Hi,
I recently built a new gaming computer and have been contemplating about the OS.
I prefer to move away from windows given obvious reasons and do like using Linux, but my experience with my steam deck has taught me that pirating games in Linux is hit or miss.
I played around with windows LTSC and honestly, seems like windows without the bloatware.
So question is, how is game pirating on Linux (in a desktop, not steam deck).
Is it as smooth as windows or should I just say fuck it and accept that my gaming computer has to stay windows for another generation?
In my experience, there is nearly no difference between windows and linux when it comes to piracy. There are a few games that linux can’t run (anticheat), but generally that shouldn’t be an issue for games that you would typically pirate. Linux does have a standard learning curve though, and you’ll need to get familiar with Lutris or some other Wine prefix manager to manage your games. If you’re dedicated to moving to linux, game piracy should not be a deciding factor.
Also you can run them in a container or a sandbox so a plus for linux
So I tried to get a couple games working on my steam deck that didn’t work at all. I do remember trying to run thing with wine, but just gave up and installed the game on a windows computer.
So would I just google Lutris and go from there?
Did you try Desktop Mode on the Deck? Makes things a lot easier. Haven’t had much issue with things like this with my Steam Deck, but on Linux PC, I’ve had none. Ever. Try Bazzite, it’s built for gaming.
I would just Google, “using bottles/lutris to install game on Linux” and I imagine you could find people walking through it.
Oh yeah, I really liked desktop mode.
Went a little crazy with my deck and setup things like remote play to my ps5 and a dev environment in case I wanted to do some coding on the go.
I did get some games working, but it wasn’t plug and play like windows, sounds like it just takes some tinkering which is great to hear.
The steam deck is kinda inconvenient when any level of tinkering is required due to switching between game and desktop mode and the input if you dont attach a keyboard and mouse. Non-deck distros lose the quick settings which I really like.
Try bottles too. you may or may not find it easier than lutris. I find the dependencies easier to install. After checking if anyone has already documented what dependencies are needed (directx, dotnet, etc.), I usually start with the default wine bottles uses, then try wine-ge and tkg at least before giving up. I have yet to find a game that cant be made to work but other software can be very finicky especially once dotnet is involved.
Not sure what quick settings you mean, but have you tried Bazzite yet? I’ve been using it on my laptop for several months now, and it’s been fantastic. Built for gaming, and it seems to already have a ton of shit set up correctly that id normally need to do myself on Arch
yeah bazzite is my daily driver on desktop and deck. you can use the htpc/deck image on non-nvidia systems to get the settigs panel (fps/hz, scaling, etc changed live) but I don’t want to have to switch between game and desktop mode on my desktop. I haven’t had much time outside of work other than my meager amount of sleeo and doomscrolling so I haven’t looked in to if the settings or overlays can be done as cleanly on desktop only images
Just to complete the trio, there is also Heroic, which is similiar to lutris but in my opinion a bit nicer to configure :)
Heroic defaults to an ancient version of Wine-GE. They are currently in the process to migrate to a new tech called umu-launcher which allows them to use Valve’s Proton and Proton-GE directly. It’s basically done, so should appear in Heroic 2.16 but if one tries Heroic today, the compatibility might be worse than Lutris or Bottles.
I’m not sure what a good written guide for manually running linux games is off the top of my head, but generally yeah you install Lutris, install the latest Proton-GE version through e.g. ProtonUp-QT, create a game entry in Lutris with a “Prefix” location dedicated to your wine prefix, pick Proton-GE as the runner, copy the game into the generated prefix, target the normal EXE, and launch it. Sometimes if a game isn’t launching you’ll need to use “winetricks” to install vcrun2022 and dotnet48 dependencies into the wine prefix, since each Wine prefix is sort of like a copy of windows, and windows has a handful of dependencies that games sometimes rely on. I’ve heard you can also just add the game as a “non-steam game” to steam, but I’ve not bothered as Lutris gives more control. Again I can’t vouch for any specific guides, but the keywords from this post should help target a general direction to move in.
That’s way too much work than simply installing fucking windows and be done
Half of the instructions there are installing tools that you only install once, not every game.
And once you set up Lutris, it’s pretty trivial to open .exe files with it.