 There are a plethora of reasons to transition your daily driver gaming rig over to Linux. You could be sticking it to the man. Or wanting to support the open source community. Maybe you daily drive Linux for work already. And all your games are natively supported anyway. Or maybe you just want a new and challenging hobby. But if what you want is a simple, painless gaming experience, then let this be a cautionary tale. One of trials, tribulations, and of course, sponsors. Thanks to Arilo for sponsoring this video. Arilo is a digital eSIM marketplace that allows you to directly download a flexible data plan for one of over 190 countries without ever having to leave your living room. Try your first eSIM at the link down below. For most of our one month challenge, Luke and I avoided specifically seeking out titles that would either validate the Linux gaming experience or intentionally make it look bad. We just focused on playing the games that we would normally want to play. Or at least we tried to. Because not all the games that we wanted to play actually worked. The very first day I installed Linux, I also tried to play the Battlefield 2042 beta. The previous day, still on Windows, I owned some noobs with my buddy Joe, and we wanted to play again the next night. But that wasn't going to happen due to this challenge. It was reassuring, I guess, that even more advanced Linux users were also unable to play. But that didn't actually remedy the fact that I couldn't play games with my friends. It's funny because I assumed that this challenge would be more painful for me than it would be for Luke. I mean, after all, he has years of Linux experience while I came in with basically none. But here's the thing. I game mostly by myself as a way to relax or to hang out with my kids. And I am extremely flexible about what game I'll play. If something doesn't work, screw it, I'll just play something else. Luke, on the other hand, whose social circle is deeply immersed in gaming culture, has so much more on the line if he can't solve a problem. Yeah, like I literally had a friend ask, Hey dude, when are you going to be back? Obviously, I had never actually left. But I was a lot more difficult to include as a lot of competitive games that have anti-cheat just don't work. Or it took me so long to get a lot of games to a satisfactory level that by the time I was ready, everyone else was just done gaming for the night. And as a lot of my friends like to just try random games out for fun, this actually happened a lot. Our goal is not to spread FUD about the state of Linux gaming though. So it's time to get specific about some of our less good experiences. First up is Steam, or rather, not Steam. Valve's goal of reaching 100% compatibility with the entire Steam game library is admirable. Actually, incredible. As noted by this here Reddit post, the Steam game library is chock full of amazing gaming experiences from AAA studios and indie developers alike. But it's also not the silver bullet that it would have been 10 or even five years ago when nearly every game worth playing was available on Steam. Half of Twitch's top 20 games, at least at the time of filming this, are not on Steam. And I know being a popular game to stream doesn't necessarily mean it's popular with random gamers out there, but these are all very big name games. And being on Steam isn't an automatic win either. Look at Apex Legends and New World, both massive games, both listed as Borked on ProtonDB. Native Linux games are obviously going to be your best bet. Want to try one of my personal favorites? Crosscode? Click install, click play, and as simple as that. I mean, I was amazed at how painlessly my Xbox One controller worked, though I should note that I stuck with a wired connection rather than trying to tackle getting the unofficial XOW driver working. Valheim, meanwhile, ran amazingly and immediately demonstrating how even smaller developers can make it work. If they've got the will. In addition to that, while not necessarily native, I played Legion TD 2, Towerfall Ascension, Faster Than Light, Slay the Spire, Path of Exile, and Rust, and they all worked perfectly with zero actual effort. And interestingly enough, Dota 2 and CSGO both had completely game-breaking problems that weren't isolated to my system during the challenge. They seem to be solved now, but it goes to show that just like with Windows, because a piece of software was made for it doesn't mean it's actually going to be perfect. I didn't have any issues running CSGO, even got me some kills, boys, but I did notice significantly more stutters than I'm used to seeing on this class of hardware. That could be an Nvidia driver issue, or it could be something else entirely, but for me, it worked well enough that I didn't feel like digging any further into that rabbit hole. Not when I could be digging for a sweet hoodie like this one on LTTstore.com and seeing it. I'd rather not have to dig for a sweet hoodie like this one on LTTstore.com instead. The next tier is Windows native games that Valve officially lists as Linux-capable via Steam Play. But before we go any further, I just want to say massive respect to the incredible teams who have worked tirelessly to make running Windows games on Linux possible. Valve's Proton compatibility layer is amazing. It's been multiple decades in the making with about half of its source code written by volunteers. That's freaking wild. And of course, honorable mentions all around for the dedicated communities that maintain tools like Lutris, which automates hacky workarounds for newbies, and ProtonDB, which serves as both a troubleshooting resource and a reference for which games work so you won't have to waste your money on a bad experience. With all of that said, in spite of all of that work, we're honestly just not there yet. And we're mere months from the launch of the Steam Deck when 100% compatibility is supposedly coming, which as of writing this just got pushed back by two months to February. Also, Doom Eternal reported great performance on my system, over 200 frames per second using the included tool. I'm kind of reminded of the issues that we used to see in old SLI configurations where the actual perceived animation smoothness is substantially less than what the benchmark seems to suggest it should be. Again, I thought maybe this is an issue with my proprietary Nvidia driver. Maybe it's out of date. But Manjaro begged to differ. Apparently, I am up to date. So your mileage may vary. Another problem that's been a thorn in the side of the Linux community for years is anti-cheat. Now, the game launches and seems to run totally fine. But while theoretically enabling BattleEye anti-cheat in Rainbow Six Siege is as simple as Ubisoft reaching out, doing a little bit of kajiggering and off we go, because BattleEye has supposedly supported Linux for ages, Ubisoft hasn't done that yet. Why? Well, because natively supporting Linux is seen by some developers as a somewhat brutal experience. Ben Gaullis has a rather enlightening thread about this on Twitter. He goes on to explain that while Linux gamers were a very vocal part of their pre-launch community, they accounted for less than 0.1% of sales, yet they generated more than 20% of auto-reported crashes and support tickets. He also stated that near the end of his time there, nearly 100% of tickets were still Linux related, despite Linux receiving the majority of the engineering effort, meaning the company likely spent hundreds of thousands of dollars supporting a community that made them a few hundred in sales revenue. And this isn't the only version of this story, and every time problems like these happen it's just more ammo for developers that would rather spend zero time working on Linux versions of their products. I believe that is why over 65% of reported anti-cheat enabled games have not confirmed Linux compatibility, despite many of the anti-cheat developers getting on board. And as much as everyone already knows it, it bears repeating. The fragmentation problem continues to be desktop Linux's greatest obstacle to widespread adoption. Take It Takes Two for example. This is a gold rated Windows native origin game that I got running effortlessly. Though I did buy it through Steam and I did launch it through Steam. At least it was effortless until I wanted to have two controllers running at the same time. Kind of a requirement for this particular game if I want to play it with the wife. That sent me on a quest to ProtonDB to see if anyone else had had the same problem. And no, not really. Everyone else's problems are basically random. So I guess we're not playing that game for now. One of my other favorite games, Supreme Commander Forged Alliance, was a game that was as simple to run as clicking install and enabling a couple of launch flags. Awesome. But if you want to play multiplayer, whoo boy. Here's the story. When gas-powered games went under, a small community arranged to preserve multiplayer support for the game by building their own launcher. It is an amazing example of the way that the PC gaming community can come together to preserve experiences that would otherwise be completely lost due to corporate buttholery. Unfortunately, every guide I could find to get the Forged Alliance Forever launcher working on Linux was either hopelessly out of date or not applicable to my particular distro. I don't blame the devs. Really, nothing but love for you guys. But Linux gamers and more broadly the Linux community needs to understand that until the burden of supporting Linux is reduced significantly, this is always going to be a problem. We actually live-streamed trying to work through the Forged Alliance issues on Floatplane. Subscribe, by the way. There were more than a few comments in the chat criticizing us for choosing to play that particular game because it's old, it's just some crappy Java game, it's obscure, or because it's not fair to Linux, or whatever. But the bottom line is that none of that matters. What matters is that we like it and we wanted to play it, but instead of doing that, we played Terminal Command Simulator. And honestly, I've gone through enough of that over the last month that it has sucked a lot of the enjoyment out of using my computer. I have a pretty busy life, and when I manage to salvage an hour to relax and play video games, that is what I want to do. And it's really opened my eyes to why so many people choose to play on console instead of on PC. Like, this has got to be how a not-super-computer-savvy user feels about updating a driver or fixing a firewall setting every time they just want to play a bloody game. To be clear, I would never say that just because some old game doesn't run, it means that Linux sucks. In fact, I've permanently switched my laptop over to Linux because there are a lot of things it just does really well, even for someone more on the noob side of things like me. What it does mean is that gaming on Linux can kind of suck. It's not that I don't enjoy tinkering with PCs as a hobby. I mean, man, the rush when Anno 1800 launched after spending a bunch of time fighting with it was phenomenal. I felt like the king. But then the next 45 minutes of, okay, why isn't multiplayer connecting, completely destroyed that vibe. You know, is it because Luke installed the game through the script on the Lutris page and then I Lutrist Ubisoft Connect and installed the game through that, resulting in a version mismatch? Is it because of some kind of Manjaro firewall nonsense? The answer ended up being that multiplayer used to work, which helped Anno 1800 get a gold rating on ProtonDB, but now it does not. Which isn't to say it won't ever work again. If you're a Linux developer wizard, you might be able to fix it yourself, or you might end up just needing to wait for the community to patch it. But anything that relies on an external service that updates independently of your computer can just unexpectedly break. And that's a lot of games these days. So you always need to make sure that you read, especially the recent comments, rather than just relying on the rating on ProtonDB. Another prime example of this is Minecraft Dungeons. Works great, apparently. Well, as long as you happen to own it through Steam rather than through Microsoft directly with the old launcher. Because in that case, apparently you can make it work. But for most people, I think it's safe to say that you're just going to have to rebuy the game. So I haven't been able to play that with my kids in a month. That ended up being an ongoing theme of this challenge. ProtonDB, again, respect for all the work that you do. It can save you a lot of time, but it won't just automatically fix all your problems. Gold, to me, should mean a pretty typical gamer can do it. So while the rating system makes for a very impressive story on the homepage, did you know, fellow gamers, that 78% of the top 100 games are gold or better on Linux? Wow. The truth is a lot less rosy. And there's another big problem with ProtonDB. It only includes Steam games. And while you can use the Proton compatibility layer on non-Steam games, even considering tools like Lutris, the compatibility picture outside of Steam is not as simple as, well, ProtonDB says Linux gaming compatibility is good. I mentioned Escape from Tarkov earlier. It's been broken for so long that due to Battlestate Games adding anti-cheat, their Linux Discord has turned into a matchmaking channel for other games so they can have some fun while they wait. Genshin Impact, kind of a huge game right now, no Linux compatibility. And while I did manage to find a honestly really great Russian guide from Penguin Gang that I could probably follow, it illustrates a point that I haven't really talked about much yet. Being on Linux can take a lot of the spontaneity out of gaming. You can't just be like, oh, cool, that game looks neat, and expect to be playing it in just a few minutes. I also hope you're not necessarily a fan of playing games right on launch. Forza Horizon 5, for example. Amazing, straight up fantastic that people got it working within just five days of launch. But that also means that it wasn't working for five days after the launch. And if all your friends were playing, they now have sick cars and you're stuck trudging through the swamps for a barn fight. To be clear, I don't want this to take away from some of the great experiences that I've had gaming on Linux in the last month. After an extremely short setup, my daughter was happily hanging out in a Discord voice channel with her siblings playing Minecraft Java Edition and had no idea she was on a completely different platform. That's freaking amazing. Luke and I had some awesome Don't Starve Together sessions. Totally stable, no crashes. And more recently, my son and Luke and I had a blast pinning each other to walls in Towerfall using Remote Play Together, which worked great on Linux. Overall, I'm really happy I did the challenge. I learned a lot and it gave me a lot of hope for the future. And I will absolutely be trying to stick with Linux when the Steam Deck shows up sometime next year. But to summarize the question that we set out to answer, is this the year of the Linux desktop? For gamers, the answer is no. I'm sorry. And the more niche your use case gets, maybe you're super into modding or the racing or flight sim scenes or maybe you're a big VR lover, the more resounding that no gets. And if I'm being honest, I'm in the same camp. But something has given me a lot of hope. And that's how much positivity we've seen from the Linux community in spite of our concerns. Because even if I'm not ready to convert my gaming rig just yet, it gives me hope that one day the meme will end and the year of the Linux desktop will come. I'm as anti-monopoly as anyone and I'd hate to see the status quo maintained forever. I know what I don't hate is our sponsor. Thanks Squarespace for sponsoring this video. We use Squarespace, like no joke, we use it. Both our linusmediagroup.com and LTXExpo.com websites were built quickly using Squarespace and are easily maintained if we need to make any quick changes, like say canceling our expo for two years in a row. If you haven't heard already, Squarespace is an all-in-one platform that makes it simple to get your website up and running quickly. If you have a home business, you definitely need one. You can even sell things. You can choose from tons of different templates and find the one that makes the most sense for you and then just run with it. And if you trip while you're running, you need help. Squarespace offers webinars, a full series of help guides, or you can contact their 24-7 support team to help you build your site. So go to squarespace.com forward slash ltt and get 10% off today. Now that the challenge is over, it's time to go back and watch the previous parts because while the overall conclusion was no, there's a lot to really like about the Linux experience.