Linux Community Magazine

One huge question that many people have about the Linux operating system is how well it can handle games. There are many who use their computer more for gaming than for other purposes, so gaming is important. Can Linux play games?

Any game that is based on the browser alone will work fine in Linux. For browser based games like Farmville, these will all work in browsers as long as there are the Flash and Java plugins. These work the same in Linux as on any other operating system.

The second type of gaming is open source games. There are quite a few free games that are made for Linux as well as other operating systems. Since these are open source, it's easy for programmers to port various versions of the game for the different operating system choices that exist.

What about commercial Windows games?

Not every single Windows game will work with Linux, but many of the popular ones will. The first issue is if you have Linux compatible hardware on your system. If your video card works well with Linux, then you won't have to worry about performance issues that some meet by not having proper drivers to run advanced 3D graphics.

You can run quite a few games through WineHQ. This is an application that can run Windows software. Not everything works, but you can check the site to see which ones do work.

Another option is to use some of the paid programs that will correctly install and run Windows games on your Linux system. Many don't want to have to pay for something, but these services do work and have support for many of the more popular games.

For older games, generally you can use applications like DosBox or ScummVM that will emulate the environment the game needs to run in.