this post was submitted on 16 Dec 2023
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There was a decent selection of games on Linux ten years ago. Just because your favourite games didn't run didn't make it a nonviable games platform. Xbox doesn't run all games either, but it's still viable.
I was going to say the same thing. Pretty much all the games I was playing at the time worked on Linux 10 years ago, Portal 2, Civ 5 , Kerbal Space program. There were others I've forgotten too.
oh man. I played SO much KSP. I think my lifelong love of indie games partly stems from being a Linux user: I tried things I wouldn't otherwise have tried. Factorio, as well, was a Linux game right out of the box. SNES and NES emulators.
Sure, a lot of the latest and greatest corporate shiny didn't work (or not without caveats) but there were tons of perfectly good games.
What is 'viability'? Like, if viability is this Holy Grail state where everything works perfectly, we're setting ourselves up for failure.
I don't think that comparison tracks. If you're a heavy gamer and the platform doesn't allow you to play a lot of your favorite games, I wouldn't recommend it as a platform. Xbox doesn't get everything but it does get about 95% of all the titles you are looking for that aren't platform exclusive to Sony or Nintendo. A decade ago linux could only play a much smaller fraction of the games you could play on windows. What your percentage of viable vs non-viable is, is up to you but I'd wager for many heavy gamers that percentage was much too low then.
It definitely wasn’t as good of a situation as it is now, but 10 years ago was actually pretty good for Linux gaming too. At that point Valve was already starting to support Linux and there were a bunch of native Linux releases for games at that time, including lots of indie titles in Humble Bundles and even a good chunk of AAA titles were getting Linux releases (e.g., Bioshock Infinite). If you had specific windows games you wanted to play you could very well have been out of luck, but there was actually a really solid number of native Linux ports at the time. I was personally pretty happy with it and just completely blew away my windows partition at that point. Of course you didn’t have access to the full catalog so to speak, but honestly you probably had access to more titles than on many consoles at the time, which arguably made it a viable gaming platform at the time (I made do with it!) Naturally, like any platform, you may or may not be okay with the selection of games available so it really depends on the person, but I was a pretty happy camper.
Feels to me like that's going too far back, to make that statement. I would say the last three/four years, personally.
It depends what you’re comparing against, but I had plenty of games on Linux when steam released their Linux client. 10 years ago was the start of a huuuge shift. It died down a little bit after a few years (I think a lot of developers stopped caring when steam machines petered out and developers started to decide the Linux releases weren’t worth it), but then after a little while Proton started kicking off and the rest is history. Obviously you didn’t have nearly the selection of windows, but there was still selection.
Outside of competitive shooters, which is my favorite genre to play on PC, a lot of stuff runs well through Proton. And that's an issue of the anti-cheat systems.
Linux gaming isn't for everyone, I play what I can on PC and have a PS5 for other experiences. There are plenty of games I wish I could play, but I'm not interested enough to dual boot windows. I would do vfio passthrough for a VM, if they weren't getting better at detecting that.
Ultimately I have enough games I can play to stay busy.
I played a lot of WoW back then, it ran fine. Speaking personally. I guess if you want to gatekeep gamer hard enough you could call Linux nonviable back then but I always thought it was dumb. A ball and a deck of cards are viable gaming platforms. :p
And that's fine, you had your game that ran well. We're not gate keeping here, we're just talking about the reality that most people want to play a wide variety of games and that simply wasn't something you were able to do then. We're also not saying that's the case today, things have changed and we should celebrate that.
There was a good selection back then too is what I'm saying. Minecraft. Literally every web based game. It was a fine gaming platform, there was more than enough to keep you busy, if you weren't picky.
Well we're glad it's better either way even if it was good enough before
Agreed! Way better. I just hate how 'viable' is such a moving target. You can always find SOMETHING to dismiss it with. Linux is 'unviable' because of some random game that doesn't work or because of some new feature in the latest whizbang. If that is viable we'll never be there.
Viable is when it meets one's needs sufficiently, not when it can do some impossible list of tasks perfectly. Viable isn't perfect, and I hate it when people pretend it is.
Chess is a really good game too
You have to play it in full screen mode though. When you play it windowed the wind keeps knocking the board over.
I guess 'viable' means different things? Is this an American usage where something isn't viable unless it can do literally all the things?
Xbox isn't a viable platform because you can't play world of Warcraft!
I'm not American so I don't know where this is coming from but you have to consider different contexts for the word. Viability is going to differ based on needs.
Yeah Linux has been better at gaming for 15 years
The issue is native software
No one puts a PS disc in a computer and say Windows isn’t good for gaming because it cant play PS games
I don't have an opinion on Linux as a banking platform, but that analogy is bad. An Xbox can play 100% of games made for the same generation of Xbox hardware. If Linux can't play close to 100% of the games released for PC hardware for at least a few years after the hardware was new, then it's a substandard option. That was the case until pretty recently.
Linux plays 100% of games made for Linux.