The Question if you can game under Qubes is often answered with no, but you can actually play a suprising amount of games under Qubes. The goal of this thread is to collect games that are known to work. Separated in the groups of needs GPU Passtrough and works without.
NO GPU Passtrough
Widelands
Battle for Westnoth
OpenTTD
Cataclysm Dark Days Ahead
Dwarf Fortress
Stardew Valley (@ 1920x1080 → FPS: normal ca.30-40 minimum low 24 4GB Ram ca.70% CPU (6 performance cores intel 115H)
Minecraft (althoug you need a secondary mouse, and you probably get low performance)
GPU Passtrough
This should be hevily depend on your GPU so I will not privide FPS/Load stats in most cases.
0ad
warzone2100
Stardew Valley (obviously. Runs way better then only in Software despite officialy not using the GPU. GPU usage is very limited in reality but appears to have a huge impact.)
NOT working under specific configuration
NOT always working
Has unclear problems that might be specific to a certain setup.
The game doesn’t work when it was tested. If the game works for you, please comment in the thread. It will then be bumped to one of the two categories above.
It is nice that you are trying to document that, but the list approach is so much harder and cumbersome than just answering the question.
Also, ability to play games in general, but especially with no GPU passthrough depends heavily on your hardware. Some people might not be able to play games you include in the list.
Can you play games on Qubes OS?
Yes. Without GPU passthrough you can play all games that are light enough to play with no GPU or don’t need graphics support in the first place (like Rogue, for example). With GPU passthrough you can play any game you can play on your computer. In both cases you might experience issues with online games because they discriminate against virtual machine users. With enough dedication you might be able get around that as well.
p.s. perhaps in addition to literally listing games you could include more generic tips that could be useful for people that don’t know capabilities of their system yet? For example balko’s idea of PCem and 86box can be extended to emulators overall, there are a lot of gems among retro and console games
One can play a lot of old games directly in browser, like on websites like: https://dos.zone/
It even includes games up to GTA Vice City.
Another idea: install PCem or 86box and play any old game from Windows 98 era with perfect simulation of old hardware.
The issue is that cursor management is broken in Qubes OS for such cases, so one need to insert a second usb mouse and pass it to the qube, otherwise it is not usable.
The issue is that cursor management is broken in Qubes OS for such cases, so one need to insert a second usb mouse and pass it to the qube, otherwise it is not usable.
Indeed, that is an annoying problem. There’s an issue on the tracker about that:
I plan to add more information to the games that i tested, as in RAM/CPU usage on what CPU and resolution.
The Idea for the list was a known good (similar to the HCL list). Espacialy because its not as simple as everything that doesn’t need a GPU (or more correct where the developer says so) works. I encountered multiple games where this wasn’t true (mostly because it included videos and the video engine expected a GPU).
I doubt this, more likely the qube haven’t had the correct codec for the video or maybe an appropriate emulator.
Well yes it’s not as simple as “everything that doesn’t need a GPU”, it is everything that doesn’t need GUI (can play in TUI), or has sufficiently low requirements to be effectively emulated (“light enough”)
Same kind of doubt here, proton is impressive but imperfect. Vast majority of games should run in a fitting virtual environment with GPU passthrough. Not including online games that choose to not run, of course. My main concern is some obscure stuff that is hard to run even on bare metal.
At this point I genuinely want to know what doesn’t run just to try it myself
Since you asked what doesn’t run, and I recently managed to use virtualised GPU:
On this testrun OpenClonk simply refused to start for me. Error message was: “Error while initializing OpenGL” and on the CLI output: “gl: Error creating secondary context!”
Don’t know if you have any Idea, but will include this (for now) in the list as known not working.
Marking anything as not working just because it doesn’t work with “highly experimental” software is a bizarre choice. It works with all OpenGL renderers I have at hand
p.s. If you have other games that you have problems with please post them regardless, as a community we might put all games into the working category.
I put it in this category more because of the error message, than it (only) not working. It looked to me more like a problem that could generall happen with GPU passtrough and not specific to my setup.
You said it worked fine for you, do you mind posting the cli output from starting the game. That might help finding out whats wrong.
