Hi everyone, I just finished writing a guide on everything you need to know in order to game on Linux. It covers Proton (Steam play), using Heroic Launcher (with Wine-GE), and all sorts of tidbits and tips I wish people had told me earlier. I hope this can be useful to someone out there!
Archive link: https://web.archive.org/web/20230816141640/https://popcar.bearblog.dev/everything-linux-gaming/
This is a solid guide to help people who are not familiar with all the tools we use. I have some suggestions for you to perhaps improve (these are small details that, in my case, have been helpful to me):
Anyway, sorry for the huge comment. Although I’m making suggestions for improvement, please know that my comment is this long because I’m very enthusiastic about your guide. A nice overview of everything a gamer needs to learn about is all there in your guide and this is something that people need if they’re migrating from Windows. You are very generous in taking the time to write this and I’m sure you’re going to help a lot of people who feel lost or don’t know where to start. Great job and thank you!
I agree with this but I generally find that performance is a bit worse, so I’m just setting expectations. One thing Proton does offer is pre-caching shaders which can help games not stutter compared to Windows, so you might get way less stutters even if your FPS is a bit worse than Windows.
You definitely can use Proton with Heroic but you generally shouldn’t need to. Wine-GE’s performance is very comparable to Proton and usually Proton can cause issues when ran outside of Steam, which is why it isn’t recommended to do so and why all these launchers prefer Wine-GE. I tried to make the guide as simple as possible, so I decide to list the best option rather than a list of options.
Definitely. I actually do use Nobara which you might tell from one of the screenshots’ background. I might do another post on distro choice but I felt like it’s a big topic that can get too opinionated, especially with recent Fedora controversies. I didn’t want to recommend Nobara only to have a lot of “Well, actually…” comments.
I thought about it but didn’t feel like it warranted talking about. If there’s a native Linux version, you’d hit install and it should work. It didn’t really need elaborating so I decided to focus on the things people can need help with.
And thank you for the feedback!
What fedora controversy?
Someone from Fedora’s development team has proposed to add some user-habit telemetry, this has triggered an immediate reaction of the community, in majority against such a feature.