this post was submitted on 05 Jul 2026
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Linux Gaming

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I am and always was a casual gamer, I like playing puzzles, strategy and builder games, sometimes I play with friends some 7 days to die or AoE2. I am on Linux Mint for more than a year now and was surprised how easy gaming was. From time to time I had problems with weird DirectX error messages, but all in all everything just worked.

My setup:

  • AMD Ryzen 5 3600
  • GeForce GTX 1660 Super
  • 32 GB DDR4 RAM

So last week my girlfriend worked on my computer (we are not living together), she wrote some bills for customers and did some table stuff in calc. When I asked her at the end of the day how it was to work on Linux, she shrugged and said "Oh I didn't notice" lol (using Cinnamon as DE btw).

Today she bought Until Dawn the remake on Steam while she is here and because she really wanted to play she downloaded it to my PC. She just started to play and everything was great. I wondered again if I should say something like "you see how great you can game in Linux", but then it came to my mind - she doesn't care and she didn't even question it! The Linux Desktop got so mature, that non-tech people just don't notice!

I think the biggest "problem" with Linux adoption is that it does not come preinstalled on computers, and this kind of proves my point I guess.

Yeah that's all, I just wanted to share this with you guys.

P.S.: There were some bugs btw. but it turned out they have nothing to do with the OS.

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[–] psycotica0@lemmy.ca 6 points 1 hour ago (2 children)

I'm glad you had much better luck than I did, because playing games with Wine always worked like shit in my experience. It was occasionally an option that made the game playable at all, and very occasionally it would work flawlessly and all would be astounded, but the vast majority of the time I had little to no success. Maybe I just sucked.

Whereas these days I hit the play button on Steam and it works 100% of the time, in my experience. I basically only ever play games with friends online, and none of them even knew that I'd switched from Windows to Linux at some point in the middle.

I think we're different kinds of gamers, though, because you said Wine recently fixed a frame timing issue that made rhythm games and racing games playable after they'd been unplayable forever... but I don't care about that at all. I don't play those games, and those were never the problems I had in the dark ages, but I'm glad you're all good now too!

[–] Buffalox@lemmy.world 1 points 1 hour ago

very occasionally it would work flawlessly and all would be astounded,

Absolutely, any semi decent game that was playable, even if it had some glitches, was AMAZING.

[–] madthumbs@lemmy.world 0 points 1 hour ago (1 children)

Not everyone uses Steam, and Steam does a lot of stuff that Proton does not.

[–] Buffalox@lemmy.world 2 points 1 hour ago* (last edited 1 hour ago)

Proton is made by Valve for playing Windows games on Steam and Steam Deck.
It seems logical that it works best for the platform it was designed for.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proton_(software)

Proton is designed for integration into the Steam client as "Steam Play". It is officially distributed through the client, although third-party forks can be manually installed.