The final piece I needed to take the plunge on daily driving Linux was gaming.

Valve’s Proton had been out for a bit, but it just started making big waves around the time when I got interested in making the switch. This was shortly before the Steam Deck was announced, which has since proven to be wildly successful and has probably been the biggest push for gaming on Linux.

I guess similar to a lot of people, I didn’t wipe my Windows installation, but instead opted to dual boot a Linux distribution next to it. After a bit of internet research, I settled on Pop!_OS. I quickly learned that my desktop PC (henceforth referred to as gaming rig 😅) was a bit ill matched with the available Linux drivers, specifically when it came to Nvidia GPUs.

The two distributions that mainly come up as a recommendation for gaming distro were Manjaro and Pop!_OS. At the time I opted for the more conservative point release approach, instead of a distribution with rolling releases, so Pop!_OS won.

I still remember booting up the OS for the first time and having my mind blown that I can login and use the system after less than 30 seconds. And that is actually use the system, as in “start whatever you want, we’re ready!”

There was however a small problem to be solved: my WiFi adapter had no official support. Well, nevermind! I hooked up my phone (that’s when I discovered USB-Tethering), searched the internet and relatively quickly found which exact model my WiFi dongle was and a project on GitHub where I could compile my own driver. I would not let myself be deterred this easily.

If I remember correctly, the first thing I installed on Pop!_OS was Max Payne 3¹ right from Steam. I’m not sure if it really worked out of the box, or if I had to try a few different versions of Proton, but I did get it running fairly quickly and it worked like a charm. I played for a few hours until I remembered why I didn’t particularly like the game².

Next on my list was Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun. This was something I owned on GOG, rather than Steam and that’s how I discovered Lutris. I logged in to my GOG account, installed the game, copied over the saves and – it worked! Amazing stuff! Great game, too! 😅

Next up: Hitman 3 (the 2021 game from the rebooted World of Assassination series). Being a humongous Hitman fan, I got this as a present for my birthday.

Well, this posed a real challenge. The game was only available on the Epic Games Store (EGS) and (as opposed to Max Payne 3) it was brand-new. And it showed.

Support for EGS has gotten better in the last few years, but setting something up in 2021 was pretty complicated. I found a few blog posts that described how to install EGS via Lutris, but that seemed like a badly nested, complicated mess. But after quite a bit of research, I found Legendary, a CLI tool that could be used to install games from EGS.

But getting the game installed was only the first step and for the life of me, I couldn’t figure out how to run it. It kept crashing and I couldn’t figure out what I needed to do to fix it. There was Proton.db, but Hitman 3 wasn’t on Steam (yet), so no help there.

I think I spent three evenings trying to get the game running. I was close to giving up.

My initial plan had been to give Linux gaming a quick try and duck and run if it didn’t work out of the box. But I got used to Pop!_OS really quickly and now I had seen that gaming on Linux was a real possibility. In fact, I was so happy simply being in the OS and using it, that the thought of going back to Windows made me sad.

I was determined to give it one last shot. Sounds overly dramatic? Don’t worry dear reader, I would rather not have played Hitman 3 than returned to Windows. 😁

And on the fourth evening, I finally did get the game running. I can’t really remember what I needed to do, but it taught me WINE basics, hacky symlinking of Proton libs to make them available to Legendary and messing around with a whole bunch of very specific environment variables people seem to know about.

I feel like I’ve been going on for ages now, but there are two more games I want to talk about, one of which I ultimately gave up on.

First up is Resident Evil 2 (hell yeah the 1998 classic, baby!). I love this game and after checking out some newer games, I wanted to see how well Linux can be used to play retro PC games.

But getting it working with Lutris was laughably easy, thanks to installation scripts provided by the Lutris community. So to make things worse, I wanted to mod the game. There’s an interesting mod called the Resident Evil 2 Seamless HD Project, which comes with upscaled textures and is a huge overhaul of the game. I also installed a whole bunch of other mods, improving the sound effects and FMV cutscenes.

This is where I learned how Lutris handles library files (DLLs) and how to override the defaults on a case-by-case basis. I also learned that unzip (or possibly 7zip) has an option to extract files case insensitive. This was necessary, because the mods came as zip archives with loads of files that needed to be overwritten. The problem with that was, that Resident Evil 2’s files were a wild mix of upper- and lowercase and the files inside the mod zip archives were a different wild mix of upper- and lowercase.

But I got it all working!!! And it took me two evenings!!! And it was amazing!!!!! 😁

Then for some reason or other, I was reminded of Nocturne.

Nobody remembers this game. Probably for good reasons, but I can’t say, because I never got to play it.

I only ever owned a demo of this game, decades ago, from a PC gaming magazine and my gaming rig at that time couldn’t run the demo (it was the 133MHz one of course and technically it wasn’t even my gaming rig).

Sadly, I still haven’t managed to get this one working. I spent multiple evenings trying out different WINE runners for Lutris, obscure Lutris settings, looking at the debug output, installing countless different versions of the game, using different WINE prefixes and compatibility settings.

Oh well, not being able to run an obscure (most likely very bad) game from 1999 is a fight I’m willing to let go. Let me instead tell you about other battles that I have won. 🙂

• Disco Elysium
• Doom (well, obviously Linux can run the original Doom)
• Elden Ring
• Max Payne
• Max Payne 2
• Quake
• Shenzhen I/O
• Silent Hill 3 (modded in a similar way to Resident Evil 2)
• Spider-Man (2018, released 2022 for Windows)
• The Case of the Golden Idol
• TIS-100
• Wheelman (the one with Vin Diesel)
• X-Men Origins: Wolverine

I’m having trouble remembering all the games I’ve played on Linux, because it has gotten so easy to do. Most of the games from this list ran right out of the box. Some required a little bit of tinkering, but I’m very willing to take that.

As I’ve said before: I am not going back to Windows!