I never really considered myself a gamer till I started playing more often but not playing those cheasy web and mobile games. I play on a PC, a Linux powered PC. Pretty much all my games are provided by Steam. I haven’t had much luck out of the others. I can get the launchers working via Lutris but that’s about it. The games are a hit or miss. Usually a miss. The game might launch but the FPS sucked so badly that they were unplayable. I assume the game would be just fine with Windows, their native platform, but I don’t want windows. I don’t mind it in a VM to be used for a few desktop apps I find myself needing but it just doesn’t play nice with my hardware so Linux it is. With the current economy and rarity to find new parts, I’m stuck with this.

I mean, I’ve been gaming on linux since before the global short happened but that’s beside the point. Linux was my solution for when I had no money to buy new hardware. Now it costs as much as one month’s rent on your average home to buy a graphics card. A card that MSRPs a 3rd of the sell price. That’s not counting the cost of the rest of the bits. While I can now buy a new PC, I don’t really want to. I would like a new GPU though. My current Nvidia GTX 1060 6G does it’s best to maintain 60FPS @ 1080p on High or Ultra graphics. I could lower the quality but I want pretty graphics too. :) Such is the life of a gamer I suppose. The persuit of high frame rates and pretty imagary. My current target GPU is a Nvidia GTX 3060 12G. I could get a 2060 but I want the newer tech. If I get the 3060, it’d likely motivate me to upgrading the rest of the PC. Would I be better off doing that, I can’t say. I might even run Windows again for the games. Just not crazy about Windows 11. I’m not a fan of the psudo mac look.

Anyway, Linux Gaming.

Steam.

My current games I’ve played or have been playing in the years 2020-2021 include and in no particular order;

  • Satisfactory
  • Car Mechanic Simulator 2021
  • Industrial Petting
  • No Man Sky
  • BeamNG.Drive
  • Wreckfest
  • Tomb Raider
  • Mud Runner
  • Shadow of the Tomb Raider
  • Just Cause 3
  • Two Point Hospital
  • Subnautica Below Zero
  • Slime Rancher
  • Cities Skylines
  • Subnautica
  • American Truck Simulator
  • Astroneers, and more.

All of them windows name games, running on a Linux PC. All thanks to Steam’s Proton. Two of those have Linux native ports but the rest are Windows “only”.

There’s more on the list, you can see them on my Steam Profile.

There are some here and there that I’ve tried but failed to get going beyond just hitting the Play button and waiting for Steam to do it’s thing. A couple years ago, I had to do some stuff following a github page for Space Engineers. It’s still not perfect but it runs. Can’t really alt-tab out so I can do something real quick outside of the game. It doesn’t release the mouse and keyboard. Thankfully, I can just keep the wine environment for the game intact and it’ll just keep working, even through a distro change. (if you’re wondering what a distro is, I suggest hiting up the ol google till I add a link to that.)

All the games I played are stable enough for me to have fun. There have been a few crashes here and there but aren’t really major game stoppers. I can’t really say what the cause might be. The good news is, my desktop itself doesn’t crash. I’m not forced to power cycle my pc because the video driver had a hiccup like I delt with with Windows 10. Nothing spoils the fun like rebooting because Windows has a problem you can’t control. lol Some will argue it’s a hardware problem and it could very well had been. I ended up changing my motherboard for another identical one when Linux started crashing too. Since then, it’s been stable. I’ve done nothing different software wise beyond updates but I’ve also not booted Windows once or twice since then.

I’ve been gaming almost exclusively on Linux since June of 2019 with perodic testing of something on Windows. For the most part, for my daily use, I’m on Linux. Started with Linux Mint, now I’m on KDE Neon. Both use the same Ubuntu LTS Base but with different desktop environments.

My current PC specs;

  • Dell Precision T3610
  • Intel Xeon E5-1650v2
  • 24GB of DDR3 1600 ECC
  • EVGA Nvidia GTX 1060 6G
  • 1TB Samsung Evo 980 NVME via PCI-E Adaptor
  • 1TB Samsung Evo 860 Sata SSD
  • 480GB Sandisk Plus
  • 512GB Samsung Evo 860 Sata SSD for Windows
  • 2TB WD Green HDD
  • 625W OEM PSU

And that’s it for now. Cheers!