Will Ubuntu allow me to play games like I do in Windows?

I was wondering if Ubuntu would let me play games like a Windows7 computer would.

ie:Team Fortress 2, Minecraft, etc

Solution 1:

Simple answer: No. You can get some to run, but a lot more won't run, many will also run badly. If gaming is a priority for you, the easiest fix is to just dual boot into Windows. If you are really lucky, the handful of games you care about might run in Linux (e.g. Minecraft does).

Solution 2:

Ubuntu can run Minecraft, or any other Java based game natively, as long as you have Java installed onto your machine Just right click on the installer and choose to open the file with either (whichever you have installed) the Open JDK or the Oracle Java versions

With most other game binries, it needs to be emulated inside a package called Wine, which emulates the Windows repositories so that the program thinks it is running in Windows. The link to the download and install page for Ubuntu is here

For flash games you need a browser to be able to run them

Solution 3:

Depends a lot on the games you want to run and on your graphics card driver.

Ubuntu depends on Wine to run Windows native software, Wine emulates a virtual environment while allowing the programs to access your system's hardware directly. Wine is not perfect and will not run everything, to check if an application can run in Wine using Ubuntu please visit the WineHQ page and search for the software you want to run.

If your graphics card can use OpenGL and the used drivers for your card are installed and active then there should not be much of an issue there. Again, depends on the hardware you have installed and the driver you are going to use.

While Wine is the backend that allows you to play games on Ubuntu some tricks might be needed to make a couple of programs/games run, developers have made it easy for you to install such software using a frontend for Wine, one of those is PlayOnLinux.
What it does is you will choose the application from a list that you want installed on your Ubuntu system, POL will then apply any other necessary applications to a Wine bottle and then install the application itself, most of the times that is all that it is necessary.

PlayOnLinux (click on the link) is probably the easiest free way of installing Windows software in your Ubuntu system.

Nothing is 100% prof using Wine, so the easiest way to testing if an application runs in your Ubuntu system is really giving it a try. Both applications that you gave as an example in your post run and have good support in Wine, it should not take much of an effort for you to install them in your system.