Let’s leave Steam and other launchers and distribution platforms alone a bit. Also lets stop discussing game engines for moment …
- What are your favorite games that run natively on Linux and what genre are they?
Would be cool if you could write a few words about the game and why it’s your favorite game.
- Hyper Rogue: Roguelike set in a non-euclidian world. It redefines what a fantastic world might look like, and has a very unique atmosphere.
- FTL: Deep space exploration ahoy. If you enjoy space operas, FTL is the thing to play.
- Atomic Tanks: Oldschool artillery game. Great fun to play with friends.
- Warsow: The quintessential FPS. Damn good.
- Battle for Wesnoth, SuperTuxKart, Hedgewars are probably known. I love these.
I’m programming our games primarily for Linux OSs. I’m very fond of them.
I’m so disappointed, no mention of tux cart?
It’s fun, but there are a lot better native games out there imo.
Shapez.io: It’s like factorio, but it is also really minimal. It is my favorite game because I can be proud of myself when I build a factory that gives me around 13 FPS. Some say it isn’t playable at such low FPS, but I still enjoy it, even if it is a slide show.
factorio, the factory must grow.
Does Minecraft (specifically the Java edition) count as a Linux native game? It’s written in Java, so thus it’s not really “native” to one specific platform.
It’s always worked perfectly for me on Linux, and have a lot of strong memories with the game. Pair it with something like Prism Launcher for easily installing mods / modpacks / resource packs / etc (which is available on Flathub) and you’ve got a pretty good setup! Though the “official” launcher is available through most package repositories these days as well.
I was an avid Minecraft player in my teens. It being cross-platform (basically 100 % compatibility) made my switch to Linux quite painless; if Minecraft did not work, I probably wouldn’t install Linux.
Stellaris and the Total War Warhammer games
- Europa Universalis IV - by far my favorite grand strategy game; most Paradox games have native Linux support
- Factorio - I bought it when it was in early access or something straight from the developer, and they had Linux support the whole time; at the time, it was pretty much the only factory game, and it was groundbreaking
- Black Mesa - fan made Half Life remake, and it’s fantastic; again, played before the official release and it had Linux support out of the gate
Aside from the first, these aren’t my favorite games I’ve played on Linux, just my favorite Linux native games. With Proton/WINE, I’ve played tons of Windows games on Linux.
Factorio.
The factory must grow!
- Genre: survival sandbox
- Why I love it:
- it’s got a bit of progression to it
- great terraforming and building
- it’s gameplay loop of “buildup, explore, smelt” repeat is on point
Mine would be Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri (with expansion). My favorite 4X game of all time.
SMAC always has a home on my hdd.
@Dirk Portal 1 y 2.
I think I installed Kohan for Linux on my FreeBSD box? Does that sound possible? I really enjoyed it, and I don’t think I had anything but FreeBSD in my home at the time…
X-plane - it’s real flight simulator (from version 9,10,11 and still12) and working fine od 10 years old PC (Endeavour OS - Gnome), for children Tux kart and 0Ad. From Steam: war thunder, arma3…
Is that the one where installing it was just copying the files over, and also let you fly on Mars? I loved that game!
Yes but now have a Linux installer and is just real one of the best flight simulator on the world.
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Neverwinter Nights
- It was the first native Linux game I’ve ever played and I enjoyed every minute of it.
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Unreal Tournament 99/2004
- It was fun when my reflexes were better. I can’t stand no chance anymore since I got old 🤣
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RTCW, Wolf:ET
- Not as fast-paced as UT99 but still enjoyable.
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Metro Last Light/Redux/Exodus
- I’ve played Metro 2033 on Win7 and was really surprised about Metro Last Light being ported to Linux. It was a pretty good port IIRC. Metro Exodus was also really enjoyable but I’m a bit disappointed about the enhanced edition not being ported to Linux.
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BioShock: Infinite
- Just as I was ready to give up on trying to get B:I running on Wine, 2k dropped the bomb. VirtualProgramming’s Linux ports aren’t popular, but it wasn’t that bad TBH.
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Serious Sam 3: BFE / Fusion 2017
- SS3 was really showing me the limits of my old AMD GPU but with a more recent one and Fusion 2017’s Vulkan power everything went fine.
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It might be somewhat controversial of a take, but to me an awesome-performing Proton version of a game is far better than a Linux version that may be native, but has severe deficiencies and/or lags behind its Windows version.
To me, my favorite native Linux games would be ones that do things on Linux that are not possible on other platforms. Generally, this would be an “unfair” advantage, as games should strive for feature parity on all platforms within reason, but so often we end up being on the wrong side of that equation that seeing some of the perks of the platform is nice.
To my knowledge, the only major game I can think of that does this to a certain extent is Factorio, which enables non-blocking game saves on Linux and macOS and not Windows. It’s not a Linux-exclusive feature, but it’s nice that the developers went through the effort to implement the feature on Linux even though it’s not possible on Windows.
Exactly. I don’t distinguish between them anymore, aside from sometimes buying a game with native Linux support when I’m on the fence. I like to see people making the effort to test and release their game on Linux, but as long as Proton can run it reasonably well, I’ll buy it.
