Does anyone know if it’s possible to run VR games on Linux? I’d love t ditch Windows for the gaming pc…
The only ones that wouldn’t work are probably the ones with kernel level anti cheat. Maybe if I would be much younger, I might have had different opinion, but, as of today, I believe that all these games that wont run on Linux due to anti-cheat are cancer anyway.
Kernel level anti-cheat is what’s probably going to keep me on Windows for a while. I get those games aren’t for everyone, but I like them well enough, and that’s what my friend group plays. Warzone, DMZ, and going to try RedSec tomorrow. Kind of a shame. Otherwise I’d love to make the jump. As it is I’ll probably see about dual booting when I get my next PC in a year or two.
You have thousand of other games you can play that don’t require kernel level anti cheat, don’t be a fool
I respect where you’re coming from, but a) “fool” is literally in my name. And b) you’re saying “there are other good games, leave those games you’re enjoying.” But you’re also saying “there are other people, leave your friends and family that you play with.” And that’s a little different.
More like Jeffcool
You should try to strengthen your relationship so that they don’t spin around a specific videogame. What happens if you get banned or the requirements for playing the game becomes even more stupid?
You can run them alternative ways usually. Fortnite works with mouse and keyboard through gamepass, although gamepass is a shit deal just for fortnite.
I know a lot of people dual boot or use a virtual machine with windows on it too.
Fortnite works with mouse and keyboard through gamepass
Only local streaming from an Xbox. Streaming from their website requires a controller and I’ve never been able to get a controller to work with a browser on Linux. Well, on Bazzite at least.
I use a Microsoft Xbox One controller I use to play game pass games on Edge. I use Debian, but it was recognized and worked when I paired it in Bluetooth
I tried Floorp and Ungoogled Chromium, and I could only get them to detect my controller if I plugged it in while on the page. If I already had it plugged in, it just wouldn’t work. Tried some online HID testers and determined it wasn’t specific to the website. IDK.
That’s strange. I definitely figured bazzite would have much better device support for game controllers out of the box.
Yeah, idk. I tried both a PS4 and Xbox One controller, too, but it was all the same.
Ive literally done it, but thats not to say it might not work all the time or under all configurations. I was using I think librefox.
Done what? Used mouse+keyboard for streaming without a console at xbox.com/play? If so, I dunno what to say, I tried on both Windows and Linux under two Firefox browsers on Windows and Firefox and Chromium on Linux. Booting any game presents me with a console UI and doesn’t respond to any keyboard input.
It only worked for fortnite, I thought I made that explicit but if I didnt, my bad. For some reason fortnite console version allows mouse and keyboard, at least thats why I think it works.
In my experience AAA games from around 2000s and early 2010s often have problems running in Linux, especially if they have DRM.
In some cases a pirated version will run just fine whilst the official one won’t.
in my experience it’s the exact same situation on Windows
Funnilly enough plenty (if not most) games which won’t at all run in a more recent Windows like Windows 10 and Windows 11 run just fine in Linux via Wine.
All in all if we consider the full or near full timeframe for “windows games” (say, all the way back to Win95) I wouldn’t be surprised if it turns out that a present day Linux distro can run more “windows games” as Windows 11.
One of the more entertaining (though hardly unexpected) discoveries for me when I moved from Windows to Linux on my gaming machine was that several of the games I owned which I could not get to run in Windows, worked fine in Linux.
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.
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 believe Destiny 2 also doesn’t work. I just don’t play it anymore lol
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.
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.
Check the Lutris website, there may be a custom install script there
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.
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
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.
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.
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
I’m installing Mint for the first time at this very moment. So far, it’s easier than I anticipated. Fuck You Microsoft.
Edit: bro, firstly, what the fuck and where did all this performance come from?!?! I vastly underestimated how many resources windows was hogging. I downloaded Steam (easy-peasy) and then Project Zomboid just as a test. This game runs like butter now. I was having major problems with it before. To the point I basically stopped playing. I know its just one example but I haven’t had my machine run this well in several years, I feel. Also, got Spotify running. Super easy. I need to figure out how to get my VPN set up (ProtonVPN) but so far, I’m kind of in shock. I can’t wait to actually dig in and see what I can do with this new setup.
https://flathub.org/en/apps/com.protonvpn.www You are welcome :)
That did it! Thank you so much!
This is just how I felt when I first switched, also to Mint. I’ve experienced it a couple other times too when switching from some proprietary application to the FOSS option.
I like to describe it as feeling the different priorities of the teams working on each project. When one is made by passionate users who care about it being good software for its purpose, and the other is designed by a committee to hit as many different corporate metrics as possible, it shows.
hit as many different corporate metrics as possible
ah yes. product roadmaps where every stakeholder gets their share except the users
Well yeah their business isn’t to “serve users.” It’s to “farm consumers.”
That’s why I’m glad I do embedded systems in a niche industry. I’m not trying to drive engagement across the globe. I’m just making a device that serves the needs of a user who has other important work to worry about.
Windows 10 did that to us. My work workstation and my wife’s laptop suffered with W10, so I searched alternate OS and found Linux. Luckily our CAD software had a Linux version and I got productivity back.
My wife’s 2010 laptop on w10 was not usable. Its super fast with Linux. Faster than my work issued brand-new Lenovo laptop with W11. The only performance problem would be rendering video or other hardcore tasks.
Protonvpn has a flatpack. Check your distro’s app store for it.
BASH will be your best friend for any Linux distro.
Ill definitely look into this.
Yeah, once you get the basics of BASH down Linux becomes really easy.
Open up your Console/Shell/Terminal and type “help” it will give you the list of standard commands that let you navigate the shell.
- cd = change directory
- mkdir = make directory
- nano = edit file
- rm = remove file
- rmdir = remove directory
- sudo = run command as administrator/root privileges
And once you get that going you’ll eventually get the options for each command, for example
rm -rfis remove a file forcefully (the -f option), if you apply that command to directories it will remove anything within those directories with recursion (the -r option).You also don’t need to cd into a directory if you want to edit a file in it. For example
nano /home/user/Desktop/SomeRandomFile.conf
2026 will be the year of the Linux desktop!
Every year
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
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 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.
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.
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?
And how many run on linux via a well documented way?
I’ve been playing around with bazzite a bit, and for sure, i can run a lot of games on it, but you often end up googling which launcher to use, which settings to use, … And then even if you find something, it doesn’t always work.
Linux is making good progress in this regard, but this title feels a bit over optimistic (or at least, users who take it at face value will quickly be disappointed when they can’t get 90% of their games to work).
I’ve been playing around with bazzite a bit, and for sure, i can run a lot of games on it, but you often end up googling which launcher to use, which settings to use, … And then even if you find something, it doesn’t always work.
Here’s a step-by-step guide:
- Launch Steam.
- Install game.
- Hit Play.
Zero issues.
To add to this-
One of the biggest traps for new linux users since forever has been to jump straight into the deep end- tweaking any and every tunable- then when that inevitably all breaks, blaming Linux and moving back.
For anyone reading- You don’t need Arch as your first distro, you don’t want to on the bleeding edge unless you’re prepared to bleed. You don’t need things like Golden Eggroll Proton or any external launchers.
Just keep it simple to start- Something like Mint, SuSE or plain Fedora with Steam using the built-in Proton.
Bazzite gets… let say ‘advertised’ a lot and it’s got a lot of good ideas - but if you’re coming from Windows I think it’s just too much - it’s an immutable system* with containers for everything. That’s an ocean away from Windows unless you were comfortable with Sandboxie beforehand (if you were, dive right in)
*\the system is read only, you cannot change anything in the default image, ie. imagine if you were never allowed to add files to c:\windows
Edit: For the newbs, an ancient meme- https://www.shlomifish.org/humour/by-others/funroll-loops/Gentoo-is-Rice.html
I know its not important, but it is actually Glorious Eggroll.
- Launch Steam.
- Game isn’t available on Steam.
- No ‘Play’ button
There are Issues.
You think you’re describing a problem with Linux, but you’re just describing a problem with the game. If it’s not on steam it would be the same way on Windows. It will most likely be in a different, less popular and barely supported launcher. By then it is the publisher who is screwing you up, not Linux.
I was simply offering a case where steam isn’t the simple solution to gaming on Linux, as described by the post above.
I never said I was describing a ‘problem with Linux’ or a ‘problem with the game’.
Not all games are available on Steam or will work with steams proton/wine/whatever.
Game publishers have the right to choose how and where they publish their games. If I can’t install and play them on my machine I simply won’t. AS there is already an endless list of great games I haven’t played.
If you only play new popular games, and buy them on steam (and not GOG which is a platform that’s far more aligned with the linux way of thinking), sure. But i’ve got plenty of old steam games that have issues, or require me to muck around with custom control stuff, have warnings that they might not be fully supported, …
I love that we’re all moving to linux to be free, and then be using steam iso GOG XD.
Please let me know if you find good documentation. I want to make the jump off of windows, but honestly I’m scared it will just cause a ton of frustration
Honestly, check https://www.protondb.com/ and look for the games you want to play, it will let you know how well they work out of the box by just installing them on steam and hitting play. The reality is that it very much depends on what games you want to play, if you like CoD and other competitive multiplayer you’re unfortunately in the missing 10%, but for most cases you should be fairly well covered.
thing is, not even protondb is reliable. There’s been many times I’ve tried running a game, and encountered an error not posted anywhere, nor protondb, reddit or steam forums. All the comments on protondb will say, “works great out of the box!”, and I’m just left digging through random forums at that point.
It’s very strange.
Most games will just launch, no problems. But then you’ll get one title like the above poster has, that just refuses to launch no matter what you do.
Most of the times there’s a work around on ProtonDB that will get you running in a few minutes. But sometimes it feels like, or is the case, where the developers actively prevent the game from launching on Linux.
I previously played with just Steam and there’s basically one setting to enable - allowing the install of non-native games - and then (for supported games) it’s pretty much the same as Windows. In some cases you need to select the Proton version but generally using “latest” does the trick. There are games that require Proton-GE to work. These were essentially ones where Valve’s Proton version doesn’t have workarounds for various DRM etc (likely because doing so would get them in trouble). On Steam Deck this is done by pretty much going into the local Appstore in “desktop mode” to install. Other distros may vary.
For non-Steam games it’s a bit more of a pain, and can vary widely by game. I’ve installed a ton either just by running the Windows installer from Wine or scripts provided by Lutris.
Honestly if you’ve got the cash and want to try things, grab a Deck and give that a shot. If it works for you, take the leap to Linux on PC. Alternatively on PC, add/resize a disk and go dual-boot. The guided installers on Ubuntu variants generally make this pretty easy.
I think you’ve gotten some good replies here.
My comment isn’t meant to scare away people, but to keep our feet on the ground. Linux gaming has made amazing progress. If you play recent, mainstream games, it’ll be very well documented, and most things will work, unless they’re explicitly made to not work (such as certain anti cheat systems).
If you play lesser known indie games, really old games, or more specific things (not sure how good VR support is?), you’ll quickly encounter issues that may or may not be well documented. Also, in another reply thread to my post, someone commented a game not working because he has multiple monitors on linux. Stuff like that is also still happening.
So it can be really decent, but know that you might encounter issues. Give it a try and see if it works for the games that are the most important for you :).
Gaming on Linux is like gaming on Windows 20 years ago when you spent more time just trying to get the fucking game to run than actually playing the game.
I got an error trying to launch a BF2 expansion that told me to contact the nearest rendering developer.
I think you’ve gotten some good replies here.
My comment isn’t meant to scare away people, but to keep our feet on the ground. Linux gaming has made amazing progress. If you play recent, mainstream games, it’ll be very well documented, and most things will work, unless they’re explicitly made to not work (such as certain anti cheat systems).
If you play lesser known indie games, really old games, or more specific things (not sure how good VR support is?), you’ll quickly encounter issues that may or may not be well documented. Also, in another reply thread to my post, someone commented a game not working because he has multiple monitors on linux. Stuff like that is also still happening.
So it can be really decent, but know that you might encounter issues. Give it a try and see if it works for the games that are the most important for you :).
i wonder how these numbers change if you weight by active players. like sure, Shooty Guns 2 (2008) running on linux is a good thing, but if it has a grand total of 5 people in the world playing it, it won’t really do much for linux adoption as long as games like league of legends, apex legends and fortnite still don’t work
(for the record i don’t play any of those games and i’ve been happily daily-driving linux with no windows intervention for the last 4 year)
Very fair argument. This way the statistics would most likely be considerably worse. Though personally, I couldn’t care less about games like League, Fortnite or FIFA. A case could be made thay they’re almost always harmful, so them being unavailable isn’t an issue.
I’ve yet to find a game that I couldn’t play (though knowing me I probably forgot one or two). It’s mainly mods that I’ve not been able to implement, as some of them require running an exe file.
However I’ve had very helpful people tell me I can do all that in a wine instance or something similar so mainly it’s just my own laziness (and lack of understanding about how to “do it in a wine instance”) that’s holding me back from installing fancy modpacks or playing the latest Stalker gamma version.
Also i don’t play multiplayer stuff so the anti-cheat thing issues don’t usually apply to me. So there’s that.
Lutris for mods. You can point it at the game exe downloaded by steam in many cases (not all), and then run arbitrary exes inside the same wine prefix.
I seem unable to find this Shooty Guns 2 (2008) you speak of.
It’s the sequel to Shooty Guns (1992), one of the first games to come in two separate floppy disks.
Can’t seem to find it all I get is either the LA shootings of 1992 or knock off games from itchio. Mind sending me an Internet archive page/ pointer to this franchise?
I’m pretty sure that’s a mock-buster title so they don’t piss any fandom off.
Well, I’m 90% proud of Linux!
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.
Wouldn’t you be playing Sierra games from the 90s in ScummVM whether you were on Linux or Windows anyway?
“Alexander pulls out his bootable USB”
Idk, I’ve never tried to run 30 year old games on modern systems.
I’m just not that nostalgic.
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.
There are still lots of reasons that stop people from jumping 100% into Linux. Gaming is less and less one of them.
True, but network effects are important to that.
There were huge numbers of people that wouldn’t move to Linux because it didn’t support all of their games. Now it does, and lots of people are moving.
There are lots of people that won’t move to Linux because they have a random bit of hardware that’s not supported, or a highly-specific bit of software they need to do their job that only runs on Windows. The manufacturers wouldn’t support Linux because not enough people used it. Ah, but now we have all the gamers, so there are quite a lot of people using it.
Each domino that falls encourages the rest. Steam Linux users are more than 3x Steam macOS users, and we’re not that far from overtaking it for general desktop usage. In some regions, that’s already the case, and while the Windows 10 exodus can move to Linux easily, they’d need to buy new hardware fo use the Mac operating system. Not many companies would question providing Apple support; once Linux has a comparable share, it would be foolish to leave that out of consideration as well.
The problem is that he biggest networked games, I.e. those with the most players online, won’t work on linux. Until fortnite or apex legends or LoL allow linux machines, people will be stuck on windows so they can still play with their friends. The same thing happens with most of the sports games except those players are almost entirely on console, and they are locked in there.
Good, gaming was the last thing keeping me on windows, once I find a distro that’s compatible with my laptop hardware I’ll move to Linux completely
Unless you have something truly obscure, I can confidently say any of them will do at this point. I recommend Pop!OS myself, others will disagree. Pop! has a download for AMD hardware and a separate for NVidia GPU-equipped machines. Try it out on a USB today! YOU CAN DO EEET!
I second this as well. It’s my first distro and it’s been a good experience.
I’ve converted all my gaming to linux including vr and couldn’t be happier! Even hardware works flawlessly these days with the exception of VR at times. I’m still struggling to get No Man’s Sky to work on my quest 3 and linux VR and thats really the only thing I’m missing but it seems close to working just needs more fiddling.
Highly recommend Bazzite for people looking for a linux gaming distribution. It’s immutable which can complicate some things but it’s mostly plug and play and impossible to ruin due to immutable nature.
I’ve installed Bazzite myself. What do you mean by immutable? I ran into an issue trying to install VPN the other night. Something about the fs being read only. I’m still yet to look into it.
Cachy does everything bazzite does but better less complicated and more friendly to new users coming from windows.
Immutable distros just add endless headache for new users and are a pain in the ass to look things up for if you don’t explicitly understand what your os is.
I use cachy on my laptop but I wouldn’t call friendly an arch based distro that during setup asks the user “which of those 19 desktop environment do you want? Choose wisely only one”
It doesn’t even have a gui to install new software (at least, I am not an expert, I chose hyprland and it didn’t install that, and when I manually installed KDE Discover and the GNOME software manager, they only show and install flatpak apps - but because I’m not an expert I might have messed something up)
Immutable distros just add endless headache for new users
I disagree here. Sure it makes copy/paste computing a bit harder but it also prevents newbies from working themselves into a dysfunctional operating system which happens way more often than you’d think. People open a port or set some system variable for one thing and never set it back breaking everything else. With immutable system new users are forced into sustainable, reversible and transparent solutions.
The issue is that immutable linux is still pretty new so some mutable solutions aren’t adapted in immutable ways yet but if you’re just gaming you should never be on that side of the bleeding edge anyway.
It is a perfect baseline OS. It gets people connected to Steam faster and easier to Windows, which is the main access to most games.
Biggest obstacles to venturing out in Linux is the documentation for everything is not built or assuming normie users. The default assumption of competancy does not exist in Windows manuals.
But even so using Homebrew in Bazzite is no more complex than in Windows.
Been a while since I used windows but afaik docs are much worse on that side of things. At least on Linux you find some command or smt that could fix your issue, many windows problems are unsolvable and completely undocumented. There isn’t even a centralized log system like journalctl on windows so every error is just an alert pop up that says nothing or just complete silence.
I have a 3090 and heard nvidia gpus dont do very well for Linux gaming if anyone wants to quell my fears and get me off Windows
I have a 3070 and it runs the majority of games better than windows. The “Nvidia doesnt work good for linux” statement has become dated. Nvidia has become much better about giving support to other platforms, I think it has alot to do with being flexible for the ai market
been running an nvidia gpu since 2019, literally switched from windows right as cyberpunk 2077 was being launched, and trust me, it was possible back then, and it’s even more performant now.
I’m on a 5090 and bazzite has (in the majority of games and apps) just worked.
Check my post history I repeat this so often I’m getting tired of it, sorry, but basically 2080ti since it’s out, been gaming nearly daily on it, from AAA to indie, from “flat” to VR and… it just works. I just followed https://wiki.debian.org/NvidiaGraphicsDrivers and that’s it, no tinkering.
I have a 3090ti. Made the switch to Linux last year after reading that most games work. Never had a problem with the card, it works flawlessly out of the box (using the proprietary Nvidia drivers).
It still was a bit of a learning curve for me though… Using steam they work without a hitch. If they are not on steam, I found that the easiest (for me) is to install them using lutris, and then adding them to steam as non-steam games and using Proton to run them.
I don’t play that many games though, so ymmv
I have a brand-new lenovo workstation with an nVidia RTX card. Works great. Vulcan calculates the shader cache on first run of a game that takes a minute to run through, but after that the game runs great. I’m on tumbleweed, the only issue I had past week was kernel moved ahead but the nvidia driver wasn’t ready right away. Just meant booting the old kernel in the boot menu till that all syncs up
My rtx2080ti runs perfectly in linux and fine on games, thats fairly old card too. My kids computers use gtx1050’s and they are also running every game including Roblox just fine.
The only real issue is hdr in my experience, runs fine through gamescope usually but I’ve found the proton only option (expose Wayland and the like through proton_ge) technically work but the colours are washed out (and yeah, I have all the dxvk hdr stuff there). Dlss and frame gen work perfectly fine, HDR through gamescope does work as well for most games, bl4 has weird dlss artifacts in linux for some reason but that’s the notable standout to me. Been running a 4070ti for the last year for reference, I do intend to go amd at some point but nvidia works fine.
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 😩
