Nearly 90% of Windows Games Now Run on Linux

2003 me was optimistic that wine was a dead-end, with games like Neverwinter Nights, and Quake 3 Arena having native linux releases.

The Year of Linux on the Desktop was near, and wine would surely be a temporary stop-gap.

In case you don't own a Steam Deck and would like to see how much of your library would run on Linux:

1. Go to your library

2. Click the filter button

3. Under "hardware support" you'll see a dropdown "Steam Deck" with 4 options, here's some explanation what they mean:

Verified - Means this game 100% works on Linux (and Deck), which is verified by Valve

Playable - Means this game works on Linux (and Deck) but it might have some tiny issues (e.g. font size)

Untested - Might work, but not tested

So to check if your games would run pretty nicely either filter on "Verified" games or "Verified or playable" games and it filters out everything which will or might not run at all.

You'll be surprised how much games can run on Linux these days -- thanks to the massive effort Valve puts in Proton and some devs (including Valve) publishing native Linux builds of their games on Steam, and even things you might not even consider at all like Skyrim or Oblivion with all your favorite mods (!)

I'm never going back. If something changes and the only option is Windows or consoles I'll just stop buying new games or take up another hobby.

Being able to use sane scripting to solve problems, ZFS snapshots to undo bad mod installs, using the same system for development, and so on is no longer something I'm willing to give up. I've also started amassing a small collection of Cloud Init configs that set up game servers inside LXD containers. Some of these have native Linux binaries but a few only have Windows servers. They run perfectly well through Wine.

Anyone here even vaguely interested, I encourage you to just try it. I use Ubuntu and it works great on both AMD and Nvidia cards for me. What have you got to lose?

Ive been yearning for the days when using linux in daily life isnt "interesting" but just something you do. It feels great

That anecdote goes the other way if you skew towards popular multiplayer games, since those are the ones with anti-cheat. Someone who plays League, Apex, PUBG, and Destiny 2, and was really looking forward to BF6, will be mightily disappointed. You're unlikely to be invested in all of those games, but a pretty large amount of people are very, very invested in at-least one of those, which, unfortunately, makes Linux a non-starter for them.

Even if 99% of games worked fine on Linux, a large amount of people spend 50+% of their time in-game in one of those games, so it doesn't end up feeling like 90+% of games work.

Thankfully, the corollary of that is that single-player games pretty much all work, barring some edge cases, like very recent titles that haven't had the kinks ironed out yet.