I was playing Quake 3 and Unreal Torunament 2003 in the early 2000s, they had native versions. One of the first mainstream Linux gaming pioneers.
I used to use Second Life on Linux too with a third party client.
this post was submitted on 28 Mar 2024
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No one is mentioning Tux Racer? Blasphemy!
I sometimes wish Proton was also available on macOS… But Wine is good enough I guess, and still works great for most games :)
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Wasn't Playonlinux for the longest time the easiest option to run games under linux?
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Who remembers Cedega. Had a lot of fun on that, both playing and configuring to play. Think I was running Fedora, or was it Mandrake/Mandriva. Man I remember having the drive to distro hop weekly at one point
I never got Proton working on my main distro (Debian), so I probably fall into this category. I did use Wine, but Wine is a lot harder to set up, and never ran games as well as Proton did.
Here is my major gaming history, since I started on Linux in 2007. Yes, I really could focus on a single game for years back then.
- 2007: Starcraft, in Wine
- 2007: Nethack, native
- 2011: Morrowind and Oblivion in Wine
- 2012: Minecraft, native
- 2014: sgt-puzzles, native
- 2016: Steam, got hundreds of native Linux games.
- 2017: Briefly got Steam and Path of Exile working inside a Wine instance.
- 2022: Steam deck, with the specific purpose of being able to run Proton on it.
- 2023: New Ubuntu installation, and Proton finally worked on my PC.
Today, I still prefer native Linux games. I mostly only use Proton when peer pressure for a multiplayer game required it. But I never use Wine any more.
I tried to get Wine working for STALKER before Proton. Never managed lol
I was in the beta for the original World of Warcraft and restarted when it officially launched. This was 20 years ago, so memory is fuzzy, but somewhere along the way I was playing it in wine exclusively under Linux. Game updates were common and frequently broke wine, but I kid you not a patch was available within 24h. Yes, this forced me to compile my own wine, but it wasn't that difficult then. Together with "checkinstall" I could maintain a clean .deb package from the source code.
Some links I found in a quick search showing the challenges:
- https://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-games-33/world-of-warcraft-in-wine-success-485886/
- https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-311551-start-0.html
To be honest, keeping the game running in Linux sometimes felt as a fun side quest!
After that I was mostly able to play all my games in Linux, with some exceptions, obviously, that sometimes required me to install windows.
Played WoW when it first came out with WINE. It was miserable. We had to mess with configs, install hacked patches, manually start jobs with scripts. And every patch broke something so you had to start from scratch again.
This was probably 2004/2005?
Oh yeah. Back in the late 90s I played all the games ported by Loki Games. I played the native quakes, portal 1 & 2. And using regular Wine and some winetricks I played about 300 hours of Skyrim and completed Mass Effect 1,2,3.
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Unreal Tournament 2k4 on one of the earlier Ubuntus, back when ShipIt was still a thing. Most have been around 2005 or 2006, as I used it in my mom's flat which I moved out of in 2006.
I also played some games on an old version of Suse Linux back in 2001 or so? Maybe earlier? There was this game where you had to manage public transport in a city. Looked for that game recently but nothing came up. Also Kartoffelknülch back then. I tried to get some distributions running (like Mandrake) but only Suse somewhat worked. Being 14 and English not being your mother tongue doesn't help with documentation when nobody in your family knows stuff about computers.
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There was still Wine, and PlayOnLinux helped further, but when I looked for a game I wanted to play on WineDB, there was no guarantee it even had an entry, and if it wasn't listed as "platinum", the chance of you experiencing any reported issue was very high.
Not to mention, playing Steam games that weren't native was an impossibility.
Thankfully I was more of a console gamer at the time, and I got a lot of enjoyment out of the few games that received Linux ports - like Team Fortress 2!
Can you imagine not having depth perception because of your hairstyle?
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I guess I'm behind in times as wouldn't emulation cause the game to be slower on Linux than on Windows?
I tried switching to Linux when I was a kid, but figured out quickly that my scrap computer could only play my games natively. I'm not sure how it wouldn't always be slower on Linux unless the game was built for Linux.
Others replied about WINE translation layer, but once binary is loaded in memory the kernel juat runs the code it does not care that it is linux or windows code, because to the systembit is chip instructions. It is why LinuxOS was fully able to run DOS way back when
One would think that, but I've seen many claims that it actually runs faster. I wouldn't know personally, I haven't used Windows in 5 years
So from my experience, I replaced my 8+ year old omen laptop with an MSI 3 years ago then installed garuda on the omen. Tested some games on each and the performance was similar until graphics were set to ultra just dye to the hardware difference. Before installing linux that laptop performance was struggling, so it really breathed life back into it and made it viable again. Hell my wife uses it to play stardew valley now and I used it to play ffxiv a few times.
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It's not really emulation. It's running on the same architecture and most of the windows libraries can be used as is with mostly only the win32 library that needs to be wrapped. That already existed for years as wine. It's mostly graphics and peripherals that are broken.
The most important thing proton added to improve gaming was a DirectX translation layer that translates to Vulcan and also loads of fixes and additions to wine.
Not a lot of games run faster but apparently in some situations, the Vulcan precompiled shaders seem to run better than native windows, although that probably means they could make their native version better as well. For older games, the Vulcan translation layer is a lot more efficient and faster than native. Also CPU and IO heavy games might run faster on the Linux kernel.
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I liked playing osu! on Linux through Wine since it offered much lower audio and input latency than you could achieve on Windows. Minecraft has also always been a safe bet on Linux (unless you enabled shaders, then it just turned into a visual abomination for just about every shaderpack).
Generally OpenGL games weren't too bad, DirectX however... the biggest change here was DXVK rather than Proton.
Never thought we'd get to where we are now.
I hated Windows 8 enough to put up with it at the time. It's nuts how much things have improved since then.