GET YOUR LINUX GAME ON

There’s always been a niche interest in gaming on Linux, but this was mostly done through Wine, which has been around since the mid-90s and frankly always felt like a sticking plaster to enable World of Warcraft or whatever the current Windows game of choice was to be played on Linux.

Things started to changed when Valve ported its Source engine to Linux along with releasing its Steam for Linux client in 2012. This opened the gate for Sourcebased native Linux game distribution. In addition, at the end of 2013 Valve announced it was creating SteamOS a dedicated Debian-based distro for running its Steam client. This was to tie in later with its failed attempt at creating a Steam Machine ecosystem. Today there are over 7,000 native Linux games available on Steam, out of around 14,000 in total.

Perhaps more significantly is that Valve never stopped developing SteamOS, despite its Steam Machine failure. In 2018 Valve released its own internal folk of Wine called Proton that was integrated into Steam itself and propelled Linux support for Windows games to a new level, with currently a reported 50 per cent of games offering Platinum compatibility.

But why all this work just to help one per cent of Steam’s Linux-using gamers? This summer Valve revealed its Steam Deck, a Linux-powered hand-held PC console, which it promised would run all Windows games via its Steam Proton layer. Perhaps 2021 is year of the Linux desktop after all…

Thanks to Steam on Linux, Tux gamers finally have thousands of games to play, and Linux Format writers can peruse the Summer Sale offerings and still claim to be doing work.