Tuesday, October 28th 2025
Almost 90% of Windows Games Run on Linux, Notes Report
Linux gaming has quietly reached a new inflection point. A recent Boiling Steam summary of crowd-sourced ProtonDB compatibility reports shows that about 89.7% of Windows titles now at least launch on Linux systems. The numbers are spread into a few categories. Games rated "Platinum," meaning they install, run, and save on Linux without requiring user intervention, made up 42% of new releases tracked in October, up from 29% the previous year. At the same time the share of titles that refuse to launch, the so-called "Borked" cohort, has fallen to roughly 3.8%, a group that still includes deliberate blocks such as March of Giants, which explicitly detects Wine and Proton and exits to the desktop.
The most persistent obstacles are not obscure indies but anti-cheat middleware and contractual choices. Easy Anti-Cheat, BattlEye, and similar systems remain the primary gatekeepers for online multiplayer, and enabling them on Linux is often more a negotiation than a mere technical flip of a switch. When a studio approves Steam Deck support, desktop Linux compatibility frequently follows within a single build cycle, suggesting the code paths are already unified and only sign-off is pending.
We recently saw a YouTuber test the ASUS ROG Xbox Ally X with Bazzite, a Linux distribution similar to Valve's SteamOS. At 17 W TDP, the Xbox Ally X achieves about 47 FPS in Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 on Windows, compared to 62 FPS on Bazzite. At 13 W, Windows gets 35 FPS, while Bazzite reaches around 37 FPS. In Hogwarts Legacy, performance jumps from 50 FPS on Windows to 62 FPS on Bazzite at 17 W. At 35 W, the gap narrows to 5 FPS, with Bazzite still leading. Additionally, Bazzite delivers a more consistent frame rate, avoiding the frequent dips seen on Windows. When Valve decides to roll out SteamOS to the public, we might see an uptick of Linux gamers to a point where making a Windows-exclusive title is no longer a common case.
Sources:
Boiling Steam, Proton DB
The most persistent obstacles are not obscure indies but anti-cheat middleware and contractual choices. Easy Anti-Cheat, BattlEye, and similar systems remain the primary gatekeepers for online multiplayer, and enabling them on Linux is often more a negotiation than a mere technical flip of a switch. When a studio approves Steam Deck support, desktop Linux compatibility frequently follows within a single build cycle, suggesting the code paths are already unified and only sign-off is pending.
58 Comments on Almost 90% of Windows Games Run on Linux, Notes Report
Someting doesn't work for you in a closed OS? You are stuck with It.
Someting doesn't work for you in GNU/Linux?Find a distros that's made for your kind of needs.
Do you have a wide spectrum of needs and not the abilities to modify your distros of choiche?
GNU/Linux Is quite small compared to windows, it's easy to multi boot differenti distros.
1- Install Fedora KDE
2- After installation, Welcome Center of KDE appears. After some NEXT clicks. It will show if you want to enable third party repositories. Click that.
3- After finishing the welcome center, go to KDE Discovery, the app center. Type nvidia in the search "nvidia". Choose it and you will see the proprietary nvidia drivers. .. The rest it obvious.
Fedora still hates some multimedia codecs because they want to ship only free open source.
Switch from ffmpeg-free to ffmpeg-full here:
rpmfusion.org/Howto/Multimedia
However, with Universal Blue Project that have 3 major Fedora "images", you will have a more ready out of the box experience, all immutable:
1- Aurora (KDE). General purpose and can do gaming.
2- Bazzite (KDE). Same as above with even more out of the box for gaming.
3- Bluefin (Gnome). General purpose. Not sure how it fairs with gaming.
The Universal Blue Project itself has came to solve some of the shortcomings of vanilla Fedora OS. You want a better version of vanilla Fedora? Get one of the threes above. Except since they are immutable, they relay on Flatpacks and Appimages for software. Big sizes. Also they update each month with big download.
universal-blue.org/
If you don't like distros that emphasis about gaming even though it can do it, grab Aurora. Non immutable with modern and up to date software without getting easily broken, Manjaro KDE or Fedora KDE are good.
Other options are either stay on old, or gets bleeding edge that makes them prone to some apps suddenly not work, or get packages regression (CachyOS). Then you have projects that don't have a strong standing, a one man project or a distro that have no forum or general chat place to seek help from community (Zorin OS). Ubuntu enforcing snaps even when using apt command in terminal, it will trick you into snaps lol, which are prone to crashes, stutters and lags. Those issues are said to be calmed down and that some (most of?) apps just work especially after Canonical hired an IT Engineer to improve Snap apps handling. The Snap version of Steam has frame pacing issues worse than flatpack.
EDIT: So I checked about Ubuntu snaps and it seems they are okay now. Still need to search more about this.
The problem is with EA/Ubisoft middleware junk and anti-cheat bollocks that never get patched for Linux for some corporate reason.
With that said, for any offline, single player gamer like myself, Linux is a bliss.
I have used Linux Mint/Wine in the past but found it to be very fiddly, so I'm curious to see how Bazzite performs.
Side note: I don't really play multiplayer games anymore, so anti-cheat isn't a big deal for me.
www.protondb.com/
There's a steep learning curve with Linux but it does seem easier than when I tried it ten years ago!
Result!