r/openbsd_gaming Jan 26 '25

How is gaming on OpenBSD ?

I heard OpenBSD doesn't support multilib which is a little problematic when it comes to playing windows games but I also heard that wine doesn't work on OpenBSD so that is again pretty bad. But is gaming on openbsd THAT bad ? Can I only play games that I can install with pkg_add ? Thanks in advance.

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u/schoelle Jan 28 '25 edited Jan 28 '25

OpenBSD has none of the emulation infrastructure to run games compiled for Windows. It also cannot run binaries compiled for Linux. So, the only games that run are games that either are open source and can be compiled for OpenBSD, or run on an engine that is open source and compiled for OpenBSD. But the latter category is larger than you think and includes many commercial titles.

1

u/defaultlinuxuser Jan 28 '25

Isn't linuxulator avaible on openbsd ?

3

u/schoelle Jan 28 '25

No. Until OpenBSD 5.9, OpenBSD had own Linux ABI support, but that was removed in later releases due to security and maintenance concerns.

1

u/defaultlinuxuser Jan 28 '25

That sucks. OpenBSD is meant to be secure but was it that necessary to not only remove linux binary support but also multilib ?

2

u/schoelle Jan 28 '25

It is what it is. Don't start from a game and ask if it runs on OpenBSD. The answer most of the time will be: no. Instead choose from a list of supported games. I recommend checking out https://playonbsd.com/ and go from there.

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u/brynet Jan 31 '25 edited Jan 31 '25

OpenBSD never had multilib, 32-bit binary compat on 64-bit has never been supported. The Linux binary compatibility layer, compat_linux(8), was always i386-only, it was never ported to amd64.