Update: As of October 10, 2019 the crashes that made the game unplayable on Linux have been addressed. The game is once again playable at least in my case. I have played it a bunch of hours over the last 2-3 days with no crashes or lock ups. The game runs very smooth and fps is very decent now. I am still experiencing some screen tearing even with vsync on which is a bit weird but not game breaking.
I have been playing Atlas for about a week now on Linux (Pop!_OS) and overall my experience has been pretty good. There currently is a pretty big hit to performance when compared to playing on Windows 10 but the overall experience is smooth and playable.
The game is currently in early access so its in no way complete or optimized but if you are looking to be a filthy pirate but don’t want to boot windows you are covered.
How to get Atlas Running on Linux
To get Atlas running doesn’t require any special tricks. All you need to be able to play, is to make sure proton is up to date as well as your graphics drivers. There is some limitations as this game uses anti cheat software on their dedicated servers. Luckily they recently added a single player mode which is what I was playing. They also have plenty of unofficial servers that don’t use anti cheat if you wish to go that route.
I played the Blackwood map during my testing. It has been a lot of fun to explore. with my Ryzen 2600x and GTX 1060 6gb I was getting pretty decent frames while out at sea but frame rate dipped into the 30s while close to villages on the map. You can see my frame rate drops in the pics I took as I was next to one of the villages at the time. Even while frame rates dipped into the 30s the game was still very smooth and playable.
If you own the game and haven’t tried it on Linux yet I recommend giving it a try especially if you have a beefy graphics card so you don’t notice the performance hit as much. Even if you are like me though and have an older graphics card its worth a try. I didn’t experience any stuttering or game breaking issues.
Atlas on Pop!_OS Sample Footage
Performance took a big hit while running OBS. I experienced some screen tearing also during recording which I didn’t experience before hand. I did a few recordings with different settings to try and remedy this to no avail.
Atlas Admin Commands
If you plan on playing single player I will leave some useful console commands I found online.
Edit: I have been building on the list of console commands quite a bit so I have moved it to its own page which you can find here: https://urbandork.ca/2019/10/10/atlas-admin-commands-for-single-player-and-private-server/