A person who prefers Linux on their home computer is like a person who prefers to be under the hood of their car instead of driving it. -- this is probably why /g/earheads prefer Linux, but we're abo/v/e that. Linux has been a favorite of neckbeards everywhere since the 90s, but now it's really been catching on: when people do a 360° and moonwalk away after seeing the unholy abomination of Windows 8, yet realize they can't afford an iComputer, they look at Linux and say, well, why the fuck not.
This page is for the games that run natively in Linux; not stuff that runs under WINE or ZSNES or whatever.
Although the amount of commercial games is still small, there are a bunch of online stores that offer them, such as Steam, Desura, Gameolith, and don't forget the occasional Humble Bundle.
As a sidenote: free software purists tend to call it GNU/Linux, but really, that's a minority in what's already a minority.
Websites[]
With the iTunes/ Steam/ GoogleChromestore interface that's getting popular Game app store interfaces (that don't try to own your ass)
- Desura
- Valve's Steam
- PenguSpy not an appstore, but not a review site either
Linux Gaming TomeDEAD died of old age.
Stuff that comes with your Linux distro[]
The "Distros" column in this section is for known good packages, mostly so you know which repositories to hit up for a copy of the game. If you have a different flavour of Linux, even a different package management system, you can still port the package over but you might need to puzzle out some missing dependencies. For those of us who love to tinker on the engine more than driving the car, you can get the source code for each of these and compile it by hand.
| Picture | Title | Genre | Description | Distros |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| File:Wesnoth-1.6-4.jpg | Battle for Wesnoth | Turn-based Strategy | Fantasy strategy game where much of the game's units, music, artwork, and campaigns are player contributed. The game plays on a hex based system, with terrain affecting the accuracy of attacks and unit movement. Six well-balanced factions are available for play at the start. It makes you really feel like you're commanding an army by having you level troops into hardened veterans, which you can recall for future battles. Dozens of custom units are available for single player and multiplayer by downloading player mods known as "eras". Fantastic quality considering it's freeware. Download stable version if you just want to play the game without too many bugs. | Debian Fedora Gentoo SUSE Ubuntu nearly every one |
| File:Beneath a Steel Sky.png | Beneath a Steel Sky | Adventure/Point 'N Click | Classic adventure style game that follows Robert Foster on a journey through a cyberpunk-esque metropolis. Requires ScummVM to be played, but that is also a free install from your local package repository. Fun fact: the background art is drawn by Dave Gibbons of Watchmen fame. |
Debian |
|
Freeciv | Empire Building | The awesome that is Sid Mier's Civilization, now with multiplayer that isn't hot-seat, custom tilesets, and you can tinker the hell out of the rules. It's been upgraded since to play more like Civ2. If you preferred the sort-of sequel "Colonization," check out FreeCol. | Debian Fedora SUSE Ubuntu |
| File:Frogatto.png | Frogatto | Adventure/Platformer | Old school adventure platformer with RPG elements like quests and buying powerups. | Debian Ubuntu |
| File:Frozen Bubble.jpg | Frozen Bubble | Puzzle | It's Bust-A-Move, that game that's like Breakout plus Bejeweled where you break the walls by adding more bricks. Every Linux magazine from here to India puts this in their top ten list. Causal gamers can't get enough of this on Linux or any other platform. | Debian Fedora Gentoo Mandriva SUSE |
| File:Nethack.PNG | Nethack | Roguelike | Imagine Dungeons and Dragons in a very difficult, video game form. Death is permanent, the dungeon is always randomly generated, and you aren't going to win for a very long time. A spinoff of "Rogue," so it's a Rogue-like game, but everyone had a go at the source code to add everything including kitchen sinks. You can check out the game's wiki Here. Default interface is ASCII graphics in a term window, but you can download extra packages for a tileset or even isomorphic interface instead. | every distro ever |
| File:Nethack.PNG | Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup | Roguelike | This game is a modern take on the roguelike genre that doesn't stray too far from its roots. It keeps the randomly generated environments, turn-based gameplay and punishing difficulty of classic roguelikes. But reduces the amount of keystrokes to learn, replaces the ASCII with more descriptive tiles and improves the interface to the point it is playable by using a mouse. It also focuses on reducing the amount of spoilers required to finish the game without sacrifing its inherent complexity. Definitely one of the best modern roguelikes (others are ADOM and TOME4) around and probably the easiest one to get into that doesn't dumb things down too much (Dungeons of Dredmor) or is barely a roguelike (FTL, Spelunky, Binding of Isaac). You can get it here. | Many distros |
| File:Oolite.ubuntu.8.10.jpg | Oolite | Space Combat, Trading | The classic 8-bit galaxy-on-a-single-floppy space game Elite lives on. Better graphics (duh), a mod community and a wiki proves that Elite ain't dead. | Debian Ubuntu .rpm |
| File:Tatham-Puzzles.gif | Simon Tatham's Puzzle Collection | Puzzle, Casual | Futoshiki, Lightup, Loopy, Nonograms, Sudoku, Untangle... all those Japanese puzzles that people install on their Blackberries and iPhones and buy cheap books of at Barnes and Noble, Simon Tatham already ported them to Linux and you can make each one as hard or as easy as you want. Also available on Android (which is Linux under the hood, so no surprise.) | ALTLinux (rpm) Debian Ubuntu |
| File:SpringRTS.jpg | Spring RTS Engine | Realtime Strategy | It's Total Annihilation re-implemented to use OpenGL and more computing power. When the kids in highschool were pissing themselves over the strategy of StarCraft, the TRUE neckbeards-in-training were playing Total Annihilation. The game mods have taken on a life of their own, so you can use Spring Engine for real-time strategy games with rules (not just re-skinned units!) for WWII, Gundam, Star Wars, sci-fi, necromancers, or even a Tron game if Darwinia isn't crunchy enough for you. | Debian Fedora Gentoo Mandriva Slackware Ubuntu |
| File:Torus Trooper - over ship.jpg | Torus Trooper | SHMUP | Another shooter from Kenta Cho. Remember Tempest? This is Tempest on steroids. You're racing down this tube, sometimes at over 4000km/h blowing shit up. The graphics and music help to put you in the mood too, kind of has the same feel as Rez. It's not a game with a whole lotta depth, but it's fun to play every now and then. | Debian Ubuntu |
| File:UrQuan Masters sshot3.png | The Ur-Quan Masters | RPG | Star Control 2. Adventure across the stars, recruiting other aliens that got the shit kicked out of them since the previous game, or fend off the aliens that decided to kiss ass to the new murderous-squid overlords. Between exploring distant stars and doing mineral scans (Hmmmm...) you get into ship-to-ship action combat against different vessels with a rock-paper-scissors balance of abilities. | Debian Fedora Gentoo Mandrake |
Distro-Agnostic Packaging[]
These are still typically free software (or at least freeware), but do not use your easy-peasy package manager to install itself deep in your system. Most of the time, they are just binaries (or executables in Windows parlance) in downloadable tar.gz archives (which work like .zip files). Though, in some more rare cases, these may also include games that come as source code only -- you need to hunt down the right libraries through your distro's package manager, compile, and install manually (while trickier, this has the added bonus of increased optimization for your computer hardware, however marginal).
| Picture | Title | Genre | Description |
Link |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| File:Action.png | Ethernet: Revenge of the Cats | Team FPS | Tug-of-war style territory fight with an unusual travel/heal/respawn mechanic. | http://ethernet.wasted.ch//index.php?page=downloads |
| File:Padmam.jpeg | World of Padman | Arena FPS | Wacky colorful cartoons and cleavage. Spray your color and run around on bookshelves. | |
| File:Katawa-shoujo-act-1-05.jpg | Katawa Shoujo | Visual Novel | The story tells of a young man who, after suffering a heart attack upon hearing a confession from the girl he loves, is diagnosed with cardiac dysrhythmia and sent to a school where he meets several lovely and charming teenage girls who each suffer from a different disability. | http://katawa-shoujo.com |
| File:Hon.jpg | Heroes of Newerth | Action-RTS | It's DotA by S2 Games. Need I say more? Just run the shell script in terminal to install and you're good to go. Went F2P model because of competition from LoL. Some heroes are original, while others are ported from DotA. This'll hold you over until Gaben decides to port every Valve game (DotA2) to Linux. | http://www.heroesofnewerth.com |
| File:Carousel weapons.jpg | Xonotic (formerly: Nexuiz) | Arena FPS/Quake clone | (Currently under development, but playable.) A game that is very much like Quake, perhaps because its engine is based on the original Quake engine, but with even more jumping around; you'll see what I mean once you play it. Includes gamemodes like Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, Capture the Flag, "Keyhunt" and more, both in Singleplayer and Multiplayer. Has about 10-30 people playing for any region at their respective daily "peak times", but hopefully there will be more once version 1.0 is released. | http://www.xonotic.org/ |
Stuff you Buy[]
For a very short time in the '90s it was cool to release a Linux version for Windows games. That got old fast. But in 2012, when the world got to see the shit twinkie that is Windows 8... and Apple locked out the umpteenth game from their app store for bullshit reasons... well.
| Picture | Title | Genre | Year Released | Description |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| File:Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri screenshot.jpg | Alpha Centauri | Empire Building | 1999 | FreeCiv IN SPAAAAAACE. There's some story that gets revealed, and landmarks you can make use of even on a randomly generated world. More diplomacy and culture-changing options too. |
| File:Amnesia-The-Dark-Descent-Cover-Art.png | Amnesia: The Dark Descent | Horror & Survival | 2010 | You play as Daniel, an amnesiac who must investigate the mysterious Castle Brennenburg, with only two goals in mind: Find your memories, and kill the castle's owner, the mysterious Alexander of Brennenburg. VERY loosely based on Lovecraft's "The Outsider" (So loosely based that you will only understand the similarities after you beat the game). TL:DR; Decently hard puzzles. Loads of NOPENOPENOPE |
| File:Aquaria.jpg | Aquaria | Metroidvania | 2007 | Massive award-winning indie title created by Spelunky programmer Derek Yu and Crayon Physics Deluxe composer Alec Holowka. Aquaria features huge underwater environments with an emphasis on exploration, challenging-but-not-stupid boss battles and an absolutely phenomenal soundtrack. Before you ask: yes, there is a nude mod.
An absolute must-have for any Metroidvania fan. |
| File:Darwinia.jpg | Darwinia | RTS | 2005 | Get your RTS on with 8-bit troops in a 32-bit terrain. Very hacker atmosphere, terrific soundtrack, simple interface that focuses you on the fights and resources instead of min/maxing and spreadsheets. You'll be cheering every time your blocky little guys defeat a wireframe evil spider. |
| File:Defcon 2.jpg | DEFCON | RTS | 2006 | You remember the movie WarGames? With Matthew Broderick? It's EXACTLY like the game that he was supposed to be playing, only this time there's no mamby-pamby AI that tells you it's a bad idea to throw nukes at the Commies. |
| File:Lux Delux.jpg | Lux Delux | Strategy | 2005 | Risk done right. Over 700 maps, and you can make your own, SDK for hacking the ruleset (like having naval units, or canals, or remember playing nuclear Risk?). Comes with LAN and Internet play too. |
| File:Minecraft.jpg | Minecraft | Building | 2010 | Have you been living under a rock? It's fucking MINECRAFT. Written in Java + LWJGL, so it works under Linux. Punch trees, get wood, build a shack to spend the night while creepers and zombies ask if they can come in. Eventually start mining, find ores, smelt them, then construct a 60m dong out of iron and lava. Or go full-on autistic mode and make a 1:1 scale model of the USS Enterprise. |
| File:Neverwinter Nights.jpg | Neverwinter Nights | RPG | 2003 | Do you like third edition Dungeons and Dragons? Well, this game is basically that, but in computer form. Play as whoever you want, read nice big blocks of text, and enjoy slow, somewhat lengthy turn-based battles. Plenty of mods out there for those who want them and tons of persistent worlds (mini-MMORPG's, ranging from action PvP to deep DM-heavy roleplaying) still online. |
| File:Unreal Tournament 2004 screenshot.jpg | Unreal Tournament 2004 | FPS | 2004 | Skip the first Unreal Tournament and get this one instead. Fast-paced arena FPS, based heavily on acrobatics and aim, recommended for its complexity and variety. Gametypes range from vehicle-based Onslaught mode to football-like Bombing Run. Unreal Tournament 2004 is commended for consistent developer support, and a once-massive mapping/modding community that produces quality content to this day. The single-player is boring but the AI is rather intelligent in all maps, especially deathmatch. |
| File:Uplink.jpg | Uplink | Strategy/Sim | 2002 | Hack computers. Don't get caught. Decent story, full of intrigue. Bring down corporations and destory people's lives for money to upgrade your computer while searching for a mysterious virus. Don't let the appearance fool you, the later missions are hard and intense, and the game has quite a few secrets. |
| File:World of Goo Screen.jpg | World of Goo | Puzzle | 2009 | I shouldn't have to tell you what World of Goo is. Yes, they made a native Linux version. Is there a platform this game DOESN'T run on? |
