Can I play my games on Linux?
My favourite game is Civilization VI. I play it on an old Intel machine with 8 GB of memory, and it runs so well on Linux that I’d almost say it runs better than it did on Windows.
I’ve used Linux since 2004, and for most of those years games were one of its two big drawbacks on the desktop. The interface was the other. Both have been dealt with, and the games half was fixed by one company.
What changed
Valve, the company behind Steam, built a tool called Proton. Its own description is short: Proton lets games that are exclusive to Windows run on Linux. It lives inside the Steam app. You turn on one setting, called “Enable Steam Play for all other titles”, and from then on you install a Windows game and press Play exactly as you always have. Your library and your friends list are where you left them.
Valve also sells a handheld console, the Steam Deck, which runs Linux and leans on Proton for most of its games. That gives the company a standing reason to keep the work going, and desktop users collect the benefit for free.
The bad news
Some games will not run, and no amount of fiddling changes that. The cause is anti-cheat, the software that online games use to catch cheaters. Certain anti-cheat systems install themselves deep inside Windows itself, at what’s called kernel level. A Linux PC has no Windows underneath for them to burrow into, and the publishers have declined to offer anything else.
In my experience the casualties are mostly first-person shooters, though the full list is a little wider. A volunteer site called Are We Anti-Cheat Yet keeps score, and at the time of writing it was tracking 1,167 games that use anti-cheat. Of those, 472 work on Linux. Another 640 are broken. The remaining 53 are marked Denied, meaning the publisher has said no, and that group includes Fortnite, Valorant, Apex Legends, Battlefield 6 and League of Legends, which isn’t a shooter at all.
Plenty of online shooters are fine. Counter-Strike 2 and Overwatch 2 both run, and so do Elden Ring and the Halo collection, all of which use anti-cheat.
If the one game you play every night is on the Denied list, Linux can’t fix that. Keep Windows on that PC, or install Linux beside it and restart into Windows when it’s game night.
Check your games in five minutes
Two free websites answer this. Are We Anti-Cheat Yet covers online games. ProtonDB covers everything on Steam, with reports from people who’ve played each game on Linux and a rating that runs from Platinum at the top, through Gold, Silver and Bronze, down to Borked, which needs no translation.
Civilization VI is rated Gold from 573 reports, and the recent ones trend Platinum. It also has a proper Linux version of its own, which some games do. That version’s store page still asks for Ubuntu 16.04 and states in capital letters that Intel and ATI graphics chips are not supported. Game requirements on Linux are often years out of date like that, so trust the recent player reports over the box.
Look up the three games you play most, and if they’re Gold or better you’re set. For the games with the most players on Steam, this site has already done the looking up.
Which Linux, and what about the graphics card
Any of the versions listed on this site will run Steam, and on Mint it installs from the app store like anything else. If the PC exists mainly for games, Bazzite arrives with Steam and the graphics drivers already in place, and it can start straight into a console-style screen on a TV.
Owners of NVIDIA cards have one job after installing, which is to switch on NVIDIA’s own driver. The hardware guide covers where that button is.
Games that aren’t on Steam
Heroic is a free app that signs in to your Epic Games and GOG accounts and runs those libraries, which makes it the answer to the Epic launcher having no Linux version. Minecraft is simple if you play the Java edition and awkward if you play Bedrock. Roblox works through an unofficial project that could stop working any day, so read that page before promising anything to a child.
None of this needs a gaming PC. The machine I play Civilization on is old and has 8 GB of memory. Start with Steam’s page, then look up your three games.