linuxmemes

I have been playing on Linux for years before proton.

WoW, HL, Fallout, Diablo, Quake, RimWorld to name a few.

PlayOnLinux was a good friend. Sometimes.

I try to only support the games that provide a linux gnu build but proton has really made that a fuzzy line.

There was still Wine, and PlayOnLinux helped further, but when I looked for a game I wanted to play on WineDB, there was no guarantee it even had an entry, and if it wasn't listed as "platinum", the chance of you experiencing any reported issue was very high.

Not to mention, playing Steam games that weren't native was an impossibility.

Thankfully I was more of a console gamer at the time, and I got a lot of enjoyment out of the few games that received Linux ports - like Team Fortress 2!

I played cracked Minecraft on Xubuntu in 2014. And some games on Wine too.

I would never have considered gaming on Linux until the Steam Deck came out. When reviews said it's actually awesome, I became convinced to try it. Basically, the deck pushed me over the edge to ditch Windows altogether. So suck on that, Satya! No wonder MS is trying so hard to stop other OEMs from making Linux handhelds.

I started using Linux with Ubuntu 6.06 and at the time I was really into the game Jedi Academy. It used OpenGL and thus ran fairly well on Wine. I upgraded from an NVIDIA GeForce 4 MX420 to an ATI Radeon X1600Pro and the ATI drivers were absolute garbage so I kinda gave up on Linux gaming for a while. I was set on going NVIDIA on my next PC but around that time AMD bought ATI and opened up their documentation, leading to rapid improvements in the open source AMD drivers. Went with a Radeon HD 5870 and not long after I built that PC I was gaming in Wine again, though poorly on non OpenGL games still. Then Steam for Linux officially released and a lot of native games became available but I was still running Windows Steam in Wine as native Steam didn't play Windows games. Then the Gallium Nine project offered a way to play DX9 games with significantly improved performance and I played a lot of Skyrim on Linux as well as a lot of other DX9 games. Then Vulkan happened and soon DXVK and Proton and the modern Linux gaming landscape evolved quite rapidly until we got to where we are today.

I played a lot on my laptop with Debian 9 with just plain wine and one prefix for everything (I don't remember the wine version).
I can't remember all the games I played, but I do remember the last 3: all the Deadspace

I hated Windows 8 enough to put up with it at the time. It's nuts how much things have improved since then.

I got NFS Most Wanted (2005) working in Wine, and was somewhat impressed how easy it was at the time. Game worked quite well, and would only crash once in a while with some cryptic errors that I don't remember. Made me hopeful for the future of linux gaming :)

Iirc I did that for roughly a year and then proton hit. It was a bit of a different experience for sure but even at that time it was not all that bad. coincidentally that time also taught me a lot on how to troubleshoot stuff so I suppose it had it's benefits despite the added hassle that it was sometimes.

Yeah I did. God bless WineDB.

Steam before proton was okay for stuff like Fallout 3. Needed some hackery with Wine prefixes and getting the right DLLs in there but eventually worked. Older GoG games like Alpha Centauri were fine with DosBox.

Proton is great. Cyberpunk 2077 on Ultra.

Basically some Source games, Gog's offerings and Guild Wars in-between rounds of tuxkart

Played WoW when it first came out with WINE. It was miserable. We had to mess with configs, install hacked patches, manually start jobs with scripts. And every patch broke something so you had to start from scratch again.

This was probably 2004/2005?

I tried to get Wine working for STALKER before Proton. Never managed lol

It was rough. I basically gave up on playing 3D games on Linux for the longest time and used a dualboot. Much less hassle.

What convinced me was when they verified Apex Legends, which was a game I was not expecting to be verified at all. Turns out Proton secretly got really good in all that time.

I bought Tomb Raider 2013 because it was Linux native. Nowadays I recommend people to play the Windows version.

I remember that Unreal Tournament 2003 came with a bootable Linux CD to play the game.