Hi. I’ve been thinking about trying out Linux for a while now (haven’t used it before). I have 1 PC which I share with my son. I mainly use it to browse the web, listen to music, watch movies and TV shows, Office for work, etc. things like that. Those things have good substitutes from what I’ve read, so not an issue. But my son plays video games like The Sims, Cities Skylines, Stardew Valley, Roblox, Minecraft, Stellaris, Slime Rancher… and from what I’ve seen it’s kind of difficult to game comfortably (stable) on Linux. As for the distro I was considering Ubuntu. Currently on Windows 10 Home. Looking forward to what you guys have to say. All advice welcome. Thanks.
In the last few years, Valve (company behind the popular Steam PC games store) has made huuuge efforts in making most games work well on Linux, because the Steam Deck console that they sell runs on Linux, and the compatibility layer they made is called Proton.
To check what games work well on Linux you should look in the ProtonDB.
If there are games that only work on Windows, you could do dual booting.
Is dual booting as simple as loading the Windows OS off of a drive in the BIOS?
Yes.
But every other year Windows seems to “accidentally” mess with Linux bootloaders on other drives/partitions.
Pretty much, yeah.
I’d recommend using two physical drives (SSD/HDD) instead of two partitions if you can, because windows update sometimes messes with the bootloader. But most laptops only have one drive so that’s not always possible.
Do keep in mind that formatting a drive (e.g. to split it in partitions) will erase all the data, so make sure you have backups!
The games you listed all work on Linux.
Roblox sometimes has problems but currently works. You need Sober to launch Roblox.
With Minecraft it depends on the edition. Java Edition works great. Bedrock Edition is rocky. The Windows version doesn’t work at all but the Android version does through the Bedrock Launcher. You’d have to buy it on Google Play. But if he plays Java Edition he’s golden.
Linux gaming is at a point where the only games that don’t work are the ones being actively blocked by the developers, mostly through anti-cheat systems. Just install a stable distro like Ubuntu or Fedora, and use Steam, Lutris and/or Heroic to manage the games and compatibility layers needed for them.
There you go https://www.protondb.com/
Also consider that you can just try and if you don’t like it, remove it. It can be a weekend fun exploration together.
Roblox will not work. The developers are actively preventing it from working in Linux.
Those other games should. If you don’t mind to tinker a bit to make sure they’re set up properly, then your son should be able to just launch them from Bottles or Lutris or whatever you set up as a games launcher.
I don’t know about Sims. I have a pirated copy of Sims 3 working just fine though.
It’s about online games and anti cheat. Many companies will not allow anti cheat to work on Linux because they “require” kernel level anti cheat, a big security and privacy concern.
You can read more about anti cheat games and their compatibility with Linux here: https://areweanticheatyet.com/
I run The Sims 4 using Steam, but I also have The Sims 2 installed via the EA App and running.
When not using Steam, there is another compatibility layer called Wine, which can run games by installing them in a .wine folder (which will contain all windows related apps).
You have to download Lutris (it runs GOG, EA, Ubisoft) and it will set things up for you, but you will need to modify some files and restart the computer to make the EA App install properly (it has compatibility problems with some settings files - you have to make a file executable and modifiable). ChatGPT or Gemini will be able to give you directions on what to modify if you copy paste the error messages.
Wine installs things on your computer as if it were a windows machine. All files (including the C folder) will be in a hidden folder on your home folder called “.wine”. Linux Mint has a button on the File Explorer to show hidden folders.
Having a LLM guide you through the process eases it a lot, but it is a lot to take in for someone that is starting on Linux, but it gets better and Linux is great because it’s hackable. You can change everything. This is one of its strong points.
Good luck running your games. Effort on adapting to Linux will pay off. It’s a OS that is closer to the machine than Windows (also for closed source and proprietary reasons Windows want to keep the user “away” from the machine).
What I mean is, if you’re using Linux, you’ll have a much easier time coding and programming something, if comes the need. Sometimes, this means being able to do things you would usually use web apps for (splitting PDFs, converting files, and so on).
