Steam, wine and dosbox with them, you can effectively play any game worth playing. Beyond that I never needed to know.
this post was submitted on 06 Jun 2025
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Really? Try installing Battlenet or Hearthstone with Wine.
I do like to play hots or d2 from time to time π
Donβt have any games that require those. So never ran into that problem. But I can imagine there are potential games/apps people would want that canβt run on Linux. Windows VMs might be a solution but I donβt know as I never had to deal with that.
I've played a lot of Battle net games by installing battle net in lutris, then installing the game I want to play there. There's a lot of scripts you can find for installing particular games. I can't speak for whether HOTS works, but I played many many hours of WoW and Overwatch (before 2) that way. It's annoying using a launcher to run a launcher to play your game, but it works.
Yeah, I think I need to investigate proton and wine? π
I guess the best distro for gamers is https://github.com/ublue-os/bazzite
I'm no gamer but if I were, I'd go with that. Thus could be helpful as well https://fedoraproject.org/atomic-desktops/
Ty for the links, I'll check them out!
I can second bazzite. It. Just. Works. But it is built differently from the distros that everyone has heard of like arch & Ubuntu, so it's best to read up on how to install non-flatpak programs.
Keep in mind that steam can run Windows programs for you with it's emulation layer. It's not the only option, but it is convenient as an app launcher.
I had heard that steam makes it easy and convenient, and definitely sets it ahead of the epic store... Guess I might part ways with my fomo free game library for a tick π€£
The most important thing: Tell us, the community, what your critical application needs are, and get suggestions for applications to use. So many people jump through fifty hoops because they Google search first and the first thing they try turns out to be deprecated, the second thing they try doesn't work on their system, the third thing they try has everything they need minus the most important part, the fourth thing they try turns out to be proprietary and half-broken, and so on.
You will not find good solutions just by searching around, you honestly, truly, need fucking nerds in this community who live this shit daily to help you know what the genuine best available solutions are. Otherwise you will spend weeks pounding your head against the keyboard using the wrong solutions, not because of anything you did wrong but because there are often so many different implementations of the same thing that it's nearly impossible to know which ones are the ones you need for your use case without directly asking some people.
Once you've been using it a few years, you'll be familiar enough with working solutions to keep track of this kind of thing yourself, but trust me, it takes a while. So please do yourself a favor and make a thread asking which applications people suggest for the distribution you've chosen to use and what kind of framework to install them from (repository or flatpak). You will save yourself a lot of trouble.
Also, as for keeping your backed up data from Windows on a USB, I think best practice is to always keep that kind of info backed up on an external drive, no matter the OS you use, or whether you plan on switching, so if anything fails, the drive will always still be there and readable (unless the drive fails, of course).
IMO, trying out new software to see what you like best is one of the most fun parts of switching OS.
You just made a great sales pitch for Windows.
Lol, I'm so done with windows
Thank you for the recommendation, let's see...
My critical apps are (and Linux solution?)
- obsidian - files are organized to be referenced cross platform
- steam - works
- talespire - requires proton (need to investigate how this works)
- discord - works using browser (will need to test for video chat), might move to revolt if things in discord get worse.
Talespire you shouldn't have any issues with as long as you run it through Steam.
The main thing is that proton is enabled in Linux in Steam out of the box but only for some games. You will need to open your Steam settings and choose the Compatibility tab and choose to enable proton for all games ("Enable Steam Play for all other titles"). That should make it so that any game launched via Steam will run through the proton compatibility layer.
For non-Steam games check out Lutris.
As for Obsidian (not familiar, basing this on quick search), if its the "personal Wikipedia" note taking app they have multiple native Linux versions including a deb and a flatpak.
Discord, as I said elsewhere, use the website or the flatpak.
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