, and they’re saying that if you are a proponent of it, then don’t use Linux because it’s something we’d like to continue not having.
There are layers of abstraction between the kernel and the userspace, and few applications need kernel level access. Anti-cheat poking around in the kernel is very invasive. I know plenty of people who equate it to spyware, myself included.
Can you prevent cheating without it?
Yeah, there’s anti cheat software that doesn’t run in the kernel. You can bypass that and still cheat, but if you’re insistent you can do that even with kernel-level anti-cheat. There’s a whole big debate on this, lots of differing opinions.
Kernel level anticheat. There’s very effective anticheat that is not kernel level and therefore works fine on Linux.
Ah thanks!
No worries buddy 👍
Linux doesn’t have kernel level anti cheat and I hope it remains that way, but I fear my opinion will be in the minority soon if not already.
Who would be against that? And why?
I’m not going to throw doubt on the 90% number. Statistics are made up and generally don’t mean anything. “90% of games” … In what context? Games on steam? Games ever made? I don’t think I’m going to be playing sierra titles from the 90s… What about Flash based games that used to run in a browser? Do they count?
I don’t know and it doesn’t matter.
The only thing I want to say is that the “10%” that don’t work are usually pretty popular.
I’d like to see this metric based on average player counts. What percentage of gamers, playing games right now, could play on Linux.
IMO, that would give a much more relevant indication of how viable it is for most gamers to switch to Linux.
I’m still using Windows 10 and no, I didn’t buy their extended bullshit. I don’t even run the latest version of Windows 10. I also have an update server setup so I don’t usually get updates often because I need to go approve them. But I also work in IT and I’ve seen every social engineering attack type that’s been used since the 90s and I know when to not click on something. I haven’t needed an anti virus on my personal system in 20 years.
To say I’m not worried about it is an understatement.
I’m still using Windows 10 and no, I didn’t buy their extended bullshit. I don’t even run the latest version of Windows 10. I also have an update server setup so I don’t usually get updates often because I need to go approve them. But I also work in IT and I’ve seen every social engineering attack type that’s been used since the 90s and I know when to not click on something. I haven’t needed an anti virus on my personal system in 20 years.
To say I’m not worried about it is an understatement.
I don’t think anybody cares you’re proud to use Windows
Neat.
Thank you for your unsolicited opinion.
The only thing I want to say is that the “10%” that don’t work are usually pretty popular.
Yeah, like I’m glad Linux support is increasing among games, but my main daily driver game (Genshin) still doesn’t support it 🤷 And I don’t think Hoyoverse will be spending work on Linux support when they are raking in so much cash from their millions of players. From what I can see Linux usage hovers around 0.3% in China, and that’s Hoyo’s main market.
You should be able to run the android version with waydroid, thought i am not sure how the expirience may be, the only hoyoverse game i ever played is ZZZ and i play it only on mobile (also, it has the nice “feature” of heating my hands in the cold morning)
I’m playing with mouse and keyboard, so not sure that’s possible with the Android version.
I saw a Linux Genshin launcher on github a while ago, but iirc it carries some ban risk that I don’t want to expose my account to.
If you open it, it mentions the data is from protondb. Which is a database of steam games
And? How does this indicate the daily active player counts for the games supported and not supported?
Half of steam is just hentai or shovelware games anyway
Wouldn’t you be playing Sierra games from the 90s in ScummVM whether you were on Linux or Windows anyway?
Idk, I’ve never tried to run 30 year old games on modern systems.
I’m just not that nostalgic.
“Alexander pulls out his bootable USB”
I tried Solus back in 2018 with Wine. The only game that didn’t work properly was Mass Effect Andromeda (if memory serves correctly); it kept crashing to the desktop anywhere between a few minutes in to 2 hours.
I didn’t want to have to do debugging both at work and outside of work, so I switched back to Windows, and it worked fine after that.
I would be willing to try again maybe, if I can find the will and time over the weekend to setup a hybrid Linux and Windows implementation on my PC - does anyone have any good recommendations?
Does anyone know if it’s possible to run VR games on Linux? I’d love t ditch Windows for the gaming pc…
Not all games are created equally.
That’s great and all but the two things that hold me back from going 100% Linux are kernel-level anticheat, and lack of graphics card acceleration in virtual environments. Once we have those I’ll be happy.
Visual Basic added to Libre Office would be really nice too, but I get that it’s not particularly feasible.
Not having Malware Anti-Cheat support is a good thing. Hopefully it will continue this way until people realize that it’s not worth giving shitty companies like EA access to your online banking passwords just to pretend to shoot 11-year-olds in the head.
Agreed. I should have said letting the anticheat THINK it has kernel access, the same way WINE makes Windows programs think they’re on a Windows machine. I know this is an oversimplification and frankly I don’t even know what kernel-level looks like, but there has got to be a workaround that doesn’t drain resources too much.
Malware Anticheat can even tell if it’s running in a VM explicitly configured to look like real hardware, so it’s probably not trivial at all to accomplish this. Like someone else said in another comment chain, the ideal solution is Microsoft patching the intentional security flaw that allows kernel-level access at all. No kernel-level cheats, no kernel-level anticheats, no incompatibility. But of course it’s against their monopolistic interests to do so even if it benefits everybody else but them.
Shut your mouth about VB… 😁
Why? I have written a lot of custom macros and created forms to assist filling data fields in large spreadsheets. I have written macros that can open a CSV, comb through the contents and pick out the data I need to fill workbooks.
I’m not saying I’m especially tied to VB itself, I actually find it to be a pretty stupid language, but I do miss being able to write my own functions and effectly use Excel as a pre built GUI for whatever I’m trying to do. If there’s an alternative in Libre Office that I’m missing please point it out.
LibreOffice supports python, JavaScript, and beanshell, as well as LibreOffice basic. The latter is similar to VBA and some VB scripts can even run unmodified.
https://help.libreoffice.org/latest/en-US/text/shared/guide/scripting.html
Oh cool. Thanks, I’ll check it out.
A bit sceptical of this number. Most popular games have some form of anti cheat which the game not run on Linux. Some other games sometimes have weird bugs that do not occur on windows. - source: I am on Linux 😩
When you are talking about “popular” games, you mean service games that are often some kind of multiplayer games. Each of them binds a lot of players and is big and popular, indeed. But these are only a few compared to the amount of games that have been released in the past decade. Let alone released games from 2024 that are listed on imdb.com are 1551 Imdb.com
So yes, I can imagine 90% is right since the most games are no service games and do not require some shitty kernel level anti cheat.
For bugs: I have no idea since I only use linux for non-gaming tasks.
Some games with Kernel Level Anticheat do work on Linux, because the KLA doesn’t actually check if it has access. Drag can imagine that the next generation technology of Linux gaming will be add-ons to WINE that lie to KLAs and tell them they have access. Like how yt-dlp lies to youtube and says it’s a browser.
Corporations will claim using these programs violates terms of service and is grounds for a ban. Players will respond to the bans by submitting refund requests for games they got banned from. And if we’re lucky, Valve will respond to the refund requests by demanding corporations support Linux in some form, whether it be removing the KLA or making it work on Linux.
Another possibility is, microsoft drops access to kernel level. This would solve all these problems at once. No more cheats on kernel level, no more anticheat on kernel level are needed.
Unfortunately I think Microsoft will avoid doing so, because it would remove one of the last barriers to switch to linux.
This is by amount of games, not by player count. Most games (including non-popular ones) are not live service multiplayer games but small indie titles that do not try to break Linux compatibility on purpose. So yes, 90% sounds plausible.
Has support for DP 2.1 or HDR in Wayland made any improvements yet? I tried Pop_OS and had lots of issues with this
https://github.com/NVIDIA/open-gpu-kernel-modules/issues/816
I’ve been following this GitHub issue waiting for this change to make it into the next nvidia driver release but still suspect this won’t address HDR. Obviously first world problems for high end hardware but it’s one of the last pieces holding me back from trying Linux on my desktop
HDR
HDR works on KDE and GNOME desktop environments. KDE is currently the better choice if HDR support is important.
As for software:
- Not included in official Proton builds yet but can be enabled in Proton-GE with 2 environment variables
- mpv works fine
- Kodi gets support in the next major version
- Firefox and Chromium have experimental support
Can’t speak for DP 2.1 since I have an AMD GPU and no hardware that uses DP 2.1 (yet).
Appreciate the info! I had been trying out the new Cosmic DE that ships with pop os and I’m guessing that’s still lacking HDR but did feel very performant. I’ll have to see if switching is worth the trade off once they nvidia driver update gets released
