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I been wanting to get more into gaming with Linux, partially because I have gotten sick and tired of Windows, and the fact that I recently gotten a lot of experience on Linux on my main laptop. With Windows I feel this sense of just uneasiness, knowing full well that Windows 10’s EOL is right around the corner, Windows 11 being significantly more awful in comparison, and Microsoft trying to justify the existence of AI, by forcing it down our throats. I been wanting to switch to Linux for a while, but it hasn’t until recently that Linux has become a viable option for most things that I do every day.

I can do pretty much most of my work on Linux. But when it comes to gaming, it always has been a question mark to me. Linux gaming is this one thing I remember hearing so much from LTT or whatever big tech youtuber, and then I went and tried it myself with hardware I have, and I ended up pretty disappointed. Linux often gave me a myriad of weird little issues with things, like minimizing a game would make the game crash, or the fact I needed to change some settings to make the game not completely shit itself, or something else entirely. Linux gaming to me felt very very fragile and like something that can break or explode if I so much as looked it the wrong way. However, ever since the release of the Steam Deck, things have significantly improved. Linux gaming finally doesn’t feel like it could break at any moment, hell, it feels like you can play almost any game without any issues at all. And with Nvidia finally deciding to play ball1, we are slowly, yet surely reaching a point where we can finally say that Linux gaming is actually good now. The hardware that I will be using for testing will be the same hardware mentioned here. Also I should mention that this will be a series of posts where I will try out more and more games that are in my library, until i finally get a full picture of what Linux can do.

The game roster:

The following list of games are some that I decided to try out. Many of these are pretty good games that I really love to play. The following table lists these games, the year of release, their ProtonDB rating, and my own very pointless rating, lmao.

Game name Release year ProtonDB rating lug’s really pointless linux compatibility rating:
Cities: Skylines 2014 Gold or Native??? 2 sucks ass - just okay i guess
DOOM Eternal 2020 Gold pretty good i think
Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus 2017 Platinum pretty good i think
Deep Rock Galactic 2020 Platinum excellent (yippee!)
PEAK 2025 Platinum excellent (yippee!)

lug’s really pointless linux compatibility rating

I feel that ProtonDB as a way to judge Linux compatibility is kinda hit or mess to be honest. Sometimes a well rated game fails to run on my hardware, and then sometimes a poorly rated game runs pretty well all things considered. This is why I made my own compatibility rating. This is not to be taken seriously btw, lmao.

excellent (yippee!)

For games that run as well as on Windows, with no weird issues, no glitching, no freezing when I change windows. The game runs out of the box, without having to configure launch options, look up ProtonDB, or r/linux_gaming.

pretty good i think

For games that run pretty well, but not as well as on Windows, has some stuttering, some graphics are kinda messed up but not enough to affect things, framerate isn’t as high as in Windows. Also for games that make me have to look up ProtonDB or r/linux_gaming to see how to fix the issue.

just okay i guess

For games that run not that great on Linux, has stuttering, glitches, or random freezing. I had to look up ProtonDB to see how to fix the issues, or change things significantly compared to how I set them up on Windows. (for example, removing mods, changing graphics settings, etc).

sucks ass

For games that outright failed to open on Linux, either due to launcher fuckery, anticheat, etc.

Cities Skylines

I really love to play Cities Skylines, however, it honestly is a very janky game. This game’s over-reliance of mods to fix game issues is very annoying, but it also proved to be a very big issue when running Linux. The game’s launcher loaded fine, but trying to play my main city that I made and play on Windows failed miserably. The game essentially locked up my whole computer, forcing me to force restart. According to ProtonDB, many of the mods in-game don’t like Linux, and careful selection is required to have a good experience in the game. I tried making a new city, and the frame rate was god-awful. I feel if I were to switch to Linux full time, I would set up a dual boot system, with Linux on one drive and Windows on another drive. (i would still have to keep a second partition anyways, lmao)

lug’s really pointless Linux compatibility rating: sucks ass
game settings: mix of low and medium settings
Lug’s notes on this game
loading is a bit slower, often taking up to 5 minutes to load a medium city,
you get audio glitching and stuttering, the same as in windows (or at least, in my setup)
trying to load a medium/larger city save causes the game to freeze completely (and by extension your whole computer, lmao), you end up having to force restart the whole system.
according to protonDB, many of the mods in the game do not like Linux that much.

DOOM Eternal

This is probably the most demanding game that I own, and its Linux performance was quite good, and in some cases, outperforms Windows. I played the beginning of the last level where you fight against the final boss, and it was just playable. I did encounter some minor issues however. You do see frame dips, once in a while, and other times you see stuff like glitched graphics or menus misbehaving. Some assets take a bit to load on Linux, which could be a bit annoying to see since they end up pixelated for a couple of seconds until the assets fully load in. Overall, DOOM Eternal on Linux is really good tbh.

lug’s really pointless linux compatibility rating: pretty good i think
settings set to medium across the board
Lug’s notes on this game
options menu has some issues with stuff dissepearing when using mouse, using the keyboard worked just as fine.
great performance, (almost) always above 115 fps according to the counter
occasional stuttering sometimes

Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus

I tend to play this game quite a lot, since it is fun IMO, and the combat and gunplay is the best that the Wolfenstein series has ever had (I also like the story and the characters, bite me). This game runs just fine on Linux, with generally good performance as you’d expect on a game from this age. My settings were set to high across the board, with motion blur turned off (the motion blur makes me feel really sick after playing for a bit). I decided to play some of the simulations in-game, those two levels being the rocket train level and Area 52 which I played in their entirety. In hindsight, I should’ve probably played a more open map, like New York or New Orleans, or just started a new game and see how the system handles it. Anyways, the FPS was high as you’d expect, but I did notice some occasional frame dips from smoke effects. Compared to Windows, you do lose some FPS overall, but it is still playable at least.

lug’s really pointless linux compatibility rating: pretty good i think
settings set to high across the board
Lug’s notes on this game
generally good performance as you’d expect on a game this age.
occasional frame dips from smoke effects from what i can tell, not game breaking, at least.
as per usual, the game keeps bothering me about the VRAM limit, lmao
generally some FPS is lost in this game, but it is still very enjoyable.

Deep Rock Galactic

DRG is a game that I haven’t played in a hot minute, so I decided to give it another go. I already knew this game ran on Linux just fine, but I think the performance now is better compared on how it was a couple years ago.

lug’s really pointless linux compatibility rating: excellent (yippee!)
settings set to medium across the board
Lug’s notes on this game
the launcher asked me to compile shaders, I decided to skip it.
intro video doesn’t show up, but the game loads fine
game runs great
occasional frame dips

PEAK

btw i made a post about this game here.

I been playing this game quite a lot, and to be honest, I wanted to see if the game worked fine in multiplayer. So I joined a game with some people from a server I am in, and just started playing. I did encounter some game fuckery, which forced me to reset the game, but eventually I got in. The game’s performance is really good, and I think is identical to what Windows gets often. I played over 45 minutes without any issues, and I encountered smoke and rain effects with no FPS drops at all. I really don’t have much to say about this game, other then it is really great and gives a great experience on Linux.

lug’s really pointless linux compatibility rating: excellent (yippee!)
settings set to high (there is not much to modify)
Lug’s notes on this game
originally had issues opening it, but it turns out that the nvidia driver unloaded itself after update i think
game seems to run great in the lobby so far.
performance continues to be pretty good in the rest of the game, and framerate is what you expect it to be
played over 45 minutes with barely any issues

Final notes

I still remember seeing all those videos back in 2018 when Steam Proton got announced. There were tons of videos of people trying out games like Overwatch (the game that was big back then) and comparing the performance on Windows. Linux showed that it had potential, but more work was needed to get a better experience. With the launch of the Steam Deck, it was clear that Valve and the open source community locked the fuck in to be able to make an experience that is so good that you can build and sell a console around it.

I kinda dislike that saying of “Year of the Linux desktop” because it is something that is probably impossible that it would happen. Apple is a trillion dollar company and it can’t manage more than 20% of the marketshare, how is Linux gonna compete with that? I do think that there will be more waves of people trying out Linux, in the same way people now are rejecting the convenience of Spotify and other streaming services and replacing them with piracy or purchasing their music again. People may grow tired of Windows and try Linux in a VM for a while, maybe get a dual boot setup, or alternatively they may get a Steam Deck and realize that they really like the experience of what SteamOS has to offer. Who knows.

I do wish to see some improvements to Linux however. The way apps crash on launch on Linux is very unhelpful (they often crash without providing any indication they crash), Wayland is still a mess and I really hope they manage to sort out most of the issues that currently exist that prevent Wayland to be fully ready for prime time, and I wish that security on Linux was taken more seriously.3

  1. lug’s note: by play ball, i mean that Nvidia is finally working to make Wayland on Linux not a shitty experience. Nowadays, I can say that Nvidia on Linux has been a significantly better experience compared to the last time I tried it a couple years ago.↩︎

  2. protondb says that it is native in the settings but at the same time says that it gets a gold rating??? idk anymore man↩︎

  3. lug’s note: this is based off a couple blogposts, some articles that I found and a bunch of reading related to the topic, apparently Linux is missing certain crucial security features compared to Windows and macOS, but I can’t figure out if this is a deal breaker for me or not. A lot of posts and stuff are very technical and go deep on apparent flaws that the operating system has. I been trying to find a clear answer and they are either “Linux is horribly unsecure, if you use it you will get hacked” or “Linux is so much more secure than Windows!”. I guess i should be fine on Fedora? It has some good defaults like Wayland and has SELinux set up out of the box too. Maybe I will make a blogpost related to this in the future.↩︎

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