Yeah I did. God bless WineDB.
Steam before proton was okay for stuff like Fallout 3. Needed some hackery with Wine prefixes and getting the right DLLs in there but eventually worked. Older GoG games like Alpha Centauri were fine with DosBox.
Proton is great. Cyberpunk 2077 on Ultra.
It was rough. I basically gave up on playing 3D games on Linux for the longest time and used a dualboot. Much less hassle.
What convinced me was when they verified Apex Legends, which was a game I was not expecting to be verified at all. Turns out Proton secretly got really good in all that time.
It’s hit or miss. A gold rated game on protondb performed terrible when I used a keyboard and mouse. Everything was smooth, but looking around was studdery. Even worse, the game failed to properly capture my mouse, so I kept getting stopped when my “cursor” hit the edge of the screen. I literally could not look around.
My first attempt to switch to Linux for my primary desktop was in 2007, and ended when my attempt to run WoW via WINE mostly worked, but had a weird an completely unfixable audio delay.
Proton (and Valve’s efforts on SteamOS and the Steam Deck more generally) have been an absolute godsend for Linux as a usable daily-driver.
PlayOnLinux was a good friend. Sometimes.
I would never have considered gaming on Linux until the Steam Deck came out. When reviews said it’s actually awesome, I became convinced to try it. Basically, the deck pushed me over the edge to ditch Windows altogether. So suck on that, Satya! No wonder MS is trying so hard to stop other OEMs from making Linux handhelds.
For real. I’ve been a pretty steady Linux user all my adult life and gaming was barely ever an option unless the game was built to run in Linux. When proton came out I gave it a shot and was blown away.
Proton got me to dump Windows… NGL Windows 11 and Lemmy did help push me over the edge. I use Ubuntu btw.
I bought Tomb Raider 2013 because it was Linux native. Nowadays I recommend people to play the Windows version.
I remember that Unreal Tournament 2003 came with a bootable Linux CD to play the game.
I have the original CD release of UT2004, it has a full Linux installer and worked well on a Dell E5400 running Ubuntu back in 2008-2010 when I was attending LAN perties
Still have the quake 3 Linux tin box around here somewhere…
I have been playing on Linux for years before proton.
WoW, HL, Fallout, Diablo, Quake, RimWorld to name a few.
Yah, I used to WoW on linux when I played. Pissed my guildies off because some patches I’d have to reboot before every boss attempt. But eventually it got pretty bulletproof.
Back in 2008 or so, for a few patches WoW actually ran better under linux than windows because of some bug.
I don’t get it. Is she excited before proton because it was exciting if something actually ran?
she’s excited because running games before proton was difficult
but your option is also goodSo excited about the challenge, like running the game is a different game than the game?
I got a manic vibe, like a similar energy to when you’ve been modding a game for 20x longer than you’ve actually played it, except in this case, it’s not a choice.
My 1999 setup running Slackware while playing Loki’s Civ CTP
First i thought you had a cat hiding there.
How many hard drives you have in that beast? I see enough ribbon cable to wrap a gift
Old story: There was a sale at a big box Electronics store on Seagate Barracuda SCSI-2 Wide 9.1GB drives and I bought 6 of them to give me a 40GB RAID-5 on an old mylex dac960 scsi raid card. Bigtime storage in 1999.
Those fed my 3:1 ratio mp3 sharing site that my uunet bot advertised haha.
That’s insane I absolutely love it. To put that in perspective, 1999 game storage requirements:
- GTA 2, 70 MB
- Quake III Arena, 70 MB
- SimCity 3000, 230 MB
- Everquest, 1 GB
I tried to get Wine working for STALKER before Proton. Never managed lol
So much minecraft and kerbal space program. They were two of the very few games that ran naively and had cracked Linux files available on public trackers. I had to put a minimum of 1000 hours of minecraft using the clit mouse that old Dell laptops used to have. I hate that they got rid of those and now the only modern laptops with the clit mouse are Lenovos which I hate. Lenovo ruined ThinkPads.
The what mouse?
I started using Linux with Ubuntu 6.06 and at the time I was really into the game Jedi Academy. It used OpenGL and thus ran fairly well on Wine. I upgraded from an NVIDIA GeForce 4 MX420 to an ATI Radeon X1600Pro and the ATI drivers were absolute garbage so I kinda gave up on Linux gaming for a while. I was set on going NVIDIA on my next PC but around that time AMD bought ATI and opened up their documentation, leading to rapid improvements in the open source AMD drivers. Went with a Radeon HD 5870 and not long after I built that PC I was gaming in Wine again, though poorly on non OpenGL games still. Then Steam for Linux officially released and a lot of native games became available but I was still running Windows Steam in Wine as native Steam didn’t play Windows games. Then the Gallium Nine project offered a way to play DX9 games with significantly improved performance and I played a lot of Skyrim on Linux as well as a lot of other DX9 games. Then Vulkan happened and soon DXVK and Proton and the modern Linux gaming landscape evolved quite rapidly until we got to where we are today.
Played WoW when it first came out with WINE. It was miserable. We had to mess with configs, install hacked patches, manually start jobs with scripts. And every patch broke something so you had to start from scratch again.
This was probably 2004/2005?
I once got The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion to run on Ubuntu, but some strange Bethesda bugs managed to creep into the experience. There was a giant 2D tree taking up a chunk of the skybox that I couldn’t get rid of, so I made it headcannon when I was playing it.
Luckily when I tried it on the Steam Deck not too long ago, this bug was no longer present.
So, what you’re saying is you had an early access build of Elden Ring?
Who remembers Cedega. Had a lot of fun on that, both playing and configuring to play. Think I was running Fedora, or was it Mandrake/Mandriva. Man I remember having the drive to distro hop weekly at one point
