How to Play Anything on Linux with Steam Play

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

No more fiddling with virtual machines and dual block.

One unpleasant fact keeps some users from switching to Linux: there are few games in this OS. Of course, things started to improve when Valve ported Steam, but it's still far from ideal.

Many developers create native versions of their games for Linux, but this is mostly done by small indie studios. With AAA titles, things are much worse.

Fortunately, Valve cares about Linux users. Recently, a new Steam feature called Steam Play came out of beta testing, which allows you to run Windows games on Linux. Let's try it in action.

Installing Steam

Install the Steam Installer. On most popular distributions, such as Ubuntu or Mint, this can be done through the App Store or the Application Manager in Manjaro. You can also download and install Steam via the DEB file from the official page.

Finally, if you are a cool Linux user and prefer to use the command line, just type the following command in the terminal:

sudo apt install steam-installer

After installation, open Steam through the main menu and wait while it downloads all the necessary updates.

Steam will prompt you to log into your account. Do this or create a new one if you don't already have one.

You can now buy and download games from Steam for Linux just like you do on Windows. Basically, launching titles with native Linux support is available without any additional settings. You can view a list of these games in the store. Those marked with the SteamOS icon work fine on Linux as well (which makes sense since SteamOS is based on Debian).

But that's not enough for you, isn't it? Now we will activate the option that will allow playing Windows titles on Linux.

Enabling Steam Play

Steam Play includes Proton. This is a Valve modified version of Wine, an application that can run Windows programs on Linux without emulators or virtual machines.

Open your Steam client settings. To do this, select Steam → "Settings" from the menu bar at the top.

Find the Steam Play Settings section (it's the last one in the list of options). Turn on Enable Steam Play for supported titles. This option will allow you to play Windows games officially approved by Valve to run on Linux. Among them are Doom, Final Fantasy VI, Mount & Blade: With Fire & Sword, Payday: The Heist, and so on. You can view the full list in the thematic community. Sparsely, but this is just the beginning. The list is growing gradually, and in addition, Steam Play has another interesting option.

Turn on the following Enable Steam Play for all titles setting and Steam will try to run all Windows games in your library on Linux, even if they are not officially supported by Steam Play.

After saving the settings, the Steam client will prompt you to restart. Confirm the action.

You should now be able to open all Windows video games on Linux. Please note that this feature is under development. Some titles may not function correctly or show poor performance.

The ProtonDB website contains statistics for Windows games that run on Linux. Each has its own status: Bronze, Silver, Gold, and Platinum, depending on how well it performs on Linux.

Users report having no problem playing The Witcher 3, Dark Souls 3, Skyrim, Tekken 7, Phantom Pain, Cuphead, Doom, and Wolfenstein on Linux. Try searching ProtonDB for your favorite game and see if it worked well for others.

The only thing that upsets: Valve has no plans to introduce similar features to Steam for macOS yet.

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