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!
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.
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.
A word of caution on using Bazzite, it is an immutable operating system based off of fedora atomic. So there are differences/limitations in how software is installed. Not suggesting you avoid Bazzite, I’m using it on my main gaming rig, just know that it’s a bit different than a standard Fedora varient.
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!
Installing GOG games (without Galaxy) is about the same as what you’re describing. The easiest way is with a game manager like Lutris, because it offers patched versions of Wine (like GloriousEggroll’s builds), DXVK, vkd3d-proton, and various Windows libraries that the game or its launcher might need. Manually discovering and installing all that stuff is harder, but it can be done.
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.
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.
You know I was reading this too, but you actually need some sort of launcher like Lutris or Heroic launcher which comes with Wine and does some setting up. Possible to run just purely through Wine (I did this at start) but the results are… not that great. Though might depend on the game.
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 :)
LinuxRuleZ makes repacks specifically for this. Has worked well with both Linux mint on desktop and bazzite on steam deck
You can add a non-steam game to steam and run it using proton, did it for one game that I couldn’t make work on Lutris or Heroic.
Though for some reason you have to enable the compatibility for it even if you have set it up to use Proton automatically for all games
Yep, all “3rd party” games can integrate seamlessly with steam very easily. It even works great for steam decks console mode. emulated games too
