I've gone over to Linux after using Windows for 25 years.
As someone who enjoys older games, I am pleasantly surprised that Wine (with dxvk and cnc-ddraw) lets me run more games in a better way than I was able to on Windows.
I can run some 16-bit games on a 64-bit OS!
Games that rudely switch to fullscreen, I can run in Wine Virtual Desktop. Previously on Windows, I had to configure hacks like DxWnd and it didn't always work.
I only wish Wine also allowed me to zoom 2x or 3x, but this is where Gamescope comes in:
Also there is a potential to use a different Wine configuration (prefix) for every game specifically. So far I haven't had to resort to this.
I noticed some Unity games waste disk space with gigabytes of zeroes, Linux lets me run them from inside a compressed SquashFS image, this even makes the game load faster:
> Games that rudely switch to fullscreen, I can run in Wine Virtual Desktop. Previously on Windows, I had to configure hacks like DxWnd and it didn't always work.
Reminds me of the mention of "contiguous zeroes" that used to be in the Apple App Store docs.[1] Which seemed like just a backhanded way to say "we encrypt and then compress so don't expect easy compression."
I suppose this might be asset padding or perhaps these are raw textures with full alpha sections? Still, it seems pretty strange. What game, what asset?
Same, but games run uncompressed assets as an optimization measure to trade disk usage for CPU usage, depending on which is the bottleneck for their particular game (iiuc)
So it'd be surprising to me if a developer chose to use uncompressed/lightly compressed assets, and compressing them caused performance to increase; because you're intentionally choosing the tradeoff in the opposite direction the developer did
Of course, there are game developers that are less technical and may not have knowingly made that tradeoff in which case all bets are off, but the games made by those developers tend not to be the kind that require beefy machines to run at 60fps+
I'm never going back. If something changes and the only option is Windows or consoles I'll just stop buying new games or take up another hobby.
Being able to use sane scripting to solve problems, ZFS snapshots to undo bad mod installs, using the same system for development, and so on is no longer something I'm willing to give up. I've also started amassing a small collection of Cloud Init configs that set up game servers inside LXD containers. Some of these have native Linux binaries but a few only have Windows servers. They run perfectly well through Wine.
Anyone here even vaguely interested, I encourage you to just try it. I use Ubuntu and it works great on both AMD and Nvidia cards for me. What have you got to lose?
I've stopped even checking protondb before getting a game these days. Pretty much unless they've gone out of their way to make it not work (which is mostly competitive games, so you can tell beforehand), it works.
I realize by posting that here on HN I'm tempting people to send me the ProtonDB garbage tier list, but it's true for the types of games I play.
Same setup here, one game setup I've hit but this will be a rare problem, is StarCraft Remastered. Wine has an issue with audio processing which I can't seem to configure my way out of. It pegs all 32 threads and still stutters. Thankfully this game can likely run on an actual potato, so I have a separate mini PC running windows for this when I want to get my ass kicked on battle.net.
After being impressed with my Steam Deck, earlier this year I purchased an RX 9070XT (my first card from team red since the Radeon 9800 Pro) for my gaming PC and switched to linux full time.
Now hundreds of hours in, I have nothing interesting to write about it. For me and the games I play it's been a seamless transition.
I found myself just never using my PC after getting a steamdeck. I had the deck plugged in to my TV most of the time. I recently just installed Bazzite on my PC and moved it to the TV so now I play on that all the time. What Valve has done to make gaming on linux work is remarkable.
I remember the days of having to manually install steam in Wine and how only a few games would work like that.
For gaming. For any somewhat smaller market software it’s not great. I had a look at DJ software and while they all support macOS. Nothing supports Linux and they are bugged out in Wine too.
In case you don't own a Steam Deck and would like to see how much of your library would run on Linux:
1. Go to your library
2. Click the filter button
3. Under "hardware support" you'll see a dropdown "Steam Deck" with 4 options, here's some explanation what they mean:
Verified - Means this game 100% works on Linux (and Deck), which is verified by Valve
Playable - Means this game works on Linux (and Deck) but it might have some tiny issues (e.g. font size)
Untested - Might work, but not tested
So to check if your games would run pretty nicely either filter on "Verified" games or "Verified or playable" games and it filters out everything which will or might not run at all.
You'll be surprised how much games can run on Linux these days -- thanks to the massive effort Valve puts in Proton and some devs (including Valve) publishing native Linux builds of their games on Steam, and even things you might not even consider at all like Skyrim or Oblivion with all your favorite mods (!)
Also in some / many cases even "unsupported" games work out of the box or needs only minimal tweaking. AFAIK most of the issues are with online competitive games which uses anti-cheat.
To be fair, the Steam Deck support level is a bit arbitrary and some Verified games may work worse than some Untested games.
The only game that I had an issue with is The Unfinished Swan which I bought on Steam after having enjoyed playing it on a PS3 (good enough to buy twice). I couldn't get it to work initially with it just going to a blank screen (not the game itself which ironically does start with an all white screen) no matter my tinkering with Proton versions. However, tried it again a few months ago and it worked perfectly with default settings.
2003 me thought Wine is a dead end project and a waste of developer time. Granted valve put a lot of effort into Proton but they wouldn't even have considered it without the massive amount of work done before, kudus to all the non cynical wine devs
for the longest time, no one in linux land cared about API stability or backward compatibility - then app/game developers realised if they could port a portion of Win32 to Linux via WINE, they could just target the win32 API or at least a portion of it and so long as WINE was installed, their app/game would always work. i find it a bit ironic; desktop Linux is being enabled by re-implementing APIs from another OS.
Aside on whether it was going to be useful, I was alway impressed by the Wine developers, extremely knowledgeable hackers, masters of both Windows and Unix.
Love this so much and do so much of my gaming on Linux now.
I just wish I could run Linux on my MacBook Pro so I could actually play games on this beautiful, portable, power-efficient criminally nerfed masterpiece of a laptop.
What percentage of Windows games still run on current Windows?
I never managed to get anything close to 90% of my library to run on the same windows installation, but I gave up years ago, and just use Linux instead.
I've been happily playing Overwatch 2 on Linux for a couple months now. I need gamescope to get it to play nicely with my multiple monitors, and it crashes maybe once a month, but performance is great and I have no major complaints. I'm never going back to Windows, except for work where it isn't optional :(
I switched to Slackware in the early oughts, but gaming was hit and miss at best with Wine. The occasional native game (like Neverwinter Nights) was always welcome.
I've dual booted to game for the last seven or eight years because of coworkers and family nagging me to play games with them, but now I don't need to. I haven't come across a game that won't run flawlessly on Linux (through Steam) for a couple of years now. I can enjoy my nightly game of Deep Rock Galactic or Necesse without being part of the botnet.
I recently ran into a game where online match making was broken in windows, but worked just fine in Linux. I felt like I was trapped in the upsidedown.
I tried GOG version of Soul Reaver and some polygons and UI kept disappearing depending on the direction the character was facing. On Windows 10. I should try Linux.
According to ProtonDB[1], about 7-10% of the top 100 and top 1000 games are "borked", but the actual reason why can be nuanced. However, these days it is almost always anti-cheat.
Anti-cheat will be basically impossible to overcome until studios specifically cater to linux. I'm not sure to what extent this is even possible given how hackable linux is, and how many variants there are, but it's plausible a blessed distro with a signed kernel (somehow? Not sure if this is a thing) might support it.
With a signed kernel and secure boot it should in principle be similiar to Windows 11? But with DMA based hacks on the rise I'm not sure it matters either way.
Yeah I have hundreds of hours or more in Rocket League on Linux, all competitive multiplayer. I use the Heroic launcher: https://heroicgameslauncher.com/
Does Rocket League no longer work with Proton? It used to work even better than both the native Linux and Windows versions for me back in the day. If not, what changed?
Nice to see this. Worth noting that a lot of Windows (or DOS) games past may also not run well on current Windows versions. The anti-cheat issue is likely to persist for at lest a few more years... though I think the relative success of the Steam Deck itself has moved the bar significantly in terms of demands for support.
I do think there's a few hiccups still with Linux support. The shift up to 6.16 kernel has itself resolved many of the issues I'd been having in the past. If you're on an older LTS that hasn't moved, you're likely to see more issues than with a more current distro.
> Worth noting that a lot of Windows (or DOS) games past may also not run well on current Windows versions.
To be fair, anything old that wasn't famous has a decent chance to be broken under WINE too. It might just be a single call to some obscure animation API or something, but it can be enough to break the entire game.
I am an avid linux user but never switched my gaming PC to linux, until the Win10 > Win11 debacle which has made me switch.
I am using EndeavorOS, my first Arch flavoured distro, it's excellent. Honestly it has all "just worked". Drivers were auto installed, I pointed Steam to my existing library on an NTFS drive originally used by windows, and it just plays my existing library fine.
Cyberpunk2077, Red Dead 2, Starfield all objectively AAA modern games, working fine. I even get a bit better performance in some areas, comparable in others.
I can swap back to windows and it still runs the same library. I really didn't expect it to work like that.
The only thing I have had to troubleshoot is getting a Quest3 VR headset to work, and an Alpha stage game which others are getting to work, I just haven't bothered to chase it down.
Nice! I'm curious if you experience any difference in IO performance (e.g game loading times)?
Last I tried NTFS on Linux it was stable but not fast, especially for writes. If it's not a notable difference between Windows and Linux then that's a big improvement from those days.
I think you could probably get a decent IO performance boost and reduce loading times by moving the library over to something like ext4 or xfs, at the cost of portability.
I play (and work) exclusively on Linux for 17 years -- most games run fine, yes, except for competitive ones (Rust, League of Legends etc), because they require kernel-level backdoors to spy on the OS kernel-level cheats.
My only limitation to ditch Windows for games is my nvidia card. I wonder if their drivers will become better before I go for an upgrade. I do have a Steam Deck for lower requirement games.
I finally got rid of the last Windows gaming box because Windows 10 started warning me about not getting security updates. So far no compatibility issues under Debian with Steam, but I play mostly single-player or multiplayer strategy.
EDIT: I remember now that Civilization 5 for Linux would crash frequently. I switched to Proton and it's been fine since.
Microsoft is bleeding a large-ish userbase with win 11: the gamers. They’re left with corpo and the laggard users who are aware their computer is not friendly , are not aware they can change OS yet. Soon they could rename it to Corporate Windows
It's been months since I've booted into Windows to play a game. Feels amazing. The only exception I've run into is heavy anticheat titles, like trying to play on Faceit CS2 servers.
I can live without that though. I don't think I'll bother setting up a Windows partition on my next PC.
I think the last time I had Windows installed was right around the release of Proton in 2018. Those initial releases were not great but the trend was very obvious.
There comes a point were you just don't miss it. The only moments that it is apparent is that disassociation you have when someone else just assumes you run Windows. I don't blame them, I am statistically the odd one there, but that is when you have to figure out things your way.
Proton/Wine is so good these days. Rarely have I had an issue running a game in the last 3 or 4 years. Sometimes EA/Ubisoft games that have their own special launchers don't work immediately, but ProtonDB and the Proton GitHub issues are great resources to get them going.
I remember when Cyberpunk 2077 came out it didn't work at first, but the Proton and Glorious Egg Roll devs got it running within a few days. Legends.
Even many games that support native linux run better under wine.
Out of the 150-isg games in my library, the only one I have had any issue with is 'From Dust' released in 2011. This is part because of the Ubisoft launcher and some video codex issues, but even so. Switching the too and from the game a few times seems to get past this.
About a month back, a demo for Lumines Arise came out and it fired up without issue, didn't even think to check ProtonDB because it has become so reliable. I suspect a big part of this is because Steamdeck has been popular enough to have it be targeted for Proton compatibility day 1.
> Even many games that support native linux run better under wine.
The same is often true on macOS, too – running games through CrossOver is often better than the native port. The reality is that there simply aren't enough professional game devs on Linux and macOS platforms to polish that last 20% and make all the difference.
Next laptop is probably going to be the quietest PC I can find that still runs linux. I love my Air but I've been eyeballing a new system as my M1 is getting a little long in the tooth
I have a pc I built when the 2080 TI came out. How is Linux support for the supporting drivers for those cards today? The machine is still more than powerful enough for my needs but I haven't used it in a couple years because Windows really is just complete garbage. I'd like to be able to take advantage of new to moderately old hardware without dealing with Windows.
1070 TI works perfect on Arch for the past ~6 months with latest drivers (better than Debian stable!). This card is old enough that only the closed source drivers are supported, but it seems to work fine.
If it helps I used to use a gaming laptop for work that had a RTX 2060 mobile version, I was able to run some recent games like Elden Ring (including mods & online play), and some older but still demanding titles like Witcher 3. All of this without tinkering too much on a oob Ubuntu LTS install (I later switched to popOS because I don't like snaps that much).
Someone else recommended PopOSin other comments. I pulled up the page but haven't looked at it extensively. In what ways is it different from a recent Ubuntu LTS install?
Dual-boot user here, while this is definitely good to hear, but I think it's even more important that how many players could ditch Windows and switch to Linux for their games.
Suppose I play one of the 10% games that wouldn't work on Linux, I'd still need to keep my Windows installation around, right?
I couldn't run Delta Force [1], due to anti-cheat as far as i can tell.
Shame about Battlefield 6, some of my friends are playing that and it would be fun to join them. Oh well. Fortunately they're mostly still playing Helldivers 2 as well, and that works fine.
That anecdote goes the other way if you skew towards popular multiplayer games, since those are the ones with anti-cheat. Someone who plays League, Apex, PUBG, and Destiny 2, and was really looking forward to BF6, will be mightily disappointed. You're unlikely to be invested in all of those games, but a pretty large amount of people are very, very invested in at-least one of those, which, unfortunately, makes Linux a non-starter for them.
Even if 99% of games worked fine on Linux, a large amount of people spend 50+% of their time in-game in one of those games, so it doesn't end up feeling like 90+% of games work.
Thankfully, the corollary of that is that single-player games pretty much all work, barring some edge cases, like very recent titles that haven't had the kinks ironed out yet.
The death of a server browser and privately owned servers led to this. The whole anti-cheat situation grew from publishers wanting to control the whole experience.
Besides, the gaming industry keeps shooting themselves in the foot by only supporting Windows (Mac is a thing too). That is slowly changing, but so many game devs are drinking the Microsoft koolaid they don't even consider using another graphics API other than DirectX. Many other decisions like that as well.
It really is impressive how many they are willing to leave behind. A quick check gives about 19% of the market.
But anti-cheat was first developed in a time where server browsers were the norm. Punkbuster was developed back in 2000 (independently of Valve) for HL1/CS, which had no matchmaking system. So you're just plain wrong about the motivation.
Not really sure why you're trying to draw a connection between private servers and anti-cheat, I understand if that's your pet grievance but they really aren't related. Games were already implementing anti-cheat even when server browsers were the norm. The "anti-cheat situation" grew out of cheaters killing multiplayer games. What are you even trying to imply with "wanting to control the whole experience"? Letting your players actually play the game they paid for is a bad thing now? When cheaters are in the game, you do not get to play it in any meaningful sense, and in short order a literal sense as servers rapidly die off. Note that I'm not endorsing kernel anti-cheat, but you didn't say kernel anti-cheat, but instead went on a polemic against the concept of anti-cheat in general.
> Besides, the gaming industry keeps shooting themselves in the foot by only supporting Windows (Mac is a thing too). That is slowly changing, but so many game devs are drinking the Microsoft koolaid they don't even consider using another graphics API other than DirectX. Many other decisions like that as well.
The gaming industry is thoroughly multi-platform, and many games that are limited to Windows on general-purpose PCs aren't so because the require DirectX, since they've also been developed for Playstation where DirectX isn't a thing.
Support for Mac can be somewhat challenging, partly because the platform (including the hardware) is so different from other general-purpose PCs, and partly because Apple doesn't particularly care about backwards compatibility, and will happily break applications if it suits their interest.
However, a developer that doesn't support Linux does so because they don't want to for whatever reason, not because the technical bar is too high. With the work that has gone into Wine, Proton, and other Windows compatibility libraries these days, there's a good chance that a Windows game will "just work" unless the developer does something to actively inhibit it.
My experience was that every game ran.. but also nearly every game had issues with controls being different than Windows(mouse sensitivity was way off), control pad not working, screen or font scaling issues, and full screen wonkyness.
Somehow changing the font scaling in Linux caused the game to be scaled by a similiar amount.. so 2x font scaling = full screen is 2x bigger than actual monitor.. and I can only see 1/4th the screen.
It's a bit painful hearing all of the success stories on this page. I ran into endless bugs running games under Wine, eventually gave up and bought a vanilla PC just to run Windows for games, and that still gives me endless bugs with most major games, but somewhat less than Linux does. With my level of hardware fu I should stick to consoles, but mods make games accessible to me.
Similar anecdote, in the past week there have been two separate games that I wanted to try out, and both were nonfunctional on linux. One had a completely black screen, and the other ignored all mouse/keyboard input. For each of them I spent 15 minutes tinkering with winecfg, installing packages, googling error messages, etc. Eventually I gave up and booted back into windows where they worked perfectly.
That you say "running games under Wine" is a hint it was a while ago, the modern way to do this is to install Steam and let it handle the compatibility layer.
A random assemblage of parts running Ubuntu, upon which most things that weren't Windows games ran fairly reliably for a decade plus. As far as I can tell nothing challenges a computer like games, except games from an alien OS.
nixos on zfs is a fun one, allowing you to tailor specific environments to specific games if you so choose. Not that I've needed to very often. Steam mostly Just Works(tm) now.
Both metrics have their uses. Personally I'm not all that interested in playing the latest hit AAA games. I am much more likely to play indie games or older games, which probably means I play more titles but the titles I play tend not to have much market share (individually or even in aggregate). You could say I'm an outlier but I feel like a lot of Linux nerds probably have similar gaming habits.
So for me it's better than 90% of all games are playable on Linux, than if a handful of games accounting for 90% of market share were playable.
Ignoring the Steam Deck, most Linux gamers are probably going to be older so that they have the funds and/or technical interest to setup a Linux machine. Which is going to remove the younger demographic which likely plays a different genre and has more available total free time for gaming.
As a young teen with nothing to do, I probably had some days in Summer where I clocked in 16 hours of gaming.
As someone who only plays videogames on Linux I have to say that it is a surprisingly good experience, even with an Nvidia Card. Some things just are unavailable, e.g. the new Battlefield, mostly due to developers wanting to insert very specific Anti-Cheat software.
But so much just works, old games, new games, singleplayer, multiplayer.
Honestly I feel like this is the last big wall for a lot of creative pros. Affinity Photo is closing in on Photoshop-level capability, and things like Bottles + Wine can actually run older versions of Creative Cloud surprisingly well now.
The real issue isn’t capability but just adoption (IMO): most studios and agencies are chained to Adobe’s ecosystem. If even one major studio publicly switched pipelines to Linux, the floodgates would probably open to actually allow this.
The launcher is a bit annoying at times but what finally made me commit ot the switch was when I realized that Anno 1800 and the demo for Anno 117 were running flawlessly.
I also recently finished AC Origins for the first time on my Linux machine.
However I don't play multiplayer ever and apparently that's where most issues are.
Was the demo through Steam or through Ubisoft Connect launcher?
I'm a huge Anno fan and I play Anno 1800 like all the time. I own that game on the Ubisoft platform. If Anno 117 runs flawlessly, I maybe will cancel the preorder on ubisoft and get it on Steam...
I've been full-time Linux again for about 12 months, gaming isn't my main problem anymore. I think the only thing I'm having a bit of difficulty with is trying to get Jedi Knight working without crashing my entire computer.
Biggest problem I'm running into now is replacing all my music mixing tools. It's getting there, but it's a whole process.
Funny. About 50% of my steam games do not run on linux and while many can be installed they usually come with all kinds of glitches and issues.
The harsh reality is that until linux requires absolutely zero extra lift for end users, windows will still be the default for the overwhelming majority.
God i hate windows but they are the only company who gives a damn about gaming anymore.
I don't think its Microsoft directly that care about gaming, There are a few factors at play. but every time a game is ported to a Playstation/Switch its being ported to a form of Linux, and in most cases the Graphics APIs are the same. Its the companies making the game have no incentive to port to Linux if the tiny user base is fine with Proton and dealing with its hacks.
Now look at what percentage of time users spend playing windows game is spent in a game that works on Linux. This raw game count metric is sqeued because everything someone releases a Unity game it will most likely work out of the box. Due to there not being that many game engines actively being used in modern times the scope is not huge. Bigger issues like Linux not having good enough security means that anticheats do not allow it.
See how with mac os, games like LoL and Valorant do not need a kernel anticheat because the operating system provides enough security.
LoL didn't have kernel-level anticheat for the majority of it's lifetime; when it was added to the game, Apple had removed kexts from the OS entirely. And Valorant doesn't support macOS in the first place, presumably because it didn't run Riot's Ring 0 anticheat at-launch.
I've gone over to Linux after using Windows for 25 years.
As someone who enjoys older games, I am pleasantly surprised that Wine (with dxvk and cnc-ddraw) lets me run more games in a better way than I was able to on Windows.
I can run some 16-bit games on a 64-bit OS!
Games that rudely switch to fullscreen, I can run in Wine Virtual Desktop. Previously on Windows, I had to configure hacks like DxWnd and it didn't always work.
I only wish Wine also allowed me to zoom 2x or 3x, but this is where Gamescope comes in:
Also there is a potential to use a different Wine configuration (prefix) for every game specifically. So far I haven't had to resort to this.I noticed some Unity games waste disk space with gigabytes of zeroes, Linux lets me run them from inside a compressed SquashFS image, this even makes the game load faster:
I encountered a game that crashes due to multiprocessor system, the fix is simple, restricting it to one CPU:> Games that rudely switch to fullscreen, I can run in Wine Virtual Desktop. Previously on Windows, I had to configure hacks like DxWnd and it didn't always work.
Maybe Wine could be ported to Windows :-)
There will be a day when Microsoft ships a "Windows" that cuts all legacy compatibility except for an included distribution of Wine.
Microsoft might not do it, but there's always reactos [1]
[1] https://reactos.org/
You can already run it in WSL2, apparently.
Reminds me of the mention of "contiguous zeroes" that used to be in the Apple App Store docs.[1] Which seemed like just a backhanded way to say "we encrypt and then compress so don't expect easy compression."
I suppose this might be asset padding or perhaps these are raw textures with full alpha sections? Still, it seems pretty strange. What game, what asset?
[1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/42478186/app-size-on-app...
Can you elaborate on Unity wasting disk space on gigabytes of zeroes?
How did you discover that? Is it intentional on Unity's part? Percentage-wise, are we talking 2% of a 100GB game, or 50% of a 4GB game?
I can't find anything about it online.
I suppose that is an issue how a specific game was made, not inherent to Unity.
I like to look inside game files and a .zip archive of 1GB unpacking to ~10GB game made me suspicious.
My first guess would be it has lots of uncompressed images or badly compressed videos as artifacts.
Same, but games run uncompressed assets as an optimization measure to trade disk usage for CPU usage, depending on which is the bottleneck for their particular game (iiuc)
So it'd be surprising to me if a developer chose to use uncompressed/lightly compressed assets, and compressing them caused performance to increase; because you're intentionally choosing the tradeoff in the opposite direction the developer did
Of course, there are game developers that are less technical and may not have knowingly made that tradeoff in which case all bets are off, but the games made by those developers tend not to be the kind that require beefy machines to run at 60fps+
Same! Fallout New Vegas runs phenomenally on Linux but struggles on Windows. Same with Call of Duty 2 and even some newer titles like Borderlands 2.
OTVDM (based on Wine) allows you to run 16-bit programs on 64-bit Windows, so it's not just a Linux thing.
Neat. I am in the habit of using the kernel squashfs with privileges. TIL about squashfuse.
I'm never going back. If something changes and the only option is Windows or consoles I'll just stop buying new games or take up another hobby.
Being able to use sane scripting to solve problems, ZFS snapshots to undo bad mod installs, using the same system for development, and so on is no longer something I'm willing to give up. I've also started amassing a small collection of Cloud Init configs that set up game servers inside LXD containers. Some of these have native Linux binaries but a few only have Windows servers. They run perfectly well through Wine.
Anyone here even vaguely interested, I encourage you to just try it. I use Ubuntu and it works great on both AMD and Nvidia cards for me. What have you got to lose?
Pop OS! With NVIDIA GPU here.
Shit just works. When it doesn't, changing the proton version usually fixes it.
Way better than Windows.
I've stopped even checking protondb before getting a game these days. Pretty much unless they've gone out of their way to make it not work (which is mostly competitive games, so you can tell beforehand), it works.
I realize by posting that here on HN I'm tempting people to send me the ProtonDB garbage tier list, but it's true for the types of games I play.
I must be the one Data Scientist in the world whose PopOS has twice failed to boot after updates. To the point I have give up on it.
My stack is so vanilla (nvidia, python, R) I can’t think what the issue is. Maybe hardware.
Give Fedora a shot. You can run that cosmic desktop on it.
Same setup here, one game setup I've hit but this will be a rare problem, is StarCraft Remastered. Wine has an issue with audio processing which I can't seem to configure my way out of. It pegs all 32 threads and still stutters. Thankfully this game can likely run on an actual potato, so I have a separate mini PC running windows for this when I want to get my ass kicked on battle.net.
Also have the same setup. Very few issues. Been very happy with the switch
After being impressed with my Steam Deck, earlier this year I purchased an RX 9070XT (my first card from team red since the Radeon 9800 Pro) for my gaming PC and switched to linux full time.
Now hundreds of hours in, I have nothing interesting to write about it. For me and the games I play it's been a seamless transition.
I found myself just never using my PC after getting a steamdeck. I had the deck plugged in to my TV most of the time. I recently just installed Bazzite on my PC and moved it to the TV so now I play on that all the time. What Valve has done to make gaming on linux work is remarkable.
I remember the days of having to manually install steam in Wine and how only a few games would work like that.
Ive been yearning for the days when using linux in daily life isnt "interesting" but just something you do. It feels great
I realize this is not evenly distributed across all hardware and distros, but I really think we're here for a lot of use cases.
For gaming. For any somewhat smaller market software it’s not great. I had a look at DJ software and while they all support macOS. Nothing supports Linux and they are bugged out in Wine too.
In case you don't own a Steam Deck and would like to see how much of your library would run on Linux:
1. Go to your library
2. Click the filter button
3. Under "hardware support" you'll see a dropdown "Steam Deck" with 4 options, here's some explanation what they mean:
Verified - Means this game 100% works on Linux (and Deck), which is verified by Valve
Playable - Means this game works on Linux (and Deck) but it might have some tiny issues (e.g. font size)
Untested - Might work, but not tested
So to check if your games would run pretty nicely either filter on "Verified" games or "Verified or playable" games and it filters out everything which will or might not run at all.
You'll be surprised how much games can run on Linux these days -- thanks to the massive effort Valve puts in Proton and some devs (including Valve) publishing native Linux builds of their games on Steam, and even things you might not even consider at all like Skyrim or Oblivion with all your favorite mods (!)
Also in some / many cases even "unsupported" games work out of the box or needs only minimal tweaking. AFAIK most of the issues are with online competitive games which uses anti-cheat.
I’ve hit more broken games due to GPU firmware bugs than due to Linux compatibility.
Windows users with my GPU report the same symptoms as I hit, fwiw.
Or use ProtonDB https://www.protondb.com/explore
To be fair, the Steam Deck support level is a bit arbitrary and some Verified games may work worse than some Untested games.
The only game that I had an issue with is The Unfinished Swan which I bought on Steam after having enjoyed playing it on a PS3 (good enough to buy twice). I couldn't get it to work initially with it just going to a blank screen (not the game itself which ironically does start with an all white screen) no matter my tinkering with Proton versions. However, tried it again a few months ago and it worked perfectly with default settings.
2003 me thought Wine is a dead end project and a waste of developer time. Granted valve put a lot of effort into Proton but they wouldn't even have considered it without the massive amount of work done before, kudus to all the non cynical wine devs
2003 me was optimistic that wine was a dead-end, with games like Neverwinter Nights, and Quake 3 Arena having native linux releases.
The Year of Linux on the Desktop was near, and wine would surely be a temporary stop-gap.
Turns out Linux needed a stable abi for games and Wine provided.
Which amusingly, also serves as a stable API for Windows now too.
for the longest time, no one in linux land cared about API stability or backward compatibility - then app/game developers realised if they could port a portion of Win32 to Linux via WINE, they could just target the win32 API or at least a portion of it and so long as WINE was installed, their app/game would always work. i find it a bit ironic; desktop Linux is being enabled by re-implementing APIs from another OS.
Aside on whether it was going to be useful, I was alway impressed by the Wine developers, extremely knowledgeable hackers, masters of both Windows and Unix.
Love this so much and do so much of my gaming on Linux now.
I just wish I could run Linux on my MacBook Pro so I could actually play games on this beautiful, portable, power-efficient criminally nerfed masterpiece of a laptop.
What percentage of Windows games still run on current Windows?
I never managed to get anything close to 90% of my library to run on the same windows installation, but I gave up years ago, and just use Linux instead.
I've been happily playing Overwatch 2 on Linux for a couple months now. I need gamescope to get it to play nicely with my multiple monitors, and it crashes maybe once a month, but performance is great and I have no major complaints. I'm never going back to Windows, except for work where it isn't optional :(
Which OS and amd or nvidia? With win10 expired I just might make the switch on my gaming pc
I switched to Slackware in the early oughts, but gaming was hit and miss at best with Wine. The occasional native game (like Neverwinter Nights) was always welcome.
I've dual booted to game for the last seven or eight years because of coworkers and family nagging me to play games with them, but now I don't need to. I haven't come across a game that won't run flawlessly on Linux (through Steam) for a couple of years now. I can enjoy my nightly game of Deep Rock Galactic or Necesse without being part of the botnet.
No further requirement to run Windows!
I recently ran into a game where online match making was broken in windows, but worked just fine in Linux. I felt like I was trapped in the upsidedown.
I tried GOG version of Soul Reaver and some polygons and UI kept disappearing depending on the direction the character was facing. On Windows 10. I should try Linux.
That means 10% of windows games use invasive anti-cheat?
According to ProtonDB[1], about 7-10% of the top 100 and top 1000 games are "borked", but the actual reason why can be nuanced. However, these days it is almost always anti-cheat.
[1] https://www.protondb.com/dashboard
Anti-cheat will be basically impossible to overcome until studios specifically cater to linux. I'm not sure to what extent this is even possible given how hackable linux is, and how many variants there are, but it's plausible a blessed distro with a signed kernel (somehow? Not sure if this is a thing) might support it.
With a signed kernel and secure boot it should in principle be similiar to Windows 11? But with DMA based hacks on the rise I'm not sure it matters either way.
Which is the same reason that we lock the data centers. If someone has physical access to the hardware, there are so many more breaching vectors.
Anywhere I could read more about the DMA attacks?
You can probably look up DMA cards. They plug into a PCIe slot and get full access to inspect and modify memory.
So, Game Genie for 2025?
Yea, all the really popular online games are gonna be in that 10%.
All i want is rocket league :(
At least tf2 works
Rocket League works just fine for me, via Proton. I have over 4k hours in, each one of them done from Linux.
BakkesMod also works, thanks to https://github.com/CrumblyLiquid/BakkesLinux
Rocket League has a platinum rating on ProtonDB: https://www.protondb.com/app/252950
Does that include multiplayer? As far as i know, multiplayer was killed a couple years ago, which is actually what i meant by “works on Linux”
Yeah I have hundreds of hours or more in Rocket League on Linux, all competitive multiplayer. I use the Heroic launcher: https://heroicgameslauncher.com/
YES! Use the Proton version, not the native Linux version.
Rocket League was native on Linux at one point.
Before Epic Games acquired it...
I was able to get a new install of Rocket League working recently using Heroic Launcher! https://heroicgameslauncher.com/
Perhaps there is an opportunity for an open source reimplementation like OpenMW or OpenRA?
FWIW, Rocket League works just fine on Linux, but you need to set it to the Proton compatibility, not the native Linux client.
I too recall having issues with the anti-cheat last I tried (years ago at this point).
How did those issues get fixed? Did they abandon the anti cheat, or does the anti cheat now work under proton?
Does Rocket League no longer work with Proton? It used to work even better than both the native Linux and Windows versions for me back in the day. If not, what changed?
Nice to see this. Worth noting that a lot of Windows (or DOS) games past may also not run well on current Windows versions. The anti-cheat issue is likely to persist for at lest a few more years... though I think the relative success of the Steam Deck itself has moved the bar significantly in terms of demands for support.
I do think there's a few hiccups still with Linux support. The shift up to 6.16 kernel has itself resolved many of the issues I'd been having in the past. If you're on an older LTS that hasn't moved, you're likely to see more issues than with a more current distro.
> Worth noting that a lot of Windows (or DOS) games past may also not run well on current Windows versions.
To be fair, anything old that wasn't famous has a decent chance to be broken under WINE too. It might just be a single call to some obscure animation API or something, but it can be enough to break the entire game.
I've actually had better experiences with Wine with older games than newer Windows.
Many old games work well. Check out protonDB before trying, but I have had good experience running older GoG games through proton.
If it's on GOG it probably wasn't that obscure.
Also, sometimes the original version doesn't work but the GOG version does, or even vice versa. I've seen all sorts of oddities.
I am an avid linux user but never switched my gaming PC to linux, until the Win10 > Win11 debacle which has made me switch.
I am using EndeavorOS, my first Arch flavoured distro, it's excellent. Honestly it has all "just worked". Drivers were auto installed, I pointed Steam to my existing library on an NTFS drive originally used by windows, and it just plays my existing library fine.
Cyberpunk2077, Red Dead 2, Starfield all objectively AAA modern games, working fine. I even get a bit better performance in some areas, comparable in others.
I can swap back to windows and it still runs the same library. I really didn't expect it to work like that.
The only thing I have had to troubleshoot is getting a Quest3 VR headset to work, and an Alpha stage game which others are getting to work, I just haven't bothered to chase it down.
Nice! I'm curious if you experience any difference in IO performance (e.g game loading times)?
Last I tried NTFS on Linux it was stable but not fast, especially for writes. If it's not a notable difference between Windows and Linux then that's a big improvement from those days.
I think you could probably get a decent IO performance boost and reduce loading times by moving the library over to something like ext4 or xfs, at the cost of portability.
I play (and work) exclusively on Linux for 17 years -- most games run fine, yes, except for competitive ones (Rust, League of Legends etc), because they require kernel-level backdoors to spy on the OS kernel-level cheats.
As someone who only has a windows machine to play games, specifically driving sims, I really wish my hardware worked on Linux.
My only limitation to ditch Windows for games is my nvidia card. I wonder if their drivers will become better before I go for an upgrade. I do have a Steam Deck for lower requirement games.
Nvidia drivers are already much better now. How old is your card? I have a 2080ti and once you get through the initial setup it works fine
I run an intel CPU and an NVIDIA 4080. Works great on pop os. I do AI shit, too, without issues.
NVIDIA is pretty good on Linux lately. Id always wait a week before updating drivers tho.
NVidia has probably the best support for Linux. None of the "game" versus "studio" nonsense, either.
Nah amd gpus work best in linux. Official mainline support in the kernel + mesa.
There are lots of niches like that. The other big one is competitive games with invasive anti cheat.
I finally got rid of the last Windows gaming box because Windows 10 started warning me about not getting security updates. So far no compatibility issues under Debian with Steam, but I play mostly single-player or multiplayer strategy.
EDIT: I remember now that Civilization 5 for Linux would crash frequently. I switched to Proton and it's been fine since.
Microsoft is bleeding a large-ish userbase with win 11: the gamers. They’re left with corpo and the laggard users who are aware their computer is not friendly , are not aware they can change OS yet. Soon they could rename it to Corporate Windows
It's been months since I've booted into Windows to play a game. Feels amazing. The only exception I've run into is heavy anticheat titles, like trying to play on Faceit CS2 servers.
I can live without that though. I don't think I'll bother setting up a Windows partition on my next PC.
I think the last time I had Windows installed was right around the release of Proton in 2018. Those initial releases were not great but the trend was very obvious.
There comes a point were you just don't miss it. The only moments that it is apparent is that disassociation you have when someone else just assumes you run Windows. I don't blame them, I am statistically the odd one there, but that is when you have to figure out things your way.
Proton/Wine is so good these days. Rarely have I had an issue running a game in the last 3 or 4 years. Sometimes EA/Ubisoft games that have their own special launchers don't work immediately, but ProtonDB and the Proton GitHub issues are great resources to get them going.
I remember when Cyberpunk 2077 came out it didn't work at first, but the Proton and Glorious Egg Roll devs got it running within a few days. Legends.
Even many games that support native linux run better under wine.
Out of the 150-isg games in my library, the only one I have had any issue with is 'From Dust' released in 2011. This is part because of the Ubisoft launcher and some video codex issues, but even so. Switching the too and from the game a few times seems to get past this.
About a month back, a demo for Lumines Arise came out and it fired up without issue, didn't even think to check ProtonDB because it has become so reliable. I suspect a big part of this is because Steamdeck has been popular enough to have it be targeted for Proton compatibility day 1.
> Even many games that support native linux run better under wine.
The same is often true on macOS, too – running games through CrossOver is often better than the native port. The reality is that there simply aren't enough professional game devs on Linux and macOS platforms to polish that last 20% and make all the difference.
Next laptop is probably going to be the quietest PC I can find that still runs linux. I love my Air but I've been eyeballing a new system as my M1 is getting a little long in the tooth
I have a pc I built when the 2080 TI came out. How is Linux support for the supporting drivers for those cards today? The machine is still more than powerful enough for my needs but I haven't used it in a couple years because Windows really is just complete garbage. I'd like to be able to take advantage of new to moderately old hardware without dealing with Windows.
1070 TI works perfect on Arch for the past ~6 months with latest drivers (better than Debian stable!). This card is old enough that only the closed source drivers are supported, but it seems to work fine.
You will be absolutely fine
If it helps I used to use a gaming laptop for work that had a RTX 2060 mobile version, I was able to run some recent games like Elden Ring (including mods & online play), and some older but still demanding titles like Witcher 3. All of this without tinkering too much on a oob Ubuntu LTS install (I later switched to popOS because I don't like snaps that much).
Someone else recommended PopOSin other comments. I pulled up the page but haven't looked at it extensively. In what ways is it different from a recent Ubuntu LTS install?
Well too. I formatted my Windows drive about a year ago to use it for games.
As Satya Nadella runs Windows OS and Office into the ground.
I still can get my desktop gaming fix, at least.
Dual-boot user here, while this is definitely good to hear, but I think it's even more important that how many players could ditch Windows and switch to Linux for their games.
Suppose I play one of the 10% games that wouldn't work on Linux, I'd still need to keep my Windows installation around, right?
Anecdotally, it's way above 90%.
I think the only game in the last 2 years I haven't been able to run is battlefield 6.
Any game that is reasonably popular has a very good chance of running. Just go to protondb and anything gold and above is generally good to go.
I couldn't run Delta Force [1], due to anti-cheat as far as i can tell.
Shame about Battlefield 6, some of my friends are playing that and it would be fun to join them. Oh well. Fortunately they're mostly still playing Helldivers 2 as well, and that works fine.
[1] https://www.protondb.com/app/2507950
That anecdote goes the other way if you skew towards popular multiplayer games, since those are the ones with anti-cheat. Someone who plays League, Apex, PUBG, and Destiny 2, and was really looking forward to BF6, will be mightily disappointed. You're unlikely to be invested in all of those games, but a pretty large amount of people are very, very invested in at-least one of those, which, unfortunately, makes Linux a non-starter for them.
Even if 99% of games worked fine on Linux, a large amount of people spend 50+% of their time in-game in one of those games, so it doesn't end up feeling like 90+% of games work.
Thankfully, the corollary of that is that single-player games pretty much all work, barring some edge cases, like very recent titles that haven't had the kinks ironed out yet.
The death of a server browser and privately owned servers led to this. The whole anti-cheat situation grew from publishers wanting to control the whole experience.
Besides, the gaming industry keeps shooting themselves in the foot by only supporting Windows (Mac is a thing too). That is slowly changing, but so many game devs are drinking the Microsoft koolaid they don't even consider using another graphics API other than DirectX. Many other decisions like that as well.
It really is impressive how many they are willing to leave behind. A quick check gives about 19% of the market.
But anti-cheat was first developed in a time where server browsers were the norm. Punkbuster was developed back in 2000 (independently of Valve) for HL1/CS, which had no matchmaking system. So you're just plain wrong about the motivation.
Not really sure why you're trying to draw a connection between private servers and anti-cheat, I understand if that's your pet grievance but they really aren't related. Games were already implementing anti-cheat even when server browsers were the norm. The "anti-cheat situation" grew out of cheaters killing multiplayer games. What are you even trying to imply with "wanting to control the whole experience"? Letting your players actually play the game they paid for is a bad thing now? When cheaters are in the game, you do not get to play it in any meaningful sense, and in short order a literal sense as servers rapidly die off. Note that I'm not endorsing kernel anti-cheat, but you didn't say kernel anti-cheat, but instead went on a polemic against the concept of anti-cheat in general.
> Besides, the gaming industry keeps shooting themselves in the foot by only supporting Windows (Mac is a thing too). That is slowly changing, but so many game devs are drinking the Microsoft koolaid they don't even consider using another graphics API other than DirectX. Many other decisions like that as well.
The gaming industry is thoroughly multi-platform, and many games that are limited to Windows on general-purpose PCs aren't so because the require DirectX, since they've also been developed for Playstation where DirectX isn't a thing.
Support for Mac can be somewhat challenging, partly because the platform (including the hardware) is so different from other general-purpose PCs, and partly because Apple doesn't particularly care about backwards compatibility, and will happily break applications if it suits their interest.
However, a developer that doesn't support Linux does so because they don't want to for whatever reason, not because the technical bar is too high. With the work that has gone into Wine, Proton, and other Windows compatibility libraries these days, there's a good chance that a Windows game will "just work" unless the developer does something to actively inhibit it.
My experience was that every game ran.. but also nearly every game had issues with controls being different than Windows(mouse sensitivity was way off), control pad not working, screen or font scaling issues, and full screen wonkyness.
Somehow changing the font scaling in Linux caused the game to be scaled by a similiar amount.. so 2x font scaling = full screen is 2x bigger than actual monitor.. and I can only see 1/4th the screen.
> I think the only game in the last 2 years I haven't been able to run is battlefield 6.
Neither has anyone else, if they bought it directly from EA.
It's a bit painful hearing all of the success stories on this page. I ran into endless bugs running games under Wine, eventually gave up and bought a vanilla PC just to run Windows for games, and that still gives me endless bugs with most major games, but somewhat less than Linux does. With my level of hardware fu I should stick to consoles, but mods make games accessible to me.
Similar anecdote, in the past week there have been two separate games that I wanted to try out, and both were nonfunctional on linux. One had a completely black screen, and the other ignored all mouse/keyboard input. For each of them I spent 15 minutes tinkering with winecfg, installing packages, googling error messages, etc. Eventually I gave up and booted back into windows where they worked perfectly.
How long ago was this?
That you say "running games under Wine" is a hint it was a while ago, the modern way to do this is to install Steam and let it handle the compatibility layer.
I think the difference is that we aren't talking about stock Wine, but Steam+Proton (which uses Wine, but just makes everything seamless).
I uninstalled Windows completely. There are many, many more games that work on my Linux PC than on my Mac.
> eventually gave up and bought a vanilla PC
What were you trying to run games on before you bought the so called "vanilla" PC?
A random assemblage of parts running Ubuntu, upon which most things that weren't Windows games ran fairly reliably for a decade plus. As far as I can tell nothing challenges a computer like games, except games from an alien OS.
Original source:
https://boilingsteam.com/windows-games-compatibility-on-linu...
nixos on zfs is a fun one, allowing you to tailor specific environments to specific games if you so choose. Not that I've needed to very often. Steam mostly Just Works(tm) now.
I think it must be at least four years since I've had to boot into Windows for a game. It's wonderful.
(Windows) Gta v online won't play on (linux) steamdeck due to some battleye anticheat nonsense.
What matters if it will run if anti cheat software then breaks it?
Shame on you Rockstar (although cheating ruined the game on PC there's been enough time to fix it).
Number of games is a weird statistic.
What about market share of play time?
Both metrics have their uses. Personally I'm not all that interested in playing the latest hit AAA games. I am much more likely to play indie games or older games, which probably means I play more titles but the titles I play tend not to have much market share (individually or even in aggregate). You could say I'm an outlier but I feel like a lot of Linux nerds probably have similar gaming habits.
So for me it's better than 90% of all games are playable on Linux, than if a handful of games accounting for 90% of market share were playable.
The latest hit AAA games also tend to work day one these days. The only thing that doesn’t work is competitive online games.
Ignoring the Steam Deck, most Linux gamers are probably going to be older so that they have the funds and/or technical interest to setup a Linux machine. Which is going to remove the younger demographic which likely plays a different genre and has more available total free time for gaming.
As a young teen with nothing to do, I probably had some days in Summer where I clocked in 16 hours of gaming.
yes, but not marketshare played on linux, but rather, how much of the marketshare that's currently played on windows would be playable on linux.
Will MS implement some kind of software signing that breaks wine?
Not impossible but that might be something that would eventually force developers onto tools that don't have that restriction.
A walled garden doesn't just keep people in, but it keeps other out. And once folks jump out they aren't likely to jump back in.
I keep having issues with Proton (on steamdeck). With that said, these are primarily older games from the 90s. Modern games generally run hassle free.
It would be amazing to have data specifically and only for steam games.
This post gives me hope that I can ditch windows forever for all things soon! Games is the only reason I do windows for development these days.
There is ProtonDB: https://www.protondb.com
As someone who only plays videogames on Linux I have to say that it is a surprisingly good experience, even with an Nvidia Card. Some things just are unavailable, e.g. the new Battlefield, mostly due to developers wanting to insert very specific Anti-Cheat software.
But so much just works, old games, new games, singleplayer, multiplayer.
Sadly Nucleus Coop us heavily focused on Windows
Am I the only one who finds the linked ProtonDB dashboard hard to understand? https://www.protondb.com/dashboard
It could use some help from a data visualization designer to make it clearer and easier to read.
In terms of compatibility and performance, there is a noticeable increase over the last years since Proton came up.
Racing wheels are still not well supported IMO. Although on Linux you can map a racing wheel to any other peripheral and work this around.
Another thing is that streaming experience is not as good on Linux as it is on Windows. OBS exists but the whole ecosystem around it is largely not.
Still... Linux is my choice of OS.
I have an ordinary logitech G29 (I think). It works uneventfully in all games I tried (including force feedback).
I'll have to retest then, few months ago I had various issues with this.
There's really not many reasons left to not use Linux. With windows 11 it's only going to get better as more refugees switch
If Adobe apps worked on Linux, I'd switch in a heartbeat.
Honestly I feel like this is the last big wall for a lot of creative pros. Affinity Photo is closing in on Photoshop-level capability, and things like Bottles + Wine can actually run older versions of Creative Cloud surprisingly well now.
The real issue isn’t capability but just adoption (IMO): most studios and agencies are chained to Adobe’s ecosystem. If even one major studio publicly switched pipelines to Linux, the floodgates would probably open to actually allow this.
If your choice of OS is the one that can run Adobe products better, they work better on macOS anyways
I generally agree, but it's hard to fault people for either not buying apple hardware or preferring the IBM PC-type OS.
How are Ubisoft games running on Linux nowadays? I think that is the only thing holding me back honestly.
I think typically the problem with Ubisoft is dealing with their launcher.
You can check individual games via ProtonDB e.g. Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag: https://protondb.com/app/242050
The launcher is a bit annoying at times but what finally made me commit ot the switch was when I realized that Anno 1800 and the demo for Anno 117 were running flawlessly.
I also recently finished AC Origins for the first time on my Linux machine.
However I don't play multiplayer ever and apparently that's where most issues are.
Was the demo through Steam or through Ubisoft Connect launcher?
I'm a huge Anno fan and I play Anno 1800 like all the time. I own that game on the Ubisoft platform. If Anno 117 runs flawlessly, I maybe will cancel the preorder on ubisoft and get it on Steam...
We need to have a steam os hardware map … or an easy to use linux installation for a hardware path for game playing.
For some definition of "run". I heard Wine silently stubs some graphics calls.
And proton was found to get better frame rates than native Windows on some games.
Dual booting from 2 SSDs is a pretty solid solution, as some programs are windows only. YMMV =3
I've been full-time Linux again for about 12 months, gaming isn't my main problem anymore. I think the only thing I'm having a bit of difficulty with is trying to get Jedi Knight working without crashing my entire computer.
Biggest problem I'm running into now is replacing all my music mixing tools. It's getting there, but it's a whole process.
> Biggest problem I'm running into now is replacing all my music mixing tools.
What are you finding that works for this? I know there's a couple decent DAWs, but running Windows-only plugins was a nightmare last time I tried.
Funny. About 50% of my steam games do not run on linux and while many can be installed they usually come with all kinds of glitches and issues.
The harsh reality is that until linux requires absolutely zero extra lift for end users, windows will still be the default for the overwhelming majority.
God i hate windows but they are the only company who gives a damn about gaming anymore.
I don't think its Microsoft directly that care about gaming, There are a few factors at play. but every time a game is ported to a Playstation/Switch its being ported to a form of Linux, and in most cases the Graphics APIs are the same. Its the companies making the game have no incentive to port to Linux if the tiny user base is fine with Proton and dealing with its hacks.
Now look at what percentage of time users spend playing windows game is spent in a game that works on Linux. This raw game count metric is sqeued because everything someone releases a Unity game it will most likely work out of the box. Due to there not being that many game engines actively being used in modern times the scope is not huge. Bigger issues like Linux not having good enough security means that anticheats do not allow it.
See how with mac os, games like LoL and Valorant do not need a kernel anticheat because the operating system provides enough security.
LoL didn't have kernel-level anticheat for the majority of it's lifetime; when it was added to the game, Apple had removed kexts from the OS entirely. And Valorant doesn't support macOS in the first place, presumably because it didn't run Riot's Ring 0 anticheat at-launch.
What point are you trying to make here?