Where to get Linux games

[Nod]

Source: http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/6-digital-distribution-services-linux-gamers/

Steam is the frontrunner platform for digitally downloading PC games. I still remember when Steam first debuted and nearly everyone screamed about how much it sucked and that it had no future. Well, look where we are now.

GOG is great. It loses to Steam in a handful of areas, but GOG’s customer support is lightyears ahead of Steam’s customer support — which is so lackluster that it seems disingenuous to call it “support” at all — and this reason alone could be enough to consider GOG the superior service.

Itch.io is a newcomer to digital distribution, but it has surged in popularity over the last year or so. Why? Because it makes it incredibly easy for indie developers to publish their games, create product pages, and earn revenue.

Like Itch.io, Desura is mainly known as a publishing platform for indie developers. It used to be a viable alternative to Steam, but news broke of potential bankruptcy in mid-2015 and it’s still too early to tell if Desura will collapse for good.

GamersGate celebrates its 15th year in business this year, which is a bit shocking because most of the gamers I know actually haven’t heard of this site before.

Lutris is an open source games manager that prioritizes free and open source games, which naturally makes it a perfect fit for the Linux gaming community. Like Steam, it’s a downloadable client that manages all of your games using one clean interface.

 

[Topdoggdbn]

very much thank you.
was just asking myself this and about to google and there. delivered.

 

[Johnatan56]

Well steam did suck at the beginning. A lot of crashes and a memory hog.
It's improved a lot since then. Just wish they'd update the in-game browser.

 

[AstroTurf]

Thanks, installing Lutris

 

[rambo919]

http://www.lgdb.org/

 

[ponder]

Gaming on linux sucks. The games you do get have lower fps than the windows equivalent. Majority of games will never have a native linux port.

I'm really hoping valve gets their steambox schite off the ground as that would probably be the biggest enabler for linux. Once you get gaming onto linux the home market is won. Mantle/vulcan also has a role to play here.

 

[ginggs]

Gaming on linux sucks. The games you do get have lower fps than the windows equivalent. Majority of games will never have a native linux port.

This blog post is a couple of years old already:
http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/linux/faster-zombies/

Running Left 4 Dead 2 on Windows 7 with Direct3D drivers, we get 270.6 FPS as a baseline.

When we started with Linux, the initial version we got up and running was at 6 FPS. This is typical of an initial successful port to a new platform.
Performance improvements fall into several categories:

• Modifying our game to work better with the kernel
• Modifying our game to work better with OpenGL
• Optimizing the graphics driver

...
After this work, Left 4 Dead 2 is running at 315 FPS on Linux.

 

[ponder]

This blog post is a couple of years old already:
http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/linux/faster-zombies/

Yes I remember that one, it's the exception though. I actually think valve pulled out all the stops there to be used for marketing purposes. Just the other day I tried csgo on linux and i found it unplayable compared to my windows install, it was not smooth at all.

 

[SYNERGY]

Gaming on linux sucks. The games you do get have lower fps than the windows equivalent. Majority of games will never have a native linux port.

I'm really hoping valve gets their steambox schite off the ground as that would probably be the biggest enabler for linux. Once you get gaming onto linux the home market is won. Mantle/vulcan also has a role to play here.

I read somewhere that mantle was shelved due to the new DirectX?

 

[ponder]

I read somewhere that mantle was shelved due to the new DirectX?

dx12 only runs on ms products, they borrowed from mantle. vulkan was derived from mantle & built on it.

 

[giggity]

You can install a Windows VM on Linux that can run games pretty damn well:
[video=youtube;16dbAUrtMX4]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=16dbAUrtMX4[/video]

 

[ponder]

You can install a Windows VM on Linux that can run games pretty damn well:

You need to pick your hardware very carefully in order to do that, would love to do it but can't.

 

[Johnatan56]

You can install a Windows VM on Linux that can run games pretty damn well:
[video=youtube;16dbAUrtMX4]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=16dbAUrtMX4[/video]

Wouldn't dual-booting Windows be a better solution then?

EDIT: Okay, answered in the beginning of the video. Guy doesn't like Microsoft due to thinking security risk.

 

[Nod]

Yes I remember that one, it's the exception though. I actually think valve pulled out all the stops there to be used for marketing purposes. Just the other day I tried csgo on linux and i found it unplayable compared to my windows install, it was not smooth at all.

Source: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=csgo_linux_blobs&num=3

The basic summary for these proprietary driver results include:

- Effectively any modern mid-range NVIDIA/AMD graphics card or better should be able to deliver 60+ FPS averages at 1080p for Counter-Strike: Global Offensive on Linux.

- The AMD Catalyst performance remains much lower than NVIDIA Linux... It's been seen for other OpenGL Linux benchmarks and it's no different for CS:GO. The Radeon R9 290 performance is poor and comes in worse than the GeForce GTX 760. It seems the Catalyst binary driver is quick to hit some sort of bottleneck at a low frame-rate leading to the HD 7950 through R9 290 all performing around the same. As mentioned earlier, the Radeon R9 270X also locked up with this driver when running Valve's new Linux title.

- The GeForce GTX 780 Ti to no surprise was the fastest graphics card.

Nvidia is still the best card for Linux as their drivers are the best currently.
AMD needs to work on their OpenGL optimizations it seems.