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Comment by sunil_loanmeet | Hacker News Reader

What about computer games such as age of empires ? Can we play regular computer games ?

Yes. Valve (Steam) spent more than a decade building and refining a translation layer called Proton. Nearly 80% of the vast Steam library is now compatible with Linux to the point they are releasing actual Linux consoles (Steam Deck and Steam Machine).

For your regular PC, you can install a gaming-focused distribution like Bazzite to get everything sorted out automatically.

80% is really impressive, but another way to state it is that 20% of the games you try won't work. I don't think I'd put up with that if I was a gamer. I guess maybe it's not evenly distributed. Do a higher percentage of the most popular games work?

I think it's largely to do with the whether the games are PvP multiplayer or not. I.e. many such games have anti-cheat systems that embed in the Windows kernel (or something like that - my Windows internals knowledge is... slim).

I assert that most people who're happy running Linux on their desktop (for games or productivity or development) do not overlap much with the people who're happy to take kernel patches from UbiFuckingSoft. And this includes those people who're willing to take closed-source NVIDIA drivers.

That 20% is mostly covered by competitive online multiplayer games that use kernel-level anti-cheat systems which will only work on Windows. There's not a whole lot Valve can do about that, other than continuing to push Linux for gaming and hope that it gets popular enough to create an incentive for anti-cheat providers to start targeting Linux as well.

I never understood why game devs don't just segregate players based on their anti-cheat status. Have a setting in the game like "only play with anti-cheat verified players" that defaults to yes.

That way Linux gamers can still play with other Linux gamers if they want (and cheaters).

Not an ideal situation but probably better than nothing.

I think that would make Linux players into second-class citizens who could only play in a pool that is 90+% filled with Windows cheaters.

Segregating into two pools: Windows-verified, or Linux-unverified, would probably not work for Linux users either. It'd be the same problem (on a smaller scale) as not including kernel anticheat in Windows. No fun for the non-cheaters.

I'm not a gamer though, so I may be missing important details.

Games with kernel-mode anti-cheat consistently don't work and probably never will (barring them having it removed or made optional). Titles released more recently are more likely to not work simply due to not having had fixes applied to them, although a rather large amount of newer games work fine out of the box if they aren't doing weird stuff. Other than that it's a toss-up, since while it's usually the same few things that prevent games from working properly on Linux, it's not something you as Jonothan S. Gamer will know about unless you go and do research and check ProtonDB and whatnot.

A good rule of thumb is that single player games generally just™ work and that older games generally just™ work.

Building, no. Refining Wine, yes.

In a word, yes. While Wine has been an option for decades, Valve and Proton have made gaming on Linux mainstream. You can check compatibility reports from https://www.protondb.com/ for whichever games you're interested in.

> Valve and Proton have made gaming on Linux mainstream.

"Mainstream" is maybe too hefty, the amount of Linux users (including SteamDeck) who participate in the Steam surveys are still in the single digit if I remember correctly. Most gamers today still use Windows, even though Valve made great strides with Proton.

I haven't had any issues installing AoE Gold under Wine. Furthermore, stuff on Steam is usually trivial to get running (just click and play). With Heroic same goes for stuff on GOG (and presumably Epic as well, IDK). PlayOnLinux and Lutris have good support for games you install from CD (I probably could have used either of them to install AoE Gold, but I've been using wine directly for so long I find it more convenient to do it myself).

Many are playable with Steam on Linux, each game in the store states whether that's supported or not. Even non-supported games allow an override. I've tried that for a few with varying success. Steam has so far refunded purchases that didn't run on Linux. Then there's Lutris which runs many old games fine.

There is a community maintained website for checking game compatibility: https://www.protondb.com/

For years now. Look into proton, its built into steam even.

Having a steam deck, I can say that gaming on linux is totally doable, but you may want to look on protondb to see what is not compatible with your library.

recently had need to run a legacy win32 game on linux. the game works fine but the updater is in some windows specific java that i just could not get to work, which is kind of ironic since its the "run anywhere" java that wouldnt work but the C++ game would. anyway -- i run the updater in a windows vm that has shared access to the game files, close the vm then run the game through wine. works.

You can play almost all solo games and most multi-player games depending on anti-cheat

Age of empires will be okay.

For reference, you can always check out these websites:

[0]: https://www.protondb.com/explore [1]: https://areweanticheatyet.com/

There was an article on the front page a few months ago that showed most games performed better on the Steam Deck with Linux than Windows.

Sure, Valve has done some amazing work in that regard. Most mainstream and older games just work, others require some tinkering.

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