
Playability Test of 100 Humble Bundle Games on Linux - unhammer
http://blogg.forteller.net/2016/humble-test/
======
onli
Some of these results are off. Shadow Warrior, Shadowrun Dragonfall and
Shadowrun Returns are marked as not working, but they definitely work, I just
played them on Linux (with an AMD gpu and the free driver). They even worked
really well. It seems the author does not have a dedicated gpu, I doubt those
games would run well on windows with that laptop.

Some other game that worked for me and marked red there: Spaz, Jamestown and
Crayon Physics (I think, might have been another version).

To start those games in window mode is a good way to mimize potential errors
resulting from Fullscreen mode, especially in different OSs, and something
that many Indie games also do on Windows.

Linux sure is not a perfect gaming platform yet, but this article paints a
darker picture than necessary.

~~~
szatkus
That iGPU (HD 4400, 20 EU) is more than enough for most of these games. I
guess Intel's Linux driver is more buggy than AMD.

~~~
witty_username
My brother's laptop has an Intel HD 4xxx (it might be 4440) and it works
perfectly. Intel Linux drivers tend to be good in my experience.

~~~
coffeeaddicted
My experience is that Intel cards produce more problems with OpenGL. But not
related to Linux, same on Windows. Part of the reason might be that it's not
so common for 3D developers to work with Intel cards so those are less tested.

~~~
jandrese
The other side of the coin is that big name GPU manufacturers spend a lot of
time working with game developers to fix issues both with the games and with
their own drivers. You often see Day 0 driver updates that coincide with major
game releases. This kind of constant test and refinement squashes a lot of
bugs over the long term.

Intel doesn't do that. You basically get the driver that they originally wrote
for your chip and that's it.

------
ingenieros
Most of those ports are being done by one lone developer named Ryan C. Gordon
who runs icculus.org Here's a talk he did about porting games to Linux with
SDL 2.0 during a Steam Dev Days event:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MeMPCSqQ-34](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MeMPCSqQ-34)
One interesting thing to note is that most of those Linux ports can only be
purchased through a Humble Bundle. (Playdead's Limbo is a case in point.) It
goes without saying that the grand majority of those ports would have never
happened if it weren't for Humble Bundle in the first place.

~~~
ekianjo
> Playdead's Limbo is a case in point

What do you mean ? Limbo is on Steam for Linux as well...
[http://store.steampowered.com/app/48000/](http://store.steampowered.com/app/48000/)

~~~
ingenieros
I stand corrected. I last checked 2 or 3 years ago when that was not the case.

------
ajuc
Distributing binaries in Linux is PITA.

Compiling a game staticaly with all dependencies is nontrivial (couldn't get
it to work last time I've tried), and if you leave some libraries dynamicaly
linked - in a few years it won't work. I made that mistake by using now
abandoned libparagui in my game ~10 years ago. It uses old libsdl, which
doesn't work with many modern resolutions, and it doesn't even compile on
modern GCC without patches.

Every time I install new system and then want to compile it - I spend a few
evenings to get it to run...

~~~
pluma
A good example is Unreal Tournament (1999). I don't think it's even possible
to get the Linux version to run on a modern install of Ubuntu even if you
track down all the 32 bit versions of all the libraries it uses. But using
WINE the Windows version just works out of the box.

EDIT: Dropped "Classic". Not sure where that came from.

~~~
NTripleOne
Y'know... I don't think I've ever heard anyone refer to UT99 as UT Classic.

~~~
pluma
Hm... you're right. Not sure where I got that from. Most people seem to call
it UT99 and personally I used to just call it Unreal Tournament (no
qualifier). I don't like putting the year on it because it makes me feel so
damn old.

EDIT: Hey, fun fact: there's an upcoming free Unreal Tournament game simply
called "Unreal Tournament" and apparently it's being developed somewhat
openly:
[https://www.epicgames.com/unrealtournament/](https://www.epicgames.com/unrealtournament/)
(code is visible on GitHub for Unreal Engine 4 subscribers)

~~~
ajuc
I hate it when people do remakes with the same title.

------
reidrac
Looking at the results, I don't think installing via deb or snap should be a
requirement to make a game "recommendable".

In my experience Linux gamers aren't just Linux users and they're quite happy
with tarball files and clicking on a executable. All self-contained and
without getting all over the place with an installer. List requirements (if
any), and it works.

Personally I don't like installing games as root, because the game developer
doesn't have the level of trust that my Linux distributor has earned over the
years.

Good effort anyway. It is true that Linux support is usually poor. If the game
plays OK with WINE I usually don't bother trying the Linux version.

~~~
maccard
> Personally I don't like installing games as root, because the game developer
> doesn't have the level of trust that my Linux distributor has earned over
> the years.

Unfortunately, that's probably a holdover from game dev on Windows. In theory,
you're supposed to install to Program Files (or Program Files (x86)) and store
any user config data in My Documents. But most games just install with full
admin privileges, and dump everything in Program Files.

Many modern games are more than just games too, they come with
patchers/installers that may require extra permissions, and they also tend to
run extra anti cheat softare in the background that require elevated
privileges.

~~~
SpaceManiac
Few games actually need those admin priveleges: Windows since Vista has a
feature called VirtualStore which maps underprivileged writes to Program Files
to a location inside AppData (which is also where games and apps should save
their non-user-facing runtime files - _not_ in My Documents, which is an
annoying antipattern).

Your point about patchers is salient - but I know that, say, Steam puts
everything in Program Files and does not run itself or games as admin. Other
games like League of Legends and World of Tanks work around the issue by
installing outside Program Files.

~~~
maccard
I wasn't aware of Virtual Store, that's actually quite nifty! And I was wrong
about My Documents being the preferential place to store it. According to [0]
it's AppData, as you say.

I never meant to imply that the elevated features were necessary for the
reasons mentioned, but it's _why_ it happens. In general, a company publishing
a game isn't going to put it's top engineers on writing the installer. Those
engineers will be fixing engine bugs or perf upgrades or have moved on to the
next project by the time that point comes around, so chances are the
installers are written by not necessarily the best people for it, which
exacerbates the issue.

Finally, it doesn't help that gamers are conditioned to granting admin
priveleges to their games and installers.

[0]
[https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/patricka/2010/03/18/where-s...](https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/patricka/2010/03/18/where-
should-i-store-my-data-and-configuration-files-if-i-target-multiple-os-
versions/)

------
the_af
Regardless of whether my own experience agrees with the author (some of the
games he had trouble with I could run more or less trouble-free), I definitely
approve independent reviews of playability/ease of installation.

I mostly only buy games on Humble Bundle, GOG or Steam now, with emphasis on
the first two because they are less invasive than Steam. I sometimes have to
deal with 32 bit libraries or problems with the default installation; it's no
big deal for me, but I can see it's a problem for non-power users (then again,
some drivers used to cause problems for Windows games a few years ago, I don't
know what the situation is now. Didn't console gamers use to argue that they
were better than _Windows_ games because of this?).

The positive side is that I can play hundreds of games, some AAA, on Linux.
The situation is not dire anymore, in my experience. The downside is that
sometimes the games require some tweaking to install or play. Occasionally
there's a game I cannot play at all (e.g. I bought but cannot play the Linux
remaster of Day of the Tentacle: my dedicated GPU is fried, and the game
simply doesn't run on Ubuntu 14.04 with integrated Intel graphics. Go figure).

Again, I approve of this effort to review the difficulties involved. It's
helpful to Linux gamers!

------
erikb
Side note: It's a lot less painful with Steam.

graphics drivers sometimes are a problem, depending on your hardware setup.
But if it works it works smoothly.

~~~
pluma
I have an nvidia card because I naively thought having a proper graphics card
would be an advantage. I have to run Steam from the shell with an
LD_LIBRARY_PATH env to make it work at all.

A recent steam update for no apparent reason moved the steam folder so I had
to manually move my steamapps (i.e. installed games) to the new location. Then
I upgraded to Ubuntu 16.04 and Steam wouldn't work anymore at all, so I had to
reinstall it using steamcmd (because the regular installer did nothing).

Oh, and some games still cause trouble: Wasteland 2 won't launch if I have
Google Chrome open. It's a known issue although it sounds completely made up.

It's less painful but it's certainly not foolproof at any level comparable to
the experience on Windows.

~~~
rawfan
That really doesn't sound right. I have an Nvidia card, too. It works flawless
without any workarounds..

Also.. the Steamupdate did not move the steam folder.. There are two versions
of Steam. The one from the Steam website and the one from Ubuntu. They have
different app folder locations. You probably switched one with the other.

~~~
pluma
Oh, fun. AFAICT I now have three versions of Steam installed.

And I can't even start Steam when I'm not using the nvidia card (and to switch
cards I have to log out from Ubuntu and log back in).

Maybe this is just the result of me being an idiot, but either way this proves
Steam on Linux does not pass the idiot test either.

------
unhammer
Results at
[https://docs.zoho.com/sheet/published.do?rid=nc4und89223056a...](https://docs.zoho.com/sheet/published.do?rid=nc4und89223056a4745c0adeb0002b7fb3325)
(the embed didn't show in my browser)

~~~
douche
This page has a poor layout to be showing a spreadsheet in anyway - half the
horizontal width is taken up by a big static title/header element.

~~~
kagamine
I call this "the other UX" pattern: Useless Experience

------
rawfan
I really think this is an awesome effort. I have completely different results,
though. Many of the games listed were played recently on my machine and all
worked and installed fine.

My machine has Ubuntu 16.04 64bit with 16gigs of RAM and an nvidia 750ti card.

Just for fun I downloaded Aquaria. I tried the mojo installer, which worked
without any problems. I tried the 32bit deb and had no problems, either. The
64bit deb is just the 32bit binaries with an additional ia32-dependency. Since
Ubuntu is multiarch now, that won't work.

These packages should be removed by humble to avoid confusion.

EDIT: So far I haven't been able to find a single game on the list, that
doesn't work.

------
richardwhiuk
The key here is that games on Windows don't target the NT Kernel, they target
Windows 7, or Windows 8.1 or Windows 10, which are full distributions.

To have any reasonable chance that this will work, you have to target Ubuntu
16.04, or CentOS 7, not just any random Linux distribution.

~~~
luchs
But the thing is that a game targeting Windows XP or even Windows 98 still has
a good chance of running on Windows 10. On the Linux side, good luck getting
binaries made for Ubuntu 14.04 run on Ubuntu 16.04.

~~~
augustl
Interesting relevant tidbit by Linus Torvalds himself about the packaging and
distribution of Linux "desktop apps".

Basically, Linus has made a desktop app, and the website distributes binaries
for Windows and OS X, but not for Linux. Link goes to 4:50, relevant rant
starts at around 5:58 :)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5PmHRSeA2c8&feature=youtu.be...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5PmHRSeA2c8&feature=youtu.be&t=290)

------
pawadu
This is awesome work! I am extremely pleased to see someone do some QA - since
the devs and the humble team obviously aren't doing any.

Also, if you think this is bad you should see their Android games. For example
the extremely high profile Android game Desktop Dungeons crashes at start
(this is 100% reproducable on Google reference devices) and has been like this
since the bundle was sold over a year ago. The bug thread for the game is 300
pages long still the game has not received a single update from humble bundle.

 _Humble Bundle is not a charity anymore, it is a scam._

~~~
dogma1138
Why should Humble Bundle do QA? do you expect gamestop to do QA also?

They rely on what the developer/publisher tells them, if they say it runs on
Linux Humble Bundle classifies it as a Linux title.

~~~
jakobegger
Because they sell you the game?

If you go to a store, buy a lamp, and it doesn't work, can they just say "our
supplier said it works"?

~~~
dogma1138
If something doesn't work you can return it in the case of some of the bundles
it might be a bit more problematic since you aren't buying a single product
but a bundle and you can pay as little as like 0.01$ for it:

Not a single store verifies any product to be functional prior to selling it,
if you have a problem they'll exchange it or refund you, if they have a
problematic product which simply does not work they will usually stop selling
it (it's not worth dealing with angry customers) and contact the supplier to
figure out what's going on.

So I don't know what expectations you have when you go to a store but when I
buy a lamp while I do have a general expectation for it to work I don't blame
the store for not verifying that it does before selling it to me.

~~~
vacri
> _Not a single store verifies any product to be functional prior to selling
> it_

Bullion stores do. Also, stores that also make the product themselves do, from
handmade crafts to factory outlets...

~~~
dogma1138
You are being pedantic without reason you understood pretty darn well what I
meant.

~~~
vacri
Plenty of stores verify things before selling to you. Mobile phone stores will
usually make sure that the thing works with the sim in it before handing it
over, and will often transfer stuff across from your other phone for you.
Similarly, plenty of higher end stores test things out before they stock them.
A simple example is a restaurant with a curated wine list. Likewise, used car
dealers will usually give a vehicle the once-over before selling it on.

I knew what you were getting at (just like you know what the parent was
getting at), but it's not really pedantry to counter a gross
oversimplification.

~~~
dogma1138
Are we now comparing brick and mortar retailers to car dealerships and
restaurants? A curated wine list is an expert "advice" I don't expect the guy
at the sports store to have tested every running shoe on display when I ask
for recommendations.

Car dealerships that sell used cars are effectively responsible for them they
not only test drive each car but they do a complete checkup because it's
mandated.

As for mobile stores they don't do that to ensure that the phone is working,
they do that because they assume most people are too stupid to activate the
sim which means they'll come back, and they do a contact/data migration again
as a service it has nothing to do with ensuring that the product works.

I can step in buy a packaged PAG phone pay and walk out without anyone testing
that it works and you very well know this.

There is no gross oversimplification the truth of the matter is that like it
or not 99% of the products you buy of the shelf are never tested by any
retailer that stocks them, are there exceptions? sure but these are again
exceptions.

I don't expect Gamestop to do curation for me, I don't expect Humble Bundle to
do it either.

Not to mention that again every game on that list as far as I can tell runs on
Linux (including games that he said do not) he doesn't recommend almost any of
those games but that's his opinion. Humble does not sell you an experience, it
does tell you that the game will run the fact that he tried to run games on a
system that does not meet the minimum requirements which are stated on both
the Humble Store, the Steam product page and the vendor website is well his
fault. And Humble never argued that playing the game on Linux or even
installing it will be an easy, pleasant or consistent experience, no Linux
experience is truly easy or consistent the ecosystem is fragmented to hell as
for pleasant well that's a subjective opinion some people like to have to
recompile the kernel to make their wifi cards work some don't.

When you buy software there are 2 general expectation 1) is that you have a
system that meets the software and hardware requirements and 2) that you are
generally capable of operating and managing software on the operating system
it runs on. He failed to verify point #1 on quite a few titles, infact I am
surprised that some titles that should not work on the Intel GPU actually did
run (Intel probably have improved their OpenGL minidriver since then) and 2)
understanding that running applications on Linux will required ensuring
compatibility with dependencies (which may break other applications) and being
familiar with the Linux command line and operating system including compiling
packages and managing permissions.

I don't fault him at all, and I agree that I would not recommend any of those
titles on Linux to anyone who's wants to play, infact if you wish to play
games I would not recommend Linux at all not even SteamOS. But that said none
of those games are inherently so broken that they will not install or run on
Linux if all the hardware and software requirements are met.

------
zokier
These results are from Ubuntu, which afaik is pretty close to best-case
scenario for gaming. It'd be interesting to see similar test done on e.g.
Fedora or Arch. It also will be interesting to see how well these games will
continue to run in future. My guess is that they will eventually bit-rot and
we'll end up using ancient versions of Ubuntu in containers to run the games.

I hope that Snappy/Flatpak/etc would make the situation better once the
landscape settles down a bit. The idea behind them seems good enough, and I
think this post validates their raison d'être which I have seen people
question.

~~~
sevensor
I've played the HB Linux versions of Jamestown, Night Sky, VVVVVV, Voxatron,
Super Meat Boy, Bit.Trip.Runner, and FTL with no issues on 64-bit Arch, using
a 2011 Thinkpad x120e, with zero problems. I remember being disappointed that
Crayon Physics and Shank didn't work. The other games in those bundles either
didn't work or I wasn't interested enough to try them. (My bar is pretty high
as I can't spend a whole lot of time gaming.)

------
raverbashing
Two games from Humble Bundle that are not on the list and I recommend (and
have played on Linux): World of Goo and Crayon Physics Deluxe

~~~
CaptSpify
I see CPD on there. If WoG works, then agreed, highly recommended

------
paines
Thanks for the effort. I have a Clevo W650RC running Ubuntu 16, almost the
same hardware as the author but with an extra gtx950m gpu. I own 4-5 Humble
bundles and claimed all Steam keys, which makes installing those games,
installable, playable and therefore recommendable. Sometimes I would run with
the Intel gpu, and most of the games still ( I am pretty sure all of them)
run, but of course much slower. I also bought an Steam controller and really
like the setup, most games would pick up the button mapping. The only thing
which sucks donkey balls at the moment is tearing under Nvidia + Linux, either
in videos games, browser etc..- Also I want to add, that I own Serious Sam 3,
Tomb Raider and Shadow Warrior, and I must say that the ports of these games
is just top notch.

------
qwertyuiop924
SpaceChem, Spaz, and Jamestown all worked fine for me back when I was running
way lower specs than he was. Actually, all of the Humble games did, save
Psychonauts, because my machine wasn't powerful enough to run it. Yes, it was
that bad.

------
kzrdude
I'd like an explanation of the recommendable column

~~~
abricot
From the document:

"Anyone should be able to use the games they buy, no matter their technical
provess.

That means it has to install via deb or snap, register in the OS menu and
package manager and run without any issues."

~~~
jandrese
This skirts a little too close to "2016 Doom doesn't run on my computer (A 12
year old Core Solo with first generation Intel graphics), don't give me a
bunch of technical mumbo jumbo, I want to play it now!"

Also, if you want super easy game installs, use Steam. Either suck it up and
accept the DRM or teach yourself enough Linux to understand how to deal with
all of the myriad weird game installers.

It's not like the Windows versions are any better on the DRM front.

------
douche
Wine has gotten so good that it's almost not worth bothering trying to run
native Linux versions of games.

~~~
ORioN63
Yes, it has suffered major improvements, but it still doesn't run everything.
Also, online games with frequent updates, break often.

Just my personal experience.

~~~
douche
> suffered major improvements

I think I'm going to start using this phrase

