I really feel you on all of that dawg. Couldn't have said it better.
I am still testing, but I felt like doing some mild gaming for the first time in a while the other day, but my major gaming build is still not up (I really need to get that finished, but life keeps getting in the way) so all I had to work with was my workstation.... And it is a Linux Mint box... And it has a pretty wimpy GPU...
I keep hearing how Linux gaming is so much improved, especially on AMD hardware so I decided to give it a try.
I installed Steam and what do you know, the Windows version of Civilization VI just worked out of the box. I didn't have to do anything special.
(Yes, I could have used the native Linux port, but it uses OpenGL, and is they haven't been keeping it up to date, so it has problems. Windows version with DXVK on Vulkan is the way to go.)
I thought this would be problematic for a few reasons.
1.) Linux Mint 22.3 is based on Ubuntu 24.04 which has a pretty **** old package base at this point, and it uses the older X11 instead of Wayland. Usually gaming on Linux requires bleeding edge packages for the best experience, but Mint 22.3 is one of the least bleeding current distributions out there. I was anticipating problems because of this. There were none.
2.) Emulation / translation API's usually cause overhead and thus have a performance impact. The Workstation only has a non-XT Radeon RX 7600. There shouldn't' be much room there for overhead. It is not a fast GPU, and it only has 8GB of VRAM, yet it worked beautifully.
I was able to run Civ VI perfectly, at 4K with Ultra settings and still maintain 60-ish FPS, which is more than sufficient for a title like Civilization. It was exactly like running th egame in Windows, except it wasn't on windows. I didn't feel like I was sacrificing anyhting at all.
What struck me was how easy it was.
I just installed Steam using the system package manager. On first launch, Steam updated just like it does on Windows, and then asked me for my signin. Once signed in it all looked very familiar. All I had to do was to - before downloading the game - go into game properties, and use the drop down to select the latest Proton instead of the native Linux version, and then when I clicked install, it installed not just the game, but also the selected proton version, and then on first launch everything just worked.
No troubleshooting, or experimenting with multiple proton versions or mucking around with performance settings to find one that worked well with proton. It just worked and has been perfectly stable for probably 12-14 hours of runtime thus far.
I have been absolutely floored by how little drama this involved.
I'm thinking that maybe - just maybe - I can finally realize my 25 year long dream of ditching Windows all together. I was going to put Windows on the game system as part of my megaproject, but now I might just use Linux instead. Not sure exactly which distribution, but looking at ProtonDB people seem to have the best luck with either Bazzite (much easier) or CachyOS (more advanced / faster) so those are the top two candidates. If I am having masochistic thoughts I may even go with Gentoo as it has th epotential of being even faster than CachyOS, but it is painful as to gain those benefits you have to compile the entire system yourself, and that takes time. Every update needs to be compiled.
So there is a real chance that I will never use this new version of Windows 11, or any future release of Windows, and that makes me as thrilled as I am surprised that this day has actually come.
Looking at the revamped classic.
