Yeah I did. God bless WineDB.
Steam before proton was okay for stuff like Fallout 3. Needed some hackery with Wine prefixes and getting the right DLLs in there but eventually worked. Older GoG games like Alpha Centauri were fine with DosBox.
Proton is great. Cyberpunk 2077 on Ultra.
It was rough. I basically gave up on playing 3D games on Linux for the longest time and used a dualboot. Much less hassle.
What convinced me was when they verified Apex Legends, which was a game I was not expecting to be verified at all. Turns out Proton secretly got really good in all that time.
It’s hit or miss. A gold rated game on protondb performed terrible when I used a keyboard and mouse. Everything was smooth, but looking around was studdery. Even worse, the game failed to properly capture my mouse, so I kept getting stopped when my “cursor” hit the edge of the screen. I literally could not look around.
the stutter has to do with mouse capture too.
on my side changing to exclusive fullscreen helps, hope it helps you too!
The developers, in their infinite wisdom, decided to not make that an option.
Back when you had to install steam in wine and then for a while you would have native steam and wine steam in the same distro install. Now it’s so easy that I figure anyone talking shit about gaming on Linux only plays those rootkit anticheat shooters or hasn’t played games since having kids or something and have become one of those people that are shocked to hear what they thought were current gen consoles are actually really old already.
I actually found an old /home drive of mine this week where I had exactly this setup, so painful.
Trying to find the correct steamapps folder for the particular instance of the game and going through all the dot folders and wine folder structure… that hasn’t actually improved much now that I think about it.
Gaming on Linux in general has improved a lot more than the pollution levels in my town at least.
My 1999 setup running Slackware while playing Loki’s Civ CTP
What is that console looking thing in the bottom right corner?
Sylvartas is right, it’s an old flatbed scanner.
Could be a scanner
Yep, playing a Loki port of Myth II - Soulblighter on SuSE Linux, iirc 5.3 is one of my earliest memories of gaming on Linux. Must have been around… 25 years ago.
Around that time too, UT99 shipped with Linux binaries on the friggin cd
I fished a tower like that out of a dumpster and built my first gaming PC in that and ran Gentoo on it about 2005. Played CS 1.6 and WoW and had better performance in Linux than Windows at the time.
How many hard drives you have in that beast? I see enough ribbon cable to wrap a gift
Old story: There was a sale at a big box Electronics store on Seagate Barracuda SCSI-2 Wide 9.1GB drives and I bought 6 of them to give me a 40GB RAID-5 on an old mylex dac960 scsi raid card. Bigtime storage in 1999.
Those fed my 3:1 ratio mp3 sharing site that my uunet bot advertised haha.
That’s insane I absolutely love it. To put that in perspective, 1999 game storage requirements:
- GTA 2, 70 MB
- Quake III Arena, 70 MB
- SimCity 3000, 230 MB
- Everquest, 1 GB
First i thought you had a cat hiding there.
Kids these days don’t even know about TuxRacer?
Loved that game
I still play it on my Android TV.
Me. Minecraft worked just as well under either OS.
Just a fyi. Java edition works just as well under windows, linux and macos.
The newer bedrock edition works only on windows and consoles.
Kids where easier to exploit with a game store then linux users who remember the old days i guess.
For bedrock on Linux I’ve had good luck with mcpe launcher, I use it to play on a friends realm
Interesting, great to hear that it does work for those who want it.
Still wont touch bedrock with it with a 10m pole.
Wine and Cedega back in the early days, I played WiW in the Vanilla days on Suse Linux. My first foray into Linux was 2002 on a system that was decent for the time. I have fond memories of the first time I got my GeForce 3 card actually doing hardware acceleration. glxgears rendered hundreds of FPS.
cedega
Yeah, this definitely makes me feel old. 😅
PlayOnLinux was a good friend. Sometimes.
My first attempt to switch to Linux for my primary desktop was in 2007, and ended when my attempt to run WoW via WINE mostly worked, but had a weird an completely unfixable audio delay.
Proton (and Valve’s efforts on SteamOS and the Steam Deck more generally) have been an absolute godsend for Linux as a usable daily-driver.
I sometimes wish Proton was also available on macOS… But Wine is good enough I guess, and still works great for most games :)
Proton is just Wine from Valve. They add their own fixes and patches and whatnot and have an “experimental” branch you can try with games that don’t work right away, but it’s just Wine. Everything Valve does to Proton eventually makes it way back upstream to Wine proper. One reason Valve may not make it available for MacOS themselves is because they’re basing their SteamOS on Linux, and while MacOS and Linux are both Unix “like”, MacOS was/is more based on BSD, so the system calls may not always line up or work exactly the same when translating them. I do think however that Proton, or a modified version of it at least, is what Apple’s game development kit thingy leverages.
Everything Valve does to Proton eventually makes it way back upstream to Wine proper.
Ah okay, that’s nice. I wasn’t completely sure about that. At least if that’s the case and the projects are so related, I’m wondering why Proton doesn’t work on macOS. I could have imagined the code bases to start to differ more and more.
But I mean, I’m fine with Wine (or to be exact the Wine/Crossover version I can get with Homebrew).
Valve contributes a lot to Wine too
What you are looking for is called Whiskey :) There’s also a paid app that does it for macbooks with pre-Apple silicon
I looked at Whiskey but as far as I can see, that’s just… a Wine wrapper and not related to Proton.
I mean I appreciate the comment, thanks, but I have Wine installed via Homebrew and it works without any real problems.
I guess I’m behind in times as wouldn’t emulation cause the game to be slower on Linux than on Windows?
I tried switching to Linux when I was a kid, but figured out quickly that my scrap computer could only play my games natively. I’m not sure how it wouldn’t always be slower on Linux unless the game was built for Linux.
One would think that, but I’ve seen many claims that it actually runs faster. I wouldn’t know personally, I haven’t used Windows in 5 years
So from my experience, I replaced my 8+ year old omen laptop with an MSI 3 years ago then installed garuda on the omen. Tested some games on each and the performance was similar until graphics were set to ultra just dye to the hardware difference. Before installing linux that laptop performance was struggling, so it really breathed life back into it and made it viable again. Hell my wife uses it to play stardew valley now and I used it to play ffxiv a few times.
Since 2012! PlayOnLinux was the closest thing to Proton then.
Actuslly wine was closest thing to proton, play on linux was nothing but a front end for managing wine software
After Steam officially released its native Linux client I played Half Life 1, 2 and “Brutal Legend” because they all had native Linux ports before proton was a thing. Before that I remember playing games like Sauerbraten (quake like fps), Battle for Wesnoth (my wife and I still play this together), Frozen Bubble, LBreakout2 and several other Linux native games.
Quake III Arena also had a native Linux version.
And Quake, Quake 2, Descent, UT, Tribes 2.
I remember that! I had Unreal Tournament 2004 and it technically had a native Linux version but it wasn’t on the CD. You had to extract most of the files from the CD and go download the Linux executable file from the unreal website to drop into the installation folder.
Alpha Centauri baby! Still one of my favourite games, I wonder if it still works
Works for me through Heroic Launcher
