For me it was just a matter of not rebooting to Windows every time I want to play something. I did most of the other things on Linux, so one day I just decided to remove the Windows entirely and stick up with Linux. I didn't regret my decision till then. :-)

I've been using Linux exclusively (no windows on my computers at all) for over 15 years as such way way way back in time when I was once young, I mostly used to play games on consoles such as PS1/PS2 etc.

But some games I was able to get to run on Linux using wine, but it was far and few between. But naturally as Valve pushed gaming further on Linux and consoles got worse and unreliable I dropped console gaming altogether and went full-on Linux gamer as wine/proton got better and better.

Honestly for me using Windows is annoying and almost always makes me want to throw the computer out of a window as it is confusing, doesn't do what it is supposed to do and mostly just felt slow with no way to quickly run a few commands to get a job done. I found this out recently when I had to use a windows computer for the first time in 15 years, suffice to say I'm happy Linux is staying right where it is on my computer with no windows in sight.

My first game for Linux was Unreal Tournament 2003, but I couldn't run it because of that S3 texture compression (they called it something else back then, DXT or something like that?). Back then you had to recompile mesa against that library (at some point later they dlopen'd it). I procrastinated and finally did that and got it working, just in time for UT2004 that didn't require it :-)

Quake 4 was really good in 2005, too.

I also played open source games like Cube and then Sauerbraten, and things like Alien Arena.

In 2007 I bought Unreal Tournament 3, thinking there was going to be a Linux port. I was naively expecting it to be on the install media. So I installed Windows so I could play my game. When that never came, I ended up buying more games for Windows (some of my forum mates played Call of Duty) and pretty much gave up on gaming on Linux. I still had my old UT2004 game* and open source games but I booted to Windows for anything else.

(* In fact I still have the same directory from the original Loki installer copied to new computers over the years! Icculus added x86_64 binaries in a patch and I just had to drop in some compatible libraries, like a 64 bit libstdc++.so.5. UT2004 runs on my custom "from scratch" system to this day.)

I revisited this around 2018 when Steam put out a Linux client. I blasted on a Kubuntu install to give it the environment it wanted. At least I could play the Half Life 2 games and stuff. Then Proton came out and I started playing with things like Wolfenstein New Colossus and successfully getting other things to work too. When I got tired of eating dog food, I customized a Manjaro setup for my purposes.

Now? I don't even have a Windows install. There isn't much that I care about, that I can't get to work acceptably on Linux.

For me, it was really straightforward: I've always been a gamer. I've been playing games every day for the past 35 years or so.

When I first started using Linux in 2004-2005, fairly quickly I found myself seeing which of the games I already had would work in Linux, whether natively or with things like Wine, DosBox and ScummVM. Pretty soon I was doing all my gaming in Linux and only booting into Windows for Thunderbird and Firefox, which seemed... wrong. So I migrated my emails & bookmarks to Linux and ditched Windows.

I got a PS3 in 2009-ish, and my new purchases were there, although I was still doing some gaming on Linux at that point. Then Humble started releasing Linux games, so I started buying those, and Steam arrived on Linux in 2013 (and I already had a Steam account from Portal 2 co-op on the PS3) which made it easier still.

I've been almost exclusively using linux for the last 12-15 years, only used windows on my computer to play TES early on, and completely ditched it outside of mandatory work time since minecraft sucked me in for 2-3 years. I've been playing games a lot longer than that though, the first games i remember playing on a computer were Raptor, Prince of persia and Lotus. My first multiplayer game was SA:MP which i still remember fondly and wish was released along with SA on linux.

Using linux mainly came from curiosity and later with convenience running latex and a bunch of software i regurarly had to use for school. At that point it already felt just as comfortable and a lot more feature packed than Windows.

I have to use windows again at work and it drives me mad. It's not intuitive at all, it's helpers and messages are useless, and comes with the worst stuff preinstalled. I have a hard time navigating these new windows now.

Last edited by dvd on 6 August 2022 at 8:28 pm UTC

Computers are a means of programming and playing games. I went directly from DOS to Linux. I didn't have any interest in Windows. I do play a lot of games on consoles. My PC generally wasn't as powerful as latest console. That has been changing but even on Linux I prefer to use a controller to play games.

Started with Neverwinter Nights in 2001. My father used Linux at work for their servers, so it wasn't foreign to me. Figured I'd try it. It sucked compared to the windows version.

Still tinkered with Linux and Open source software over the following years, mostly because I couldn't afford proprietary stuff, like Office. Did all my college work on open office on Windows 98 and XP. Built my, still running, debian file server in 2008 and started dual booting cause I couldn't afford next Windows version (7?) Gamed on both for a while before switching all the way to Linux around 2009 (when I got my heavily modified Morrowind to work in Wine)

I'm prolly in the minority, but I'm not a Windows hater. Came to Linux for the price and stayed cause I liked the OS. Windows was good for what it does. Still does some stuff better than Linux.

İts all about freedom and hate of capitalism monopoly for me when i find my friends are using Knoppix i just want to check.
it was amazing then i found some linux native games as tuxracer or so then some bunch of other native demos. or Full games.
When i meet wine it was miracle for me on linux then its Valve Steam and you know rest. But still we are not the point where we are really about to dominate desktop systems.
we need native games optimised exlusively for Linux games.

For me it was RetroPie (If you count that as using Linux) on the Raspberry Pi back in late 2016 after Nintendo made the NES mini avliable to only youtubers and scalpers (I know thats not strickly true but it damn well felt like it)

So I did some research and bought a Raspberry Pi 3B and installed RetroPie on it and dumped a bunch of roms on it ands away I went.... Upgraded to a 3B+ after that was released......

2 months ago I ditched Windows and installed EndeavourOS with KDE Plasma and havnt looked back.....

I dont use the Pi much anymore as I use RetroArch for most of my emulation needs these days on my PC......

I'd always had access to PC games starting with DOS and later Windows 95/98 and XP. I first saw Linux showcased in a tech magazine project but I didn't have any success trying to install it as a kid though. In 2011 I finally started building computers specifically for gaming, with Windows 7 through 8. During that time, Minecraft had me hosting stuff on an old PC with MineOS (Crux, later Turnkey) which made me familiar as I finally got around to exposing myself to a running Linux environment.

Around 2014 I'd finally had it with all of the antifeatures in Windows and the news of PRISM and other surveillance programs, and dove headfirst into Linux Mint on my main system. I played my first native Linux games in 2015, Deadcore and The Talos Principle (a fantastic choice for computer geeks btw) and eventually moved onto Debian. I haven't run any Windows or Windows games in roughly 8 or 9 years now.

Today I play exclusively open source (or leaked code/reverse engineered hehe) games.

I'm loving all of these stories, and I'm really surprised by how many folks are in the "using Linux exclusively for 10 to 15 years" bracket (I am, too - started with Kubuntu 14 years ago, moved to Xubuntu a year later, and have stuck with it ever since). There's a lot more variety than I expected.

Came from C64, the DOS/Win3.11 and later Win95 on a Packard Bell 486SX 25 Mhz. My first PC that I owned myself was an Escom Pentiun 60 with Windows 95. After that I got an IBM Aptiva Pentium 200 MMX. I believe that one also ran Win95 but I upgraded to 98 at that time. After that I ran AMD systems. First a Duron and after that an Athlon. Those were Win 2000 machines.

And I believe there is where my interest in Linux started. I have used Mandrake Linux KDE for the longest time but also used Suse but switched to Fedora when it released. Still using it today.

It was a hobby to compile KDE and installing it on a bare system. Also did a gentoo install for fun. But most of the time I was busy getting games to run through WINE. Spent hours on winehq analyzing other people's logs and adding mine.

Dual booted with windows, first 7, then 10, for a while to test things out before trying them under Linux.

Then came Proton along and I found that I just wasn't booting into Windows anymore. So I decided to reclaim the space.

I bought back many of my old computers, as well as others I could never own, because they are retro now. At this time I have three C64s, an Amiga500, Sgi Indy, Dell XPS 720, PS3 slim, Nintendo WII, and an IBM Aptiva AMDK6-2. The last one was in an unused state and I couldn't pass it up.

So technically I still run windows in a way, just not on my main machines.

I'm loving all of these stories, and I'm really surprised by how many folks are in the "using Linux exclusively for 10 to 15 years" bracket (I am, too - started with Kubuntu 14 years ago, moved to Xubuntu a year later, and have stuck with it ever since). There's a lot more variety than I expected.

We're all secretly old, lol.
But I will give a lot of credit to Ubuntu back then too.

We're all secretly old, lol.

No secret about it here - I'm almost in my 40s, haha! Seen plenty of generations of computers and consoles, started with the former for gaming, moved to the latter, and most recently ended up back on computers again.

On that note, a Commodore 64 C was my first computer (1990), then I was forced to use Windows out of necessity but never got on with it (1996), then moved to Mac OS X during its 10.3 days which was a nice introduction to the conventions of Unix/Unix-likes (2004) while waiting for Linux laptop support to get to where I wanted it to be, then finally got myself over to Linux on a ThinkPad (2008) right after the Asus Eee PC hit and brought a lot of attention to Linux. I've enjoyed trouble-free computing ever since, and now I'm finding the same with gaming, too!

Last edited by Pengling on 7 August 2022 at 3:53 pm UTC

Yup we're old but we're not obsolete

Was already gaming since 96 on the PC with windows 95 until Vista disaster. Vista was the reason (BSODs and not enough customization options for desktop) i made the switch to Linux back in 2007. Never looked back. Back then i pretty much only played World of Warcraft, which worked fine under linux also with the help of wine, so i had no trouble with switching. There were always plenty of games to play under Linux. Native or with the help of wine, so i didn't really have problems with it. These days it's too many games. Hard to choose what to play :).

Last edited by Xpander on 8 August 2022 at 7:43 am UTC

Late February this year marked my 20 years since the big change. Which practically meant I switched my primary boot to Linux (and also switched my keyboard to the Dvorak layout). Did very limited gaming before that and not much after that either. Which also meant that my next PC upgrade two years later meant I had no more windows partition either. So really, I didn't get "into Linux gaming" at all. :) However, gaming got into Linux and I kind of jumped on it. First with a couple of LGP games and later when Steam jumped on the Linux train I actually started buying powerful GPUs to do so.

I was dealing with Windows 98 SE issues back in 1999/2000. There was a mod for UT99 called Silent Hunter. It was a assassin game where you got points for killing your intended target but negative points for killing the wrong target. t was renamed a few times. I was at a LAN center and UT99 just kept on crashing as it had been doing. Anyway, at the LAN center the only ppl not crashing were Linux users. So I joined up the LUG in my area and they helped me install Slackware and also helped me install UT99 and bunch of other games. Soon after I got into Lindows/Linspire and dumped Windows entirely around 2001. Have not used Windows since. Found a job around that same time that was all Linux based been at that job since around that time also.

Last edited by Mezron on 8 August 2022 at 11:25 am UTC

My history of gaming extends back to the early 1980s micros, and I then took the MS-DOS and Windows route for many years. I'd been tinkering with Linux on and off for a while, but in 2006 I installed OpenSUSE and accidentally deleted my Windows partition! Couldn't be bothered to rebuild it and stuck with Linux ever since. My primary game at that time was TES: Oblivion and it worked on Linux using Cedega so I was stoked :-)

Windows 8 being terrible got me interested in alternatives. It started with running a seperate system with Linux but I quickly realized I wasn't going to learn how to use it properly unless I made it my daily driver. Windows 10 being just as terrible as Windows 8 combined with my finding out just how bad Windows was for privacy and security sealed my fate and I moved to Linux full time. That was in 2015 and I haven't looked back. I have gone further down the rabbit hole and am trying to stick to mainly FOSS games and run gaming systems that have as little in the way of black boxes and closed source blobs as I can. So far I have gotten rid of the Intel ME and AMD PSP from my life, my next goals are to have a gaming system that I can run the Libre kernel on.