I wasn’t even using Wine. I installed it and launched through Steam and the entire process was as seamless as if it were on Windows. Valve is doing great work.
I check PCGW more prominently these days because even if the original game works, you can expect there to be some quirks that exist on Windows as well that Proton accurately replicates.
I didn’t try MCC or multiplayer, since I was just performance testing on the computer (will eventually be the wife’s machine after we move next month), but even running Academy with the bots was running great. I was able to sign into my Microsoft account no problem though, so I want to try multiplayer next.
I’ve been exclusively using Silverblue (well, Kinoite, which is the KDE version) as my main workstation OS for at least 8 months, and gaming on it is no different from other operating systems. Once you install Steam from Flathub, it all just works. The only difference is that you might need to give Steam permission to access your external drives if you want to add a Steam library on them. KDE Plasma lets you do it from the system settings app easily.
For generic Wine usage, I just use Lutris. Steam does allow you to add non-Steam games and run them through Proton, but IMO Lutris’ interface is easier for doing more advanced Wine stuff without having to drop into a terminal. That’s personal preference though.
As far as drivers, I didn’t have trouble installing the Nvidia driver (I have a 1080 TI). I don’t remember exactly what I did to install it system wide, since that was many months ago, but it was easy and well-documented IIRC.
What’s more complicated is getting the driver to work in graphical apps launched from toolboxes. If you’re doing development, or expect to build graphical software/games from source, you’ll likely need to deal with this. Basically, you just need to install the driver again inside of the toolbox, and make sure it’s the same version as what’s installed on your base system. I have some scripts to automate this if you’re interested, but it’s not really that useful unless you’re planning to use toolboxes a lot.
Overall, I’m very happy with Silverblue/Kinoite. The immutable base system gives me a lot of confidence on the long-term reliability of the system. Originally, I expected it to be a real blocker for most software, but the only thing I couldn’t get working was TeamViewer (didn’t try that hard tho tbh). I’ve even been able to get complex stuff to work like Unity, O3DE, Stable Diffusion webui, and a bunch of other AI-related stuff that is normally hard to install even on a regular system.
I fully switched over to using Silverblue close to a year ago now, it’s been great for my needs. I have AMD hardware so everything worked nicely out of the box.
There’s some caveats to consider when switching to an immutable OS, especially if you’re the kind of person who likes to make a lot of tweaks or (try) running very recent builds of certain packages. This will inherently be a bit less intuitive on an immutable system precisely because its entire premise is to not make many or any changes to the system bits – though you can still do it if you want, of course.
There’s some minor nuisances like hardware accelerated H.264 and H.265 video playback not being available out of the box for system-installed (as in, non-Flatpak) apps, but whether that’s actually a real issue for you depends on your use-case. If it is, you can either switch over to using Flatpak apps (probably the recommended way), or layer the necessary packages (next-best thing).
Alternatively you could also consider using Universal Blue’s container offerings, which has options for as close to vanilla Silverblue as possible but with some quality-of-life packages pre-installed, or ones with Nvidia’s proprietary stuff pre-packaged, and more. Mind you, I don’t have first-hand experience with Universal Blue’s offerings, mostly as I deliberately stick with AMD hardware and like to keep my OS as close to vanilla Fedora as possible. Depending on what you’re looking for, it might be recommended to try to stick as close to Fedora’s offering too.
Ultimately whether switching to an immutable distro is the right choice for you is really up to what you do with your machine, and what you want to do. In my case it was absolutely worth the switch as I want my machines to just work. And I just love how Silverblue updates work (download new base image, reboot, done) and how it offers ease of mind and the very easy ability to revert to a previous version, should that ever be needed. I primarily consider my machines for work first, so need them to be reliable.
When I do play a game on one of my devices, they run great and I’ve basically never run into an issue with something not working because I’m running an immutable OS. Lutris is great for installing and managing non-Steam games, and the Steam Flatpak is fantastic. I just layered the steam-devices package so game controllerrs work as you’d expect.
Yuzu is already really impressive. I have a relatively low-end system (rx570, ryzen 2200g) so I’m not really trying to push graphics, but I’ve been playing totk comfortably at 20-30 fps (yeah I know my standards are low, but it’s perfectly enjoyable). There are a few occasional graphical bugs, but none are game breaking, and the major ones have been fixed. And remember, this game is a recent release. Older stuff is generally going to work a lot better.
Since it’s mostly cpu bound, with a more powerful system (and probably a less demanding game) you can probably up the resolution quite a bit. I was even able to turn on fsr without a noticable performance loss.
There’s a compatibility list you can check, although it seems down right now.
That compatibility list isn’t worth checking. It hasn’t been updated in years when compatibility can improve dramatically even between minor releases. I’m playing games at 1080p with no glitches on titles that the compatibility list tell me shouldn’t be able to get past the menu.
Also, that list doesn’t consider workarounds making a title playable, so titles like Diablo II, which apparently works just fine if you use an offline patch (haven’t tried this, myself), are listed as incompatible.
tl;dr: If that list says that a game is playable, it’s probably playable, but if it says the game is bad or not working at all, you’ll need to look into it yourself.
I’m not super sure what exactly causes the XWayland funkiness on Wayland with NVIDIA’s driver. The Phoronix article mentions “DMA-BUF v4 Wayland protocol support”
This is the root cause for what you’re experiencing, and isn’t improved by any Wayland protocol support. It has entirely to do with the implicit sync stack that exists within Xwayland and nVidia’s lack of support for implicit sync entirely. nVidia proposed an explicit sync method in another merge request that was shot down by the X devs as they “don’t solve anything for the Mesa driver” by supporting explicit sync as a concept. Explicit sync is a concept that has less of a performance penalty, and other vendors support the notion of switching to it, but nVidia’s hostile relationship with the X developers and FOSS as a whole has caused roadblocks at present where the projects don’t wish to collaborate with nVidia’s proposals.
So to summarize, this is exclusively an Xwayland issue, nVidia and the developers have disagreed as to how to proceed, and neither side shows any signs of flinching. nVidia is hard nosed about implicit sync and refuses to implement it in their driver for various reasons, and the Xwayland devs are being hard nosed and absolutely refuse to accept nVidia’s merge requests for adding explicit sync support for reasons relating to what I can tell is basically “bad blood” between the groups. Even if the project accepts explicit sync, nVidia still has to add the feature to their release pipeline, which would put it past the 545 release some months down the road. Again, even if everyone agreed effective today, we still wouldn’t see resolution on this until early 2024 at the soonest. Xwayland will remain broken for nVidia users basically for all time, at the present rate of development. Our applications will all be ported to Wayland before this gets fixed.
Sorry for the soapbox moment, but, it has been incredibly frustrating to see this all play out.
No, I’m grateful for the rant. It’s been driving me nuts and with the apps I need to use for work not supporting Wayland whatsoever it basically makes me stuck on X, which sucks because Wayland feels much better for me other than XWayland.
It’s a really bad issue for me, it makes XWayland completely unusable. Like, characters appear in different order as I’m typing. The cursor sometimes looks like it’s a character behind. It’s obnoxious that such a huge bug is stuck in politics.
It is currently not possible. Games installed through GamePass have some kind of Windows compatibility layer which cannot be run by any wine or proton versions. At least not yet.
Yep, for steamdeck your options are to install windows or to stream. Greenlight is a good linux application that handles the streaming better than the website imo. It can also do remote play if you have an Xbox, which generally has much lower input latency.
One issue I’ve run into with immutable Linux distros is getting the xone drivers for the Xbox wireless dongle to work. Not having that is a no go for me and gaming.
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