linuxmemes

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.

I sometimes wish Proton was also available on macOS… But Wine is good enough I guess, and still works great for most games :)

No one is mentioning Tux Racer? Blasphemy!

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.

WoW in 00s, OpenTTD, Tux Kart

I was playing Quake 3 and Unreal Torunament 2003 in the early 2000s, they had native versions. One of the first mainstream Linux gaming pioneers.

I used to use Second Life on Linux too with a third party client.

Wasn't Playonlinux for the longest time the easiest option to run games under linux?

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.

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?

Oh yeah. Back in the late 90s I played all the games ported by Loki Games. I played the native quakes, portal 1 & 2. And using regular Wine and some winetricks I played about 300 hours of Skyrim and completed Mass Effect 1,2,3.

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

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 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.

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 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.

What about xbill? Why is noone mentioning it?

Can you imagine not having depth perception because of your hairstyle?

Yeah, it wasn’t anything like the meme