This is a myth and has been for several years. The only games that do not work with linux are ones that have intentionally artificially disallowed the use of linux using kernel level anticheat (rootkit). Many of these games worked on linux until adding no-linux policies to their anticheat.
There is no technical incompatibility, only artificial policy choices that game companies have made
EDIT: you can downvote me, but I am still correct.
I have been trying to get the sims to work on my wife’s Linux laptop. I can either get it to run at 3-4fps, or I can get it to run without the ability to save anything.
I have Steam deck and with every game I have tried on it so far working, I thought it would be the same with a laptop. Boy was I wrong.
It looks like The Sims 4 is the only one that might need some tinkering. Stupid EA installers…
Though the only entry for the first Sims game that appears in the results is the “Legacy Collection,” so if you’re referring to like the original CD-ROM or something, it might be different.
Edit: just noticed that Sims 3 doesn’t appear to have any entries on ProtonDB so I don’t know… If any of them don’t work is most likely because of EA bullshit
Sims 4, and I have tried every version of Proton, I have tried proton ge or whatever it is, I have tried every suggestion in the sims 4 protondb entry.
I have tried the suggestions in my thread about it. (I think there was one I still need to try, actually)
I have the fitgirl repack, I have tried via steam, I have tried the .exe from EA.
What distro of Linux did you install on the laptop? I’ve had no luck getting wine to work on Fedora, but my desktop is running Bazzite which is based on the steam deck OS and I’m games run great (sometimes with tweaking required).
Oh, Sims 4 fit girl pack Ive gotten to run consistently on Cinnamon. Feel free to ping me sometime if you try it and run into an issue, I may be able to get lucky with a pointer.
It’s got a shit ton of expansions in it.
Edit:
(Believe the last couple of times I did the installs through Lutris. I just picked the .exe and used the standard wine defaults for the install, then once it’s done I believe it worked fine by adding a game and pointing it to the .exe for the play file. Then if you feel like it you can switch to proton to see if you get better performance, but a Mint install with a Pentium Processor with 4gb of ram (HP touchsmart) was able to run it, so most anything should be able to use the standard wine setup just fine.)
Ok let’s give you some more software which still don’t work with linux
- recordbox
- serato
- traktor
- engine dj
While recordbox 6 still worked in a kvm environment … recordbox 7 crashes even in this environment.
You can to a certain degree avoid maybe serato or traktor and use “engine dj in a kvm” to prepare denon stuff but you always need recordbox for preparing usb sticks too as a dj.
Again, further proving my point. Rekordbox was arbitrarily designed to detect if it is being run with WINE to prevent use with linux. There is no technical incompatibility, only a policy choice, and you can get rekordbox to run with linux if you jump through hoops to defeat the WINE detection.
It’s a very small subset of games and most are live service microtransaction garbage not worth playing anyway. Many are spyware and viruses disguised as games, eg Valorant
No, they’re saying you are making a mountain of molehill and using it as justification. You are saying you are technically correct, the best kind of correct.
Now you two feel free to proceed, I have my popcorn.
Yeah but they are saying a reason why people don’t move, not a justification of why he isn’t.
That said I had to run a program that detected my computer specs for a job interview recently, and they flagged my machine because I had just booted Windows in Virtual box so I could hopefully pass their test. Instead I had to borrow my spouses laptop, run the test then went back to using my computer for everything else once the test was over.
That said, you should never take a job that requires you to use your own hardware… But desperate times…
The user asked why people still use Windows and I gave a few examples.
You gave examples, but they were incorrect and invalid examples. As I already corrected you, you’re parroting a myth because games do run on Linux. In fact, games run better and faster on linux than windows
I just wanted to chime in that there’s far more reasons that your software doesn’t work on Linux than just the developer saying no.
Basically, if your game or software has to interface with anything at the driver level, such as a keyboard or a headset configuration software, or anything that needs to access complete system access such as kernel level access or being able to see processes outside of the wine environment. It’s going to be incompatible. This is by design for system security and is unlikely to change on official releases any time soon.
Additionally, if the game requires any type of integration into basically anything Microsoft, so be it the Microsoft account services, the authentication token services, multiplayer services, applications on the MS store etc, it’s going to be a no go as they have yet to make a decent translation layer for those systems. Being said with the push for demand of Game Pass on PC, there are people working on those projects, but I haven’t personally seen anything that had decent progress.
I have to hard disagree with the statement that it’s a myth. Yes, many games will work with minor tinkering. However, We are still a long way from having something that is just a click play and it works style system and it’s not usually from developer choices (outside of choosing not to make a Linux distributable)
Being said, it has gone a long way since I started using Linux back with Mint Maya. ProtonDB is an excellent resource to find known workarounds when it breaks, But you definitely should not go into any Linux system expecting it to “just work™”
I have multiple versions of proton installed currently. However, I’ve mostly given up on the glorious egg rolls because they seem to have caused more issues than they are worth. But if you have a specific version that you’ve found is easier to use and not as annoying, I’m up for suggestions.
Once my system loads, I’ll tell you what versions I’ve tried and which ones I’ve had issues with.
Currently I have proton GE 9-7 as my default for steam(with the hope that it works), and when that fails I swap to proton 9-0-4 or experimental, but I have GE 10-10 and 10-4 installed but they currently aren’t on any games as I haven’t got any games to seem to want to run with them.
Then on lutris main I’m using a custom runner for one of my games because it needs to get around EAC since standard support is iffy, but I default to Wine 10 for it as they state proton shouldn’t be used on non-steam. However I do have Lutris-GE-8-26 installed but it only ever worked right on one of the games.
Then for lutris on my distrobox Arch container(because FF XIV and Genshin launchers & controller support break for some reason otherwise) I use Wine-ge-8-26 which is a coinflip of if it lets me launch or crashes which makes me suspect that theres a race condition somewhere.
I haven’t had good experiences with GE which is why I was hoping you might have some recommendations on a /stable/ version if you can call GE stable lol
If it is a system file issue, I’m not sure what it would be because I’ve already tried nuking out the wine and proton versions and reinstalling them and that had zero luck. And I have similar issues between lutris and steam in terms of it as well, and those should use completely separate paths
sorry yea, I was moreso curious if you had seen a version that tended to work better than others so I didn’t include them!
Currently my main grievances is phasmaphobia which doesn’t let you talk in lobby, the spirit box is broken and campground maps have massive artifacting.
The Isle, which can’t play at night due to the sky being a rave
FF XIV which won’t pass the main launcher outside of a distro box (which currently works but bugs me)
Death stranding which hard freezes around BT’s
and Ark SE, which I personally hate the studio but, my friends still play so not having to wait 30+ minutes to enter a modded server would be /amazing/ lol
And star citizen which runs almost flawlessly on Windows with no lag, but crashes to a crawl on my main OS.
I have researched into these games quite extensively to try to find solutions and failed but if you have any ideas of what might be causing it, I’m all ears, or like before if you have any suggestions for versions that seem to work better I can default to those to maybe remove some troubleshooting time in the future.
Unfortunately I don’t have a lot of overlap with you. (I do own Star Citizen from the initial kickstarter, but haven’t tried it on Linux. There IS a Bottles setup for it that says it works well, but I have no experience to share.)
Phasmophobia I thought I played on Linux a bunch, but the game itself was just terribly buggy. Could be that was Linux, but I could swear my friends on Windows were having similar problems. (One reason we don’t play this anymore.)
The rest I haven’t tried, so can’t help. It feels like either you game quite a bit more broadly than I do, or you got really unlucky. Here’s a quick list of my recently played games with no hiccups - maybe the issue is indy titles tend to work better?
Vampire Survivors
Schedule I
Kingdoms Reborn
PULSAR: Lost Colony
Mindustry
Star Trek: Resurgence
Tales and Tactics
Powerwash Simulator
Motor Town
The Headliners
Ale & Tale Tavern
Space Engineers
…
No problems. Didn’t really have to think about anything with any of these.
I’m parroting old talking points because those talking points still exist. They existed in 2022. They existed in 2012 when I started, and they still exist today August 2025.
I said I agree that wines gotten better, but I’m sick and tired of people thinking that it’s some sort of magical unicorn that can just resolve all the inner communication issues with Windows & Linux.
In the last 2 months alone I have had several games that have failed to launch completely. at least 10 games that have required me using a specific proton version. One game that required me to install a custom wine runner that’s specifically configured for the game to function, a handful of software incompatibilities, The most annoying of which being the software that is supposed to make my headset compatible with the computer, which required me due to the fact it’s not compatible with wine, to have to make my own audio profile to split the two mixes it has, and I’m currently working on a custom user interface for it to allow me to actually change the settings on the headset.
All of these examples are completely ignoring the reason that you provided of companies not wanting to support it. It’s just the support doesn’t exist in the current wine infrastructure. If we’re including the games that are using kernel level AC or disabling the usage on Linux, that list becomes bigger.
10 games that /launched/ on linux. there is a difference. It was for sure not 10 games that ran the same as if in a windows enviroment. For example one of those games in that critera you can’t tab out of it or it hard crashes. (Safecracker if you were curious)
Another one of those games was “The Isle” which has a raving disco ball sky during the night time.
Then theres phas… which while it functions the mic support is iffy cant work in lobby and night vision video is broken
Of the popular titles, of what I tried was probably Phas, Death Stranding (random crashes when the BT’s show), Sniper Elite 3 (overall laggy), Ark SE (not surprising but it has massive pre-game queueing if the server is modded so it takes 20-30 minutes to enter a modded server), Genshin Impact (controller issue on my main OS so i need to run it on my Arch distrobox) and FF XIV which launcher crashes unless I run it in a distrobox, and has weird audio issues.
Another one of those games was “The Isle” which has a raving disco ball sky during the night time.
You should probably try this again, I can only assume that it has been a long time since you tried, because the protondb posting for the last 4+ months all say there are zero issues and it works perfectly. No clue why you’d need to use a specific version of proton because the posts include the latest version as well as a variety of others.
Then theres phas… which while it functions the mic support is iffy cant work in lobby and night vision video is broken
Lol I literally play this one on linux, and no, it works 100% without any issues or bugs.
this doesn’t work sadly, I tried it already. it’s not the act of tabbing out that causes it, it’s the fact the window loses focus which is still done with borderless
You should probably try this again
I tried The isle 2 weeks ago but i guess I’ll try giving it another shot
Lol I literally play this one on linux, and no, it works 100% without any issues or bugs.
I don’t know what to tell you here. The phas proton db page for it is filled with others having the issue. Mic works in game, spirit box requires text mode, and no communication in lobby. I have tried GE 9-20, experimental, latest and bleeding edge, the issue remained. I have been waiting for another major update to hopefully address it. (I forgot to add, i have tried the launch option solution as well)
edit: made the parts I was referencing more clear cause full chain doesn’t show in notices.
this doesn’t work sadly, I tried it already. it’s not the act of tabbing out that causes it, it’s the fact the window loses focus which is still done with borderless
This is a myth and has been for several years. The only games that do not work with linux are ones that have intentionally artificially disallowed the use of linux using kernel level anticheat (rootkit). Many of these games worked on linux until adding no-linux policies to their anticheat.
There is no technical incompatibility, only artificial policy choices that game companies have made
EDIT: you can downvote me, but I am still correct.
I have been trying to get the sims to work on my wife’s Linux laptop. I can either get it to run at 3-4fps, or I can get it to run without the ability to save anything.
I have Steam deck and with every game I have tried on it so far working, I thought it would be the same with a laptop. Boy was I wrong.
Not sure which Sims you’re referring to, but it looks like it should work: https://www.protondb.com/search?q=the+Sims+
It looks like The Sims 4 is the only one that might need some tinkering. Stupid EA installers…
Though the only entry for the first Sims game that appears in the results is the “Legacy Collection,” so if you’re referring to like the original CD-ROM or something, it might be different.
Edit: just noticed that Sims 3 doesn’t appear to have any entries on ProtonDB so I don’t know… If any of them don’t work is most likely because of EA bullshit
Sims 4, and I have tried every version of Proton, I have tried proton ge or whatever it is, I have tried every suggestion in the sims 4 protondb entry.
I have tried the suggestions in my thread about it. (I think there was one I still need to try, actually)
I have the fitgirl repack, I have tried via steam, I have tried the .exe from EA.
Bummer, sorry to hear that.
What distro of Linux did you install on the laptop? I’ve had no luck getting wine to work on Fedora, but my desktop is running Bazzite which is based on the steam deck OS and I’m games run great (sometimes with tweaking required).
Mint Cinnamon
Oh, Sims 4 fit girl pack Ive gotten to run consistently on Cinnamon. Feel free to ping me sometime if you try it and run into an issue, I may be able to get lucky with a pointer.
It’s got a shit ton of expansions in it.
Edit: (Believe the last couple of times I did the installs through Lutris. I just picked the .exe and used the standard wine defaults for the install, then once it’s done I believe it worked fine by adding a game and pointing it to the .exe for the play file. Then if you feel like it you can switch to proton to see if you get better performance, but a Mint install with a Pentium Processor with 4gb of ram (HP touchsmart) was able to run it, so most anything should be able to use the standard wine setup just fine.)
@theunknownmuncher @TheFeatureCreature
Ok let’s give you some more software which still don’t work with linux
- recordbox
- serato
- traktor
- engine dj
While recordbox 6 still worked in a kvm environment … recordbox 7 crashes even in this environment.
You can to a certain degree avoid maybe serato or traktor and use “engine dj in a kvm” to prepare denon stuff but you always need recordbox for preparing usb sticks too as a dj.
Again, further proving my point. Rekordbox was arbitrarily designed to detect if it is being run with WINE to prevent use with linux. There is no technical incompatibility, only a policy choice, and you can get rekordbox to run with linux if you jump through hoops to defeat the WINE detection.
I never gave a reason why a game would/wouldn’t run on Linux. I just said that games are a reason some people continue to use Windows.
It’s a very small subset of games and most are live service microtransaction garbage not worth playing anyway. Many are spyware and viruses disguised as games, eg Valorant
The quality of those games is irrelevant. The user asked why people still use Windows and I gave a few examples. Simple as that.
You are arguing for the sake of it.
No, they’re saying you are making a mountain of molehill and using it as justification. You are saying you are technically correct, the best kind of correct.
Now you two feel free to proceed, I have my popcorn.
Yeah but they are saying a reason why people don’t move, not a justification of why he isn’t.
That said I had to run a program that detected my computer specs for a job interview recently, and they flagged my machine because I had just booted Windows in Virtual box so I could hopefully pass their test. Instead I had to borrow my spouses laptop, run the test then went back to using my computer for everything else once the test was over.
That said, you should never take a job that requires you to use your own hardware… But desperate times…
You gave examples, but they were incorrect and invalid examples. As I already corrected you, you’re parroting a myth because games do run on Linux. In fact, games run better and faster on linux than windows
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2025/06/games-run-faster-on-steamos-than-windows-11-ars-testing-finds/
I just wanted to chime in that there’s far more reasons that your software doesn’t work on Linux than just the developer saying no.
Basically, if your game or software has to interface with anything at the driver level, such as a keyboard or a headset configuration software, or anything that needs to access complete system access such as kernel level access or being able to see processes outside of the wine environment. It’s going to be incompatible. This is by design for system security and is unlikely to change on official releases any time soon.
Additionally, if the game requires any type of integration into basically anything Microsoft, so be it the Microsoft account services, the authentication token services, multiplayer services, applications on the MS store etc, it’s going to be a no go as they have yet to make a decent translation layer for those systems. Being said with the push for demand of Game Pass on PC, there are people working on those projects, but I haven’t personally seen anything that had decent progress.
I have to hard disagree with the statement that it’s a myth. Yes, many games will work with minor tinkering. However, We are still a long way from having something that is just a click play and it works style system and it’s not usually from developer choices (outside of choosing not to make a Linux distributable)
Being said, it has gone a long way since I started using Linux back with Mint Maya. ProtonDB is an excellent resource to find known workarounds when it breaks, But you definitely should not go into any Linux system expecting it to “just work™”
Tell me you haven’t tried Proton on Linux without telling me you haven’t tried Proton on Linux.
I have multiple versions of proton installed currently. However, I’ve mostly given up on the glorious egg rolls because they seem to have caused more issues than they are worth. But if you have a specific version that you’ve found is easier to use and not as annoying, I’m up for suggestions.
Once my system loads, I’ll tell you what versions I’ve tried and which ones I’ve had issues with.
lmk
Currently I have proton GE 9-7 as my default for steam(with the hope that it works), and when that fails I swap to proton 9-0-4 or experimental, but I have GE 10-10 and 10-4 installed but they currently aren’t on any games as I haven’t got any games to seem to want to run with them.
Then on lutris main I’m using a custom runner for one of my games because it needs to get around EAC since standard support is iffy, but I default to Wine 10 for it as they state proton shouldn’t be used on non-steam. However I do have Lutris-GE-8-26 installed but it only ever worked right on one of the games.
Then for lutris on my distrobox Arch container(because FF XIV and Genshin launchers & controller support break for some reason otherwise) I use Wine-ge-8-26 which is a coinflip of if it lets me launch or crashes which makes me suspect that theres a race condition somewhere.
I haven’t had good experiences with GE which is why I was hoping you might have some recommendations on a /stable/ version if you can call GE stable lol
Is it possible that old system files are your problem? I’ve never had problems with any version of GE or Lutris.
If it is a system file issue, I’m not sure what it would be because I’ve already tried nuking out the wine and proton versions and reinstalling them and that had zero luck. And I have similar issues between lutris and steam in terms of it as well, and those should use completely separate paths
You haven’t told me any of the games you’re trying to get to work.
If they have kernel anti-cheat, anti-Linux checking, etc then you’re going to have bad luck and may want to consider a VM and GPU passthrough.
With the vast majority of games I have tried on Linux, things Just Work out of the box.
sorry yea, I was moreso curious if you had seen a version that tended to work better than others so I didn’t include them!
Currently my main grievances is phasmaphobia which doesn’t let you talk in lobby, the spirit box is broken and campground maps have massive artifacting.
The Isle, which can’t play at night due to the sky being a rave
FF XIV which won’t pass the main launcher outside of a distro box (which currently works but bugs me)
Death stranding which hard freezes around BT’s
and Ark SE, which I personally hate the studio but, my friends still play so not having to wait 30+ minutes to enter a modded server would be /amazing/ lol
And star citizen which runs almost flawlessly on Windows with no lag, but crashes to a crawl on my main OS.
I have researched into these games quite extensively to try to find solutions and failed but if you have any ideas of what might be causing it, I’m all ears, or like before if you have any suggestions for versions that seem to work better I can default to those to maybe remove some troubleshooting time in the future.
Unfortunately I don’t have a lot of overlap with you. (I do own Star Citizen from the initial kickstarter, but haven’t tried it on Linux. There IS a Bottles setup for it that says it works well, but I have no experience to share.)
Phasmophobia I thought I played on Linux a bunch, but the game itself was just terribly buggy. Could be that was Linux, but I could swear my friends on Windows were having similar problems. (One reason we don’t play this anymore.)
The rest I haven’t tried, so can’t help. It feels like either you game quite a bit more broadly than I do, or you got really unlucky. Here’s a quick list of my recently played games with no hiccups - maybe the issue is indy titles tend to work better?
Vampire Survivors Schedule I Kingdoms Reborn PULSAR: Lost Colony Mindustry Star Trek: Resurgence Tales and Tactics Powerwash Simulator Motor Town The Headliners Ale & Tale Tavern Space Engineers …
No problems. Didn’t really have to think about anything with any of these.
Tl;dr parrotted talking points completely irrelevant since 2022
If you want to specifically use Microsoft software then you have to use Microsoft software? Wow, gee, what a perceptive point. You got me there lmao
I’m parroting old talking points because those talking points still exist. They existed in 2022. They existed in 2012 when I started, and they still exist today August 2025.
I said I agree that wines gotten better, but I’m sick and tired of people thinking that it’s some sort of magical unicorn that can just resolve all the inner communication issues with Windows & Linux.
In the last 2 months alone I have had several games that have failed to launch completely. at least 10 games that have required me using a specific proton version. One game that required me to install a custom wine runner that’s specifically configured for the game to function, a handful of software incompatibilities, The most annoying of which being the software that is supposed to make my headset compatible with the computer, which required me due to the fact it’s not compatible with wine, to have to make my own audio profile to split the two mixes it has, and I’m currently working on a custom user interface for it to allow me to actually change the settings on the headset.
All of these examples are completely ignoring the reason that you provided of companies not wanting to support it. It’s just the support doesn’t exist in the current wine infrastructure. If we’re including the games that are using kernel level AC or disabling the usage on Linux, that list becomes bigger.
Nope!
So in other words, 10 games that worked on Linux…
10 games that /launched/ on linux. there is a difference. It was for sure not 10 games that ran the same as if in a windows enviroment. For example one of those games in that critera you can’t tab out of it or it hard crashes. (Safecracker if you were curious)
Another one of those games was “The Isle” which has a raving disco ball sky during the night time.
Then theres phas… which while it functions the mic support is iffy cant work in lobby and night vision video is broken
Of the popular titles, of what I tried was probably Phas, Death Stranding (random crashes when the BT’s show), Sniper Elite 3 (overall laggy), Ark SE (not surprising but it has massive pre-game queueing if the server is modded so it takes 20-30 minutes to enter a modded server), Genshin Impact (controller issue on my main OS so i need to run it on my Arch distrobox) and FF XIV which launcher crashes unless I run it in a distrobox, and has weird audio issues.
LOL That’s literally a classic window bug. Try borderless-windowed. You’re welcome!
You should probably try this again, I can only assume that it has been a long time since you tried, because the protondb posting for the last 4+ months all say there are zero issues and it works perfectly. No clue why you’d need to use a specific version of proton because the posts include the latest version as well as a variety of others.
Lol I literally play this one on linux, and no, it works 100% without any issues or bugs.
this doesn’t work sadly, I tried it already. it’s not the act of tabbing out that causes it, it’s the fact the window loses focus which is still done with borderless
I tried The isle 2 weeks ago but i guess I’ll try giving it another shot
I don’t know what to tell you here. The phas proton db page for it is filled with others having the issue. Mic works in game, spirit box requires text mode, and no communication in lobby. I have tried GE 9-20, experimental, latest and bleeding edge, the issue remained. I have been waiting for another major update to hopefully address it. (I forgot to add, i have tried the launch option solution as well)
edit: made the parts I was referencing more clear cause full chain doesn’t show in notices.
gamescope should work.