A Look Back on Linux Gaming for 2022

What a year it has been! I hope everyone has had a glorious time this year, despite the international ups and downs we’ve all been through. Seeing that I’d done my first reflection on Linux gaming back in at the end of 2020, I thought it was fitting for the New Year to do a write-up on this year’s experiences.

This will be a short and sweet article here, that I will most likely llink to on my blog. Previously, I remarked upon 2018 being the real kicker for Linux gaming in general with the advent of Proton. Then in 2020 I received the GPD Win Max 1 and started running various distros on it to get used to handheld Linux gaming. Now we have such wondrous things as Valve’s very own Steam Deck! What a journey it has been…

As of August this year, I have mainly been playing a lot of games on my Steam Deck, running to and from my various errands as well as upon reaching my destination while hiking. It’s been fantastic to bring my library and backlog with me everywhere! I’ve also loved the flexibility that projects such as HoloISO allow us to have, such as testing out a spin of SteamOS on other hardware to see how it will run when Valve releases it for real.

Here are the specs of the low-to-mid-end desktop that I’ve been playing games on:

• AMD Ryzen 5 5600X
• 16GB 4000mhz DDR4 RAM
• 1TB PCIe Gen4 NVMe drive
• AMD RX 6600XT GPU

As per my 2020 post, I’ll go ahead and bullet point the list of my games I’ve mainly played this past year. I’ll also link to the associated ProtonDB pages for each, and note if I played them on both the Steam Deck and desktop or just the desktop, below.

• Risk of Rain 2 (desktop)
• Core Keeper (desktop + deck)
• Shatterline (desktop)
• Cult of the Lamb (deck)
• Fall Guys (desktop + deck)
• Slay The Spire (desktop + deck)
• Necesse (desktop + deck)
• Borderlands 3 (desktop + deck)
• Rocket League [steam version] (deck)

While I didn’t play a ton of games this year, I definitely put hours into the ones mentioned above. Risk of Rain 2, my ongoing favorite, has been flawless via Proton Experimental since initial launch in 2019. While modding via r2modman broke for it recently, a fix from a community member has already been mentioned and seems to work! Love seeing the community come together around this game.

Core Keeper, while somehow quickly draining battery life on Deck, has been a blast to play! A mix somewhere between Minecraft, Terraria and a sprinkle of Legend of Zelda, it’s been a fantastic time exploring the various biomes and fighting bosses as I work on automation to grab all the resources. I even have a server to play on with friends now! This works natively, as a Linux binary is shipped for those of us playing on Deck and Linux desktop distros.

Shatterline has been a new addition to the pile. A fun little jump-in-and-slay roguelike first-person shooter that has a three player PvE mode that I enjoy quite a bit! This is lovingly developed by a small studio based in Ukraine. GloriousEggroll got this running as of GE-Proton7–36 or so and it’s been quite enjoyable since. I’ve used the Protonup-QT app for easily installing those releases as they come out.

Cult of the Lamb, one of the big hits this year, has worked flawlessly. Even though the game was shipped with a Windows binary and required Proton, it worked out of the box as if it were native! ‘Nuff said! I believe I used the Valve-recommended Proton release for this one.

Fall Guys seemingly requires an older version of GloriousEggroll’s GE-Proton when running it on the immutable SteamOS that the Steam Deck ships with. On my desktop and laptops, I found that this video mentioned in the Desktop entries on ProtonDB explains the SteamTinkerLaunch fix that you need to get it going, flawlessly! I’ve been enjoying this with a cousin and best friend throughout the year.

Slay The Spire needs no introduction, being a glorious deckbuilder roguelike loved many times over by various Twitch streamers. It’s a native Linux build. Necesse is also a native Linux game, so no tinkering needed there. Fantastic resource-management-settlement-sim as well.

Borderlands 3 has been something the LinuxGameCast crew have been playing through for a bit towards the end of the year, due to Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands not being on sale for cheap. I saw one of Jordan’s streams where he was playing it, realized it was in my library and started it back up as well! All I did was set it to use my most recently-installed GE-Proton build and it ran flawlessly. I believe, when this game first came out, it was rife with bugs that deemed it almost unplayable. Nice to see all the changes that have been made in custom Proton variants over the years to make it playable again.

Rocket League. A great game that came out in 2013. Played it a ton on PS4 back then, only to grab in on Steam almost 7 years later to further enjoy it. When Epic Games pulled the plug on their Steam listing, I considered myself lucky to still have it in my account. The Steam listing is still getting updates, as well! Due to having it on Steam, I don’t have to mess around with the annoying Epic Games launcher on the Deck either, so I’ve mainly just been playing it on Proton Experimental and have been enjoying all the seasonal multiplayer events with my childhood friends quite a bit.