I just wish someone could have a walkthrough guide on how to get the games (and launchers) to work for me like they do for you. Every time something jams up and I have to reinstall until I shrug and put windows back on.
ProtonDB usually has pretty good information on launcher settings for games. I’ve found several good walkthroughs on game forums, as well, like on Steam community forums or the game’s own website.
What games are giving you trouble and where are you looking for walkthroughs? And what are you looking for in the walkthrough?
Been traditionally trying to use Linux Mint but am at my wits end so I'm willing to try anything. As far as what I'm looking for, just step by step to get Steam and Heroic installed and working. Any game I've found that has a launcher is simply a no go, never works.
Now we've got flatpaks out and people swear by them but I usually get something working one day and the next it quits. I admit it, I need more experience at this; but I can't quit Windows until I understand what the hell is going wrong and how to fix it.
I don’t know what games you are playing, and I only used Mint for a short time before moving to other diatros, but I remember it being pretty plug-and-play for most things. I admit I was mostly playing through Steam and a few applications through Lutris (mostly FFXIV), using a Wine wrapper to use the official launcher.
For Steam, the Steam launcher will handle most of the game-specific launchers for you. For Lutris, make sure you open Lutris and update it after installing it and before trying to add any games to it. I don’t have any experience with Heroic (or with Windows version of Epic Launcher either).
Trial and error, lots of reading ProtonDB, wikis, etc. I only just recently got a decent handle on how to properly use wine prefixes to get mods and things working.
In general, use Steam when you can, then use Heroic for non Steam games. Lutris is very powerful and super useful for games that aren’t installed from a larger distributor, ie from a CD or direct from the devs, but I find the UI can be a bit spartan. Steam and Heroic have fewer features but are way more user friendly.
Good luck. It can definitely be frustrating but remember that you have access to tons of resources and an excellent community if you encounter issues.
It’s really easy, just install steam or lutris. However, some games might have their own specific issues when running under proton/wine under specific hardware configuration. If this is what happened to you, I’m afraid there might not be an easy way outside of putting some elbow grease to start tinkering with the config, or ask for help in linux gaming community.
I’ve actually never tried on X11. I will admit, using VR seems to cause some issues with the rest of my desktop (Plasma ocassionally needs to be reloaded). However in the grand scheme, I can get past that for now considering it doesn’t cause any gameplay issues.
> Runs at a solid 80fps at 1440p on high settings, the only graphical issue I noticed was flickering volumetric clouds. This game ate my old card (the venerable GTX 1080) alive even on Windows.
I moved to Linux on my desktop back in 2019. I was sick of my slightly old (4 year old) processor running constantly at 20 to 30 percent utilization.
During COVID, there were times I worked from home and did so successfully on Linux.
Gaming was one of the big for me as well but the transition to Linux was not really that painful. There was only one of two games that I had to leave behind, and even then, I was able to set up Looking Glass to play them occasionally (definitely not a task for a regular end user).
I think some people are too comfortable with MS Office to migrate, if anything, I think Office isa bigger barrier to Linux adoption than Windows is. After all, the are plenty of comments saying “Windows 10… Bad. Windows 11… Worse!” There are no comments focusing on the Office suite being bad.
Because honestly, Office is pretty great for what it does.
I know a lot of folks here can’t get over it being proprietary or all the other anticompetitive stuff Microsoft has done with Office, but once we got M365 at work, a lot of my work life got a lot easier.
Any time I have tried to use LibreOffice or other alternatives, I feel like I’m giving up ten years’ worth of quality of life improvements. That’s generally my experience with 99% of FOSS stuff - fully functional but dogshit to navigate and use.
Glad ALVR worked for you on Wayland. It never did for me but it’s been a while. All Linux needs next is support from Adobe and AutoCAD and it’ll be 100% for most people
I know, I know. But what I hear from Photoshop editors, this is one area where Linux still is the alternative as the Foss software here is still of lesser quality than Photoshop. Or has that changed semi recently?
There’s nothing quite like Photoshop, but Photopea helps bridge that gap. Soon™ Gimp 3.0 will be out which will help too. Depending on your needs, Krita is very high quality and up there with professional paint applications. Then there’s a bunch of other tools that fill in more specialized needs here and there. It’s more so a matter of combining & linking the alternatives together to cover your needs best you can than relying on one end all be all application.
I wish it was friendlier to Nvidia (though, that’s no fault of the Linux community), because that’s the one hangup for me. I built my rig just a couple years ago around the 3060ti, and the spotty/shoddy support provided by Nvidia (again, not at all the fault of the Linux community) keeps me where I am in the world of Windows.
Hopefully, NVK can successfully remove that barrier for folks like me, because I run Linux on every other computer I own, and it’s looking very promising that it may be the case sooner than later.
Funnily enough I’ve never had any problem out of my GTX-1080, and I run Mint. Still I’ve heard irritation stories about RTX cards. Which is why my next GPU is gonna be Radeon.
It’s funny because back in the day the lack of support for amd is what made me choose to go nvidia in the future. Maybe the pendulum will swing back who knows? Kind of surprising it’s not well supported given the popularity / importance of cuda.
It’s the ol’ spectre of Capitalism come to haunt the market again. Nvidia’s support has always been an afterthought, and given the relatively small share of Linux gamers, “good enough” has been their level of investment.
I forget when AMD went open source, but I think it was that move that has brought them up to competing (surpassing?) with Nvidia in the Linux space. Not only is the support better, but they were able to secure a hold on Steam Deck sales, and with Linux gaming improving as a result of upstreamed fixes, now they’re becoming the better option for people who want to dump Windows but still play games (Nvidia even leeches off those improvements and ports them into their own code).
If Nvidia would go open source, the Linux community wouldn’t have to reverse-engineer everything re: Nouveau and NVK, and they might be a stronger competitor again.
I have 4 drives. An NVMe drive with four partitions: 500MB /boot 64GB Swap 100GB / and the rest of the 1TB goes to /home. Then I have a 1TB SSD for games which is mounted to ~/Games. Then I have two 1TB HDDs, one for Music mounted to ~/Music and another for Torrents mounted to ~/Torrents. I also have an 8TB HDD coming which will be another torrents drive
Yeah, logical volumes has a teeny bit of overhead, same with RAID. both together means you can run older things but things that have a lot of textures loading you will see some drop.
I have nothing to add except that ED with VR and hotas controllers is one of the best VR spaceflight experiences out there. Dogfighting with that setup is unparalleled. Being able to watch your target as you flip over them to their tail just gets my jimmies jumpin’.
My jam was always turning off flight assist and just tossing a small ship through an asteroid belt. Haven’t played much since Odyssey but I recently got the itch again
I also recently made the switch and was pleasantly surprised at how many games I could still play, even “Windows only” titles. Though my requirements are nowhere near yours as I don’t have VR or HOTAS.
I’m still rocking an NVIDIA 1060… What’s the Linux community consensus on NVIDIA vs AMD? Because I think it’s about time to upgrade.
AMD is generally a much better experience overall, but a handful of things are worse than NVidia (off the top of my head, Ray Tracing, AI, and Emulators. AMD cards tend to have graphical glitches in emulators even on Windows. They can be mitigated, and aren’t universal but they are an issue).
In my experience, AMD is the way to go. My old GTX 1080 was a beast and put in great work, but just had too many naggling stability issues that constantly got in the way of enjoying it. Been really happy with my AMD.
AMD being preferred was my sense of the situation so it’s good to have that confirmed. Looks like I need to get more familiar with that family of cards.
AMD’s naming scheme is honestly similar to Nvidias. They have X600, X700, etc (the “X” being the generation of card, the second digit being the model).
So for example, the current gen is the 7000 series, with the 7600 being the lowest, and roughly analogous to the 4060, and the 7900 to the 4090. There are also XT versions which is AMD’s version of the Ti line. They have more VRAM, higher clocks, overclocking, etc.
I’d look at the 6700XT, or the one I have which is the 7600XT. Both have similar specs, the 7600XT is more recent with better performance in a couple areas, but the 6700XT is tried and true, and you’ll be more likely to find a good deal on it. The 7600XT only came out a couple months ago and isn’t anywhere near as well established, but IMO it performs excellent at good temps without any tweaks. Both are great for 1080p or 1440p with modern games.
I am like you but a year behind. I hope to get there too at some point. Switched to Linux for the majority of my pc use and a lot of games. But my VR flight sim and the occasional racing is holding me back. I have an HP Reverb G2 (Windows Mixed Reality) headset which doesn’t work very well on Linux (yet?) and an Nvidia RTX 3080.
There doesn’t seem to be an ideal Linux VR setup yet, now that SteamVR still does not work with Wayland. Hoping they’ll fix it and then I can sidegrade to a Valve Index and an RX 6900 XT and be set. I don’t like the complexity and latency of wireless streaming.
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