The stereotype is of the haughty Linux user, but fuck me all I ever see in these discussions is Windows users being belittling assholes.
I’ve seen so many Windows users come out of nowhere to shit on Linux when gaming comes up. There was the whole thing where a bunch of alpha testers got banned on Ashes of Creation a few weeks ago and the discord just had like half of people in their discord throwing hate around.
Also accusing Linux users of being cheaters… as if game cheats are made for Linux.
Unfortunately those pesky live service games that have the most player counts are disproportionately represented in that 10%.
They tend to require installing a rootkit on your own computer. I wouldn’t buy them even if they did support Linux.
you are a minority in this case
Which I’m sure is much higher than windows games working on windows. Proton is awesome for old games.
Switching to linux had me cold turkey league of legends im a healthier happier person now.
Same for me but I switched to dota; im not healthier
the real cold turkey was Riot killing linux support last year. Seems like there wasn’t enough linux players at the time for them to walk back that decision.
I think this is a higher percentage than Windows 11 if you include 16-bit ones from the 90s and early 2000s. (What was wrong with NTVDM64, anyway?)
I would love to swap to Linux if we could get games with kernel level anti cheat to be compatible.
I’m gonna be that guy, most of them are in some way or another. The devs literally decided to not bother pressing the button that enables compatibility because they don’t feel like it.
100% of games worth playing work on Linux!
For me its 100% of games, but sure, havent tried all games that exist…
Typically the competitive multiplayer ones fail because of kernel-level anticheat.
This keeps getting repeated as a blanket statement and it irks me a bit. More than half of the top ten most played games on steam on any given day work. There’s a small handful of games that don’t work that fit into the competitive multiplayer genre and an even smaller handful that are actually popular.
To be clear, I’m not irk’ed with you, just that this myth that gets passed around a lot hasn’t caught up to reality.
Top games by player count by daily players (numbers are peak in 24 hrs)(skipping anything that doesn’t qualify as competitive multiplayer):
- CS 2 - ✅ - 1.4 mil
- BF 6 - ❌ - 413k
- Dota 2 - ✅ - 761k
- Pubg - ❌ - 620k
- Arc Raiders - ✅ - 322k
- Apex Legends - ❌ - 155k
- War Thunder - ✅ - 78k
- Delta force - ❌ ✅ (work around exists) - 182k
- Marvel rivals - ✅ - 83k
- Dead by Daylight - ✅ - 66k
- Naraka: Bladepoint - ✅ - 120k
- Rust - ❌ (some servers do work though) - 130k
✅ Top 20 total - 2.83 mil ❌ Top 20 total - 1.5 mil (including Delta force)
Idk. Having just crunched the numbers I guess it’s fair to warn people about some borked Anti-Cheat games but I wish people would caveat by saying the majority of games people play even in the competitive multiplayer scene work. And it’s only going to get better i’d argue, although games like bf6 being a recent launch that didn’t work is a bummer. As the percentage of Linux users climb they’ll be increasingly incentivized to find a solution.
League isn’t on here, that would skew the numbers pro-windows.
Impressive, now tell me what % of the top 20 current concurrent players games run on linux.
Here you go:
Want more?
More?
MOAR?
And personally:
What am I looking at? What are the colors?
Ok, I figured it out after visiting protondb.com
as far as i can tell this only accounts for games on steam, which means massive games like fortnite, valorant, league of legends and genshin impact are excluded. also for some reason apex legends is rated as silver on protondb despite very much not working on linux? so i guess at least one of the silvers in the top 10 chart should be downgraded to not working
This is true. For anticheat specific issues there is https://areweanticheatyet.com/
Apex Legends is silver because it had 3k+ positive reviews before, but about a year ago EA decided to flip the switch on Linux within EAC. Likely to fuck with steam deck, or maybe to do some handwaving of dealing with cheaters.
Okay, real talk.
I know there’s probably 100 videos on this, but I don’t have time to watch any of them right now…
How much performance is lost/gained from using Linux to play games via proton?
I’m certain any game with a native Linux version will work great, I’m mostly concerned with the ones that need some kind of emulation layer.
colloquially, I hear “5-10% overhead depending on the game and if you’re running mods”
On the other hand, some testing has found that running games on Linux with Proton is actually faster than with Windows on the same hardware, because Windows is such a resource hog.
The hardware in in this test being the Legion Go steamdeck rival.
See, that’s what I was thinking. I’ll have to do more research, but I would think all the overhead from Windows being Windows, would kind of diminish the gap between running it natively on Windows, and using proton or something so you can run it on Linux.
The overhead on both should be fairly similar, though with how Windows is, it wouldn’t surprise me if it was slower.
I guess the beefier your system is the less you will notice the impact of a greedy OS (because thats a fixed/absolute overhead) while the performance hit of having to translate directx through Proton will always be there (because that’s a percent-based overhead for each rendered frame)
So for the most top-end rigs, probably still Windows will squeeze a few more FPS. But it’s close.
At the end of the day Linux and Windows are both pretty comparable for gaming performance, so we shouldn’t worry about that as a deciding factor in which OS to choose, and can decide based on other merits.
Good, but native would be better. At least they can’t kill Linux the way they did os/2
I’ll take compatible.
Most people game on windows. It’s monolithic nature also means that they will mostly encounter the same bugs.
Linux has a wider base of functionality. A bug might only show up on Debian, not Ubuntu.
End result, they spend 60% of their effort solving bugs, for 2% of their base. That’s not cost viable.
Compatibility means they just have to focus on 1 base of code. All we ask is that they don’t actively break the compatibility. This is far less effort, and a lot easier to sell to the bean counters.
Once Linux has a decent share, we can work on better universal standards. We likely need at least 10% to even get a chance there.
Ummmm sure?
I don’t want to start that extremely old flame war of native VS jit code but…
Proton is not an emulation, it is a translation to native code, and while it has some drawbacks (more memory usage, more time at start up to compile things) it can unlocks a lot of potential when the hw support new capabilities, this is the reason that some dx10 games run faster on Linux…
The only game I am not able to make it work on Linux is “The Sims 4”. After installing it on Steam, when clicking on Play, it runs the EA app in the background and tries to start the game, but it doesn’t load. Any suggestion?
always check protonDB:
https://www.protondb.com/app/1222670
Looks like most people are using GloriousEggroll’s version of Proton (ProtonGE) and some are using launch options to disable the EA Launcher.
GE works on Wine at Red Hat and is thus very knowledgeable about windows translations and the stuff he changes about Valves Proton are often merged down the line, its like an unofficial beta release and I’ve had good a experience with his proton Versions.
That said, to actually get custom Proton Versions I use “ProtonUp-Qt”(available as flatpak): https://davidotek.github.io/protonup-qt/
Which downloads different Proton Versions and manages them for you. You can then set the default for all games in the steam settings, or on a game-by-game basis
Unfortunately the 10% that don’t include the biggest, most played games in the world.
Like Elden ring and nightreign? Hugely successful games. Play them all the time in Linux.
Hows battlefield 6 going on linux? Fortnite? Black Ops 6? Warzone? PUBG? Apex Legends? GTA 5 / GTA Online?
I don’t play any of those.
My point is, there’s loads of great popular multiplayer games that don’t use garbage kernel level anticheat.
But Elden Ring and Elden Ring Nightreign are not multiplayer games…?
You can also add many more of the top most popular multiplayer games to my list, I just listed a few of the biggest. You won’t be playing GTA6, which is likely to be the biggest game of all time, on Linux. Black Ops 7, the biggest release of this year, won’t be on Linux.
You obviously know nothing about these two games lol. Yes they are multiplayer. Nightreign is also designed to primarily be played 3 players online at a time.
Co-op, duels, and “invasions” lol. Not what we’re talking about here. Elden ring is a single player game for all that any one cares or knows.
We’re definitely not talking about co-op when anyone says multiplayer.
You need to learn the definition of “multi”, then.
This. Plus anti-cheat is still a removed on Linux.
Anticheat works fine. Just not the kernel level nasty ones. But that’s a good thing.
But that’s a good thing.
If you don’t want to be able to play the biggest games released, I guess…
You’re looking at it wrong. They need to not invade our kernel.
For this type of anti-cheat yes, they do.
You can choose not to let them, it just means you can’t play the games. Do you believe they’re installing malicious code or something in the anti-cheat?
Exactly. This is not a type I need. My kernel does not need to be invaded. It’s literally enabling spyware and you’d never know it.
Do I believe it? I don’t know. But it’s possible and I’d never know, so fuck that.
- ESEA Bitcoin miner incident (2013) In April 2013 ESEA (a third-party matchmaking + anti-cheat service) had a built-in bitcoin-miner component in their client. It was discovered by users in May. � XDA Developers +1 Because the ESEA client ran with high privileges (as a driver/anti-cheat style client), the mining component was harder to detect and harder to remove compared to normal user-mode software. � XDA Developers The company settled for a $1 M payout. � Lesson: Granting deep OS access to a client means if it goes rogue (or is malicious) you get real damage (mining, rootkit-like behaviour, etc). XDA Developers
- Riot Vanguard (for VALORANT) and related complaints Vanguard is the kernel-level anti-cheat used by Riot Games in VALORANT. � Wikipedia +1 It has drawn criticism for its always-running behaviour (some users report it loads at boot even before the game). � Gist +1 Some users report system instability (blue screens) after installation. � Lesson: Even if the anti-cheat isn’t malicious per se, because it’s so deep, any defect or compatibility issue can cause system-wide pain (crashes, instability). XDA Developers
- Theoretical/privacy risk: drivers acting like rootkits Academic work (“If It Looks Like a Rootkit…”) analyses KLAC and finds that some solutions behave very similarly to rootkits: intercepting kernel calls, hiding modules, monitoring broad system activity. � arXiv Articles note that allowing game companies to insert drivers at boot time that monitor “outside the game” sets a “potentially dangerous precedent”. � Lesson: Even when everything is “legal”, the architectural model has intrinsic risk: trusted code has extremely high privileges; if trust is misplaced (malicious dev, insider threat, compromise) you have huge exposure. How-To Geek
- Example of “residual services” / bad uninstall behaviour A Steam forum post (for game “Delta Force (2025 video game)”) reported that the anti-cheat driver “ACE-BASE / AntiCheatExpert” remained active even after game uninstall, caused conflicts, etc. � Lesson: When kernel-level drivers aren’t cleanly managed/uninstalled, they can linger as “shadow” privileged components, increasing risk surface. Steam Community
- Corporate/State concerns & data-privacy An article points out that KLAC by its nature has full system visibility (“what this means is that this type of spyware can exfiltrate sensitive information…”) and calls out potential misuse—especially worrying when combined with acquisitions or state-influence (e.g., the purchase of a KLAC-provider by a sovereign entity). � Lesson: Beyond just “can it crash my PC”, there’s question of what else the driver could observe (system activity, other processes, telemetry) and whether user has meaningful control.
That’s a lot of “it possibly could, but it never has happened with huge reputable billion dollar companies”. Also seems like an AI generated list, or copied from Wikipedia? If that’s the best you can find, yeah there’s no issue.
No one should be giving some random anti-cheat program made by who knows who kennel level access, but one by EA? Fine. EA aren’t in the business of getting bankrupted by installing rootkit malware with their video game anti-cheat.
Calling anti-cheat “spyware” is dumb.
Linux people responses will be like: “ive never seen that, works fine on my machine. i’m curious tho what version of Wine, Proton are you using? …. oh? what’s your desktop environment? … oh KDE…? ah must be a Bazzite thing? i’ve never seen that before on Mint with GNOME on my Intel Graphics Card”
https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@SilbinaryWolf/115483449807384098
Interesting. I beat hollow knight on my Linux desktop years ago. And I’m currently playing through silksong on my steam deck. And you’re right. I’ve never seen this lol.
Skill issue
I played through and 100%'d Silksong entirely on Linux. The only issue I had was that the native Linux version had buggy controller support causing phantom inputs, and didn’t activate rumble at all (like the original Hollow Knight).
I normally play everything through Proton-GE by default and didn’t realize the game was initially installed as native. Forcing GE installed the Windows version and it was flawless all through the final boss.
(In short, definitely a skill issue)
That 10%? The games everybody plays.
I guess I’m not everbody then. After writing this message I’ll go and play some Witcher 3.
Witcher 3? Never heard of it.
/s
This may be the first time I haven’t fallen into the subset of “everybody.”
Everything I want to play runs using Linux/proton. It seems like the only things that have trouble are things I’d never consider even installing, let alone running.
