Suggest some desktop games to attract a person to Linux

**K.Mandla** · February 12th, 2007

I'm setting up a show-off machine for a friend, to try and convince him to use Linux over Windows.

He's not a gamer, but he does like to play Solitaire and Minesweeper on his PC, as well as a Frozen Bubble-type game (I forget the name ... it's something like "Squelbs" or something ... it plays almost exactly like Frozen Bubble).

I'm looking for some good desktop games that don't rely on heavy 3D acceleration and don't take longer than a half an hour to play. Things like Gweled and FB are perfect , but Wesnoth is a bit too involved. Crack-Attack is good, but that's about the limit of the 3D workload this machine can handle. I've tried Fizzball, but it's a little heavy for the machine.

And I'm trying to avoid as much of the Gnome framework as I can, since it burdens the machine too much. So please don't suggest the Gnome (or KDE) game packs.

I was thinking about PySol and XMahjongg, but I want them to look nice and hopefully avoid that primitive old GTK1 look. Pingus is kind of cute, but he's not into cute, and it looks a little archaic.

Any suggestions? They don't have to be in the repositories, and I'm not afraid to compile.

**Perfect Storm** · February 12th, 2007

AstroMenace is good. I play it alot. You can save the game if you get tired of it. If you are to something like space invaders 3D'ish

**tkjacobsen** · February 12th, 2007

xmoto, lbreakout and supertux..

Be sure to get the latest supertux (0.3.0) from edgy-backports

**EvilMarshmallow** · February 12th, 2007

Console emulators might be good too. Yeah, I know, they're available for windows as well, but just a thought...

It may be a little much but I love Falcon's Eye. I was always a Nethack/Angband fan but I really like the way that looks. Might be too deep, might not...

**hikaricore** · February 12th, 2007

You might try I Have No Tomatoes it ran fairly well on my integrated intel video card before I installed my Nvidia, so it's not too taxing on graphics. The game itself takes about 10minutes to play through and it can be quite addicting.

There's even a ubuntu package here: http://www.getdeb.net/getdeb.php?fil...tdeb1_i386.deb

**K.Mandla** · February 12th, 2007

Sweet. Thanks for the ideas.

XMoto (and AstroMenace) are just too taxing; I should have given an idea of the system specs. This is a lowly 750Mhz with an 8Mb ATI in it. It's going to do rudimentary acceleration at best, but nothing beyond that. I actually tried Armagetron and it will work ... if I turn off everything but the cycles and the grid.

SuperTux is perfect; thanks for reminding me. I'd add an emulator but as far as I know he's not an emulator guy. lbreakout is good, but I think Falcon's Eye would be too intricate. My friend isn't really a gamer (he writes novels) but he does like a distraction now and again.

I'll try some of these others and see how they work. Thanks again!

**jake3988** · February 13th, 2007

Great games. I've always had a fondness for lbreakout2.

thanks for Xmoto, its a nice game. Although, its INCREDIBLY difficult. And I can't stress that enough.

**K.Mandla** · February 13th, 2007

Actually, I'm glad you said that. I thought I was having a problem, because I could hardly get through the first level of the game. I see now that I'm not the only one who thinks it's tough.