What are /r/linux_gaming's favorite Products & Services?

From 3.5 billion Reddit comments

> Interestingly, Epic Games actually acquired the maker of Easy Anti-Cheat last year...

Of course. I'm getting really tired of seeing their name on depressing news...

Yes.
*Edit: Apparently he already did!

If you're planning to move to linux the best possible option is to stick with steam, they treat linux users as first class citizens and even actively contributes into making the ecosystem better for everyone by supporting open standards and making a lot of their tools open source, so people doesn't need to be locked to their solutions if they want to buy games. There's the humble store which has helped linux users a lot too and AFAIK is a pioneer regarding gaming on linux with their humble bundle initiative, on top of that they give you a DRM-free copy along an steam-key most of the time, there's no client tho. There's itch.io too which has a client that supports linux perfectly, it's even open source if i recall correctly, the negative part is that (i may be wrong) the game catalog is lacking compared to other stores. There's gog too, while there has no been any remarkable news lately about linux support and their client, they sell linux versions of games and the whole store is DRM-free, which is important.

Fortunately there's a lot of stores so we're not starved regarding options, specially if you consider steam which is the biggest one on windows too, but it's sad discord doesn't want to dance with us in this party. The more the merrier.

I personally think you're all being a load a grumpy sausages.

A couple of videos showing positive Wine progress, showing people using Linux for gaming shouldn't be moaned about, it should be encouraged. This isn't a subreddit just for native ELF binary games, it's a superset of playing games on Linux.

That all said, not all videos (or posts) have the same value. Some of them have shown "smooth" performance at 360p resolution or that it works but it's glitchy as balls. That something is technically works without crashing isn't news. Save it up and let us know when it's playable.

But megathreads are useless. Just tone out the rubbish.

If you don't want to know about Wine or DXVK, consider using Reddit Enhancement Suite to filter out those threads.

This article is written by a GNOME dev. There have been other developer having issue with them or with the process they use.
Look at how the desktop icons stuff went down, yes there was a discussion but really no user knew and participate in the discussion, and result was a LOT of people pissed off.
And the answer was to do an extension, extension that in gnome are very hard to maintain as they refuse a stable API (other big source of friction).

Other quick search popping in:
https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2020/09/arc-menus-lead-dev-just-quit

https://felipec.wordpress.com/2011/09/23/no-gnome-doesnt-want-user-feedback-how-i-argued-in-favor-of-voting-in-bugzilla-and-got-banned-as-a-result/

Truth is... Complicated, as always.
Gnome deva could not be at fault in this case, but sure there is friction from their side too

GitLab already has a migrator in place if you're wanting to move.

https://about.gitlab.com/

>At its current state, GitHub importer can import:
>
>the repository description (GitLab 7.7+)
>
>the Git repository data (GitLab 7.7+)
>
>the issues (GitLab 7.7+)
>
>the pull requests (GitLab 8.4+)
>
>the wiki pages (GitLab 8.4+)
>
>the milestones (GitLab 8.7+)
>
>the labels (GitLab 8.7+)
>
>the release note descriptions (GitLab 8.12+)
>
>the pull request review comments (GitLab 10.2+)
>
>the regular issue and pull request comments
>
>References to pull requests and issues are preserved (GitLab 8.7+)
>
>Repository public access is retained. If a repository is private in GitHub it will be created as private in GitLab as well

Just an FYI for anyone dealing with the "hey just use Windows to update xxx", make a Hiren's Boot CD USB since it boots into Windows 10 PE. Then run whatever firmware update you need and reboot into Linux. Hiren's Boot CD is crazy useful anyway for other things, so it's nice to keep handy on a USB, or to keep the ISO on a SATA Drive for use as a Virtual CD.

Proton 6.3-7 changelog:

• The following games are now playable:
  • Life is Strange: True Colors
  • Quake Champions (broken after a game update)
  • Divinity Original Sin 2 (broken after a game update)
  • eFootball PES 2021
  • EVERSLAUGHT VR
  • WRC 8, 9 and 10
• Fix Logitech G920 mapping for F1 2020.
• Fix Resident Evil Village display settings.
• Improve Forza Horizon 4 windowing.
• Update DXVK to v1.9.2.
• Update vkd3d-proton to include the latest development work.

https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/wiki/Changelog#63-7

Right, you can't make games with it which are "harmful, abusive, racially or ethnically offensive, vulgar, sexually explicit, defamatory, infringing, invasive of personal privacy or publicity rights, or in a reasonable person's view, objectionable".

The license is a bit strange, you can read it here: https://www.cryengine.com/ce-terms

Not really what we expect from open source, but at least we can now view the code and edit it for the purpose of making games.

Godot is a bit of darling in the open-source communities, because it's an active open-source engine project. There are quite a few open-source engines, but most of them are self-assembly toolkits without an ecosystem of tutorials. I'd look at the various Doom and id Tech engine versions. The Open 3D Engine just got fully open-sourced, for someone patient, ambitious, and looking for an engine newer than id Tech 3 and id Tech 4. It was, to be blunt, not cross-platform before it was open-sourced, but progress seems healthy.

Unity and Unreal Engine support developing on Linux, but AFAICT neither one is 100.0% identical in user experience between Linux and Windows. For example, I recall people saying that the Unity asset store isn't available from Linux for some reason. UE4 for Linux required one to compile the engine first, whereas most Windows users and tutorials had someone just downloading a precompiled copy. Probably not a big deal, but you deserve to know about such differences going in.

I can't speak authoritatively about the Linux crossbuild support with those engines, but I frequently crossbuild non-game projects from Linux using Clang/LLVM and the Mingw-w64 version of GCC. I'd have no reservations about using them to crossbuild games, but I'd recommend doing routine crossbuilding from early in a new project just to avoid surprises.

if you dont already know about it, lutris is a platform for sharing configurations for games (uplay, gog, bnet and even emulators), though it looks like destiny 2 is not working.

there is also protondb to check if games other than the whitelisted games work with proton

>How do I fix this?

By not trying to use Steam for non-Steam games. It doesn't work how you think it does.

I completely understand how a new user would have constantly heard about Proton so they think they need Proton to run all their Windows games. You don't. Proton is for Steam games, and Steam games only. For non-Steam games, you use Lutris.

Install Lutris, then go to https://github.com/lutris/docs, follow the instructions for "Wine Dependencies" and "Installing Drivers."

Then start installing games. You can go to https://lutris.net and find your game there and click "Install," or you can just open Lutris and go to the left pane and click on Lutris under Sources and search for whatever non-Steam game you want to install. Then click Install.

Every vcrun and other windows component that games need, Lutris automatically installs for you. Steam cannot do that for non-Steam games, so even if you get this game to work by using protontricks, you'll have to do it every time (and most times you don't get a handy popup telling exactly what you need). So yeah. Use Lutris.

It depends on the game - on average I would say no, not yet. Sometimes you find a title that has better performance (for me it was e.g. Bioshock 2 Remastered) or installs and works when on Windows it didn't (for me it was Disciples 2).

> Also can I play OSU on it?

Yes! You have several options, including opsu! (unofficial Linux client) and osu!lazer (new, official, cross-platform client).

I recommend you to check it out through Lutris: https://lutris.net/games/osu/

You can port Vulkan detection from my Proton PR: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/pull/1749 (see vkquery.py). This way Lutris could detect dynamically if hardware supports Vulkan and turn on WineD3D only DXVK is guaranteed not to work.

I can also port it myself, if you'll care to point me how you would like to have this functionality integrated in Lutris ;)

Cool! Could you describe how this differs from Lutris or GameHub? What is the use-case that it solves? (I.E, easier to use, unique features, etc?)

One or more of the screenshots in the blog post were taken on Linux, not that you could tell, which is a good thing.

The AppImage is currently building and will be up on the download page any moment now.

Proton is just a package that combines Wine, DXVK, OpenVR, and a few others, as well as a Steam client passthrough library which allows Windows games to talk to the native Steam client.

Valve also made changes to Wine as part of this project, but those changes are integrated into Wine, and are not considered part of Proton itself.

I guess your network is restricted but they shared details from only Facebook.I will paste it for you.

We’re crazy excited to announce that Mad Max is getting revved to utilise Vulkan, the Khronos Group’s next-generation graphics API. To join the public Beta: In your Steam library, right click on Mad Max. From the drop-down menu, select Properties. The Properties window will appear. Select the Betas tab. Enter "livelongandprosper" into the text box, then select Check Code. A message will appear to confirm that you now have access to vulkan_beta. From the drop-down menu above the text box, select vulkan_beta. Close the Properties window. If Mad Max is already installed, an update will begin downloading automatically. If Mad Max is not installed, highlight Mad Max in your Steam library, then select Install and follow the instructions. The following driver versions are required to participate in the Beta: NVIDIA Requires NVIDIA driver version 375.26 or later. AMDGPU-PRO Requires 16.50 or 16.60. 16.60 has a known regression which causes the game to appear darker than it should. A driver fix for this is in progress. We’re aware of some rare full system hangs when using GPU-PRO. MESA (RADV/ANV) Requires latest Mesa 17.1-dev (as of this post) compiled with Vulkan support. On Ubuntu this can be installed using the Padoka ppa found at https://launchpad.net/~paulo-miguel-di…/+archive/ubuntu/mesa. INTEL ANV requires Broadwell or Skylake, but Haswell is currently unsupported. Please make sure Steam is up to date (built March 22 2017 or later). This Beta does not currently support SteamOS. To pass us your feedback, email with a support report generated from the options window. Please provide as much detail as possible.

Thank you for reaching out and for really trying to support our platform.

Unfortunately, the Vivox situation looks non-ideal.

Unless you can find another middleware that's as convenient and doesn't incur too much refactoring / cost on your end, the best thing to do is to push forward with a Proton/Wine developer to get to the bottom of why Vivox craps out on Proton.

Pushing down on the likes of:

https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/issues/4316

With the next version 2.8.

From the RC notes: https://www.blender.org/download/releases/2-80/

>The Blender Game Engine was removed. We recommend using more powerful, open source alternatives like Godot.

Just a reminder that I made this page to track the Linux share on Steam, based on the monthly data Valve put out from their HW Survey.

Just thought it would be more interesting to see a timeline, rather than an article every month.

Usually the truth lies somewhere between two opposing opinions. Based on the conversation between GNOME and System76 on this subreddit they are at least trying to be professional. That being said, if misinformation was spread, a retraction and apology is NEEDED. If not from Jeremy, then from System76. Especially in this day and age where we should all be keenly aware of the negative impact of misinformation.

I also think it's a bit ironic (assuming bad behaviour occurred) that System76 will be building a new desktop environment using RUST; the language that has prospered under their Code of Conduct.

I say this all while running Pop!_OS on my main rig.

I don't think they stopped serving them.

They misplaced them or something like that.

The Squad players have already investigated it: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/issues/938#issuecomment-939315396

1. The official channel is the github issue page. Make sure you set the label correctly.

https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/issues

The unofficial channel is this Google Spreadsheet.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1DcZZQ4HL_Ol969UbXJmFG8TzOHNnHoj8Q1f8DIFe8-8/edit#gid=0

1. Doubt it, you are better off buying more games with native support so there is more market data

2. It could be! You might also be better off promoting Linux in general. It's all about getting the market share up to a point that it becomes worthwhile for devs.

I see your point, but Proton is open source, so it's not like it were a thing availiable exclusively to Steam. You can compile Proton yourself and use it to run all kinds of non-Steam games.

While of course their first concern is pushing their own platform, Valve is at least giving back to the community.

You can extract GOG installers with innoextract.

innoextract --exclude-temp setup_rollercoaster_tycoon2_german_2.0.0.6.exe

will leave all resources necessary to run OpenRCT2 in ./app/

I want to suggest Dwarf Fortress. The sheer amount of time I must have spent playing this game is scary to think about.

You build and manage a fortress for your dwarves, their children and their pets in a procedurally generated world with thousands of years of history (including people, monsters, events, deaths e.t.c.). As your fortress grows in size and wealth, word spreads and more dwarves migrate to join you, goblins and other nasties will also want a piece of your fortress too so you better be ready to defend it.

The game has a steep learning curve but a rewarding one, imagine grabbing the bogey man by his teeth and kicking his head clean off, well you can do this in game.

Did you have the latest verison of Nvidia Drivers installed? According to Proton's Github, Proton (Steam Play) requires Nvidia Drivers 396.51 or higher in order to play. You can check Nvidia drivers by typing nvidia-smi in the terminal, and looking at Driver Version at the top.

-

Edit: just saw you were missing Python 2.7, congrats on being a Linux gamer OP! (Just gonna leave this post here for anyone who needs the information.)

SteamOS is officially still in beta right now from what the Valve pages are stating:

http://store.steampowered.com/steamos

Hardware for SteamOS like the official Steam Controller hasn't launched yet either. When the Steam machines and controllers ship then SteamOS will likely leave beta and be 'officially' launched.

I think this is why people are talking about SteamOS coming in the future as right now it is still a beta and the hardware for it hasn't shipped either.

Linux is pretty easy to use in 2021 but you do have to have some familiarity with computers in a general sense.

Which distro are you using? Regardless

• Step 1: Install Lutris
• Step 2: From this link - https://lutris.net/games/heretic-ii/ - Which version do you own? - Select it
• Step 3: Allow the prompt to install it on Linux. Let it complete.
• Step 4: Play the game

The NMS devs "unofficially" sort of support Linux. They've released patches in the past that address Linux issues. For example - https://www.nomanssky.com/2019/08/beyond-patch-2-08a/ >Fixed Steam VR in Linux.

Linux certainly isn't a primary platform for them, but they do seem to keep an eye on it.

What distro are you running? Here are the links for Mangohud and Goverlay - follow the instructions in the readme section to work out how to get packaged application for your distro if you aren't comfortable building your own. Once both are installed, goverlay provides an interface to set and view the results being saved into the Mangohud config file. This allows you to get fps, temps and other data you want in your HUD plus some basic screen positioning for it.

At first I was getting as far as loading a game and experiencing a full system freeze after rendering one frame, but after I followed the instructions here to install the recommended version of Mesa it started working.

You can set your platform preference here: https://store.steampowered.com/account/preferences

Edit: You will have to click through your existing "Discovery Queue" and start a new discovery queue for it to apply to the discovery queue since this a pre-generated list.

• Nethack (seriously)
• FreeCiv (a bit redundant now with Civ V on Linux but still somewhat interesting in its own right)
• Dwarf Fortress (free as in beer)
• Battle for Wesnoth
• HedgeWars (Worms clone)
• 0 A.D. (not personally a fan but many seem to like it)
• OpenMW (not entirely free since you need the Morrowind data files in order to play but an amazing project based on an amazing game)

All but Dwarf Fortress should be in your repos.

How would you have it improved then?

Furthering that, how is it really any different from a Windows user downloading random software from the web?

Take legitimate tools such as Everything and AtroGrep.

How is downloading those much different than a script on GitHub or GitLab?

I suppose that both are just as dangerous and nobody is saying that it's not, but at some point, it just needs to be accepted that the end-user is going to have to be the responsible party. They are ultimately responsible for their actions, and should know how to navigate the web safely.

This isn't a problem inherent to Linux. It's any OS - mobile or desktop,

The Linux community can only do so much hand-holding. Same with Windows or Android, etc.

Phoronix uses the automated phoronix-test-suite for all of its benchmarks and in order for games to be easily included in that they must have automated benchmarks that can be launched by a command. Occasionally he manually benchmarks some games but he can't get reliable and repeatable results from that.

Since it is open source if you can make repeatable benchmarks for any of these games I'm sure he would accept them.

I am. Buyers beware: - Steam voice chat doesn't work - The microphone (and webcam) do not function in the Steam Web browser, so you can't use services like Wire Web to get around the broken Steam voice chat problem, you have to go to desktop mode to talk to people. - Although I haven't tried it myself, Flatpak's shortcuts supposedly can't be used from within Steam BPM - So far, no one has been able to figure out how to get GOG games (or anything else using the same installer, such as DRM-free games from Humble Bundle) installed in such a way that they can be launched from within Steam BPM - To install some of the most trivial software available for Debian or Ubuntu downloaded as deb files from the Internet, you have to manually edit a text file in desktop mode to enable the Debian repo, and it is not clear if this will someday have negative consequences since this configuration is unofficial/unsupported - Switching from desktop mode to Steam BPM is unreliable - sometimes it will become unresponsive to input so you have to do hard-reset - Unlike in Ubuntu, some games will have broken audio out of the box requiring hacky workarounds - Sometimes the system will refuse to shutdown and just run forever showing the SteamOS logo, forcing you to hard-shutdown - You can't use the Steam Controller to type anything in desktop mode. Yes, on the Steam Machine with a Steam Controller, you have to plugin an external keyboard!

On the plus side, the update system is very nice. I am surviving with it by using Discord for voice chat (it is one of the few debs I downloaded that actually installed properly). Surprisingly, if you start a voice call in desktop mode, and then switch to Steam BPM, after a few seconds you will both be able to hear each other -- even though desktop and Steam BPM are two different users running in two different X contexts.

This was taken from the regular edition box. You can also purchase the Obsidian Edition which includes some extra goodies (both physical and digital).

I thought this would merit its own post since you don't see Tux too often in video game packaging. As always, feel free to keep supporting Linux gaming on whatever format you prefer. :)

>but the only company that cares about us is Valve

The lead developer of the itch.io desktop app uses Linux primarily and the entire client, as well as various libraries and software stacks powering their store and related stuff, are FOSS.

Well it's possible but you need to mount the NTFS drive correctly

https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/wiki/Using-a-NTFS-disk-with-Linux-and-Windows

This also applies to using wine on an NTFS drive so you have to mount it like this to use with lutris

http://www.x.org/wiki/Events/XDC2015/Program/deucher_zhou_amdgpu.pdf

Page 3.

Vulkan and OpenCL drivers remain proprietary until some magical time in the future when they open source them, which almost certainly means never. Yet we don't even have the proprietary driver. Don't worry guys, just trust AMD, they will respect our software freedoms eventually!

Solution:

Buy DRM-Free Linux game on Steam https://pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/The_Big_List_of_DRM-Free_Games_on_Steam (steamcmd to download your games from terminal straight away)

Everything else: Itch.io (indie developer can keep up to 100% of the money you pay to them: full support to the actual developer, no middle man)

GoG? Linux existence is incidental to them, Witcher 3 is one of those application who are used as "platform seller": CDProjekt is a platform seller for Windows, PS4 and Xbone (and so Cyberpunk will be). To play Witcher/Cyberpunk, you're required to buy a Windows license(and comply with Microsoft's DRM OS) or restricted hardware console (DRM hardware, DRM OS).

Simply put: CDProjekt favor their ties with Sony/Microsoft (Windows-Xbox/PS4) rather provide a free and fair platform to everyone (Linux)

More good games journalism; thanks to the authors and B2G.

The low number for Factorio seems like it should be off by at least one order of magnitude, if not two. I'm sure Wube Software have some very talented programmers, but I wonder if there's some technical factor causing this to be misreported somehow?

I'd hate for a game developers to be getting bad information about their real audience and addressable audience. Note that I have always told game developers that they can safely project/budget 1% of sales on Linux. They can also take measures to increase that fraction, but that's a subject for a different thread.

>Fixes for networking in NBA 2K19 and NBA 2K18.

YESSSS. I know that this probably isn't the most popular game amongst us nerds, but this was the only game I've been missing since Proton released. I left some logs on the github issue page, but wasn't holding my breath as I didn't think a sports game would get much priority.

THANK YOU PROTON DEVS!

Now if only I could get all my windows VSTs seamlessly into Reaper on Linux, I would never need to reboot.

you can OC nvidia cards directly from gpu settings on linux, i think you need to enable a flag in Xorg.conf or something so that the UI will show it

afterburner is optional in windows, just a overclocking utility

here is a linux program with similar features

• https://gitlab.com/leinardi/gwe

No direct links to the official website? There.

Should also be noted that while Urban Terror is free (as in "it doesn't cost money") it's not really free software. The game assets have always been non-free. And I think even though the engine is based Quake 3, they ended up making their own fork as closed source (or at least they wanted to) to prevent cheating. Also development seems slow and chaotic, and not much progress have been made over the years.

Now... The game itself is pretty fun and I really wish it had more players than that (and less uber-veterans that completely destroy you, as it's often the case for this kind of games). You guys should play it.

https://www.khronos.org/vulkan

>“Industry standard APIs like Vulkan are a critical part of enabling developers to bring the best possible experience to customers on multiple platforms. Valve and the other Khronos members are working hard to ensure that this high-performance graphics interface is made available as widely as possible and we view it as a critical component of SteamOS and future Valve games.”

Gabe Newell - Valve

Trying out the new Vulkan graphics API on PowerVR GPUs

You forgot:

• Non-libre
• Centralised

Mumble can do most of what you claim (private messages, inline pictures in chat, friends list, phone app…). I'll gladly pay a cheap server (like $15/year) to run Murmur. Or if you have a decent upload (1 Mbps per 10 people, with very good voice quality), just run uMurmur on your own router for free with some QoS and you're good.

Sorry for linking to Phoronix I wanted to link to the original source, but it seems to be banned from reddit (for vote manipulation or something).

• https://www.unrealengine.com/blog/41-update-preview

You don't need their custom hardware any more. Steam Link software is now available for Raspberry Pi 3 model B and B+.

Looks like raspbian is the officially supported OS. I have read reports of people getting it to work on Open ELEC as well, so there's a good chance that the community will get it working on a bunch of different distributions.

Project Ascension came from the drama of Steam charging for Skyrim mods. From what i saw, the team seems to be too ambitious and not organized at all. Though I would love to be proven wrong.

GOG Galaxy will likely get a Linux port. It's likely just not available for now.

You should check out lutris. It's open source and is made for Linux. I haven't used it though, but looks good.

I suggest buying from Humble Bundle store if you want a DRM-free version (and the mobile version once it is released)

https://www.humblebundle.com/store/p/papersplease_storefront

Edit: Same discount as Steam right now, and you get the steam key. There's nothing to lose.

> Discord

I mean, you're kinda asking for it by using a proprietary centralized chat service.

Seriously though guys, check out Matrix with the Riot client.

I don't think it shows anything of the sort. If anything, it shows how far Wine has come even though there's still stupid workarounds needed to actually get the game launched and play comfortably (as evidenced by the video author's comments). uPlay doesn't and has never worked well in Wine or Proton, and uPlay itself is a form of DRM since Ubisoft games can't be played without it. Unlike Steam, which against popular belief doesn't mandate DRM of any sort. There's plenty of DRM-free games on Steam that can be launched and backed up without Steam running.

And how the hell would you as a Wine user even know if a DRM is invasive? Let it fuck around and eat sand in its Wine playground all it wants, see if I care.

It's basically an open-source cross-platform implementation of XNA. It's been used to bring several games to Linux as well as give better modern Windows compatibility to older XNA games.

> repair those issues or else it's not going to happen as interest seems to be nearly non-existent.

Hi! Thanks for bringing attention to my call for help! I wouldn't say interest is non-existent; lack of hardware is a problem, but Pierre from Valve provided everything we need to fix it, which is why I asked him to file those bugs. Enough people in Ubuntu preordered the controller that I don't expect it to be an issue when it's available for the general public. It might not be zero-day support for people who preordered but we will try. Remember we're also in the middle of releasing wily so it's not like we've got nothing else to do.

> Chances are, lots of activity is happening in the background for these two issues and they will be resolved soon for the Steam Controller on Ubuntu.

We do everything publicly so what you see there is what is happening. In an awesome twist of fate, a bunch of us will be in Bellevue next week sprinting for work, and if worst comes to worst we'll fix it over beers with the Valve guys in the bar, however if someone wants to be a hero and submit a patch now, that would be most awesome. For these controller fixes in particular mdeslaur will be putting them in his PPA over the next few days.

Around the same time Steam Machines ship development for the next LTS will open, and then we'll likely want to push all this stuff from PPAs into Debian/Ubuntu proper, the xpad fixes should land in the upstream kernel, and all that should really put us in a nice spot for gaming.

And this doesn't even list all the organisational problems, such as pushing a close source office program over libreoffice, or when they fired their treasurer because they were using funds from the project without going through the proper channels, or the time they lost most of their forum archives when migrating, or the fact they have now brought down the AUR twice due to the fact that pamac keeps DDOSing it.

I cannot with any sincerity recommend Manjaro, which is a shame because I really do think Arch is a great base for a user-friendly system if it was actually run competently. I'm keeping half an eye on GarudaLinux hoping that it might fill that gap.

His story seems to be almost the universal story. When it's easy to support Linux, we get Linux support. When it isn't easy to support Linux, we don't get support. The sales aren't worth it unless porting to Linux is effectively an extra few button clicks and maybe a handful of bugs.

This is why we also get more indie games than AAA games, AAA publishers are driven by investors to achieve maximum return on investment. Which means it isn't strictly a matter of if something is profitable or not, it's a question of "what's the most profitable thing we can be doing right?".

The take home from this is, if we want more games on Linux, we need to make it easier for developers to support Linux. That means we need more engines and middleware to have out of the box support for Linux (long term, supporting Godot is a good idea), and we need the Linux ecosystem to be as easy to develop for as possible. Expecting developers to come to us isn't going to work, we need to make it easier for developers to come to us.

That's partly why Valve's Proton project is such a good thing, because it reduces the effort for developers down to zero.

https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton

The whole project is open source, so you could even propose patches if you find that something is not working as expected.

The most important extra component is dxvk which translates directx calls to vulkan api calls.

With Nvidia it feels like it's always something. A couple of months ago they finally fixed a long-standing bug on their end that caused KDE's panel to break when you play games, but at the cost of DXVK crashing outright in some games (off the top of my head I know WoW and FFXIV were affected). With AMD right now it seems like after the first couple months things are stable. Nvidia has also been a huge barrier in the way of Wayland adoption, which is the future of the Linux desktop, so that's also worth considering.

To sum it up, I'll reference this github comment about the aforementioned crashing bug: "Relying on a fix from nvidia won't get you anywhere. When it comes to Linux support, their timeframes are generally measured in years."

But at the end of the day, we have to see how AMD answers the challenge. If AMD can't compete, then our options are going to be fairly limited.

I don't feel bad for Larian at all, they've been prospering off the game. I feel back for us Kickstarter backers who spent hard cash and still haven't been able to play the game.

In my mind, if you promise Linux support and don't deliver, that's negligent. They should have had builds at least compiling and launching for ALL of their target platforms right from the start so it could influence their library choices to maintain compatability. They're making the libraries they chose the scapegoat for their own terrible decision making and processes.

Tips for creating multi-platform applications:

1. Create project skeleton.
2. Ensure project skeleton builds on all target platforms.
3. Make a script to build on all target platforms. There's so much shit already available for this, both software and services. One example is http://buildbot.net/.
4. Run builds regularly (nightly, on commits or merges, whatever.)

?utm_source=reddit-android isn't necessary. Don't tell anyone that you use official reddit Android app :)

In the meantime I can recommend Slide - open source Android client for reddit. No ads there!

https://github.com/ccrama/Slide

AMD cards earn a lot of performance by using the latest Mesa drivers. You can add the Padoka PPA to your system, a quite popular repository which is based on the latest Mesa-Dev and is stable for everyday use imo.

Instructions on how to add it can be found on it's page: https://launchpad.net/~paulo-miguel-dias/+archive/ubuntu/mesa

One problem is that some people will just google their apps on Linux and try to install them like its 1999 (or typical Windows) instead of using a package manager, Gnome Software or KDE Discover.

Documentation isn't really the problem either. I think those people don't go in thinking they have to learn a new OS but rather believe the paradigms of Windows should still apply to everything instead of searching for 'how to install software on Linux' or their distro of choice.

I just looked up random handbrake installation instructions with some different searches and they all either tell you to use the package manager and how (usually apt) or on the actual Handbrake downloads page it tells you to use Flatpak and how. Even going back to the first 1.0.0 release instructions to tells you to use apt. It is apparent that person didn't even read Handbrake's own download and install instructions.

I'm a huge fan of a single player game called Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup and it runs well on my netbook and older machines. If you like diablo or nethack this game should be fun. DCSS is a rogue-like game where you can play tile graphics version or ANSII from the terminal. You can also play the game from your web browser and chat with other players.

I'm currently at 2606 hours in Rocket League (entirely played under Linux). And I reckon I'm about half as good as I could be. RL has a very high skill ceiling.

I've got about 1500 hours in Left 4 Dead 2 though that was mostly played back when I still used Windows for gaming.

I've got 300ish hours in both Crusader Kings II and Europa Universalis IV and I've barely scratched the surface in either. If you want a game that'll easily do you for thousands of hours you can't go wrong with those two.

I've got 400 hours in Divinity: Original Sin over both versions (all played on Linux - Wine then native). Definitely recommend that one if you like expressive turn-based combat. Great in co-op.

I also have hundreds of hours in Mount and Blade across the versions, mainly pre-Steam. Amazing game if you like both lancing motherfuckers in the face and do-what-you-want sandboxes.

And I think Morrowind deserves an honourable mention. I've got a good coupla thousand hours in it and it's playable natively on Linux with OpenMW - in fact that's the best way to play it these days.

Hmm. My entire immediate family are gamers and we all use Linux and gamepads to play all of our games. We've not had any issue with gamepads in many years (almost 10, I would say). Here are some of the ones that we use:

• Saitek P220
• Logitech F310 Wired
• Steam Controller
• HORI Fighting Stick Mini
• DreamGear Classic Pad

• RetroLink N64 Classic Gamepad

• We also have a bunch of no name brand ones for our basement gaming setup. They all work. Most of them are PS3 and NES knock offs from the dollar store.

All of my HTPCs are set up with 4 game controllers ready to go for all of the games we own on Steam, itch.io, GOG, Humble Bundle, Emulators, freeware and others. All of our gaming rigs have some controller on them with my main one having 2 on them at all times. Never used a XBOX controller before but I have ppl that I know on Linux using it and they use it without issue.

Most of my family is on Ubuntu Mate except for my lady that is on Fedora and my oldest kid who uses Manjaro and Ubuntu dual booted.

We also have the following programs installed:

• Antimicro - This is game for games that were made with no controller support whatsoever - You can make it work with your gamepads by loading up the profiles. You can even bind them via .sh if you want.

• SC Controller - This allows you to use your Steam controller without using Steam or having it installed at all. My kids use Steam but I'm more of a GOG/HB/itch.io gamer. We use this all the time to play all kinds of games and works excellently.

comes with a closed source application which has:

1) No linux port

I like how standards made these years, it further caused my interest ,expectations and courage of being a software engineer go down.

Here is the software that will became a standard

You're doing it the hard way. Sure, it's kind of possible to run any windows programs with proton, but it's not that it's meant for. Far easier option linked below.

https://lutris.net/games/star-citizen/

Steam and Proton is magic. Don't forget about Lutris (https://lutris.net/) which is another magic tool that helps with setting up games that are not on Steam.

POP is probably the best for you to start out with indeed. Easy to use, and from what I have heard, works good out of the box with regards to gaming.

Good luck! I switched back in 2018 when Proton came out. Started with Manjaro Cinnamon and now I am on EndeavourOS KDE arch based since I love getting my updates so I am always running on the latest tech.

You should ditch the amdgpu-pro driver and use Mesa instead. There should be instructions on how to uninstall the pro driver from the amd drivers site or documentation thay came with the driver package - follow them and uninstall it.

Next, add the padoka stable ppa: https://launchpad.net/~paulo-miguel-dias/+archive/ubuntu/pkppa

Then do an apt update/ upgrade and your Mesa stack will be updated.

If you're on Ubuntu, it is also highly beneficial to install the hwe or hwe-edge kernel (4.10 and 4.13, respectively) as that includes updates to the amdgpu driver which will boost performance significantly: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Kernel/LTSEnablementStack

Here's the copy paste, not including uninstall of the pro driver:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:paulo-miguel-dias/pkppa sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade sudo apt install --install-recommends linux-generic-hwe-16.04-edge xserver-xorg-hwe-16.04

This is all assuming Ubuntu 16.04, but should work for any 16.04 derivitive or flavor

When it comes to AMD cards, the most important thing is how up-to-date your Mesa driver is. I would want Mesa 17.0 at the minimum.

Ubuntu 17.04 currently has Mesa 17, but for older versions of Ubuntu you'll want to use the Swat-X Mesa PPA.

In my opinion, rolling distros like Solus, openSUSE Tumbleweed, and Antergos tend to work best with AMD cards, as they have the latest kernels and mesa package by default, and will upgrade those automatically as newer versions become available.

I personally use Solus Linux, as it essentially combines the user-friendliness of Ubuntu with the stable rolling nature of openSUSE Tumbleweed (i.e, it doesn't break like Antergos and Manjaro can). It also features the awesome Steam-Integration package, which ensures Steam works perfectly, so it's a particularly good distro for gamers.

With Solus, you would not need to configure anything, it'll 'just work' right outta the box. :)

Also, I would recommend never using the closed source AMDGPU-Pro drivers from AMD's website (which only work for CentOS and Ubuntu), as they are only intended for enterprise/business users. AMD themselves recommend gamers use the open-source Mesa driver, as it performs better and is far more stable in games.

Anyway, hope that helps. ^_^

The good news: Feral are aware there is demand for Lego on Linux.

The problem: There haven't been any Mac ports of Lego games since June 2016, and without those to spread the cost there aren't likely to be Linux ports.

I'm sending a message in support of these games coming to us - my Steam preferences are set to Linux only and the Lego games which have been ported to Mac are on my wishlist. Maybe that message would be clearer if I instead wishlisted the Lego games released since then.

Unfortunately I don't think there is anything more we can do.

Edit: I've added the newer Lego games to my wishlist.

Single player yes*, multiplayer no

*it launches and plays sometimes, crashes others. seems like most problems are with Nvidia from the proton GitHub

Edit: might also want to try this

The game is infamously bugged and the community-made unofficial patch is pretty much required to play it

I have no idea about how well it works under Proton though.

What do you mean open source drivers don't support 3D? Using them since January with 7770 on various games, including Sanctum 2.

Open source drivers are much better than fglrx, but you need latest development version. You can get it from:

https://launchpad.net/~oibaf/+archive/ubuntu/graphics-drivers

Just use Lutris and if a game you want to play has a DXVK installer button, just click that to get similar experience to proton.

Otherwise, if you'd like you could try to run /tmp/proton_run path-to-game-exe

I also like Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup. You can also play on http://crawl.lantea.net:8080/#lobby.

I'm a bit spoiled by Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup's tileset. Is there a good tileset for nethack?

If you are into old-school games and like to tank rush, OpenRA is a good game to spend time on. It's more multiplayer oriented, but new single-player mode is coming soon.

It also includes mods for original C&C, Dune2000 and devs are working to include Tiberian sun & Red Alert 2 mods.

Spyware doesn't need a TPM to uniquely identify you. Heck, if your browser sends off enough signals to uniquely identify you, I can only imagine how many factors are available to software running outside a sandbox.

>Games submitted(34)

--

>Linux (33)

If anyone is curious, the "non-Linux" game is Stickmans Journey... which was made in Love and can potentially run on any desktop or mobile platform. Including Linux.

Ditto. The most advanced solution right now really seems to be Tox. Open source, p2p (decentralized), everything always end-to-end encrypted, anonymous replacement for Skype and other communication systems.

This is not a system level package manager, it is just a collection of installers of some applications. That is an external application (need to install it externally) and a service (need to sign up an account) I have to trust my entire system and programs to install from. And I would make my system dependent on an external third party application, which locks specific features behind a paywall, such as "Runtime Malware / Virus Protection" and "Full Package Synchronization": https://chocolatey.org/pricing

So no, this does not count as the same as an integrated package manager like in Linux. And this is not user friendly at all. I am currently looking through their privacy policy: https://chocolatey.org/privacy#how-do-we-use-your-information

I’m not sure what you are asking. If I take a random game from https://pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/The_Big_List_of_DRM-Free_Games_on_Steam and copy its folder to another computer without Steam installed it works fine. Not sure how Valve could “turn it off.”

Release notes:

This new beta comes with a whole bunch of fixes and improvements over the last one. Most of the remaining issues targeted for this release are related to how the new process monitor handles steam games,especially on exit. Other features to be implemented are cover art support in the website API and completing the default sidebar (with no games selected).

Here are a few highlights for this beta:

• A new runtime, based on Ubuntu 18.04 is available and will be used with future wine builds

• Installer files can be cached locally and re-used between installs. To use the cache, you can open the Preferences window and set the Cache Path to a valid destination. This is compatible with GOG games.

• Both Nvidia and Mesa driver version are detected and printed on startup

• Configuration dialogs have been simplified

• A new installer task is available: install_cab_component which installs a specific component from a cab archive. This allows installing Windows Media Foundation in the GOG Darksiders Warmastered Edition installer ( https://lutris.net/games/darksiders-warmastered-edition/ ) and enjoying working in-game cinematics. Look at the Darksiders installer and give it a try on other MF based games!

A lot of internal components have been refactored and cleaned up, this fixes a lot of issues regarding game updating in the view.

Maintainers, please add the python3-requests and python3-pil packages to the dependencies.

Many popular old games with high replayability have open source engine replacement projects and there even few projects that started like that and then become better than original: Dark Mod, 0 A.D, Spring RTS, OpenTTD, etc.

There also multiple games that original developers released source code, but sadly not all of them was properly ported on Linux (Jagged Alliance 2, JA2 v1.13) and not all of them open source (Free Space).

Of course there is plenty of games where source code is are actually lost forever long time ago, but for anything else it's reasonable to encourage IP holders to release source. That would always give longer life for old game you like.

So from one point of view I support what GOG was doing, but I would be more happy if some developers released their code as open source instead. Fans would put much more time and love than any "porting" company would. Rewriting from scratch is sadly not really feasible in case of many games that you can't extend or improve gameplay-wise.

PS: Good collection of projects can be found there:

http://osgameclones.com/

By the way, Nightdive Studios happened to have the source code of No One Lives Forever and No One Lives Forever 2 with the intention of re-releasing the titles for Windows, macOS and Linux. However, trademark negotiations with Warner Bros., Activision, and 20th Century Fox failed without being shown an actual legal ownership document. Bloody corporate miserables...

https://kotaku.com/the-sad-story-behind-a-dead-pc-game-that-cant-come-back-1688358811

I needed corefonts for the launcher and then these settings for the actual game

https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/issues/37#issuecomment-415833819

As an initial whirl of a non whitelisted game, I tried out Snake Pass. I'm on a relatively fresh Ubuntu 18.04. It works, mostly! It started up with a few Steam boxes mentioning that it was doing a one-time setup, then opened the game.

A few notes:

• Frame rate was ok. A tad juddery, for a game that Windows on the same machine doesn't skip a beat. It was still playable since the game doesn't require much reflex. For many games if the performance is comparable this should be adequate.
• Audio was distorted, scratchy. Haven't noticed that with native Linux games.
• The game window was initially obscured by the GNOME UI, but going to options and untoggling and retoggling full screen fixed the issue.
• (also a problem with native Linux games) I was able to play with my Steam Controller but not pull up the Steam overlay, and I believe there's no custom mappings
• After doing this I reread Proton requirements (https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/blob/proton_3.7/PREREQS.md) and it lists version 396.51 of Nvidia drivers, and I had 390.48 which had been suggested by the Ubuntu installer. I tried to update them via the instructions there and get an error for an unmet dependency for several libraries `396.51-0@ubuntu0~gpu18.04.1`

Overall it's a bit rough but plenty to explore!

EDIT: The following got my nvidia drivers updated (similar performance afterward):

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:graphics-drivers/ppa

sudo apt update

sudo apt upgrade

sudo apt install libnvidia-cfg1-386

sudo apt install xserver-xorg-video-nvidia-396

sudo apt install nvidia-driver-396

The latest commit to Livestreamer was almost a year ago. There's a fork called Streamlink which is more actively maintained and works with all streaming services I've tried.

> FL Studio

you might wanna check out http://www.bitwig.com/en/bitwig-studio/download.html This is from some guys former working on abelton.

Also there are a good amount of opensource music production tools checkout this side -> http://wiki.linuxaudio.org/apps/daw_apps The one maybe close to FL Studio are lmms and qtractor

As usual, while the people who recorded it might not use Linux, the improvements are for every platform and for example Ni no Kuni which has a good level of performance is pretty much playable on Linux. Some people report random crashes, others not. Your mileage may vary (possibly race conditions). Looks great in 4k, and runs great thanks to Vulkan.

https://rpcs3.net/quickstart

It was a vague question because you didn't specify the type of game you want to make. The engine (if any) recommended for an FPS would be different from that for an interactive fiction or 2D puzzle game.

Also it comes down hugely to personal preference. Do you want a big IDE-like engine like Unity or Unreal 4? Or do you prefer something more DIY like Love2D (which is great btw, you should consider it for a 2d game)?

Budget also matters if you're looking at 'pro' engines. Most take a fee or a cut in various ways. Cryengine has Linux support so that's an option (unless you wanted the tools to run on Linux - you didn't specify).

Also would you prefer FOSS tools or are you ok with proprietary? The FOSS 'answer' to Unity is Godot, which seems pretty decent.

And obviously you can make a game in any language that has GL and/or SDL bindings. Or even those without if you're willing to do some very hard work. You could make a game in anything with Ncurses support. Or just in text. You could make a game in the form of a Libre Office spreadsheet.

But yeah, based on the clarification you offered after the vague OP, Unity (which does run on Linux now as /u/RyuzakiKK mentioned) or Godot sound like what you're after.

Hey guys. I've had a Linux build of my god game available for a while. I'm posting here for a few reasons a) someone suggested it b) I thought you guys might be interested and c) I haven't had that much feedback from the Linux community and would love some pointers. My update frequency has slowed (because of new jobs and moving to a house with very slow internet) but I keep a list of all suggestions here - which you are welcome to comment on.

The game is something I've had in my head for years. You start on a lifeless world and are tasked with creating a balanced ecosystem. You can create species of plants, herbivores and carnivores. These all have genes which effect their behaviors and interactions. Through breeding and genetic mutation evolution is fully modeled in the simulation. This in itself was a cool sandbox but not really a game. I saw some similarities between incremental/idle games and the player's goal, in my game, to create an efficient life creating ecosystem and decided to lean into it. This lead to my science system which I think has really added some meat to the sandbox experience.

I designed the scientific research system based on incremental games, where the input comes from the organisms in your ecosystem... For example, if a plant is in range of a research building it increments your plant science counter. You can upgrade stations to increase the amount it increments by and the range. The reason you care about this is that this research can be spent on genetic modification abilities which help (if you are careful) you build a better ecosystem, which in turn means you generate more research.

Not a Unity advocate myself but according to http://unity3d.com/unity/roadmap OpenGL 4 is finally schedules to be release in Unity 5.3 which appears to be currently in beta and set for release next month.

For those unaware, github.

> A Vulkan and OpenGL overlay for monitoring FPS, temperatures, CPU/GPU load and more.

gif

FYI, if you think VALVe doesn't listen to requests, consider the following...

1. I requested they add Release Notes to their Releases section (they weren't doing that): https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/issues/2479
2. So they did: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/releases

Also, you can find the Release Notes in the Releases section now peeps! Enjoy! \o/

Also, LLVM version 7 supposedly stops DX11 based GPU hangs, which I assume are the shader caches.

https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/blob/proton_3.7/PREREQS.md

Also, OpenGL games apparently require MESA 18.2. (Explains why I had to force Vulkan on DOOM) Both Mesa 18.2 and LLVM7 I think are beta. At least on Manjaro which is rolling release, I'm on Mesa 18.1.6 and LLVM6. (Stable. Testing version may have updated drivers, but since they're not "stable", I'd rather wait.)

We have some pretty complex installers for some Wine games such as configuring a Wine prefix, running Winetricks tasks, setting up Xinput controller compatibility, applying patches to games, etc

A good example is the Dark Souls installer: https://lutris.net/games/install/1298/view

• Downloads the game on Steam
• Downloads and extracts DSFix 2.4
• Creates a Wine prefix inside the Steam game folder
• Installs a couple Windows components with Winetricks
• Activates Xinput controller compatibility

It's also possible to do all of this manually from Lutris itself, you can run Winecfg, Winetricks, the Joypad control panel, arbitrary exes, etc