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.
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.
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 would never have considered gaming on Linux until the Steam Deck came out. When reviews said it's actually awesome, I became convinced to try it. Basically, the deck pushed me over the edge to ditch Windows altogether. So suck on that, Satya! No wonder MS is trying so hard to stop other OEMs from making Linux handhelds.
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.
My last foray into Linux gaming was back in the early-2010s, and I was mostly just trying to get EVE Online to run unsuccessfully. I was running a laptop that was top if the line (in 2009) and my PCs were cobbled together from old Dells and HPs donated by family and friends or retired and given away by my company IT team.
Steam on Linux was nice, and would show you which games in your library had Linux native versions to install. I held out on that and browser gamed for a while. Played a lot of Runescape and Minecraft. Taught myself to code a bit, but didn't really get anywhere with that.
Eventually I had money and time to put together a "proper" gaming PC, and of course I put Windows on it since I wanted to get an NVidia graphics card as I'd had so much trouble with the AMD drivers on my laptop.
Ran Windows for gaming and kept Linux on the laptop since then. First PC ran Win7, which i loved. Next one ran Win 8, which I hated. Current one was running Win 10, which was meh, and I've only soured on it over time. Made the switch back to Linux last week after I got tired of M$ constantly asking me if I want to try Copilot on /both/ my work and personal PCs.
Proton is fucking great. Never going back. The old laptop is still running strong after 15 years. It's got BunsenLabs installed at the moment.
Took me multiple attempts and multiple weeks to get cs 1.5 running on red hat around 2000. I still remember searching and downloading random rpms online. If I'm not mistaken the website was called meatsource or something like that.
Anyway, we have come a long way since then but the inner workings are the same.
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.
So much minecraft and kerbal space program. They were two of the very few games that ran naively and had cracked Linux files available on public trackers. I had to put a minimum of 1000 hours of minecraft using the clit mouse that old Dell laptops used to have. I hate that they got rid of those and now the only modern laptops with the clit mouse are Lenovos which I hate. Lenovo ruined ThinkPads.
I ran a half-life dedicated server on Linux for years!
minecraft and team fortress 2 for 3 years.
end of list.
Beta Minecraft accounts for at least half of all my gaming. I'd be just fine without proton.
Hey, Nexuiz rocked.
Everybody? That thing with coloured bubbles? The network thing with all the OSs? The thing where you had to guess the position of things with lasers in a grid, all the breakout clones, innumerable tetris, doom (or was that in Irix?). Also there were lots of games if you installed the games packages. Like Mille Bornes (or whatever it was called in English) or hangman, or many other crowd pleasers.
Circa 2015-2016. I was still dual booting Win 10 and Ubuntu at the time. It was a pain in the ass.
I once got The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion to run on Ubuntu, but some strange Bethesda bugs managed to creep into the experience. There was a giant 2D tree taking up a chunk of the skybox that I couldn't get rid of, so I made it headcannon when I was playing it.
Luckily when I tried it on the Steam Deck not too long ago, this bug was no longer present.
I started using Linux with Ubuntu 6.06 and at the time I was really into the game Jedi Academy. It used OpenGL and thus ran fairly well on Wine. I upgraded from an NVIDIA GeForce 4 MX420 to an ATI Radeon X1600Pro and the ATI drivers were absolute garbage so I kinda gave up on Linux gaming for a while. I was set on going NVIDIA on my next PC but around that time AMD bought ATI and opened up their documentation, leading to rapid improvements in the open source AMD drivers. Went with a Radeon HD 5870 and not long after I built that PC I was gaming in Wine again, though poorly on non OpenGL games still. Then Steam for Linux officially released and a lot of native games became available but I was still running Windows Steam in Wine as native Steam didn't play Windows games. Then the Gallium Nine project offered a way to play DX9 games with significantly improved performance and I played a lot of Skyrim on Linux as well as a lot of other DX9 games. Then Vulkan happened and soon DXVK and Proton and the modern Linux gaming landscape evolved quite rapidly until we got to where we are today.
No one is mentioning Tux Racer? Blasphemy!
Played WoW when it first came out with WINE. It was miserable. We had to mess with configs, install hacked patches, manually start jobs with scripts. And every patch broke something so you had to start from scratch again.
This was probably 2004/2005?
I was in the beta for the original World of Warcraft and restarted when it officially launched. This was 20 years ago, so memory is fuzzy, but somewhere along the way I was playing it in wine exclusively under Linux. Game updates were common and frequently broke wine, but I kid you not a patch was available within 24h. Yes, this forced me to compile my own wine, but it wasn't that difficult then. Together with "checkinstall" I could maintain a clean .deb package from the source code.
Some links I found in a quick search showing the challenges:
- https://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-games-33/world-of-warcraft-in-wine-success-485886/
- https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-311551-start-0.html
To be honest, keeping the game running in Linux sometimes felt as a fun side quest!
After that I was mostly able to play all my games in Linux, with some exceptions, obviously, that sometimes required me to install windows.
I tried to get Wine working for STALKER before Proton. Never managed lol
Who remembers Cedega. Had a lot of fun on that, both playing and configuring to play. Think I was running Fedora, or was it Mandrake/Mandriva. Man I remember having the drive to distro hop weekly at one point
I never got Proton working on my main distro (Debian), so I probably fall into this category. I did use Wine, but Wine is a lot harder to set up, and never ran games as well as Proton did.
Here is my major gaming history, since I started on Linux in 2007. Yes, I really could focus on a single game for years back then.
- 2007: Starcraft, in Wine
- 2007: Nethack, native
- 2011: Morrowind and Oblivion in Wine
- 2012: Minecraft, native
- 2014: sgt-puzzles, native
- 2016: Steam, got hundreds of native Linux games.
- 2017: Briefly got Steam and Path of Exile working inside a Wine instance.
- 2022: Steam deck, with the specific purpose of being able to run Proton on it.
- 2023: New Ubuntu installation, and Proton finally worked on my PC.
Today, I still prefer native Linux games. I mostly only use Proton when peer pressure for a multiplayer game required it. But I never use Wine any more.
I liked playing osu! on Linux through Wine since it offered much lower audio and input latency than you could achieve on Windows. Minecraft has also always been a safe bet on Linux (unless you enabled shaders, then it just turned into a visual abomination for just about every shaderpack).
Generally OpenGL games weren't too bad, DirectX however... the biggest change here was DXVK rather than Proton.
Never thought we'd get to where we are now.
Permanently Deleted
There was still Wine, and PlayOnLinux helped further, but when I looked for a game I wanted to play on WineDB, there was no guarantee it even had an entry, and if it wasn't listed as "platinum", the chance of you experiencing any reported issue was very high.
Not to mention, playing Steam games that weren't native was an impossibility.
Thankfully I was more of a console gamer at the time, and I got a lot of enjoyment out of the few games that received Linux ports - like Team Fortress 2!
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.
Unreal Tournament 2k4 on one of the earlier Ubuntus, back when ShipIt was still a thing. Most have been around 2005 or 2006, as I used it in my mom's flat which I moved out of in 2006.
I also played some games on an old version of Suse Linux back in 2001 or so? Maybe earlier? There was this game where you had to manage public transport in a city. Looked for that game recently but nothing came up. Also Kartoffelknülch back then. I tried to get some distributions running (like Mandrake) but only Suse somewhat worked. Being 14 and English not being your mother tongue doesn't help with documentation when nobody in your family knows stuff about computers.
I hated Windows 8 enough to put up with it at the time. It's nuts how much things have improved since then.
My eve online circa 2008-10 was on Linux, as well as other not-entirely well remembered attempts dating back to around 2005, when I was more interested in spinny cube desktop. Fglrx and I were well acquainted, but not quite friends.
Ah yes, mostly Portal and Portal2 and LBreakout2
Iirc I did that for roughly a year and then proton hit. It was a bit of a different experience for sure but even at that time it was not all that bad. coincidentally that time also taught me a lot on how to troubleshoot stuff so I suppose it had it's benefits despite the added hassle that it was sometimes.
10 years ago back in college I mainly ran Ubuntu and did the windows VM with VFIO GPU passthrough to game on a fullscreen windows VM that got full PCI usage of the GPU, was the best of both worlds
I started gaming on Linux at the beginning of 2019, that was afaik half a year after Proton was released, and I still remember how rough around the edges it was. Back then it still felt somewhat like a coin flip (the odds in reality were obviously a good deal better) if a game ran. Seeing how much they improved it over the last 5 years is really quite something.
OpenTTD worked excellent on Ubuntu on my Dell E5400 back in 2009-2011 or so.
It was, if you were born in the 21st century.
I played a lot on my laptop with Debian 9 with just plain wine and one prefix for everything (I don't remember the wine version).
I can't remember all the games I played, but I do remember the last 3: all the DeadspaceI try to only support the games that provide a linux gnu build but proton has really made that a fuzzy line.
I played cracked Minecraft on Xubuntu in 2014. And some games on Wine too.
Dink Smallwood
I got NFS Most Wanted (2005) working in Wine, and was somewhat impressed how easy it was at the time. Game worked quite well, and would only crash once in a while with some cryptic errors that I don't remember. Made me hopeful for the future of linux gaming :)
