I’m thinking of installing Linux (think I’m going to use Nobara) on my new budget gaming PC, and my biggest worry is video games compatibility. I have most of my games on Steam and Epic. Some on GOG, and some on Itch. I know a bit about steam compatibility, but not much about the rest. Is this something I need to worry about, or should it just work?

Edit: for anyone that finds this, sounds like the Heroic Launcher is the way to go. Thanks everyone!

Edit 2: I’ve used Heroic Launcher and Steam + Proton for a few days now, works great! I’d recommend it to anyone with a similar question.

  • someonesmall
    5·
    9 months ago

    I’'m using Lutris to play games on Epic:

    • Create a new wine/proton prefix
    • Put the epic launcher installer on C:, set it as the exe to run in the Lutris settings, run it and install.
    • Change the executable to the exe of the installed epic launcher. Run the launcher, install and play your game.

    I’m using a separate wine/proton prefix for each game. This allows to appy custom proton settings and workarounds per game. The epic launcher is about 250mb so it doesn’t waste that much disk space.

    • F04118F@feddit.nl
      5·
      9 months ago

      This is excellent! Each step can be Googled but for a quick summary:

      A wine or proton prefix is like a small Windows filesystem inside your Linux. This is how you run most games. Steam normally hides this from you, but it does this exact thing: one proton prefix per game.

      On Nobara and Fedora, you will not need to worry about duplicating files and wasting space at all: they use a very advanced filesystem which (among other things) does not actually repeat files but just goes “this file is the same as the earlier one, just read that” and saves on disk space that way. You don’t see this in the file explorer, you can just copy a file a hundred times but it will not consume a hundred times the disk space. Very cool stuff. And very useful with proton tricks.