Yeah I did. God bless WineDB.

Steam before proton was okay for stuff like Fallout 3. Needed some hackery with Wine prefixes and getting the right DLLs in there but eventually worked. Older GoG games like Alpha Centauri were fine with DosBox.

Proton is great. Cyberpunk 2077 on Ultra.

It was rough. I basically gave up on playing 3D games on Linux for the longest time and used a dualboot. Much less hassle.

What convinced me was when they verified Apex Legends, which was a game I was not expecting to be verified at all. Turns out Proton secretly got really good in all that time.

Back when you had to install steam in wine and then for a while you would have native steam and wine steam in the same distro install. Now it's so easy that I figure anyone talking shit about gaming on Linux only plays those rootkit anticheat shooters or hasn't played games since having kids or something and have become one of those people that are shocked to hear what they thought were current gen consoles are actually really old already.

My 1999 setup running Slackware while playing Loki's Civ CTP

My first attempt to switch to Linux for my primary desktop was in 2007, and ended when my attempt to run WoW via WINE mostly worked, but had a weird an completely unfixable audio delay.

Proton (and Valve's efforts on SteamOS and the Steam Deck more generally) have been an absolute godsend for Linux as a usable daily-driver.

I would never have considered gaming on Linux until the Steam Deck came out. When reviews said it's actually awesome, I became convinced to try it. Basically, the deck pushed me over the edge to ditch Windows altogether. So suck on that, Satya! No wonder MS is trying so hard to stop other OEMs from making Linux handhelds.

PlayOnLinux was a good friend. Sometimes.

Since 2012! PlayOnLinux was the closest thing to Proton then.

Wine and Cedega back in the early days, I played WiW in the Vanilla days on Suse Linux. My first foray into Linux was 2002 on a system that was decent for the time. I have fond memories of the first time I got my GeForce 3 card actually doing hardware acceleration. glxgears rendered hundreds of FPS.

Me. Minecraft worked just as well under either OS.

Kids these days don't even know about TuxRacer?

I bought Tomb Raider 2013 because it was Linux native. Nowadays I recommend people to play the Windows version.

I remember that Unreal Tournament 2003 came with a bootable Linux CD to play the game.

My last foray into Linux gaming was back in the early-2010s, and I was mostly just trying to get EVE Online to run unsuccessfully. I was running a laptop that was top if the line (in 2009) and my PCs were cobbled together from old Dells and HPs donated by family and friends or retired and given away by my company IT team.

Steam on Linux was nice, and would show you which games in your library had Linux native versions to install. I held out on that and browser gamed for a while. Played a lot of Runescape and Minecraft. Taught myself to code a bit, but didn't really get anywhere with that.

Eventually I had money and time to put together a "proper" gaming PC, and of course I put Windows on it since I wanted to get an NVidia graphics card as I'd had so much trouble with the AMD drivers on my laptop.

Ran Windows for gaming and kept Linux on the laptop since then. First PC ran Win7, which i loved. Next one ran Win 8, which I hated. Current one was running Win 10, which was meh, and I've only soured on it over time. Made the switch back to Linux last week after I got tired of M$ constantly asking me if I want to try Copilot on /both/ my work and personal PCs.

Proton is fucking great. Never going back. The old laptop is still running strong after 15 years. It's got BunsenLabs installed at the moment.

I mean… does Tuxracer and Wesnoth count?

I used to play StarCraft II in Wine back in like 2010.

Took me multiple attempts and multiple weeks to get cs 1.5 running on red hat around 2000. I still remember searching and downloading random rpms online. If I'm not mistaken the website was called meatsource or something like that.

Anyway, we have come a long way since then but the inner workings are the same.

I have been playing on Linux for years before proton.

WoW, HL, Fallout, Diablo, Quake, RimWorld to name a few.

After Steam officially released its native Linux client I played Half Life 1, 2 and "Brutal Legend" because they all had native Linux ports before proton was a thing. Before that I remember playing games like Sauerbraten (quake like fps), Battle for Wesnoth (my wife and I still play this together), Frozen Bubble, LBreakout2 and several other Linux native games.

So much minecraft and kerbal space program. They were two of the very few games that ran naively and had cracked Linux files available on public trackers. I had to put a minimum of 1000 hours of minecraft using the clit mouse that old Dell laptops used to have. I hate that they got rid of those and now the only modern laptops with the clit mouse are Lenovos which I hate. Lenovo ruined ThinkPads.

Alpha Centauri baby! Still one of my favourite games, I wonder if it still works

I ran a half-life dedicated server on Linux for years!

I remember playing Minecraft on Ubuntu 14.04, does that count?

minecraft and team fortress 2 for 3 years.

end of list.

Beta Minecraft accounts for at least half of all my gaming. I'd be just fine without proton.

Everybody? That thing with coloured bubbles? The network thing with all the OSs? The thing where you had to guess the position of things with lasers in a grid, all the breakout clones, innumerable tetris, doom (or was that in Irix?). Also there were lots of games if you installed the games packages. Like Mille Bornes (or whatever it was called in English) or hangman, or many other crowd pleasers.

Hey, Nexuiz rocked.

I don't get it. Is she excited before proton because it was exciting if something actually ran?

I first gamed on Linux in a time where Humble Indie Bundles weren't a thing yet and Wine was still very limited. Console emulators and some older native ports was all that was available. Oh and I walked uphill, both ways.

Circa 2015-2016. I was still dual booting Win 10 and Ubuntu at the time. It was a pain in the ass.

I started using Linux with Ubuntu 6.06 and at the time I was really into the game Jedi Academy. It used OpenGL and thus ran fairly well on Wine. I upgraded from an NVIDIA GeForce 4 MX420 to an ATI Radeon X1600Pro and the ATI drivers were absolute garbage so I kinda gave up on Linux gaming for a while. I was set on going NVIDIA on my next PC but around that time AMD bought ATI and opened up their documentation, leading to rapid improvements in the open source AMD drivers. Went with a Radeon HD 5870 and not long after I built that PC I was gaming in Wine again, though poorly on non OpenGL games still. Then Steam for Linux officially released and a lot of native games became available but I was still running Windows Steam in Wine as native Steam didn't play Windows games. Then the Gallium Nine project offered a way to play DX9 games with significantly improved performance and I played a lot of Skyrim on Linux as well as a lot of other DX9 games. Then Vulkan happened and soon DXVK and Proton and the modern Linux gaming landscape evolved quite rapidly until we got to where we are today.

No one is mentioning Tux Racer? Blasphemy!

I was playing Quake 3 and Unreal Torunament 2003 in the early 2000s, they had native versions. One of the first mainstream Linux gaming pioneers.

I used to use Second Life on Linux too with a third party client.