Mildly Infuriating

Pretty damn good these days.

Fantastic - made the jump a month ago. I don't play FPS games. Those are the ones that have trouble running on Linux due to anti-cheast software, but the vast majority of my 600 steam games run with no issues it all - at sometimes running even better than on windows.

For example division 2 was sluggish on win11 on my Lenovo y540 (integrated GeForce whatever gaming laptop card) with 16gig of ram, now that I swapped over to Pop!_os - it doesn't lag at all.

I mostly play single player games, but guild wars 2 2 and ff14 work great too if you are an MMO fan.

PoE works great if you want an ARPG to play.

Make the move and own your PC again.

I play mosty either indy games or just older games on an older gaming laptop (geforce 1070m based HP Omen) and Steam/Linux Mint work pretty great. Outer Wilds works even better in Linux now that I've begun using CoreCtrl to disable CPU power throttling. Otherwise, it runs about like it did on Windows. The MCC runs flawlessly. Recently purchased No Man's Sky and it runs pretty well and is actually incredibly smooth--no idea how that one runs in Windows because I've been just using Linux full-time for maybe two months now.

There is some weirdness like having to process Vulcan Shades before games boot up which can be annoying, but it hasn't discouraged me yet. You can also skip that and the only difference is there might be a bit of stuttering for the first bit of game play. After going back to Windows to compare performance, I think it does this stuttering thing anyways?

Not a gamer myself but from reading it used to be "this is a limited list of games that will work in Linux" and now it's a "this is a limited list of games that will not work", with a lot of thanks to valve, pop-os!, etc.

I have been a Linux gamer for the past 10 years. I haven't booted into Windows to play a video game in 8.

When I started out, it was very much a question of "Here is the list of games that work on Linux." You had to look for that Steam logo next to the Windows or sometimes Apple logo on the Steam page, and there are some games I would have played years earlier had that logo been there. With Proton, it has switched to "Here is a list of the games that don't work on Linux." Because most just do, with the very notable exception of competitive shooters, because something something anticheat.

I often hear that games actually run better on Linux than they do on Windows, except the newer whiz-bang features don't work. Give a recent example, apparently Cyberpunk 2077 runs at a significantly higher framerate on Linux than Windows, but DLSS, HDR and RTX aren't available.

Let me tell you the tales of two gamers on Linux:

My tale: I was disgusted with Windows 8.1, I had been learning some Linux because I wanted to use a Raspberry Pi with my ham radio stuff, so I went...why don't I try switching? This was circa 2014. There was exactly one game in my Steam library that just could not be persuaded to run and that was Sleeping Dogs.

There have been a few games I've wanted to try that refused to run in some way or another; Heave Ho! by Devolver Digital...the demo ran fine, had a good time with it. Bought the game, and the UI on the player select screen didn't work. Grow Up or Grow Home (one is a sequel to the other, I forget which it was) launched, but the character didn't respond to any controls. Oh and Fallout: New Vegas launched one of those Windows-style autorun screens then asked me to put in the DVD. I bought it from Steam. And refunded it.

I generally avoid AAA games, I don't play many online multiplayer games, I do play multiplayer games with friends, stuff like Stardew Valley or Unrailed, but I don't go play with random people online, those just are not fun to me. I tend to prefer more indie stuff, more nerdy stuff, like I've got hundreds of hours in Factorio and Satisfactory, both work fine. I think it just so happens that I'm into games that are likely to be well supported on Linux. Antichamber, Firewatch, Hollow Knight, Return of the Obra Dinn, every Zachtronics game I've tried, Undertale, Subnautica, these all run great.

My cousin: had an aging Dell upgraded from Windows 7 to 10 on an "optane boosted" hard disk drive, starting to run pretty sluggish. Swapping out the hard disk and optane module for an SSD and attempting to install Win10 on bare metal just wouldn't work, it kept throwing cryptic errors, so to get the machine to work at all I put Linux Mint on it.

She has more mainstream tastes than I do, lots of Bethesda and EA games. Funnily enough, I found that the third-party launchers were the real problem. The Sims 4 ran pretty well on Linux...Origin barely does. Minecraft support on Linux is actually worsening with time as a result of Microsoft's involvement, but at least the Java edition does currently run.

In brief, I have observed a very stark inverse relationship between Linux compatibility of games, and the size/corporateness/evilness of the developer.

Mildly inconvenient at worst unless certain anti cheat software is being used. At best, you can run games on Linux that your machine may not be able to handle on windows because distros that use more resources than windows are rare. Steam on Linux has proton built into it and it just works once you set it to run through it. You might have gpu driver trouble with Nvidia but it’s a maybe issue that happens less and less.

I play Baldurs Gate 3 on it and it turned out the issues I thought might be linux related were hardware, when I fixed it it worked perfectly.

Between Steam's Proton Compatibility Layer and Lutris, pretty damn fine.

SteamOS has been a big boon to the Linux gaming world.

Pretty great actually. Not as out of the box as on Windows but almost there. Firstly you get a vastly different experience depending on if you are using Steam. Since I have my entire library on Steam I can't say anything about other stores. There's imo 3 points where the experience still differs:

1 - you have to enable Proton as the default compatability tool, Valve has a guide for it and the setting is pretty straightforward to find.

2 - Most games just work now but a few don't in those cases things like protondb.com are an enormous help.

3 - Mods are hit and miss (Steam Workshop works fine) depending on the game, for Cyberpunk for example I had to mess with the Proton Config a bit but there were guides for it. However since we are now in a niche of a niche (modding a game running proton) you're likely to run into unexplored territory

Great, I play a lot on it and the only game I had to use windows for so far was titanfall 2 because it kept stuttering on linux and troubleshooting stutter is hard.