this post was submitted on 08 Aug 2025
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A lot of software still requires Windows.
Games are a big one for sure, but there is a lot of productivity and creative software that does not run on Linux.
This is a myth and has been for several years. The only games that do not work with linux are ones that have intentionally artificially disallowed the use of linux using kernel level anticheat (rootkit). Many of these games worked on linux until adding no-linux policies to their anticheat.
There is no technical incompatibility, only artificial policy choices that game companies have made
EDIT: you can downvote me, but I am still correct.
I just wanted to chime in that there's far more reasons that your software doesn't work on Linux than just the developer saying no.
Basically, if your game or software has to interface with anything at the driver level, such as a keyboard or a headset configuration software, or anything that needs to access complete system access such as kernel level access or being able to see processes outside of the wine environment. It's going to be incompatible. This is by design for system security and is unlikely to change on official releases any time soon.
Additionally, if the game requires any type of integration into basically anything Microsoft, so be it the Microsoft account services, the authentication token services, multiplayer services, applications on the MS store etc, it's going to be a no go as they have yet to make a decent translation layer for those systems. Being said with the push for demand of Game Pass on PC, there are people working on those projects, but I haven't personally seen anything that had decent progress.
I have to hard disagree with the statement that it's a myth. Yes, many games will work with minor tinkering. However, We are still a long way from having something that is just a click play and it works style system and it's not usually from developer choices (outside of choosing not to make a Linux distributable)
Being said, it has gone a long way since I started using Linux back with Mint Maya. ProtonDB is an excellent resource to find known workarounds when it breaks, But you definitely should not go into any Linux system expecting it to "just work™"
Tell me you haven't tried Proton on Linux without telling me you haven't tried Proton on Linux.
I have multiple versions of proton installed currently. However, I've mostly given up on the glorious egg rolls because they seem to have caused more issues than they are worth. But if you have a specific version that you've found is easier to use and not as annoying, I'm up for suggestions.
Once my system loads, I'll tell you what versions I've tried and which ones I've had issues with.
lmk
Currently I have proton GE 9-7 as my default for steam(with the hope that it works), and when that fails I swap to proton 9-0-4 or experimental, but I have GE 10-10 and 10-4 installed but they currently aren't on any games as I haven't got any games to seem to want to run with them.
Then on lutris main I'm using a custom runner for one of my games because it needs to get around EAC since standard support is iffy, but I default to Wine 10 for it as they state proton shouldn't be used on non-steam. However I do have Lutris-GE-8-26 installed but it only ever worked right on one of the games.
Then for lutris on my distrobox Arch container(because FF XIV and Genshin launchers & controller support break for some reason otherwise) I use Wine-ge-8-26 which is a coinflip of if it lets me launch or crashes which makes me suspect that theres a race condition somewhere.
I haven't had good experiences with GE which is why I was hoping you might have some recommendations on a /stable/ version if you can call GE stable lol
Is it possible that old system files are your problem? I've never had problems with any version of GE or Lutris.
If it is a system file issue, I'm not sure what it would be because I've already tried nuking out the wine and proton versions and reinstalling them and that had zero luck. And I have similar issues between lutris and steam in terms of it as well, and those should use completely separate paths
I mean like the other files on your system that wine or proton would use. Like glibc or vulkan or x11/wayland. If you're on an LTS distro, maybe some file that proton is trying to call is old?
You haven't told me any of the games you're trying to get to work.
If they have kernel anti-cheat, anti-Linux checking, etc then you're going to have bad luck and may want to consider a VM and GPU passthrough.
With the vast majority of games I have tried on Linux, things Just Work out of the box.
sorry yea, I was moreso curious if you had seen a version that tended to work better than others so I didn't include them!
Currently my main grievances is phasmaphobia which doesn't let you talk in lobby, the spirit box is broken and campground maps have massive artifacting.
The Isle, which can't play at night due to the sky being a rave
FF XIV which won't pass the main launcher outside of a distro box (which currently works but bugs me)
Death stranding which hard freezes around BT's
and Ark SE, which I personally hate the studio but, my friends still play so not having to wait 30+ minutes to enter a modded server would be /amazing/ lol
And star citizen which runs almost flawlessly on Windows with no lag, but crashes to a crawl on my main OS.
I have researched into these games quite extensively to try to find solutions and failed but if you have any ideas of what might be causing it, I'm all ears, or like before if you have any suggestions for versions that seem to work better I can default to those to maybe remove some troubleshooting time in the future.
Unfortunately I don't have a lot of overlap with you. (I do own Star Citizen from the initial kickstarter, but haven't tried it on Linux. There IS a Bottles setup for it that says it works well, but I have no experience to share.)
Phasmophobia I thought I played on Linux a bunch, but the game itself was just terribly buggy. Could be that was Linux, but I could swear my friends on Windows were having similar problems. (One reason we don't play this anymore.)
The rest I haven't tried, so can't help. It feels like either you game quite a bit more broadly than I do, or you got really unlucky. Here's a quick list of my recently played games with no hiccups - maybe the issue is indy titles tend to work better?
Vampire Survivors Schedule I Kingdoms Reborn PULSAR: Lost Colony Mindustry Star Trek: Resurgence Tales and Tactics Powerwash Simulator Motor Town The Headliners Ale & Tale Tavern Space Engineers ...
No problems. Didn't really have to think about anything with any of these.
Thank you for your assistance regardless. And yes, I have noticed indie games ironically do tend to function a lot better than AAA titles, I do play quite a few indie games as well.
I prefer simulation style games but it defo isn't a hard lock to the genre... I fell into the money trap that is humble bundle choice and every month I end up getting another 7 or 8 games which is why they add up fast, and I accumulate faster than I can play lol. I've never been very good at sticking to one game and playing it for an extended period of time.
Also, if you do end up playing Star Citizen again, definitely use the custom wine runner their LUG forum has, it's one of the few that let's it through EAC, But where it says to have 32 gigs of native ram, and 8 gigs of swap, definitely bump that up to like 15 gigs minimum of swap because it's rough and was bottlenecking still at 32 native with 10 gb of SWAP. it's still laggy as heck, but at least it will be somewhat playable.
anyway thanks again lol happy gaming!