linuxmemes

I first gamed on Linux in a time where Humble Indie Bundles weren't a thing yet and Wine was still very limited. Console emulators and some older native ports was all that was available. Oh and I walked uphill, both ways.

Circa 2015-2016. I was still dual booting Win 10 and Ubuntu at the time. It was a pain in the ass.

Alpha Centauri baby! Still one of my favourite games, I wonder if it still works

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.

WoW in 00s, OpenTTD, Tux Kart

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

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.

Hey, Nexuiz rocked.

Yeah, it wasn’t anything like the meme

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.

What about xbill? Why is noone mentioning it?

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.

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 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.

Basically some Source games, Gog's offerings and Guild Wars in-between rounds of tuxkart

I hated Windows 8 enough to put up with it at the time. It's nuts how much things have improved since then.

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