Last Updated on May 22, 2022
Emulators
Emulation is the practice of using a program (called an emulator) on a PC to mimic the behaviour of a home computer or a video game console, in order to play (usually retro) games on a computer.
Home computers were a class of microcomputers that entered the market in 1977 and became common during the 1980s. They were marketed to consumers as affordable and accessible computers that, for the first time, were intended for the use of a single non-technical user.
Back in the 1980s, home computers came to the forefront of teenagers’ minds. Specifically, the Amiga, ZX Spectrum, and Atari ST were extremely popular. They were hugely popular home computers targeted heavily towards games, but they also ran other types of software.
We showcase the best emulators for Linux in this article.
Other locations
Flathub is the home of hundreds of apps which can be easily installed on any Linux distribution. There’s a small choice of 22 games and most of them are available from the Ubuntu Software app.
We provide roundups of free and open source games.
PortableLinuxGames is a site that packs and distributes Linux games as portable, self-contained packages that will (or should) run on any Linux system including Ubuntu. However, many of the AppImages are 32 bit and won’t run on Ubuntu 21.04 without installing various libraries.
Pages in this article:
Page 1 – Ubuntu Software App
Page 2 – Steam Store
Page 3 – Emulators and more
All articles in this series:
Gaming on linux? Are you serious?
Well I am. Linux is vastly underrated as a gaming platform. Of course many big titles aren’t available but there’s still tons of great games out there.
A section about gaming distros would be nice. I’m using Drauger.
All these forks of Ubuntu are just a colossal waste of opportunity.
Are they really? It’s agreed there is often a lot of duplicated work when people fork distros and open source software in general. That also applies to proprietary software. In fact the implications are much worse with proprietary software.
When a proprietary product is abandoned, all the work is effectively lost. This happens so many times when a large multinational acquires a promising product and then just dumps it after 12-18 months.
With an open source project, when the original developer or team stops developing, there’s still a chance that someone else or a group will take the code and carry on with the program’s development. The code is not lost.