We’ve got to be honest with ourselves, because that’s the only way we improve.

Gaming on Linux is Great…ish

There are plenty of examples that I could give of games that work flawlessly on Linux. I use Steam primarily, as a good chunk of the gaming community do, and I can safely click ‘install’ on any number of games in my library, content in the knowledge that they will install and work without headache.

But it’s not all of them, and outside of the Steam Deck, it still requires that I enable Proton by default for all titles, which is a step in itself that puts a barrier up between me and my games.

Steam

In the case of Steam, there are still games which don’t work out of the box, at all, and then there are games which require a good amount of tweaking to get working to a level that’s, at least, playable.

Some of these tweaks are easy, you have to enable this specific version of Proton, because there was some breaking change in a later release that nobody spotted; other fixes are more in depth, like you having to use protontricks or a similar mechanism to install some missing DLL that can’t be legally shipped with Proton or Wine because of its licence.

To be clear, I don’t think this is uniquely a Linux problem, because I still recall some of the madness I had to go through to get older games working on modern versions of Windows. Don’t let anybody tell you that a game from 2005 will “just work” on Windows 11, because there is absolutely no guarantee that they’re right.

Valve, to their credit, are well aware of this. They have a select place in their store for Steam Deck games, which are games that have been reviewed and are known to work on the Steam Deck (to a greater degree of “work”) however this is still fraught with problems. There is something of a guarantee that games work ‘at the time of reviewing’ with the Steam Deck, but there’s nothing stopping a developer from releasing an update that breaks compatibility.

Indeed, a real world example might be Final Fantasy XIV. While not Steam Deck certified at the time of writing, it worked perfectly on Linux (after tweaking) but was recently broken with an update, which stopped the launcher from working. Launchers for games are another topic entirely, that I won’t dip into here.

Where does this leave Valve? Well it leaves them playing cat and mouse until developers actively start to “support” the Steam Deck, and I don’t just mean submitting their build to be approved and tested by Valve, I mean actively making the Steam Deck a target platform, like Xbox, PlayStation, or the Switch.

I am hopeful that this will happen sooner, rather than later.

Other Stores

Now we come onto the other stores, which have a varied amount of Linux… friendliness?

Good Old Games, a platform on which I have a few titles, has somewhat eschewed Linux in recent years, probably because of dwindling interest in the idea.

I support some of what GoG do, and it’s easy to support a company who ticks all the nostalgia boxes for me; a good deal of the games that I have on the platform are literally those that I played during my formative years.

While they don’t have an official Linux client, there have been open requests for years to get them to support it, and there are even open implementations of the same like Minigalaxy that work well.

Their games are also installable as standalone items, which make them relatively easy to get onto your computer using systems like Lutris and Bottles to name a couple. These are not, however, click-and-install solutions, requiring at least a modicum of understanding about what constitutes an “OS” before you can begin to fathom how they might work. This is not a slight to the developers of Wine, Bottles, Lutris, Crossover, etc. it is simply an observation.

Epic, who have historically been very hostile to Linux thanks primarily to their contrarian-in-chief Tim Sweeney, also don’t support Linux natively.

However, as with GoG, you can install tools like Heroic to make your life a little easier.

The linux_gaming subreddit does maintain a wiki too, which is okay as a starting point for newcomers.

What’s my actual point?

Clicking install on a game should be a simple affair, you put in a disc (if you’re old enough to still have games on disc,) wait for the computer to tick over for a bit, and then press the installation executable.

If you’re using Steam, you click install; if you’ve installed any of the other store fronts, you click install there instead.

Right now, this is not the case on Linux and regardless of the OS you install, you have to jump through hoops (though some distributions, like ChimeraOS, go a long way to making this painless for end-users).

It is not easy right now, outside of the Steam Deck ecosphere, but it could be.

What’s the solution then?

Uniformity, oh christ it’s hard though.

As a collective, (which in itself is a terrible concept,) Linux users need to come together and select a polished platform to recommend to newcomers, or Windows refugees. It needs to come with default launchers for each store that a user might buy games from, and it needs to have the necessary tweaks already in place so that games work out of the box.

What I’ve just said though, isn’t going to happen. Mostly this is because every Linux advocate has their own distribution of choice, and they’ve all got their own opinions on the proper way to do things. I’ve already mentioned ChimeraOS as a noble idea, but that doesn’t stop people from immediately recommending Arch instead, or heaven forbid, Ubuntu…

Or at least, it’s not going to happen soon.

Honestly I feel like SteamOS could be the answer here. Not the Debian-based horror that was released several years ago, but the spin that’s supposed to be the independent OS which the Steam Deck happens to run, but that you can install on your own PC.

From SteamOS, need to come those guides. You know the ones I mean, the various out-of-date blog posts and wiki pages that have existed for years. They need to be updated or rewritten, with a specifically SteamOS bent, and from there the gates are open for newcomers to explore the other worlds of Fedora, openSUSE, etc.

I’m not going to take it a step further and say it needs to be a spin of SteamOS that also bakes in the other stores that I outlined above, but there do need to be easy-to-follow setup guides, perhaps even scripts, that mean people aren’t immediately put out at the idea of getting their GoG games running too.

We can do it people.

I’m doing my part.