How are people coping with games that just won’t run on Linux (aside from leaving them behind)? Do you dual boot Windows? Virtualize? What’s your strategy for this?
This will be extremely rare for me since I don’t play a lot of competitive stuff, but I’d love to find a solution. I have a large library, and it’s bound to happen from time to time.
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It kinda depends on what games you are using.
If they are online only with anti cheat dual booting is the only viable solution because most anti cheat’s that don’t work with Linux/proton will flag you as cheating if you try to use a vm.
If its some older game its prolly better to use a vm for that OS, lien a lot of old games for windows XP or windows 95 are like that. For really old ones you can just use dosbox which is very tried and true.
If it’s just some random game that doesn’t work I either A: figure it will get working in some way eventually or B: give up on ever playing it again.
I think I’m at the point where if a new game comes out and it didn’t work on Linux I just wouldn’t buy it. But I might be an outlier since most of the games I like usually get a Linux port or will work with proton anyways
I stopped playing games. Honestly, they are more boring than lying around watching flys buzz.
I switched fully to Linux on my main gaming PC about 18 months ago. Honestly Proton has become so good that I really haven’t had to dual-boot Windows or run a VM or anything. I even bought a licence for CrossOver when I first switched but ended up not needing it.
For the few games that really won’t run (after trying what I find in ProtonDB and PCGW) I really do either A) wait for fixes, or B) just leave them behind. With a library of like 2500 games it’s not hard to find something else to play.
These are the only games I recall not working at all for me:
- Beyond Good & Evil (GOG) - Might be fixed now
- Prince of Persia: Warrior Within (Steam) - Might be fixed now
- Dauntless (EGS) - Broken due to Easy Anti-Cheat
It’s nice to meet someone with a bigger pile of shame than mine. How do you pick the next game to play from that pile? And do you still add games to it? :)
I like how you accidentally (edit: or maybe not) donated Wine devs by buying CrossOver license :D
It was intentional 🙂
I don’t buy games that won’t run on linux.
aside from leaving them behind
Thats asking for an empty comment section.
This is the way
I still have some games that I can only run on my PS3, but I don’t really use it much.
Nowadays I just play something else, so many games out there that work flawlessly (thanks to wine/proton). I also did virtualization successfully for some time but it can take a while to get it right. The best and simplest solution is to get a separate SSD just for windows and dual boot.
Dual boot
Dual boot, although I usually prefer to drop it rather than go to the trouble.
I wouldn’t recommend virtualization, not only do you lose performance when you need it most, but (depending on the devices and system) setting everything up properly can be very tedious.
this rarely happens, but when i run into a game that doesn’t work i - check protondb.com to see if someone else has already found a solution. trying different proton versions can sometimes help as well
The PCGamingWiki is also another good resource especially for older or more obscure games. Most fixes are Windows specific but they can be used on Linux. For example here is the page for Need for Speed III: Hot Pursuit where it links fan patches and an open source engine recreation.
If someone is really desperate there’s always the option of searching GitHub issue pages like dxvk to see if it has been documented, if there is a temporary fix, if a fix is on the way, or if it’s going to remain a constant issue (ex. FiveM).
Absolutely this. It is becoming increasingly rare to find a game that doesn’t work in linux (excluding stupid copy protection/anti-cheat implementations). We haven’t reached the works-out-of-the-box stage but the combination of proton-ge/wine-ge with lutris or heroic provides a solid alternative to games not on steam.
Dualbooting is the easiest, IMO.
I had a shrunk down windows partition and a tiny portion of HDD space to install the couple games that only worked on windows.
I’ve since nuked both partitions, as some of the games now do work on Linux, and the rest were no longer enough to actually make be boot into windows to play.
I dual boot anyway to use some features on my scanner, so I might as well use that in case something doesn’t run. So far I’ve been able to move all games I play to Linux. Older games tend to run better than on Windows, in my experience.
Before going with dual boot I was considering running a VM, which seems way cooler but also very tricky to set up properly with passthrough and all that.
I use Proton Experimental to play my games and they all work without exception. I’m in my late 30s, so I no longer play competitive games that have a kernel rootkit, I mean kernel anti-cheat.
Basically, Linux gaming is like this: If you want to play competitive games with anti-cheat, stay or play in Windows. For all other games, play in Linux.
Are you me? I used to play some online multiplayer games, but switching to linux (some 3 years ago?) and being less competitive came hand in hand. Now I enjoy single players only (with sprinkle of Path of Exile and World of Tanks (well, not really anymore)) and can’t understand why should I even consider going back to those toxic waters of competitive play… Am I officially old?
Haha. we’re officially old. I was an extremely competitive gamer back then. I played Quake 3, UT 99, Tribes 2, America’s Army, etc. I was even in a Tribes 2 squad and we basically practiced for tournaments every day.
But now that life is stressful enough with the responsibilities I have, I just can’t play competitive games anymore. I just want to enjoy the story. I no longer have the stamina and the reflex for competitive games anymore.
This has generally been my experience as well. The sole exception: Distant Worlds. I’ve never, ever gotten it to run with any version of Proton.
When I had to worry about that,I dual-booted. It’s the simplest solution. I don’t really play multiplayer PC games anyway, and multiplayer anti-cheat is 90%+ of the reason games won’t run on Linux nowadays with the advancements made to Proton, so I don’t really have that problem anymore and I haven’t had any Windows on my system in a few years.
A “ez” solution would be simply stay on Windows and leave Linux as a novelty. A somewhat complicated solution – double booting (apparently Windows can be a privacy nightmare even while dual-booting). A quite hard one would be installing Linux and running Windows on a VM with GPU passthrough. The “are you bleeping kidding me?” approach would be buying another PC just to run Linux while leaving your “main” PC for Windows.
“Is there a sane approach for this?” – yep, there is! Which is, buying a console and use it solely for gaming while leaving your main PC for daily browsing and everything else (i.e Linux).
To march into a thread asking about what they can do with their PC to play as many games as possible just to tell them to drop several hundred dollars on a console that will only be able to play games available on that console is a bold move
Tbf 80% of responses here are just “don’t play the games that don’t run” which is just as helpful.
I used to have a second partition with Windows for such cases, but over time I just stopped bothering with those games.
Now I just refund if it doesn’t work and move on in my to-play list.
I still have a Windows VM for some applications and for doing firmware updates but I never bothered to set it up for playing games.
Mostly same here, but (I have an SSD with W10 on it. I haven’t booted into my Windows drive since 2023. I only had a a few games installed on that drive, but it was also useful for the rare instance that I needed to some some propriety configuration utility.
