Playing "Windows only" games without Windows

MaxMatti · March 1, 2017

Hi,

I'm new here so I'm not sure if this is the right spot to ask or if I'm the 10000th guy to ask this. If that's the case sorry in advance, please just point me in the right direction.

tl;dr: (how) can I play "Windows only" games on Linux without having to deal with this massive pile of shit called Windows?

Today I wanted to play Far Cry 3 with a few friends so I booted up windows and started steam to check if I need to download an update and my original plans were to play 10 minutes later.

Then followed 4 hours of problems with windows and now my friends went to bed and the only reason I'm still up is to prepare my machine so I can play tomorrow without having the same problems again.

I don't want to have my pc freeze or crah 3 times while I'm trying to download and install the drivers for the PCIe device I installed (which just works when using Linux).

I don't want every single one of my programs to wait until I start them to tell me about updates - on Linux I have all my updates (well except the programs of which the maintainers are too dumb for that) in one Place.

I also don't want to have to run every single one of my programs in the background just to be able to see if there's an update.

I don't want any more problems with drivers that "need" to be updated immediately in order to just play the fucking game that already worked quite a few times with the old driver version.

Now I'm not saying that I don't have any problems with Linux. But the problems I have with Linux do not require immediate action when I just want to do something else.

In a WAN show a few weeks ago Luke mentioned, that I could use Unraid to run Windows and Linux at the same time and then use Steams in-home-streaming feature to play Windows games on a Linux machine, however I think this might still require me to deal with all the shit that Microsoft throws at me for using their OS while only having the benefit of being able to run my Linux programs parallel to the game.

I know that some games run just fine with Wine - some older ones run even better that on Windows 10 - but most don't and my not that big PC (i5-4460k+gtx750ti) is not able to handle the performance overhead that comes with running most newer Windows games with Wine.

I am not interested in the latest AAA-titles but for games like Far Cry 3, Mirror's Edge, Space Engineers I still need to boot up Windows and I'd like to avoid that.

Regards,

Max

Edited March 1, 2017 by MaxMatti
clarified some stuff.

2FA · March 1, 2017

You would have to use WINE but not all games are guaranteed to run well or even run at all.

Streetguru · March 1, 2017

7 minutes ago, MaxMatti said:

Level 1 techs has a lot of GNU/Linux tutorials

your best bet is doing GPU passthrough, but otherwise can't you just use WINE's game thing to run things on linux?

MaxMatti · March 1, 2017

Just now, Streetguru said:

Level 1 techs has a lot of GNU/Linux tutorials

your best bet is doing GPU passthrough, but otherwise can't you just use WINE's game thing to run things on linux?

For some games wine might work just fine but for most games I had a lot of problems and fiddling around getting them to run the first time. Did I just use the wrong packages or settings there?

When I install Windows in a virtual machine I might have the benefit of being able to run my Linux programs in the background and thus reducing the amount of Windows programs running but I still have to install Windows and deal with all that driver shit that (for me) for some reason never really works. Also I'm not sure if my CPU will be a bit tight bottleneck in that setup.

Streetguru · March 1, 2017

1 minute ago, MaxMatti said:

For some games wine might work just fine but for most games I had a lot of problems and fiddling around getting them to run the first time. Did I just use the wrong packages or settings there?

When I install Windows in a virtual machine I might have the benefit of being able to run my Linux programs in the background and thus reducing the amount of Windows programs running but I still have to install Windows and deal with all that driver shit that (for me) for some reason never really works. Also I'm not sure if my CPU will be a bit tight bottleneck in that setup.

Your CPU would need to support the passthrough process in the first place, and then ya unless you have an 8 core, you'd lose performance overall

but really there's not going to be much you can do, it's why most people just dual boot windows

fjdhdhcyfhf · March 1, 2017

I understand the hassle with Windows updates, puts me off using windows, however visualization is not going to solve your problems just make them worse. The best system for running wine would be arch linux coz you get the latest software, but it does break.