Track Mania Nations Forever, the free racing game from developer Nadeo can now be installed and run rather easily on Linux thanks to a Snap package.

The package was created by Martin Wimpress and Alan Pope from Canonical as a "bank holiday weekend project". I spoke with Wimpress about it and tested it a bit, here's what he said about it:

In addition to having a cool Windows game, it is confined so it doesn't mess with whatever WINE stuff you might already have setup. The snap of tmnationsforever is also a template upon which anyone can create snaps of WINE compatible games and applications.

If your distribution doesn't have Snap support built in yet, find install instructions here. You can install it running this simple command in the terminal:

snap install tmnationsforever snap connect tmnationsforever:joystick

I've noticed, that it doesn't work on the NVIDIA 396 driver series, but it does work fine on the 390 driver.

To be clear, it's not finished yet and they are looking for feedback, which you can do so in this linked forum post. For those interested in the snap template to make your own, it's on GitHub.

I actually played one of the Track Mania games years ago before being a Linux user and I had a serious amount of fun with it, so things brings back some good memories.

I'm not often one to advocate the use of Wine, but taking into account that it's free, old and likely never to be ported to Linux, making use of Wine for a game that works so well seems like a perfect fit. Having it all configured for you with a single package like this, certainly makes it a lot easier too.

Article updated after publishing to point to the newer install method, it's no longer in the unstable channel.