Which I’m sure is much higher than windows games working on windows. Proton is awesome for old games.
Switching to linux had me cold turkey league of legends im a healthier happier person now.
the real cold turkey was Riot killing linux support last year. Seems like there wasn’t enough linux players at the time for them to walk back that decision.
Funniest thing.: the Mac client also doesn’t support Kernel anti cheat, but it still works. Fuck riot, I’m glad I ditched it.
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Same for me but I switched to dota; im not healthier
Dota 2 took 2k+ hours from my life. Loved every minute lol. Welcome aboard, it’s not healthier but I’d argue it’s better :D
10.000 in lol, 1.000 in dota, currently. I feel you. On the other hand, haven’t watched tv in 12 years
Honestly not missing much lol. There’s like 1000 hours of good TV content in total out there IMHO.
The stereotype is of the haughty Linux user, but fuck me all I ever see in these discussions is Windows users being belittling assholes.
We tend to come off as haughty when Windows users show up demanding help and being insulting while having put in zero work on understanding their own problem.
I’ve seen so many Windows users come out of nowhere to shit on Linux when gaming comes up. There was the whole thing where a bunch of alpha testers got banned on Ashes of Creation a few weeks ago and the discord just had like half of people in their discord throwing hate around.
Also accusing Linux users of being cheaters… as if game cheats are made for Linux.
I think this is a higher percentage than Windows 11 if you include 16-bit ones from the 90s and early 2000s. (What was wrong with NTVDM64, anyway?)
For me its 100% of games, but sure, havent tried all games that exist…
Typically the competitive multiplayer ones fail because of kernel-level anticheat.
This keeps getting repeated as a blanket statement and it irks me a bit. More than half of the top ten most played games on steam on any given day work. There’s a small handful of games that don’t work that fit into the competitive multiplayer genre and an even smaller handful that are actually popular.
To be clear, I’m not irk’ed with you, just that this myth that gets passed around a lot hasn’t caught up to reality.
Top games by player count by daily players (numbers are peak in 24 hrs)(skipping anything that doesn’t qualify as competitive multiplayer):
- CS 2 - ✅ - 1.4 mil
- BF 6 - ❌ - 413k
- Dota 2 - ✅ - 761k
- Pubg - ❌ - 620k
- Arc Raiders - ✅ - 322k
- Apex Legends - ❌ - 155k
- War Thunder - ✅ - 78k
- Delta force - ❌ ✅ (work around exists) - 182k
- Marvel rivals - ✅ - 83k
- Dead by Daylight - ✅ - 66k
- Naraka: Bladepoint - ✅ - 120k
- Rust - ❌ (some servers do work though) - 130k
✅ Top 20 total - 2.83 mil ❌ Top 20 total - 1.5 mil (including Delta force)
Idk. Having just crunched the numbers I guess it’s fair to warn people about some borked Anti-Cheat games but I wish people would caveat by saying the majority of games people play even in the competitive multiplayer scene work. And it’s only going to get better i’d argue, although games like bf6 being a recent launch that didn’t work is a bummer. As the percentage of Linux users climb they’ll be increasingly incentivized to find a solution.
League isn’t on here, that would skew the numbers pro-windows.
The green tick may give the impression that the game runs just as well on Windows. In reality, there have been issues with CS2 on linux recently. Even though its officially supported, It may look like Valve doesn’t have good enough testing to actually ensure that. I tried it on Fedora KDE with wayland and nvidia and it crashed after one match (if not in the middle of it). Similar issues have been reported on the issue reporting repo. It may be an Nvidia+Wayland issue again (like there have been so many times before).
I was going off of protondb. I can’t vouch for each game on the list’s exact state on any given day, only that according to everyone who ranks on the website it’s native or gold.
Apex Legends worked on Linux every year except this one. League I’m told dropped support only recently (in the last couple of years). Like, idk man, there’s ups and downs to this data, but the point is not all competitive multiplayer games don’t work on Linux and seemingly the majority do based on steam and protondb data.
Yeah, and these are biggest ones, Fortnite, LoL, Valorant… They are in that 10% but they are the biggest, so at least people like me that don’t play them should just make the jump already.
Or games from the late '90s and early 2000s 'cause they’re just weird.
But those don’t work right on modern windows, either
Which means if they worked in Linux they’d be exclusive.
Out of curiosity, is this something that can be circumvented by playing in a Windows VM?
No, that was my setup for some time. KVM with PCI-e passthrough to pass the entire GPU to a windows VM. Worked great, until EAC started banning me for using a VM.
Thanks, good to know
Okay, real talk.
I know there’s probably 100 videos on this, but I don’t have time to watch any of them right now…
How much performance is lost/gained from using Linux to play games via proton?
I’m certain any game with a native Linux version will work great, I’m mostly concerned with the ones that need some kind of emulation layer.
colloquially, I hear “5-10% overhead depending on the game and if you’re running mods”
On the other hand, some testing has found that running games on Linux with Proton is actually faster than with Windows on the same hardware, because Windows is such a resource hog.
The hardware in in this test being the Legion Go steamdeck rival.
As I had an older pc this was true most of the time
See, that’s what I was thinking. I’ll have to do more research, but I would think all the overhead from Windows being Windows, would kind of diminish the gap between running it natively on Windows, and using proton or something so you can run it on Linux.
The overhead on both should be fairly similar, though with how Windows is, it wouldn’t surprise me if it was slower.
I guess the beefier your system is the less you will notice the impact of a greedy OS (because thats a fixed/absolute overhead) while the performance hit of having to translate directx through Proton will always be there (because that’s a percent-based overhead for each rendered frame)
So for the most top-end rigs, probably still Windows will squeeze a few more FPS. But it’s close.
At the end of the day Linux and Windows are both pretty comparable for gaming performance, so we shouldn’t worry about that as a deciding factor in which OS to choose, and can decide based on other merits.
Even if there is a slight performance loss, I feel like for the vast majority of games it’s basically irrelevant, especially since most of the examples I see are like maybe 5-15% worse if it’s worse at all.
If you are still over 60FPS then I don’t really see why it’s that much of an issue. Even having 165hz monitors I don’t really notice much difference above 100, as long as the frame rate is consistent.
And as far as I’ve seen for AMD performance will be equal to if not better than Windows. The only issues I’ve seen with performance are Nvidia, but it’s been improving and seems to be “good enough” from what I hear. Also, the more people who switch the more likely that will improve even more.
Yup. I agree. I was just checking to see if that was the case.
I was certainly hoping it was, but I wanted to see what other people’s experiences have been.
Thanks for the conversation.
Most stuff works outside of system anti-cheatl level multiplayer and some visual novels that can be tough to setup sometimes.
I finally switched to Linux just a few days ago when upgrading my laptop’s SSD, and so far I have only opened minecraft to see how it runs - extremely smoothly, even though I could not figure out how to make use the Nvidia GPU. I’d say it runs noticeably better on Linux than it did on Windows.
Unless it has changed recently, I think most distros default to running on the Nvidia GPU all the time: Switching back and forth doesn’t always work. (Or at least, that’s how my laptop run with Manjaro)
The only game I couldn’t get to run on Wine was NOLF 1. Everything works except the music, which relies on DirectPlay / DirectMusic.
Maybe try protontricks. You can add the libraries needed for directmusic to the game that way. Worked for me this way for gothic.
Wen vr?
I would love to swap to Linux if we could get games with kernel level anti cheat to be compatible.
I’d love for those games to be on Linux if they remove the spyware.
I’m gonna be that guy, most of them are in some way or another. The devs literally decided to not bother pressing the button that enables compatibility because they don’t feel like it.
Even Starcraft???
The only game I am not able to make it work on Linux is “The Sims 4”. After installing it on Steam, when clicking on Play, it runs the EA app in the background and tries to start the game, but it doesn’t load. Any suggestion?
always check protonDB:
https://www.protondb.com/app/1222670
Looks like most people are using GloriousEggroll’s version of Proton (ProtonGE) and some are using launch options to disable the EA Launcher.
GE works on Wine at Red Hat and is thus very knowledgeable about windows translations and the stuff he changes about Valves Proton are often merged down the line, its like an unofficial beta release and I’ve had good a experience with his proton Versions.
That said, to actually get custom Proton Versions I use “ProtonUp-Qt”(available as flatpak): https://davidotek.github.io/protonup-qt/
Which downloads different Proton Versions and manages them for you. You can then set the default for all games in the steam settings, or on a game-by-game basis
“ProtonUp-Qt” looks great, thx. I just reinstalled Bazzite and this looks like the go.
Try the GE version of Proton, it’s usually more curring edge.
Mayb this can help: https://www.protondb.com/app/1222670
Thank you so much, it worked installing EA app on Lutris and using ProtonGE 10.25
Happy that it worked! GE Proton is usually more cutting edge, and it’s my default. I fall back to regular one if I have problems, but it’s rare.
Playing Hogwarts legacy at the moment, but I also tested ETS 2 and the tenants.
Unfortunately the 10% that don’t include the biggest, most played games in the world.
Like Elden ring and nightreign? Hugely successful games. Play them all the time in Linux.
Hows battlefield 6 going on linux? Fortnite? Black Ops 6? Warzone? PUBG? Apex Legends? GTA 5 / GTA Online?
I don’t play any of those.
My point is, there’s loads of great popular multiplayer games that don’t use garbage kernel level anticheat.
But Elden Ring and Elden Ring Nightreign are not multiplayer games…?
You can also add many more of the top most popular multiplayer games to my list, I just listed a few of the biggest. You won’t be playing GTA6, which is likely to be the biggest game of all time, on Linux. Black Ops 7, the biggest release of this year, won’t be on Linux.
You obviously know nothing about these two games lol. Yes they are multiplayer. Nightreign is also designed to primarily be played 3 players online at a time.
Co-op, duels, and “invasions” lol. Not what we’re talking about here. Elden ring is a single player game for all that any one cares or knows.
We’re definitely not talking about co-op when anyone says multiplayer.
You need to learn the definition of “multi”, then.
This. Plus anti-cheat is still a removed on Linux.
Anticheat works fine. Just not the kernel level nasty ones. But that’s a good thing.
But that’s a good thing.
If you don’t want to be able to play the biggest games released, I guess…
You’re looking at it wrong. They need to not invade our kernel.
For this type of anti-cheat yes, they do.
You can choose not to let them, it just means you can’t play the games. Do you believe they’re installing malicious code or something in the anti-cheat?
Exactly. This is not a type I need. My kernel does not need to be invaded. It’s literally enabling spyware and you’d never know it.
Do I believe it? I don’t know. But it’s possible and I’d never know, so fuck that.
- ESEA Bitcoin miner incident (2013) In April 2013 ESEA (a third-party matchmaking + anti-cheat service) had a built-in bitcoin-miner component in their client. It was discovered by users in May. � XDA Developers +1 Because the ESEA client ran with high privileges (as a driver/anti-cheat style client), the mining component was harder to detect and harder to remove compared to normal user-mode software. � XDA Developers The company settled for a $1 M payout. � Lesson: Granting deep OS access to a client means if it goes rogue (or is malicious) you get real damage (mining, rootkit-like behaviour, etc). XDA Developers
- Riot Vanguard (for VALORANT) and related complaints Vanguard is the kernel-level anti-cheat used by Riot Games in VALORANT. � Wikipedia +1 It has drawn criticism for its always-running behaviour (some users report it loads at boot even before the game). � Gist +1 Some users report system instability (blue screens) after installation. � Lesson: Even if the anti-cheat isn’t malicious per se, because it’s so deep, any defect or compatibility issue can cause system-wide pain (crashes, instability). XDA Developers
- Theoretical/privacy risk: drivers acting like rootkits Academic work (“If It Looks Like a Rootkit…”) analyses KLAC and finds that some solutions behave very similarly to rootkits: intercepting kernel calls, hiding modules, monitoring broad system activity. � arXiv Articles note that allowing game companies to insert drivers at boot time that monitor “outside the game” sets a “potentially dangerous precedent”. � Lesson: Even when everything is “legal”, the architectural model has intrinsic risk: trusted code has extremely high privileges; if trust is misplaced (malicious dev, insider threat, compromise) you have huge exposure. How-To Geek
- Example of “residual services” / bad uninstall behaviour A Steam forum post (for game “Delta Force (2025 video game)”) reported that the anti-cheat driver “ACE-BASE / AntiCheatExpert” remained active even after game uninstall, caused conflicts, etc. � Lesson: When kernel-level drivers aren’t cleanly managed/uninstalled, they can linger as “shadow” privileged components, increasing risk surface. Steam Community
- Corporate/State concerns & data-privacy An article points out that KLAC by its nature has full system visibility (“what this means is that this type of spyware can exfiltrate sensitive information…”) and calls out potential misuse—especially worrying when combined with acquisitions or state-influence (e.g., the purchase of a KLAC-provider by a sovereign entity). � Lesson: Beyond just “can it crash my PC”, there’s question of what else the driver could observe (system activity, other processes, telemetry) and whether user has meaningful control.
That’s a lot of “it possibly could, but it never has happened with huge reputable billion dollar companies”. Also seems like an AI generated list, or copied from Wikipedia? If that’s the best you can find, yeah there’s no issue.
No one should be giving some random anti-cheat program made by who knows who kennel level access, but one by EA? Fine. EA aren’t in the business of getting bankrupted by installing rootkit malware with their video game anti-cheat.
Calling anti-cheat “spyware” is dumb.
