Adventures in Old-School Gaming on Linux Mint 20

I had some free time recently, so I finally did a clean install of Linux Mint 20 on my PC, which seemed preferable to attempting an upgrade from Linux Mint 19.3. As usual, after getting all of the basic programs installed, I started reinstalling some essential games: Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, etc.

I did things a bit differently from last time — better, and less hacky, I hope — which required educating myself a bit. I also found a bug which doesn't seem to have been documented anywhere, and I honestly cannot be bothered to figure out where or how to submit a bug report, so I'm just going to document it here. Maybe it will help someone.

ECWolf and GZDoom

As I had done before, I started by installing some source ports: ECWolf for Wolfenstein 3D and Wolfenstein 3D: Spear of Destiny; and GZDoom for The Ultimate Doom, Doom II: Hell on Earth, Final Doom, Heretic: Shadow of the Serpent Riders, Hexen: Beyond Heretic, and Hexen: Deathkings of the Dark Citadel. Unfortunately, these source ports are not provided in Linux Mint 20's default package repository. Perhaps the easiest way to get ECWolf and GZDoom is to download .deb files from here and here respectively, but for the sake of automatic updates, I think it's best to grab them from the DRD Team repository:

wget -O- https://debian.drdteam.org/drdteam.gpg | sudo apt-key add -
sudo apt-add-repository 'deb https://debian.drdteam.org/ stable multiverse'
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt install ecwolf gzdoom

These don't actually come with the game files, though, so I downloaded the relevant games from Steam. (Although they could easily be acquired by... other means... they happen to be in my account thanks to bundles and gifts, and it's just the easiest way for me to get the data.) The Steam versions of the aforementioned games run in DOSBox by default, and the classic Doom games now come with the Unity ports as mentioned in an earlier post, but I would rather take the files provided by Steam and use them with Linux-native source ports.

Manual file management

What I did next, I now realize you probably shouldn't do. I manually copied the necessary game data into ~/.config/ecwolf/ and ~/.config/gzdoom/ as appropriate:

cp -t ~/.config/ecwolf/ -- \
    ~/.steam/steam/steamapps/common/Wolfenstein\ 3D/base/*.WL6 \
    ~/.steam/steam/steamapps/common/Spear\ of\ Destiny/base/*.SOD \
    ~/.steam/steam/steamapps/common/Spear\ of\ Destiny/base/*.SD1 \
    ~/.steam/steam/steamapps/common/Spear\ of\ Destiny/base/*.SD2 \
    ~/.steam/steam/steamapps/common/Spear\ of\ Destiny/base/*.SD3
for sd1 in ~/.config/ecwolf/*.SD1; do mv -f $sd1 $(echo $sd1 | sed s/SD1/SOD/); done
cp -t ~/.config/gzdoom/ -- \
    ~/.steam/steam/steamapps/common/Ultimate\ Doom/base/Doom.WAD \
    ~/.steam/steam/steamapps/common/Doom\ 2/base/Doom2.WAD \
    ~/.steam/steam/steamapps/common/Final\ Doom/base/PLUTONIA.WAD \
    ~/.steam/steam/steamapps/common/Final\ Doom/base/TNT.WAD \
    ~/.steam/steam/steamapps/common/Heretic\ Shadow\ of\ the\ Serpent\ Riders/base/HERETIC.WAD \
    ~/.steam/steam/steamapps/common/Hexen/base/HEXEN.WAD \
    ~/.steam/steam/steamapps/common/Hexen\ Deathkings\ of\ the\ Dark\ Citadel/base/HEXDD.WAD

For the most part, this is pretty straightforward, but things get a bit weird when we look at the Wolfenstein 3D: Spear of Destiny files. That ugly file renaming in the for loop ensures that the *.SD1 files that come with the Steam version of Spear of Destiny have the proper *.SOD names. I think Steam has these *.SD1 files because, when running the game with DOSBox, it needs to rename the *.SD1, *.SD2, or *.SD3 files to the appropriate *.SOD names depending on which mission pack is being played. ECWolf, meanwhile, just wants the Mission 2: Return to Danger and Mission 3: Ultimate Challenge files to be named with *.SD2 and *.SD3 respectively. At least, I think that's how it works. In any case, the manual renaming above resulted in ECWolf running each mission pack correcty with no complaints. So this manual file copying and renaming is an option if you just want to run the Steam versions of all these games with ECWolf and GZDoom.

However, I ended up undoing all of this manual file management in favor of experimenting with a program called game-data-packager, which took some work to understand but seems to work quite nicely most of the time.

Game Data Packager

I became aware of game-data-packager not because I went looking for such a tool, but simply because it was installed automatically as a dependency when I installed some Linux-native engines for Hexen II and the Quake trilogy (more on that later). If you don't already have it installed automatically for similar reasons, you should be able to install it on Linux Mint 20 as follows:

sudo apt install game-data-packager

Once installed, the game-data-packager program can be used to identify the required files for various games, and install them for use with various source ports.

The basic syntax is

game-data-packager [-d OUTDIR] [-i] GAME [PATH ...]

where GAME is the name of a supported game, and PATH tells the program where to look for the game's files (if it can't find them on its own). The game's files are packaged into one or more .deb files, which are written to the current working directory by default but can be sent to some other directory OUTDIR using the optional -d argument. The optional -i flag tells game-data-packager to go ahead and install the new .deb file(s) using the system's package manager. I think it's safe to delete the .deb files after installation unless you want to keep them. At this point, however, you'll need to use sudo apt remove with the name of the locally installed package (e.g. sudo apt remove doom-wad) in order to uninstall the game data from your system.

When executed with the -i flag, game-data-packager also attempts to install dependencies, including source ports and native engines, if they're not already installed. Basically, it should give you everything you need in order to play the game, as long as you supply the copyrighted data.

Wolfenstein 3D

For Wolfenstein 3D and Spear of Destiny, my usage of game-data-packager was as follows:

mkdir -p ~/deb/
game-data-packager -d ~/deb/ -i wolf3d
game-data-packager -d ~/deb/ -i spear-of-destiny

Additional positional arguments would specify folders in which to search for each game's files, but game-data-packager is smart enough to look in Steam's directories. Since I had already downloaded the games via Steam, the above commands were enough to locate the games on my system, package the necessary data into .deb files (which I saved to a ~/deb/ folder I had created), and install the games from those .deb files. In this case, the Wolfenstein 3D and Spear of Destiny data files get installed to /usr/share/games/wolf3d/. The package manager tracks these games' data as the locally installed packages wolf3d-v14-id-data, spear-of-destiny-data, spear-of-destiny-mission1-data, spear-of-destiny-mission2-data, and spear-of-destiny-mission3-data.

However, it assumes you want to use Wolf4SDL for Wolfenstein 3D; it did not care that I already had ECWolf installed, so it installed Wolf4SDL for me. If you want to use Wolf4SDL, you're in luck. If you're like me and you want to use ECWolf instead, you can either edit the BaseDataPaths field in ~/.config/ecwolf/ecwolf.cfg to include /usr/share/games/wolf3d/, or you can make some links:

ln -s -t ~/.config/ecwolf/ -- \
    /usr/share/games/wolf3d/*.wl6 /usr/share/games/wolf3d/*.sod \
    /usr/share/games/wolf3d/*.sd2 /usr/share/games/wolf3d/*.sd3

This got ECWolf to see all of the files it needs on my system. Wolf4SDL is still installed, which is a bit redundant, but I don't mind.

Doom

Next I used game-data-packager to package up the classic Doom games — The Ultimate Doom, Doom II: Hell on Earth, Master Levels for Doom II, and Final Doom — which I had also downloaded via Steam:

mkdir -p ~/deb/
game-data-packager -d ~/deb/ -i doom
game-data-packager -d ~/deb/ -i doom2
game-data-packager -d ~/deb/ -i final-doom

This installs all of the relevant .wad files to /usr/share/games/doom/, tracked by the local packages doom-wad, doom2-wad, doom2-masterlevels-wad, plutonia-wad, and tnt-wad. As with the Wolfenstein games, game-data-packager also automatically provided me with a source port, Chocolate Doom. I probably won't it use very much, because I already have GZDoom installed, but it doesn't hurt. Meanwhile, no tweaks were required to get GZDoom to find the data files; its default configuration included /usr/share/games/doom/ in the search path.

Master Levels

In addition to Chocolate Doom, the automatically installed dependencies also included a program called doom2-masterlevels which provides a simple GUI for selecting maps from the Master Levels pack. (Note that the command ending in doom2, above, took care of packaging the Master Levels for Doom II data as well as the Doom II: Hell on Earth data.) Here's where things get weird, though: I didn't even notice this doom2-masterlevels program until I found it by accident. There should have been a shortcut created in the Linux Mint menu, but it wasn't there. This is because the desktop entry file at /usr/share/applications/doom2-masterlevels.desktop contained a mistake:

TryExec=/usr/share/games/doom2-masterlevels-tryexec

The file referenced in that TryExec field, /usr/share/games/doom2-masterlevels-tryexec, does not exist. As a result, the entry was ignored and did not show up in the menu. However, the file /usr/share/games/doom/doom2-masterlevels-tryexec does exist. This discrepancy in the .desktop file is obviously a bug. I honestly cannot be bothered to figure out how to report this bug, to whom it should be reported, or whether it has perhaps already been fixed in a newer version of game-data-packager than my package manager provides. (Linux Mint does not always have the latest version of everything.) However, it's easy enough to fix the desktop file by changing the TryExec line:

TryExec=/usr/share/games/doom/doom2-masterlevels-tryexec

If you don't want to use a text editor, this can also be done from the command line using sed:

sed s/\\/usr\\/share\\/games\\doom2-masterlevels-tryexec/\\/usr\\/share\\/games\\doom\\/doom2-masterlevels-tryexec/ -i /usr/share/applications/doom2-masterlevels.desktop

With that fixed, the "Doom 2: Master Levels" entry now shows up in the menu.

Heretic and Hexen

I ran into some more minor trouble when I tried to package the Heretic and Hexen files. As with the previous games, I had downloaded them from Steam and tried running game-data-packager with the -i, and it failed with errors about engines not being available. Specifically, for Heretic:

ERROR:game_data_packager.build:Engine "chocolate-heretic" is not (yet) available, aborting

And for Hexen:

ERROR:game_data_packager.build:Engine "chocolate-hexen" is not (yet) available, aborting

However, these errors are nonsense. When the Chocolate Doom source port was automatically installed to /usr/games/chocolate-doom upon packaging and installation of the classic Doom games, the executables /usr/games/chocolate-heretic and /usr/games/chocolate-hexen were installed as well. These actually appear to be Chocolate Doom under the hood, but I quickly confirmed that they were able to run Heretic and Hexen respectively if executed with the appropriate -iwad arguments. Perhaps game-data-packager gets confused because chocolate-heretic and chocolate-hexen are virtual packages. In any case, to get past these bogus errors, we can omit the -i flags so that game-data-packager just creates the .deb files, and then install from those .deb files using apt:

mkdir -p ~/deb/
game-data-packager -d ~/deb/ heretic
game-data-packager -d ~/deb/ hexen
sudo apt install ~/deb/heretic-wad_64_all.deb
sudo apt install ~/deb/hexen-wad_64_all.deb
sudo apt install ~/deb/hexen-deathkings-wad_64_all.deb

I've probably discovered an actual bug here as well, but again, I really don't know how and to whom it should be formally reported, and the workaround was easy enough.

Hexen II

Hexen II is playable on Linux with the Hammer of Thyrion source port, which is called uhexen2 in Linux Mint 20's package repository. Hammer of Thyrion recognizes game data placed in ~/.hexen2/data1/, so we can copy the appropriate .pak files into that directory manually after installing uhexen2. Alternatively, we can use game-data-packager to install the files to /usr/share/games/hexen2/data1/, tracked by the local package hexen2-data. Again, I had downloaded Hexen II via Steam, so I didn't need to tell game-data-packager where to look for the files:

mkdir -p ~/deb
game-data-packager -d ~/deb/ -i hexen2

I think this would have resulted in the automatic installation of uhexen2, if not for the fact that I had already installed it beforehand using apt:

sudo apt install uhexen2

So that probably could have been skipped.

Quake

Linux Mint 20 also provides native engines for Quake, Quake II, and Quake III Arena, and all of these games are supported by game-data-packager. All three games are also on Steam, but I don't have the Steam versions. I have them on a set of CDs, in a box set called The Ultimate Quake, which I had purchased before I even created a Steam account. Fortunately, my outdated PC still has an optical disc drive, and game-data-packager can read from CDs (although it apparently needs to be told explicitly where to look).

The funny thing about Quake and Quake II is that the discs contain both game data and CD audio. In other words, each CD-ROM is also a music CD. Not surprisingly, game-data-packager creates separate packages for game data and music, hence the separate game-data-packager commands below. (Maybe the game files and music packages for a game can be created with a single command, but I used separate commands anyway because I don't think combining them would make things less confusing.) Meanwhile, ripping the CD audio required some extra dependencies which were not made known to me until game-data-packager started complaining that it could not find cdparanoia or oggenc. I assume these were not automatically installed as required dependencies because they are only sometimes needed. In any case, installing cdparanoia is trivial because that's the exact package name, and oggenc is made available for Linux Mint 20 in the package vorbis-tools, so I installed both:

sudo apt install cdparanoia vorbis-tools

Now, to install Quake, I ran the following commands with the CD inserted:

mkdir -p ~/deb
game-data-packager -d ~/deb/ -i quake /media/michael/Winquake/
game-data-packager -d ~/deb/ -i quake -p quake-music /dev/cdrom
game-data-packager -d ~/deb/ -i quake -p quake-aopfm

In the command to package and install the game data, /media/michael/Winquake/ is the location to which Linux Mint automatically mounted the CD when it was inserted, so that part will vary. The game's music doesn't show up in /media/michael/Winquake/ (because, I guess, that's just not how CD audio works), so in the command to rip the music, I used /dev/cdrom (which is a reference to the optical disc drive itself, and is actually a symbolic link to /dev/sr0). The last command installs the package quake-aopfm which is a free expansion. I can't vouch for whether this expansion is any good, because I haven't played it yet — but I noticed after installing the base game that a shortcut for the expansion had already been created in my menu, and that expansion shortcut wouldn't work without the expansion's package installed, so I figured I might as well install it instead of deleting the broken shortcut.

Installing Quake II was similar. I swapped out the Quake CD for my Quake II CD and ran the following:

mkdir -p ~/deb
game-data-packager -d ~/deb/ -i quake2 /media/michael/Quake2/
game-data-packager -d ~/deb/ -i quake2 -p quake2-music /dev/cdrom

Finally, Quake III Arena had no CD audio portion on the disc, so it required only this:

mkdir -p ~/deb
game-data-packager -d ~/deb/ -i quake3 /media/michael/Quake3/

I think these commands would have triggered automatic installations of these games' native engines, but I had already installed them manually beforehand:

sudo apt install quake quake2 quake3

Other Notes

I think much of what's written above could also be applied to other versions of Linux Mint, but I've been clear about the fact that I'm using Linux Mint 20 just in case I'm wrong about that. Meanwhile, as of the time of this post, I'm using gzdoom version 4.5.0, ecwolf version 1.3.3, game-data-packager version 64, chocolate-doom version 3.0.0-5, and uhexen version 1.5.9+dfsg-1.

Also note that game-data-packager gave me some warnings about being unable to unpack certain files due to missing programs, so I installed a couple of additional packages just to make the warnings shut up:

sudo apt install innoextract lhasa

However, these don't appear to be strictly necessary, and I'm not sure if it really made a difference. At least for the Doom games, game-data-packager was already finding all of the data needed for playing the games, despite the warnings.

Adventures in Linux Gaming

Last month I wrote about Playnite and GOG Galaxy 2.0. What I forgot to mention is that, for me personally, the major downside of each is the lack of Linux support.

I've been using Windows 7 for a long time. I didn't like the look of Windows 8 when it came out, and never saw the point in switching. Having used Windows 10 at work, I definitely have no interest in using it on my home PC, regardless of all the spying it supposedly does. I just don't enjoy using it. I suppose I don't particularly enjoy using Windows 7 either; I've had my share of problems with it. It just happens to be the best version of Windows which is still officially supported. Unfortunately, with that support ending at the start of next year, I would be forced to "upgrade" to a worse version of Windows if I want to continue to get security updates.

Do I really need security updates? I don't know. Is Windows 10 really worse or am I just biased? I guess it's a little of both. Ultimately, though, it probably doesn't matter. I've been somewhat unhappy with Windows in general, and... well, Linux is free.

Switching to Linux, and Why You Should, Maybe

Switching to Linux is seen by some as a daunting task, and perhaps there's good reason for those with no experience with Linux to be just a bit intimidated. To those terrified Linux beginners, I would recommend a user-friendly distribution like Linux Mint. That's what I'm using, despite several years of experience with Linux as a software engineer. It's just incredibly convenient. The Cinnamon desktop environment is fairly Windows-like, and Linux Mint comes with nearly all the features you need in order to avoid ever touching the command line if you don't want to. The installer is also very easy to use. Some casual PC users might not know what all of the options mean, but for those users, I think the defaults are probably fine.

Of course, no matter how automated the installer and how fully-featured the desktop environment, every Linux user will inevitably run into some kind of problem. The very same is true on Windows; the difference is that, when you search the internet for a solution to a problem on Windows, you'll almost certainly find a solution posted by someone who uses the same version of Windows. There are many Linux distributions, though; if you're not using one of the popular ones, you might find solutions which aren't quite what you need, or you might not even find any reliable documentation of the exact problem you're experiencing.

When I turn to the internet for help with installing something or fixing some error on Linux, the solutions I find are usually tailored to Ubuntu, which is fine because Linux Mint is based on Ubuntu, but it's not always the case. Sometimes the answers I find are all about Debian or Fedora. Sometimes it doesn't matter. Other times it does. I'm not saying that troubleshooting on Linux is a nightmare. These days, it really isn't. However, the fact that there isn't just one Linux comes with some inherent problems, such as this one, and troubleshooting does require a bit more patience.

But the fact that there are so many distributions means that, if you hit a roadblock and absolutely nothing works, you could always just try a different distribution.

How I Ended Up with Linux Mint

When I first decided to install Linux on my home computer, I tried Ubuntu. The installation process was mostly easy. I had some difficulty setting up dual-boot with Windows 7, but it wasn't Ubuntu's fault. It was because, while attempting to install Ubuntu from a USB stick, and I had inadvertently booted to my USB stick in UEFI mode while my Windows installation was using legacy BIOS. If you don't know what that means, don't feel bad; neither did I.

The short version of this story is that, when I booted my USB stick in legacy BIOS mode, the installation and dual-boot set-up went smoothly. However, I found Ubuntu's default desktop environment difficult to customize and annoying to use in general. Even after a bit of research, I couldn't figure out if my problems were the result of bugs or just obtuse design. Ultimately, for this reason and others, I decided that Ubuntu just wasn't for me.

That's when I tried installing Debian. The installation process seemed to work perfectly. Then I tried to boot to Debian, and nothing happened. I got a black screen. I did some research but there was really no way for me to try any of the solutions proposed to others who had similar problems, because I didn't even have a working terminal. I couldn't enter any commands. I assume that it was a video driver issue, and I could have attempted to fix it, but I decided that it wasn't worth my time. I had heard good things about Linux Mint, and I hadn't tried it yet, so I dropped Debian like a hot turd and started downloading Linux Mint.

That turned out to be the right decision; Linux Mint was easy to install, it booted up just fine, and to this day I've had no significant problems with it... except when trying to run games that were never meant to run on Linux.

Gaming On Linux

It always takes me a while to get to the point.

Linux Mint is great as a general-use desktop operating system. It comes with Firefox, LibreOffice, a media player, etc. But how is it for playing video games? Well, I'd say it's just as good for games as any other Linux distribution, and gaming on Linux today is better than ever, thanks in part to Steam.

Steam Play and Proton

A Linux version of the Steam client has been available since 2013, allowing Steam users to play any games which happened to have official Linux versions. It was only about a year ago, however, that Steam rolled out an update to the cross-platform Steam Play feature, allowing Windows games to be installed using the Linux client and providing a Wine-based compatibility tool called Proton which allows many of those games to run on Linux with very little effort from the user.

Installing Steam on Linux Mint doesn't require any command line usage, nor does it even require a web browser. You just open the Software Manager, search for Steam, select the first result, and click the install button. Meanwhile, enabling Steam Play for all games is just a matter of checking a box in the Steam settings menu. If I remember correctly, this option is disabled by default, and initially Steam Play is enabled only for officially supported games, which is no surprise; it's sensible for anything that isn't guaranteed to work to be disabled by default. But the option isn't hard to find, and often no effort is required to get games to work even if they're not officially supported.

ProtonDB tracks how well Steam games work with Proton by aggregating user-submitted reports. Games without native Linux support are rated on a scale of Borked (meaning it won't run at all) to Platinum (meaning it runs perfectly out-of-the-box), with three ratings (Bronze, Silver, and Gold) in between. I'll let the statistics on ProtonDB speak for themselves, but they appear to indicate that the majority of games are playable.

My own personal experience with running Steam games on Linux has been better than expected. Of course, I've been using ProtonDB as a resource since the beginning, and I haven't bothered to install games which are definitively rated Borked. In general, I've gravitated more toward the games with higher ratings. Therefore, I can't claim that the games I've tried playing on Linux via Proton, of which there are about a dozen, are a random sample. However, even when I've tried to play games rated Bronze or Silver, I've been mostly successful, as I've found solutions in ProtonDB's comments to some of the minor problems I've encountered. And the only game rated Borked which I've really gotten the urge to play since installing Linux Mint is L.A. Noire, and for such games, I still have Windows 7 installed on my other hard drive.

I won't describe my experience with every game in detail, but the first Windows-only game I played on Linux Mint was Max Payne, and... frankly, it just worked. It worked perfectly, actually. The only difficulty I had was not with the game itself but rather with the unofficial widescreen patch, and it was only a momentary setback. The comments on ProtonDB quickly set me straight; I added WINEDLLOVERRIDES="d3d8=n,b" %command% to the game's launch options in Steam and even the widescreen patch worked perfectly.

Similarly, Max Payne 2 works perfectly in Linux, and getting the unofficial widescreen patch to work simply requires adding WINEDLLOVERRIDES="d3d9=n,b" %command% to the game's launch options. Playing Max Payne 3 was a bit more difficult; initially, it wouldn't launch. Following the advice of comments on ProtonDB, I added PROTON_USE_WINED3D11=1 %command% to the game's launch options, and it worked, but with some bugs. The minor issues with Max Payne 3 which remain can probably be fixed, perhaps by trying one of the other Proton versions offered by Steam or by further modifying the runtime configuration, but I had only installed it for testing purposes anyway. I was really more interested in playing the first two games in the series, so I didn't spend much time troubleshooting the third.

Non-Steam Games and Wine

Despite needing the occasional web search to find the correct configuration with which to run a certain game, Steam Play with Proton is actually so convenient it's easier than ever for me to ignore the games I bought from other online stores such as GOG. While there are games on GOG with official Linux support, the GOG Galaxy client does not have a Linux version (despite a lot of GOG users wanting one). Downloading games directly from the GOG web site isn't hard, but clients such as Steam and Galaxy do offer a lot of convenience.

Furthermore, although I could probably use Wine or other tools to play many of the Windows-only games from my GOG account on Linux, it would require more effort than running Windows games via Steam, which very often just works automatically. I did install Wine with the intention of playing non-Steam Windows games, but I just haven't used it yet, because Proton — when it works, which it usually does — is just so effortless. If I'm trying to decide what to play, and I've narrowed down my choices to one GOG game and one Steam game, I'm likely to pick whichever is easiest to run on Linux, and that's going to be the Steam game nine times out of ten.

That might change a bit when I get around to trying Lutris, a game client not associated with any particular store, which also claims to reduce installation of many Windows games on Linux to a zero-effort, one click process. It looks like a promising solution for playing some of my GOG games on Linux. For what it's worth, though, installing Lutris is one extra step. I'm going to have to be a jerk and say that Steam still makes it easier by having Proton integration built in to its own client. So many of my games were already working on Linux as soon as I installed Steam that I haven't taken the time to use much of anything else.

So I don't have much to say about running Windows games with Wine, via Lutris or otherwise. I plan on experimenting with it eventually, and once I've done so, I'll probably write a sequel to this post. Right now, though, I'm looking at a huge Steam library and a high success rate with using Proton with very little tweaking, so I probably won't be straying away from Steam very often, except for the sake of experimentation. When I just want to play a game, Proton is often the best way to make it happen.

The Classics

There is one category of games for which I've already strayed outside the Steam bubble: Old-school shooters. I've got to have them.

The Steam versions of The Ultimate DOOM, DOOM II: Hell on Earth, Final DOOM, Heretic, HeXen: Beyond Heretic, and HeXen: Deathkings of the Dark Citadel all run in Proton. They were all, in fact, officially tested by Valve with specific versions of Proton, so that they show up in my Steam library with labels like "Proton [version number] selected by Valve testing" and will run with the indicated Proton version instead of the default I selected in the global Steam settings.

I find this rather amusing because the Steam versions of these games run through DOSBox which, if I'm not mistaken, has a Linux version. However, I'm not suprised that the game's publisher, id Software, hasn't made the effort to repackage these old games with the Linux version of DOSBox for an official Linux release on Steam, especially given that most users who are computer-savvy enough to use Linux will just take the game files downloaded via Steam and run them in a source port instead of DOSBox anyway.

That's what I did with all of these games, immediately after installing them. There's a Linux version of GZDoom, which isn't a suitable source port for anyone who wants the games to run exactly as they did in the '90s, but it's good enough for me. Like any sane person, I did disable major gameplay options which were not in the original games (such as vertical freelook in the DOOM games, jumping in DOOM and Heretic, and ridiculous stuff like crouching), but the graphical upgrades don't bother me.

Getting GZDoom to launch with the correct options for each game was a bit of a hassle, but no more than it was on Windows. The only real problem is that GZDoom, on my system, encounters some kind of error when I close it, which might have something to do with the fact that it doesn't seem to save changes to the gzdoom.ini file unless I enter the writeini console command while running GZDoom. Knowing the workaround, I'm not really bothered by it.

Satisfied with the DOOM and Heretic/HeXen games, I moved on to Wolfenstein 3D and its expansion Spear of Destiny, and installed the source port ECWolf. To my surprise, it seems to work perfectly despite being, in my estimation, less widely used than GZDoom. So then I moved on to the Marathon trilogy, available as freeware since 2005, and attempted to install the source port, Aleph One. That, unfortunately, could have gone more smoothly.

Not Everything is User-Friendly

The official Aleph One web site has some pretty basic instructions for installing the Linux version: Unpack the .tar.bz2 file and, in the unpacked directory, run ./configure && make && make install. Unpacking the file was easy, but I started having problems as soon as I ran the configure command. I won't bother going into all of the messy details, but I went through several iterations of trying the installation, which would fail due to missing dependencies, and then installing those dependencies.

Synaptic Package Manager, included in Linux Mint, makes finding and installing missing packages about as easy as it can be; doing it on the command line using apt or apt-get isn't very hard either. But I had never needed to hunt down dependencies like this. When installing software through Linux Mint's Software Manager, or even when installing a program using apt install, all dependencies are installed automatically (which I now regard as a miracle). Installing software manually, however, isn't quite so easy. Perhaps I was to blame for not knowing what all of the dependencies were beforehand, but it was getting frustrating.

When I finally got Aleph One installed, I was able to launch Marathon, but it printed some errors to the screen and there was no HUD. Searching the internet for a solution, it turned out I was still missing some "optional" dependencies, and installing those made things worse; my next attempt at installing Aleph One failed outright, seemingly due to a dependency which I had already installed.

That's when a comment on the Aleph One GitHub repository, posted only eight minutes before I saw it, clued me in to the fact that I had gone down the wrong rabbit hole. The easier and more reliable way to install Aleph One is to clone the Git repo, go into the root level folder, and run ./autogen.sh followed by make and make install. I had to install git (which I've used extensively but not at home) and I was still missing a couple of dependencies required by the autogen.sh script, but it told me exactly what the dependencies were, so installing them was just a matter of running the correct sudo apt install command.

So I've got Marathon and its sequels working on Linux now, but installing Aleph One took more than an hour after all was said and done. I've learned a lot, though, and ultimately the solution to every problem was revealed with a simple internet search. This story could scare people away from trying to play games on Linux, but it's important to keep in mind that I had this much trouble only because I was trying to play a 25-year-old game. Doing that on Windows isn't always easy either.

I still haven't installed the classic Quake games, and I think those are next. I can only hope installing their source ports will be a bit easier.

Conclusion

I guess the moral of this story is that installing and running games on Linux can take a bit of patience, but I only came close to running out of patience when I tried to do things that only an old-school game enthusiast determined to use Linux at all costs would ever try to do. With Steam, many of the games that work on Linux will "just work" and, for non-Steam games, I'm told that Wine isn't very hard to use either. However, I do know just enough about Wine to know that it requires some effort. The average consumer expects things to work with a single mouse click. They want one-click install and one-click launch of every game.

For games with native Linux support, you can have that. For the rest, Steam comes pretty close to providing that level of convenience. Until other stores like GOG implement some kind of compatibility layer like Proton into their own clients, Steam will dominate Linux gaming for the same reason that Windows dominates gaming in general: It's just easier.