Nearly 90% of Windows Games Now Run on Linux

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:

    gamescope -S integer -F nearest --borderless wine game.exe

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:

    mkdir ./game
    squashfuse ./game.squashfs ./game
    pushd ./game
    wine game.exe
    popd
    sleep 1
    umount ./game
    rmdir ./game

    taskset --cpu-list 1 wine game.exe

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?

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.

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 (!)

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

Now imagine Apple put the same amount of effort and resources into a Proton-like layer for macOS.

The M-series hardware is perfectly fine for most games, overpowered even. What is lacking are the actual games. Very few companies bother with Metal ports of games.

Build a compatibility layer so we can just install any Windows game from Steam and start playing.

And they do run quite well, out of the box.

On Linux, I've been having a good run for years now. Steam's Proton is fantastic, if the thing doesn't work, I just select another Proton version, and try again. Or look at ProtonDB on how others did it.

I have also tried the Heroic Launcher, which is similarly good, and open source even. Just create an entry for a game or software, select the executable, select the Proton / Wine version, and it's good to go. No need for an account or anything.

I also have a Steam Deck now, which natively runs Linux, and Steam, and Proton. I'm sure my game selection also matters, but my experience is that everything just works. Valve did a tremendous job with integration - standing on the Wine giant's shoulder, of course.

Multiplayer, specifically the nasty anti-cheat software is the last remaining bastion, I think. For that, I reboot into my Windows 10 LTSC.

What percentage of Windows games runs on Windows? I'm not trying to be funny; it's clearly less than 100%.

I've been personally running Linux on my gaming box for 2-3 years I think. AMD hardware, obviously. BF6 doesn't work (and perhaps never can work) because of its quite invasive anti-cheat, but there are so many games out there that it's not a big deal. Insurgency: Sandstorm is a vastly better game anyway.

I realize that this is probably a big deal for many people, though, but perhaps those people are better off with a Playstation anyway.

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!

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.

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 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.