I Don't Actually Need to Dual Boot? Testing Games on Linux

2021-07-03

If you missed my last log, I migrated my Linux install to a new drive recently. I used to dual boot with Windows, mostly just because my laptop came with it installed and I had the space for it. But with a new drive and Windows 11 around the corner, I've taken this as an opportunity to experiment going Linux full-time.

The only thing I used Windows for was some light gaming and -- spoiler alert -- I've found out this week that everything I play regularly works fantastic on Linux.

Gaming for me is mostly just a way to keep in touch with friends, so most of what I play ends up being indie games or older titles which are easy to run for everyone. We tend to play a lot of Source engine games like Counter Strike Source and Garry's Mod, and those seem to all have native support. Garry's Mod was the only title that gave me trouble, but I switched to one of the beta branches and it's been rock solid (or as solid as Garry's Mod can be). Phasmophobia is another game we play often, and it works great as most other Unity titles do. The only thing that doesn't work is its voice recognition since it depends on a Windows feature, but that's a pretty minor part of the game especially if you're playing with friends.

Here's a fun fact: I actually had the least game crashes out of my friends this week. But I'll just chalk that up to good luck for now.

At this point I'm pretty confident I can format my old drive with Windows on it and not miss it! If you're only keeping Windows around for some casual gaming, consider testing your game library out in Linux and you might be as surprised as I was.

A Few Tips

Make sure you've got the vulkan packages for your GPU installed otherwise you might see games crash on launch when running them under Proton. This confused me for a few minutes since it's not obvious at first.

If you're using KDE, you can create a window rule to disable compositing when any Steam game is running. It's not required but will probably give you a small performance boost. Go to System Settings > Window Management > Window Rules and add a new rule with the regular expression "steam_app_[0-9]*" for the window class. Then add the "block compositing" property and set it to "force temporarily" and "yes".

Links

Home

protondb.com -- check the user-reported Linux compatibility of any Steam game [https]