Hi. I’ve been thinking about trying out Linux for a while now (haven’t used it before). I have 1 PC which I share with my son. I mainly use it to browse the web, listen to music, watch movies and TV shows, Office for work, etc. things like that. Those things have good substitutes from what I’ve read, so not an issue. But my son plays video games like The Sims, Cities Skylines, Stardew Valley, Roblox, Minecraft, Stellaris, Slime Rancher… and from what I’ve seen it’s kind of difficult to game comfortably (stable) on Linux. As for the distro I was considering Ubuntu. Currently on Windows 10 Home. Looking forward to what you guys have to say. All advice welcome. Thanks.
In the last few years, Valve (company behind the popular Steam PC games store) has made huuuge efforts in making most games work well on Linux, because the Steam Deck console that they sell runs on Linux, and the compatibility layer they made is called Proton.
To check what games work well on Linux you should look in the ProtonDB.
If there are games that only work on Windows, you could do dual booting.
Is dual booting as simple as loading the Windows OS off of a drive in the BIOS?
Yes.
But every other year Windows seems to “accidentally” mess with Linux bootloaders on other drives/partitions.
Awesome, thanks for the info and heads up
I dual boot Linux Mint, installed it AFTER Windows and never had any problems. I default boot Linux.
Pretty much, yeah.
I’d recommend using two physical drives (SSD/HDD) instead of two partitions if you can, because windows update sometimes messes with the bootloader. But most laptops only have one drive so that’s not always possible.
Do keep in mind that formatting a drive (e.g. to split it in partitions) will erase all the data, so make sure you have backups!
Usually the bootloader is only on one drive regardless. Keeping them on separate physical drives can be nice for simplicity but there’s no reason you can’t put them on the same drive.
The games you listed all work on Linux.
Roblox sometimes has problems but currently works. You need Sober to launch Roblox.
With Minecraft it depends on the edition. Java Edition works great. Bedrock Edition is rocky. The Windows version doesn’t work at all but the Android version does through the Bedrock Launcher. You’d have to buy it on Google Play. But if he plays Java Edition he’s golden.
If it’s a fairly new computer (especially if you if you have 32 gigs of RAM), Bedrock Minecraft can run pretty decently in a virtual machine.
Linux gaming is at a point where the only games that don’t work are the ones being actively blocked by the developers, mostly through anti-cheat systems. Just install a stable distro like Ubuntu or Fedora, and use Steam, Lutris and/or Heroic to manage the games and compatibility layers needed for them.
There you go https://www.protondb.com/
Also consider that you can just try and if you don’t like it, remove it. It can be a weekend fun exploration together.
Steam for steam games, Lutris for anything else, Heroic for Amazon, Epic and GOG if you prefer it. Roblox is unsupported, but there are workarounds. For online, not LAN based, games, you will need to check title by title. I recommend Are We Anti-Cheat Yet? for this. Other than that, you are almost 100% cool. If you encounter any problem, you will need to check ProtonDB and Lutris/games sites for each case. But nowadays almost anything runs perfectly out of box.
You might consider Linux Mint instead of Ubuntu. A lot of what you want is going to work (and be preinstalled) right out of the box. It’s a great system to start with.
I play Stellaris and Minecraft on Linux Mint… Stellaris runs fine through Steam. Minecraft, just download the Linux launcher, it will do everything else for you.
From my experience, Cities Skylines works great through proton on steam (it’s a compatibility layer for windows games) and Minecraft has it’s own native launcher (which is downloadable from their site here, you need to use the debian installer for ubuntu). As far as ubuntu native, I haven’t used it a lot. Linux mint is a distro recommended for people who are used to windows most often, you can take a look around.
As far as the other games go, only slime rancher is one that I know doesn’t work through steam. For most games you can take a look at protondb, where you can just search for the game.
My daughter plays slime rancher off my desktop running Arch streaming to the steam link in her room.
I have persuaded The Sims to run on Linux; though if the game wasn’t purchased through Steam it can take some doing. No experience with Cities Skylines. Stardew Valley runs very well, I think ConcernedApe releases Linux native versions. My understanding is Roblox deliberately prevents itself from running on Linux. Minecraft Java edition runs on Linux and you’ll find launchers for it in most package managers. An open source alternative called Minetest or recently changed to Luanti exists, but I know it’s not the one his friends play and that’s mostly the point. Can’t say for Stellaris or Slime Rancher.
got slime rancher and slime rancher 2 running on pop!_os 22.04 direct from steam. no tweak. do not know if performance hit because pc was potato.
I’ve seen a few seconds of gameplay, but I’m not sure what that game “is.” Is it fun?
farm type game but with slime, open world to explore and find new slime. more cute/comfy
City Skylines is one of my staples. It runs fine (1, I don’t own 2 yet. Waiting on a hardware upgrade)
Roblox will not work. The developers are actively preventing it from working in Linux.
Those other games should. If you don’t mind to tinker a bit to make sure they’re set up properly, then your son should be able to just launch them from Bottles or Lutris or whatever you set up as a games launcher.
I don’t know about Sims. I have a pirated copy of Sims 3 working just fine though.
Roblox works with Sober.
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It’s about online games and anti cheat. Many companies will not allow anti cheat to work on Linux because they “require” kernel level anti cheat, a big security and privacy concern.
You can read more about anti cheat games and their compatibility with Linux here: https://areweanticheatyet.com/
The EA app (like most other games) can run with Proton, Valve’s compatibility layer for running Windows games on Linux. If you run your games through Steam they should just work. External games or Windows programs can be added to Steam and configured to use Proton.
There’s a third party alternative to the Epic launcher called Heroic, works pretty great. Also apparently Roblox works with something called “Sober” – no idea what that is just regurgitating other comments.
I run The Sims 4 using Steam, but I also have The Sims 2 installed via the EA App and running.
When not using Steam, there is another compatibility layer called Wine, which can run games by installing them in a .wine folder (which will contain all windows related apps).
You have to download Lutris (it runs GOG, EA, Ubisoft) and it will set things up for you, but you will need to modify some files and restart the computer to make the EA App install properly (it has compatibility problems with some settings files - you have to make a file executable and modifiable). ChatGPT or Gemini will be able to give you directions on what to modify if you copy paste the error messages.
Wine installs things on your computer as if it were a windows machine. All files (including the C folder) will be in a hidden folder on your home folder called “.wine”. Linux Mint has a button on the File Explorer to show hidden folders.
Having a LLM guide you through the process eases it a lot, but it is a lot to take in for someone that is starting on Linux, but it gets better and Linux is great because it’s hackable. You can change everything. This is one of its strong points.
Good luck running your games. Effort on adapting to Linux will pay off. It’s a OS that is closer to the machine than Windows (also for closed source and proprietary reasons Windows want to keep the user “away” from the machine).
What I mean is, if you’re using Linux, you’ll have a much easier time coding and programming something, if comes the need. Sometimes, this means being able to do things you would usually use web apps for (splitting PDFs, converting files, and so on).
I don’t know if you happen to have any other machines available to you, but I do recommend you consider giving it a go on a machine you don’t share with another person, or at least dual-booting on that machine. It could be pretty jarring to be dumped onto another operating system so quickly, especially as one works out how to use the programs they had been running just fine before.
I recently made the swap to Linux myself, and a dedicated laptop for that transition has made my life a lot easier. I still have my old laptop on Windows, heavens forbid I absolutely need it, but I do find some issues with compatibility. As another person has mentioned, Roblox does not offer native Linux support, which means you have to run a program that more or less tricks Roblox into thinking you’re playing on a smartphone. You can do the same for Bedrock Minecraft if you want to play cross-platform.
For a lot of things there are alternatives that tend to work even better in some ways. For others, there are workarounds. And for others yet, you just can’t use some applications you might have been using before.
Dual booting may be the way to go. Sure Steam, Proton, blah blah but there are so many other launchers and AAA games that are not going to be supported at all (or at least not without a bunch of fiddling). For my own kid, I gave up on Linux ages ago and they have a Wintendo now. I have been daily driving Linux since the mid 90s but I’m also practical when I need to be.
That machine is also isolated on its own VLAN to hopefully reduce the blast radius of whatever garbage it eventually detonates. I make regular backups of it and am ready to repave it at a moment’s notice.
I’ve barely scratched the surface of Linux gaming (started using Linux as my main OS for games) and the biggest issue I’ve run into is Nvidia drivers. They’re technically supported on Linux but that doesn’t mean it’s equal to AMD or fully featured. Waydroid (Android emulator) doesn’t work with Nvidia nor does Sunshine (game streaming server). These cases may not apply to you but if I started from scratch I wouldn’t buy an Nvidia card. Hopefully this doesn’t apply to you.
Sunshine works perfectly fine with nvidia on linux for me, what issue have you run into?
I’m running a 4070ti on the most recent nvidia open source drivers on arch for reference.
I got scared for a second, I love Sunshine. I don’t think I will have much need for it in my current situation unfortunately
I have a Nvidia card, use sunshine and never had any problems in Linux Mint
I have been running Linux full time on my gaming PC for a number of months now. I have found only a few instances where a game hasn’t worked. I know that certain games won’t work because of their invasive or Windows specific DRM, but for me personally I don’t want to play those games anyway. Some examples of games I can play without issue: Horizon: Forbidden West, Brotato, Plate Up, GTFO, Dome Keeper, Noita, Enlisted, Power Wash Simulator, Risk of Rain 2 …
I guess all those games work out of the box in linux through steam. I personally play just Stellaris from that list, but I do not see why the others wouldn’t.
Try Linux in a VM (virtual machine) for a while.
- Low hassle compared to dual booting,
- no risk of Microsoft randomly doing something to windows that breaks your Linux install.
- low/No system downtime if you decide you don’t like one distro or another and want to switch,
- no loss of game data for your son (I’ve lost so many saves because of games putting them in nonsensical places in windows; why is appdata still the default for minecraft saves!?)
I’ve only really messed with VMs running in linux and I know video acceleration can be an issue. Do VMs running on windows have an easier time of setting up GPU passthrough?
