[HN Gopher] Nearly 90% of Windows Games Now Run on Linux
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Nearly 90% of Windows Games Now Run on Linux
Author : jamesgill
Score : 106 points
Date : 2025-10-28 18:37 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.tomshardware.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.tomshardware.com)
| youngNed wrote:
| As someone who only has a windows machine to play games,
| specifically driving sims, I really wish my hardware worked on
| Linux.
| dontlaugh wrote:
| There are lots of niches like that. The other big one is
| competitive games with invasive anti cheat.
| rererereferred wrote:
| My only limitation to ditch Windows for games is my nvidia
| card. I wonder if their drivers will become better before I go
| for an upgrade. I do have a Steam Deck for lower requirement
| games.
| qudat wrote:
| Nvidia drivers are already much better now. How old is your
| card? I have a 2080ti and once you get through the initial
| setup it works fine
| ErroneousBosh wrote:
| NVidia has probably the best support for Linux. None of the
| "game" versus "studio" nonsense, either.
| stusmall wrote:
| I recently ran into a game where online match making was broken
| in windows, but worked just fine in Linux. I felt like I was
| trapped in the upsidedown.
| scotty79 wrote:
| I tried GOG version of Soul Reaver and some polygons and UI
| kept disappearing depending on the direction the character was
| facing. On Windows 10. I should try Linux.
| tracker1 wrote:
| Nice to see this. Worth noting that a lot of Windows (or DOS)
| games past may also not run well on current Windows versions. The
| anti-cheat issue is likely to persist for at lest a few more
| years... though I think the relative success of the Steam Deck
| itself has moved the bar significantly in terms of demands for
| support.
|
| I do think there's a few hiccups still with Linux support. The
| shift up to 6.16 kernel has itself resolved many of the issues
| I'd been having in the past. If you're on an older LTS that
| hasn't moved, you're likely to see more issues than with a more
| current distro.
| o11c wrote:
| > Worth noting that a lot of Windows (or DOS) games past may
| also not run well on current Windows versions.
|
| To be fair, anything old that wasn't famous has a decent chance
| to be broken under WINE too. It might just be a _single_ call
| to some obscure animation API or something, but it can be
| enough to break the entire game.
| tracker1 wrote:
| I've actually had better experiences with Wine with older
| games than newer Windows.
| constantcrying wrote:
| Many old games work well. Check out protonDB before trying,
| but I have had good experience running older GoG games
| through proton.
| o11c wrote:
| If it's on GOG it probably wasn't _that_ obscure.
|
| Also, sometimes the original version doesn't work but the
| GOG version does, or even vice versa. I've seen all sorts
| of oddities.
| starkeeper wrote:
| It would be amazing to have data specifically and only for steam
| games.
|
| This post gives me hope that I can ditch windows forever for all
| things soon! Games is the only reason I do windows for
| development these days.
| shmerl wrote:
| There is ProtonDB: https://www.protondb.com
| marcodiego wrote:
| That means 10% of windows games use invasive anti-cheat?
| qudat wrote:
| Yea, all the really popular online games are gonna be in that
| 10%.
|
| All i want is rocket league :(
|
| At least tf2 works
| ZiiS wrote:
| Rocket League was native on Linux at one point.
| kgwxd wrote:
| Does Rocket League no longer work with Proton? It used to
| work even better than both the native Linux and Windows
| versions for me back in the day. If not, what changed?
| wingmanjd wrote:
| FWIW, Rocket League works just fine on Linux, but you need to
| set it to the Proton compatibility, not the native Linux
| client.
| amarant wrote:
| I too recall having issues with the anti-cheat last I tried
| (years ago at this point).
|
| How did those issues get fixed? Did they abandon the anti
| cheat, or does the anti cheat now work under proton?
| Jeaye wrote:
| Rocket League works just fine for me, via Proton. I have over
| 4k hours in, each one of them done from Linux.
|
| BakkesMod also works, thanks to
| https://github.com/CrumblyLiquid/BakkesLinux
|
| Rocket League has a platinum rating on ProtonDB:
| https://www.protondb.com/app/252950
| 0xC0ncord wrote:
| According to ProtonDB[1], about 7-10% of the top 100 and top
| 1000 games are "borked", but the actual reason why can be
| nuanced. However, these days it is almost always anti-cheat.
|
| [1] https://www.protondb.com/dashboard
| hamdingers wrote:
| After being impressed with my Steam Deck, earlier this year I
| purchased an RX 9070XT (my first card from team red since the
| Radeon 9800 Pro) for my gaming PC and switched to linux full
| time.
|
| Now hundreds of hours in, I have nothing interesting to write
| about it. For me and the games I play it's been a seamless
| transition.
| SchemaLoad wrote:
| I found myself just never using my PC after getting a
| steamdeck. I had the deck plugged in to my TV most of the time.
| I recently just installed Bazzite on my PC and moved it to the
| TV so now I play on that all the time. What Valve has done to
| make gaming on linux work is remarkable.
|
| I remember the days of having to manually install steam in Wine
| and how only a few games would work like that.
| samrus wrote:
| Ive been yearning for the days when using linux in daily life
| isnt "interesting" but just something you do. It feels great
| knallfrosch wrote:
| Number of games is a weird statistic.
|
| What about market share of play time?
| em-bee wrote:
| yes, but not marketshare played on linux, but rather, how much
| of the marketshare that's currently played on windows would be
| playable on linux.
| constantcrying wrote:
| As someone who only plays videogames on Linux I have to say that
| it is a surprisingly good experience, even with an Nvidia Card.
| Some things just are unavailable, e.g. the new Battlefield,
| mostly due to developers wanting to insert very specific Anti-
| Cheat software.
|
| But so much _just works_ , old games, new games, singleplayer,
| multiplayer.
| pton_xd wrote:
| It's been months since I've booted into Windows to play a game.
| Feels amazing. The only exception I've run into is heavy
| anticheat titles, like trying to play on Faceit CS2 servers.
|
| I can live without that though. I don't think I'll bother setting
| up a Windows partition on my next PC.
| Simulacra wrote:
| There's really not many reasons left to not use Linux. With
| windows 11 it's only going to get better as more refugees switch
| almiron10 wrote:
| If Adobe apps worked on Linux, I'd switch in a heartbeat.
| sthuck wrote:
| 2003 me thought Wine is a dead end project and a waste of
| developer time. Granted valve put a lot of effort into Proton but
| they wouldn't even have considered it without the massive amount
| of work done before, kudus to all the non cynical wine devs
| eterm wrote:
| 2003 me was optimistic that wine was a dead-end, with games
| like Neverwinter Nights, and Quake 3 Arena having native linux
| releases.
|
| The Year of Linux on the Desktop was near, and wine would
| surely be a temporary stop-gap.
| Fire-Dragon-DoL wrote:
| Sadly Nucleus Coop us heavily focused on Windows
| adverbly wrote:
| Anecdotally, it's way above 90%.
|
| I think the only game in the last 2 years I haven't been able to
| run is battlefield 6.
|
| Any game that is reasonably popular has a very good chance of
| running. Just go to protondb and anything gold and above is
| generally good to go.
| ErroneousBosh wrote:
| > I think the only game in the last 2 years I haven't been able
| to run is battlefield 6.
|
| Neither has anyone else, if they bought it directly from EA.
| Telaneo wrote:
| That anecdote goes the other way if you skew towards popular
| multiplayer games, since those are the ones with anti-cheat.
| Someone who plays League, Apex, PUBG, and Destiny 2, and was
| really looking forward to BF6, will be mightily disappointed.
| You're unlikely to be invested in all of those games, but a
| pretty large amount of people are very, very invested in at-
| least one of those, which, unfortunately, makes Linux a non-
| starter for them.
|
| Even if 99% of games worked fine on Linux, a large amount of
| people spend 50+% of their time in-game in one of those games,
| so it doesn't end up feeling like 90+% of games work.
|
| Thankfully, the corollary of that is that single-player games
| pretty much all work, barring some edge cases, like very recent
| titles that haven't had the kinks ironed out yet.
| mindcrash wrote:
| In case you don't own a Steam Deck and would like to see how much
| of your library would run on Linux:
|
| 1. Go to your library
|
| 2. Click the filter button
|
| 3. Under "hardware support" you'll see a dropdown "Steam Deck"
| with 4 options, here's some explanation what they mean:
|
| Verified - Means this game 100% works on Linux (and Deck), which
| is verified by Valve
|
| Playable - Means this game works on Linux (and Deck) but it might
| have some tiny issues (e.g. font size)
|
| Untested - Might work, but not tested
|
| So to check if your games would run pretty nicely either filter
| on "Verified" games or "Verified or playable" games and it
| filters out everything which will or might not run at all.
|
| You'll be surprised how much games can run on Linux these days --
| thanks to the massive effort Valve puts in Proton and some devs
| (including Valve) publishing native Linux builds of their games
| on Steam, and even things you might not even consider at all like
| Skyrim or Oblivion with all your favorite mods (!)
| jakebasile wrote:
| I'm never going back. If something changes and the only option is
| Windows or consoles I'll just stop buying new games or take up
| another hobby.
|
| Being able to use sane scripting to solve problems, ZFS snapshots
| to undo bad mod installs, using the same system for development,
| and so on is no longer something I'm willing to give up. I've
| also started amassing a small collection of Cloud Init configs
| that set up game servers inside LXD containers. Some of these
| have native Linux binaries but a few only have Windows servers.
| They run perfectly well through Wine.
|
| Anyone here even vaguely interested, I encourage you to just try
| it. I use Ubuntu and it works great on both AMD and Nvidia cards
| for me. What have you got to lose?
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| In terms of compatibility and performance, there is a noticeable
| increase over the last years since Proton came up.
|
| Racing wheels are still not well supported IMO. Although on Linux
| you can map a racing wheel to any other peripheral and work this
| around.
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(page generated 2025-10-28 23:01 UTC)