I will admit I am truly surprised at how quickly people managed to find a way to run Halo: The Master Chief Collection on Linux with Steam Play.

343 Industries included an option to turn off Easy Anti-Cheat, to allow people to play single-player and mess around with modding which was the first thing needed to get it working on Linux. While Easy Anti-Cheat supports Linux, it does not work with Proton/Wine.

Sadly though, there was a major problem right at release—it required a login that didn't work with Proton/Wine. However, user LukasRuppert managed to find a workaround for that and posted it on GitHub (with updates after too). So it only took around 8 hours after launch and someone found a way to play Halo: The Master Chief Collection on Linux, simply amazing.

There's a caveat though, it probably will take multiple tries to login before it gets through. It goes without saying but I will anyway, use this at your own risk .

If you don't fancy messing around with building your own Wine with the linked patches, you don't have too. Proton GE already has a test build up on their GitHub. Download it, extract it and place the contents into:

~/.steam/root/compatibilitytools.d/

Restart Steam and then you will be able to select it by right clicking on the game, going to Properties and at the bottom you will see it:

Actually logging in really can take a while. Sometimes it will give a fatal error and need you to restart it, but eventually it should tell you login failed and allow you to hit retry until it works. Took me a good 5 minutes to get in, and even after that you then need to link up an Xbox Live account which also takes multiple tries (so make sure you have a password ready to copy/paste…).

Eventually though, you get in. After that, you can play the campaign and custom multiplayer modes (no matchmaking due to EAC). Here's a video I took earlier of it running on Manjaro Linux:

If you want all the details shown in the left HUD, use this as a launch command:

DXVK_HUD=full %command%

Performance is actually good, once you get past the usual shader compiling stutter and everything else works as expected. I didn't try messing with any VSync settings, which is why the gameplay is locked to 60FPS. Unless you're a Halo super-fan though, it might be better to wait for a less finicky fix. Hopefully a more complete solution will be worked on and make its way into the official Wine and Proton builds.

This is a great start and it's hard not to appreciate being able to play one of Microsoft's top new PC releases on Linux, that's pretty incredible really. Who would have thought 2-3 years ago, or even 1 year ago that this would be at all possible.

You can find the Halo: The Master Chief Collection on Steam here.

Update 13/12: The latest version of Steam Play Proton adds out of the box support.