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OpenBSD for Gaming?!?!

2022-12-06 Correction: vmm IS hardware-accelerated

Is OpenBSD an option for gamers? How do I squeeze out the last bit of performance? I have noticed questions in that vein coming up, maybe more than there used to be since gaming of OpenBSD has become a little more visible. Let's examine the current state.

What is being asked?

what kind of FPS do you get on Open BSD and BSD as a whole?

Also asks if OpenBSD is the "best desktop BSD for gaming"?

Running Windows in a VM to have Steam installed and play games - a viable solution?

Will roblox work on openbsd?

Is it posibble to use Steam and Proton on OpenBSD?

They mention wanting to move to OpenBSD, but gaming a lot and not sure if that will work.

How can i launch Steam?

Why no Wine on OpenBSD?

Steam Issue

Steam games works well on openbsd?

Other questions that came up elsewhere outside of reddit from my recollection:

*nix Gaming

Linux gaming has significantly more volunteer and corporate support. Linux also is where you get dotnet that actually works.

I can't really speak to other *BSD, but it would seem to me that FreeBSD is probably the closest to Linux in its capabilities. Unlike OpenBSD, it still has the Linux emulation layer. This way, the actual Steam client and AFAIK Proton do work. I have heard that games that use some anti-piracy measures tend not to work. I don't know much about the bhyve virtual machine and if it can be used for hardware-accelerated emulation of a Linux machine.

FreeBSD Discord server that has a #gaming channel with regular discussions

Trying to buy a computer to optimize your gaming on OpenBSD has a high chance of disappointing

Hardware selection, especially "cutting edge", is a very DIY endeavor at this point.

"Tried and tested" is probably the safest way for hardware selection. I highly recommend jcs@'s entries that test some laptops for how well they play with OpenBSD.

OpenBSD on Laptops

Thinkpads tend to be fairly well supported, due to their popularity with OpenBSD developers.

If you want to try more cutting edge or less used hardware, you may want to find out the components and search through the OpenBSD mailing lists to see if people have used it, and if issues have been reported. Still, you may want to expect unsupported or only partially supported hardware. If you are ready for this, as well as looking for solutions on your own and/or filing bug reports, then this may be the way for you.

OpenBSD: Problem Reports

Major Shortcomings to be Aware of

Then Why Bother?

For someone with a gaming hobby, the net effect of switching to OpenBSD is that it puts severe constraints on what games you can play, as well as requiring a considerable DIY attitude and tolerance for things not working the way you may have gotten used to.

Most genres are represented in the catalogue of games, with many high-quality entries that are either source ports of classic games (say, X-Com or OpenTTD) or indie games based on open source frameworks that require a small amount of (largely automated) workarounds (e.g. Dead Cells or Slay the Spire).

PlayOnBSD list of OpenBSD games

Alternative, CSS-styled interface to the same database of OpenBSD games

It can be argued that while the OpenBSD gaming library is comparatively small, the average quality of the games is quite high - especially as no (Unity?) shovelware or AAA games made to milk their consumers exist here.

Finally, I stick with my opinion that you should not choose OpenBSD for gaming. You choose OpenBSD for what makes it OpenBSD - a security-focused development approach that doesn't try to run everything under the sun at any cost. And I consider all the games that can run somehow to be a bonus, to sweeten the deal and give me one fewer reason to boot into another operating system.

You can get games from popular distribution platforms without needing a separate install of Linux or Windows. GOG.com allows you to downloads games directly via the web interface, and for Steam there is steamctl in ports.

Advocacy Helps

Even in the absence of significant commercial incentives to consider non-Linux *nix, not all game developers are the same and they have different motivations. In my experience, indie game developers have often responded with interest when they learned that their game could easily run on even more obscure platforms than Linux.

There is a misunderstanding that modern games "just can't run" on OpenBSD. It is rather a question of software being coded and published in a way that ties it strongly to a particular platform, something that Microsoft Windows and gaming consoles have a significant history of.

It is a welcome surprise every time a game developer decides to opensource their game. This way any future issues can be worked around, as long as someone with the right skills gets on the job. This is ideal for both cross-platform support, as well as video game preservation.

Video game preservation - Wikipedia

Archiving the Past: Why Game Preservation Matters

In the end, if people being interested in running their games on OpenBSD helps curb some of the habits in game development that are so heavily influenced by the big corporations, maybe it will still have a small net benefit for gaming culture as a whole.