I try to post articles here that I find interesting and worth discussing. If you would prefer to have more articles about native Linux games, please post them.
Fair point! I’ve seen quite a number of instances don’t allow discussion of stuff that’s absolutely related to games, such as how to get games (torrents, etc).
Case in point, I think there’s still a valid torrent going around with the old Loki game ports for Linux…
I’d just like to interject for a moment. What you’re referring to as GNU/Linux, is in fact, GNU/Linux/Wine/Proton, or as I’ve recently taken to calling it, GNU plus Linux plus wine plus proton. GNU/Linux is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning GNU system made useful by the GNU corelibs, shell utilities compatibility layers and vital system components comprising a full OS as defined by POSIX.
Many computer users run a modified version of the wine/proton system every day, without realizing it. Through a peculiar turn of events, the version of wine/proton which is widely used today is often called “steam”, and many of its users are not aware that it is basically the wine/proton system, developed by the win Project and valve.
There really is a GNU/Linux, and these people are using it, but it is just a part of the system they use. Linux is the kernel: the program in the system that allocates the machine’s resources to the other programs that you run. The kernel is an essential part of an operating system, but useless by itself; it can only function in the context of a complete operating system. GNU/Linux is normally used in combination with the wine/proton compatibility layer: the whole system is basically GNU/Linux with wine/proton added, or GNU/Linux/Wine/Proton. All the so-called “GNU/Linux” distributions are really distributions of GNU/Linux/Wine/Proton.
It’s not about stuff I don’t think belongs, it’s rather an issue of focus. When you go to a sub that says “Linux gaming” and 90% of what you see is how to use what ultimately is still Windows systems…
Arc won’t have proper game support until it’s using the Xe kernel mode driver (not until at least kernel 6.6) instead of i915. You can follow the progress of sparse rendering support for Xe here. Hardware AV1 encoding will with Xe, however.
If you want to stream your gaming (as long as it doesn’t require sparse rendering) and enjoy hardware AV1 encoding of the video you will have to disable Xe and revert to i915. You can choose one or the other.
There is a little hope for i915 to fake sparse rendering support (for games that don’t really use it, yet expect the feature flag). But you will still be stuck with last gen driver performance unless the optimizations are back-ported somehow.
As far as performance I found the A770 to fall quite far behind the AMD RX 6700XT for games (but no hardware AV1 encode for RX6700, the RDNA3 - RX7000 series can provide this). Who knows what the next gen Arc Battlemage will be like, but until the drivers mature I don’t think you will be unhappy with AMD.
The people in that a thread… How entitled can you fucking be. Holy shit.
Be patient and wait till the people working on the Xe driver enable HWEnc on DG2 my god…
If you wanted a known fully working product on Linux, you should not have bought a first-gen product (like, at all?) and certainly not one that’s known for its relatively poor support on even its primary target OS.
In my country it released for 1/5 minimum wage, and it is “free” on windows game pass that costs 1/8 of the game, Totally nonsense. I don’t think I will play
WoW server emulators have been in development for over a decade, they’re public projects on GitHub and released under opensource licenses, all private servers use those emulators, none of them has original code, it’s never been stolen.
You can compile them for Linux (as well as Windows), how well they work depends on the version, up to WoTLK they’re fine, from Cata on they’re quite bad.
You will need the original clients that are Windows only but they work flawlessly with WINE.
If you never played WoW before, I suggest you play the official one before dabbling with emulators/private servers, it’s a much better experience if you know nothing about the game.
WoW client is not native on Linux but it runs flawlessly regardless, always have, it’s also very easy to install with Lutris: lutris.net/games/world-of-warcraft/, use the battle.net script and follow instructions to install dependencies first.
I’ve played WoW classic on Linux without any real issues. The easiest way imo is through Lutris.
Install Lutris (should be in most distro repos)
Add game, choose battle.net
Let it install, launch, and login to battle.net
Install WoW classic from inside battle.net
Be sure to note where Lutris is installing your games (it’s configurable), so that if you decide to use add-ons you’ll know where to put them. I used WowUp, specifically the CurseForge version to manage my add-ons.
WoW itself runs pretty much flawlessly. I may have made some VK3D tweaks, but I’m not home and can’t check my notes. Let me know if you run in to any problems.
So if it would require kernel module how the heck would they do for snap/flatpak users would it ask everytime for root password at launch? They didn’t said anything other than it will be supported.
I’ve spent quite a lot of time trying to get The Hell mods running on Linux. Finally today I managed it. I wrote up some instructions (below) and provided the special Wine prefix were required to get the game running. Please let me know if you have any issues or have suggestions for improvement!
It was very difficult to find a way to run this on Linux - so I wrote this guide to help others who I know have also beat their heads against the table. The trick which finally allowed me to run it was I lucked into building a Wine prefix which is apparently crucially important to running the game. I have no idea what makes this Wine prefix special, but I’ve tested it on four computers (Ubuntu 20.04, 22.04, & Pop!OS) and it works on them all.
Downloads
You need the following four files
The mod: TH3_vx.xxxx.zip, and music pack: TH3_music_vx.x.zip
Available on the game CD-ROM, a copy from GOG, etc.
Wine setup and install
We’ll create the Wine prefix, install The Hell into that prefix, and then set up Lutris to point to it. This guide will create the prefix at ~/Games/diablo-the-hell, but you can put it elsewhere if you like.
Unpack the wine prefix file diablo-the-hell-wine-prefix.tar.xz to ~/Games/diablo-the-hell
Create a Windows folder for the game. You can use the UI or the terminal: mkdir ~/Games/diablo-the-hell/drive_c/Program Files/diablo-the-hell/
Unzip the mod file TH3_vx.xxxx.zip to ~/Games/diablo-the-hell/drive_c/Program Files/diablo-the-hell/
Unzip the music file TH3_music_vx.x.zip to ~/Games/diablo-the-hell/drive_c/Program Files/diablo-the-hell/
Copy diabdat.mpq to ~/Games/diablo-the-hell/drive_c/Program Files/diablo-the-hell/
Open ~/Games/diablo-the-hell/drive_c/Program Files/diablo-the-hell/config.ini and make the following changes:
set DDraw onVery important!!
set fps 60 Limits frames per second (optional)
set startvideo off Skips opening cinematic on startup (optional)
set screenwidth 1920 Sets resolution width (optional)
set screenheight 1080 Sets resolution height (optional)
Lutris config
Press + to add a new game, and set the following:
Name: "Diablo - The Hell"
Runner: Wine
Click Game Options, set the following:
Executable: ~/Games/diablo-the-hell/drive_c/Program Files/diablo-the-hell/TH2.exe (for The Hell 2), or ~/Games/diablo-the-hell/drive_c/Program Files/diablo-the-hell/TH3.exe (for The Hell 3)
Wine prefix: ~/Games/diablo-the-hell/
Click Save
Optional, if the game art doesn’t auto-populate:
Right Click on “Diablo - The Hell” -> Configure
Next to “Identifier” click Change
Change text to "diablo"
Click Apply -> Save
Click Lutris under “Sources” on the left -> Community Installers
Search for “diablo”, and wait for results to populate (the search downloads the art)
Exit the community installer section
Final thoughts
Important note on running the game: the opening UI menu has a visual bug But with the mouse & arrow keys (& some patience) you can navigate the menus to create a character. Once through the initial screens the game runs perfectly fine.
The special Wine prefix was built using Bottles, however Bottles is not required to run the game (these instructions use Lutris). If anyone can learn what is special about this prefix which makes the game work please let me know!
Despite what I’ve read online this mod works fine with DXVK. I don’t recommend disabling DXVK in Lutris when running the mod (contrary to what others have).
In case anyone asks: the specific Wine version doesn’t seem to matter. I had success with: lutris-GE-Proton8-8, lutris-7.2-2, and soda-7.0-4
My best guess would have been that they mean Ubuntu, since thats what companies usually use in tutorials/develop for. But since they also want to include the steam deck, they must also mean arch. With Arch and Debian (probably) covered, im not too worried about compatibility.
To me it sounds like that will mean most of them, they just don’t want to commit to saying all because there will always be another distro they missed.
Almost certainly means they will only actively support one distro. But of course, all distros can run the same software, it just may need to be packaged manually by distro maintainers. Most proprietary software only officially supports Ubuntu. Even Steam only officially supports Ubuntu outside of SteamOS.
Looking through their Discord it seems there hasn’t been any details yet regarding how this is going to work if this indeed is real. I highly doubt Faceit would want to vastly weaken their effectiveness on Linux in the same way EAC and Battleye do by running it as a user process. Even if just speculation, that would mean a kernel module that would need secure boot enabled (though even that is not required for the windows variant in battlebit) with a signed kernel and so on and would only work for specific distros?
From the statement above and other comments, it’s a new FaceIt product sometimes described as “lite”, which gives me the impression it is a Usermode anti-cheat.
Yeah, looking at the weekly recap stream where they actually talked about it, it is indeed a new anti cheat like you mention that (according to their own statement) is still more effective than “what they have now” (that being eac). youtu.be/nIay2Aq2ars?t=702Apparently they want to do a stream again with the team from Faceit talking about it in more detail.
linux_gaming
Newest
This magazine is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.