The state of gaming on FreeBSD

The gaming industry, outside of console and mobile games, is mainly focused on three operating systems: Windows, GNU/Linux, and macOS. This leaves FreeBSD with a library mostly restricted to open-source native games. These restrictions may decrease the interest of new and current gaming users for FreeBSD as their main OS as they are accustomed to having access to a wider variety of games (as is the case for GNU/Linux ). Today, thanks to a handful of contributors and through the use of Linuxulator or Wine FreeBSD users have the necessary tools to enjoy gaming :) Firstly, the port of Steam, which allows us to run both GNU/Linux games on FreeBSD under a chroot, and the multiple ports of wine, wine-devel, and wine-proton, which will enable us to play Windows games under FreeBSD. Secondly In addition to these ports, the upstreaming first approach with Wine allowed us to quickly update the Wine version available after a release. This talk will shed a light on the available compatibility tools and how we can leverage these tools to improve the gaming experience on FreeBSD.

Links to the mentioned project: https://docs.freebsd.org/en/articles/linux-emulation/ https://www.winehq.org/ https://github.com/shkhln/linuxulator-steam-utils https://github.com/ValveSoftware/wine https://github.com/shkhln/libc6-shim