Please remove or tell me to delete if this isn’t allowed!
I’ve been dual booting Ubuntu and Windows for a good few years now. I keep the windows around for gaming, because, ahem, I don’t like giving EA, among others, money. I know it’s not a problem to play most of the games I’ve paid for on Linux, but does anyone have experience with playing games on Linux that you’ve, somehow, obtained for free? And keeping them updated, too?
I’m still going to dual boot because keeping my games separate from my work is a decent adhd strategy for me, so I’m open to gaming friendly OS suggestions as well!
You’re going to want to install the Proton tools which include Wine and pile of other tools for making games work well (sometimes better) on Linux.
Besides installing Steam for Linux, you can also use Lutris which allows you a lot of tweaking to get non-steam games working under Proton.
You can check the viability of running your games on Linux with ProtonDB.
A shortcut to all this is to use a distro like Nobara or Bazzite that are pretty much designed from the ground up to run games and other graphics intensive software like video editors etc.
Good pointers, thanks! Testing it before actually deleting windows is important to me
Yah, those distros have all this stuff preinstalled and I don’t have nVidia, but if you do there’s a place in the Nobara welcome screen to enable the nVidia drivers. GloriousEggroll, who does the Nobara distro, is one of the primary contributors to Proton.
Heroic launcher with GE proton installed runs about anything that works on Steam Linux.
for games that fell off a truck or something, maybe look here. I’ve found almost all of those I’ve found in the mentioned way to work without issues with lutris.
as to upgrading the games, hadn’t tried that. I know there are periodic updates for popular titles (like Cyberpunk 2077) released and you can find them in the same place you found the game, but seems too much hassle.
Oooh that’s promising, thank you!
Yes just use Lutris. Depending on the method of installation you may need to either select the + and install from an exe file or copy the files over and then tell Lutris where the game’s exe file is.
I actually don’t have experience with this, but I’ve heard that all you have to do is use WINE and use the installers as usual and things should work out.
I’m considering doing the same actually so I’d be interested in hearing how this goes. I don’t dual boot, but use Linux on my work computer and have just been using WSL on my home computer. Would be nice to get rid of the “gaming mode” Windows for my ADHD as well.
Hmm I somehow thought that wouldn’t work with illicit copies; I’ll read up on wine and torrent software that works on it and get back to you if you want :)
I’ve done plenty of installs for older games. I found using Lutris was easier than trying to do it manually, but it’s not perfect (but it handles things like Proton, as another comment mentioned). It’ll let you install games from their windows installers, so whatever games you’ve aquired should install as usual.
I think you can use Steam (for Linux) to manage Proton and your non-steam installs, but I haven’t tried it.
LinuxRuleZ makes repacks specifically for this. Has worked well with both Linux mint on desktop and bazzite on steam deck
