Linux+gaming?

tygasp

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Mar 15, 2012
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First of all is it a good idea to game on Linux? If it is is there any certain version that is better for it than others, or all of them about the same when you run wine or a program like it? Also will regular windows programs run on Linux with wine too? Thanks for anything you can tell me.
 
Tough question and many linux lovers will disagree, but windows is still better for games simply because most games are written for windows and wine isnt 100% compatible (yet).

As far as gaming on linux...more or less things will be the same across distributions, things like driver versions, and wine version have larger impact on performance and what will run. And of course there are native linux games like http://www.desura.com/
http://www.penguspy.com

search what works with wine here: http://appdb.winehq.org/
 
It definitely can be done. Older games will work much better than newer games. It will not run as well as it would normally on Windows given the same hardware, just because it's not made to run on Linux.

Check out the appdb and give it a try, not much more to it than that. Make sure your drivers are good.
 
i find with some games (like cod 5 - i know its quite old but for my old box? could hardly handle it under windows O.O) i get better fps in linux (up to the point i could put the settings from low to medium)
i think thats down to the fact that windows has a bunch of crap running in the background at all times and linux... well it dosent
 
In fairness to Windows most of that can be turned off very easily, I'd agree lots of it should not be there but the world and his mother all seem to want to install a service with their software. In general you'll get higher FPS on Windows with most modern cards due to the better drivers than in Linux land.