HACKER Q&A
📣 aggrrrh

How do I play Doom on Linux?


I'm an experienced linux user and I tried to play doom 1 today. And for me it was a complete failure. How it has come that it is so hard?

There were Linus youtube series [0] about linux gaming. But I was skeptical about it as all games I wanted to play have native linux support. And I didn't experience any problems with them at all.

But today I wanted to launch Doom 1(which I own via gog.com) and it was a failure. I tried to launch it via wine and dosbox with no luck. Also, it doesn't have any .wad files available.

I tried to search it via duckduckgo and I came across zdoom [1] and tried to download it. Ubuntu's 64bit version is 404 at the moment. 32 bit version requires .wad files which gog.com version doesn't provide. And I'm stuck here trying to play 28 yo game.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0506yDSgU7M [1] https://zdoom.org/downloads

  👤 smoldesu Accepted Answer ✓
My package manager's repos have gzdoom, you should probably check that out. As a related sidenote, both Doom 2016 and Doom Eternal also play quite nice on Linux through Proton.
👤 okdjnfweonfe
unintuitive to learn how to do things the first time, but

Download the windows version of a given application, and then use https://constexpr.org/innoextract/ (check your package manager) to extract the game files from the executable, and there will be your WADs

then for any third party engine, following the instructions provided to find where to put those WADs

- - -

Alternatively, if that still doesn't work:

https://flathub.org/apps/search/doom flathub has a bunch of engine options, including those based on free WADs

And flatpak is fairly easy to add to a system https://flatpak.org/setup/Ubuntu/

👤 manbart
You don’t need wine, there are plenty of native engines for Doom that run on Linux. Just Google ‘Linux doom engine’, there are several. You just need to supply your own .wad files, those are what contains the copywrited materials (though there are ‘freedoom’ wads available too)