The topic Linux gaming still breaks in ways that make normal people give up is currently the subject of lively discussion — readers and analysts are keeping a close eye on developments.
This is taking place in a dynamic environment: companies’ decisions and competitors’ reactions can quickly change the picture.
Linux gaming has come such a long way in the last decade, and for seasoned Linux users, that’s a great thing. There are fewer reasons than ever to keep a Windows boot drive in our systems, and the experience only gets better with each passing month. With that said, I want gaming on Linux to grow as much as anyone, but it still has the potential to break in ways that cause those that aren’t familiar with the trappings of Linux to flee right back to Windows. There’s more promise around the platform than ever, but the lack of polish on the technical side is proof that we’re still a long way from mainstream adoption.
Valve’s full SteamOS release will change PC gaming again, and here are some of the most important ways.
Before jumping into what causes static between casual PC gamers and Linux, Valve deserves some real credit for getting Linux where it is today. Proton is one of the most impressive pieces of software to come out of PC gaming, and thanks to Valve, it can take almost any Windows game that was never designed for other operating systems, and make it playable on Linux, often with the performance to match. ProtonDB, a community-maintained database that tracks which games run well through Proton, is proof of this. A quick scroll through will show you that very few titles are straight up incompatible. These titles don’t run due to DRM or a deliberate decision on the developers’ part, but that’s something Proton can’t work around.
This renaissance is due to the Steam Deck, in large part. Valve had a commercial reason to make Linux gaming viable for non-technical users, and SteamOS pushed Proton from an interesting hobbyist project into something that has to work for millions of handheld owners who have never opened a terminal. Proton isn’t locked to SteamOS either, which opened the door to virtually any distro being viable for gaming, granted it has the proper packages installed.
Looking to game outside of Windows? You’ll need one of these Linux distros.
Despite all the excellent work Valve has done, gaming on Linux still has rough edges. There are a lot of Linux diehards that turn their nose at anyone who dares to insinuate that this is the case, but this is the truth, and a quick look through online forums proves that.
Even in my own experience, I’ve dealt with issues that I couldn’t solve, both with games being played through Proton and native Linux titles. In the case of the latter, War Thunder was a game that I dealt with a ton of crashing in, across multiple GPUs on different systems. The game would run fine for a while, but would crash mid-match, and this was the case with both Radeon and Nvidia GPUs. Distro didn’t seem to make a difference here either.
Then there’s anti-cheat, which is less a technical problem than a policy one. A meaningful slice of modern multiplayer gaming runs on kernel-level anti-cheat systems that either don’t support Linux at all or require the publisher to opt in to Proton compatibility. Escape From Tarkov, a game that frequent readers of my articles here on XDA know I enjoy a lot, has BattlEye anti-cheat that doesn’t work on Linux. All it would take to make it work would be a simple software toggle. In other titles, the anti-cheat was never intended for Linux from the start, making the likelihood of Linux support extremely slim.
Lastly, there’s performance quirks, and these crop up very differently depending on setup. Most games that run, run well, but there are situations where performance is poor, and the cause is very hard to track down. If it is due to something in your setup, it could take time to troubleshoot, but some games simply don’t play nice, and I experienced this across different distros with different window managers.
For the Linux novice, these things, as small as they might be for a seasoned Linux veteran, are simply too much to deal with, and going back to Windows is a far more attractive prospect.
There’s a lot of sentiment among hardcore Linux users that the experience is mainstream-ready, and it’s simply not. A Windows user who hits a framerate problem updates their GPU driver, tweaks some in-game settings, and moves on. A Linux user diagnosing the same problem might end up reading about kernel parameters, switching Proton versions per game, editing launch options, checking whether their distro is on Wayland or X11 and whether that matters for the title they’re trying to run, and verifying their GPU driver stack is the one the community currently recommends. None of that is hard if you enjoy that sort of thing, but it’s just not something normal people want to do, and that’s the hard truth.
And it doesn’t just come down to performance or compatibility problems. There’s a known bug with Bazzite, the most popular gaming distro, that I ran into recently, where using the “switch accounts” function on Steam completely bricks your Steam installation. Yes, there’s a fix, but it takes looking at the documentation and writing commands to the terminal. Having it happen on the fastest-growing distro for gaming was surprising, and while performing the fix, I couldn’t help but think: “This is the last thing a novice would want to be doing.”
With all of that said, the trajectory that Linux gaming is on is real, and can’t be ignored. These small technical quirks, while there are many of them, will progressively get ironed out faster as the user base grows. Proton continues to mature alongside gaming-specific distros like Bazzite, making the plug-and-play dream more realistic than it was even just a few years ago. The growth that Linux has seen has forced developers to take notice, and I do think it’s a matter of time before it really does become viable for “normal” people.
Linux is a completely different beast than it was a decade ago.
Linux just isn’t there quite yet, though. I’m rooting for it, and I can’t wait to write about how it’s finally ready for your non-techie friends to jump in with both feet, but the truth is, it’s just not polished enough. Proton and Bazzite have done wonders to close the gap, but that gap still exists, and it’s full of issues that normal people don’t want to be bothered solving, and I can’t blame them. Until the experience truly is plug-and-play, it’ll be reserved for those who are willing to put up with the quirks.