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linux_gaming

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spicystraw , in Linux is officially at 99% for me.

I am in a similar situation, I use quest 2 a lot to drive in assetto corsa. I have a Thrustmaster TS 300 PC, I don’t think there are any Linux drivers for that base.

bigmclargehuge OP , (edited )
@bigmclargehuge@lemmy.world avatar

Oversteer should be what you need. Just take note that you need an extra driver module for the T300RS.

Edit, if you meant the TS-PC you may be out of luck. It looks like support for the TS-PC has an open request in the T300RS driver but it isn’t implemented yet.

spicystraw ,

Ah! Thanks, I will check it out. TS-PC is indeed what I meant. Maybe this is a good reason to upgrade my sim setup to more open source friendly brand.

bigmclargehuge OP ,
@bigmclargehuge@lemmy.world avatar

I’m in the same boat. I’m actually on the verge of going full open source and building my own direct drive with OpenFFBoard.

spicystraw ,

Nice! Is there a kit you’re buying or are you sourcing parts from Aliexpress or similar? If you’re interested there is a guy doing open source pedal sets and shifter which I’m thinking of building as next project. www.youtube.com/

bigmclargehuge OP ,
@bigmclargehuge@lemmy.world avatar

I was considering sourcing my own parts as I haven’t come across a full kit that seemed to have everything I wanted.

Also thats super cool, although I’m currently pretty happy with the rest of my setup atm. May look into the shifter at some point tho

mesamunefire , in Backup Game Saves Solutions?

I’ve used nextcloud with a dedicated folder before. Steamdeck and miyoo mini works with it well. That or good old fashioned sd card, look for .sav then push all into another drive.

mesamunefire , in Backup Game Saves Solutions?

Game vault looks cool!

FrederikNJS , in How are you all partitioning your setup?
  • 1TB NVMe SSD
    • 512 MB EFI
    • BTRFS partition for / filling up the rest
  • Ancient 128 GB SATA SSD
    • Swap
  • 1TB SATA SSD
    • 500 GB Windows installation for VR games
    • 500 GB BTRFS partition mounted at /mnt/games

Since both my root and home are on the same BTRFS partition they share space.

I have made sure to create sub volumes for the Steam and Game install directories, to avoid taking snapshots of them.

Steam has 2 “libraries” registered, one in my home directory and one in /mnt/games

million OP ,
@million@lemmy.world avatar

Two libraries sound good, but I heard the Steam Flatpak has issues with libraries on multiple drives. Haven’t had a chance to try it myself.

RayOfSunlight , in Linux is officially at 99% for me.

Windows XP and 7 got a special place on my heart, but once i get a PC, I’m moving to Linux Mint

bigmclargehuge OP ,
@bigmclargehuge@lemmy.world avatar

Honestly I’d still use XP if more programs supported it. As i said to another user here, it was Windows at its peak. It created the basic layout and feature set that modern Windows still uses, but lacks all the bloat and ads.

RayOfSunlight ,

Can’t recommend XP knowing it’s vulnerable

bigmclargehuge OP ,
@bigmclargehuge@lemmy.world avatar

Fair enough. Not really speaking to its tech specs, mainly just how nice it was to use compared to modern windows

RayOfSunlight ,

I can understand, but still, it’s not wprth it using windows XP unless you’re using a VM for playing retro games offline

SkabySkalywag ,

Same. A friendly poster recommended Mint and I’m loving it! The fact that it automatically walks you through the dual boot set up was exactly what I wanted.

forbiddenlake , in Backup Game Saves Solutions?
@forbiddenlake@lemmy.world avatar

Ludusavi does it all for you, works great, and the dev implemented my feature request within a few weeks (handling a mounted Windows drive better)

github.com/mtkennerly/ludusavi

PoorPocketsMcNewHold ,

Quick question : What is your need of using Windows drives ? (Except if you are dual-booting, in that case, except for specific modding cases, why would you want to use it/mount it on Linux ?)

For my own curiosity, you can generally install all Windows games via wine easily (except counter-claims)

Worx , in How are you all partitioning your setup?

I wouldn’t recommend it, but my current setup is I reach into the computer, unplug one SSD and plug in the other. Not the most high-tech dual boot but yeah

UnhappyCamper ,
@UnhappyCamper@kbin.social avatar

Why not switch between the drives in the bios when you want to use the other?

Worx ,

I can’t leave them both plugged in because Windows keeps complaining that my drive is damaged and it needs to run a disk check. The reason I don’t set up grub or something else properly is mainly laziness. I use one OS for a project that lasts several months at a time so I don’t switch between them that often. It’s just not worth the time or effort to save two minutes every few months

sugar_in_your_tea ,

Couldn’t you just configure your BIOS to boot from one or the other? I’ve never had Windows care about drives it’s not configured to use.

Worx ,

Probably could, but it’s not worth the time or effort. I switch so rarely that even if it only took five minutes to configure, that’s still more time than I spend switching in six months

sugar_in_your_tea ,

There shouldn’t be any configuration, you just push F11 or whatever and select the other boot drive. I still do that when I boot into Windows like once/year.

Worx ,

I’d assumed you’d read my other comment. When I do have both drives plugged in at once, Windows always does a disk check on every startup, which takes a long time and is completely unnecessary. Just switching which device I boot from isn’t a good solution for my computer

sugar_in_your_tea ,

As mentioned, I’ve never had that issue. I put the Windows disk in whichever slot it prefers and Linux in another, then configure the BIOS to prefer the Linux drive.

I think it’s doing the disk check because it’s in a different slot than it expects or something.

hperrin , (edited ) in Linux is officially at 99% for me.

I switched from Windows to Linux during the whole Vista debacle back in 2008. For basically ten years I was out of the PC gaming scene. I fucking love Proton and what its done for Linux as a gaming platform. Now I play (almost) everything on Linux, no sweat. The only things I ever need my Windows partition for anymore are things with those shitty anticheat platforms that just assume you’re a cheater if you use Linux. Cause, you know, Linux scary.

bigmclargehuge OP ,
@bigmclargehuge@lemmy.world avatar

Yeah I’m right there with ya, of course it’s the users fault for choosing an alternative OS, it has nothing to do with gaming companies choosing the cheapest, least effective and most invasive client side anti cheat solutions instead of more universal server side ones. Nothing at all.

GoodEye8 ,

I kinda get it, there’s a reason games a turning towards P2P architecture instead of the traditional client-server architecture. Servers are expensive and turning the game effectively server-authoritative is even more expensive.

I imagine the cost benefit analysis rarely pays out which is why companies go for the cheaper option.

KrokanteBamischijf ,

those shitty anticheat platforms that just assume you’re a cheater if you use Linux. Cause, you know, Linux scary.

To be fair, the people at the cutting edge of modern computing are statistically very likely to be Linux users. Therefore it’s not entirely unreasonable to have some prejudice against Linux users.

But as a sweeping measure these anti-cheat measures are absolutely unacceptable. The only other explanation is that they just don’t want to bother with the market share still being low compared to Windows.

Personally, if a game requires anti-cheat, it’s probably not a game I’d enjoy playing. Not a big fan of competitive gameplay. But for those that are, this needs to stop. Especially with all the new bullshit Microsoft has been pulling in Windows lately.

kilpatds ,
@kilpatds@mastodon.social avatar

@KrokanteBamischijf @hperrin But it needs to stop in a way that keeps those competitive games fun...

  • Trusted Computing-based solutions
  • Don't tell the game anything-based solutions...
  • ??

Trusted-Computing requires a more locked down system than any distro provides, and also (effectively) everyone going along with some MS-controlled standards for TPMs and so forth.

Ignorant-Games approaches perform terribly.

What else ya got?

kilpatds ,
@kilpatds@mastodon.social avatar

@KrokanteBamischijf @hperrin Protecting code from the computer it runs on is either impossible or really really hard, depending.

https://multicians.org/thvv/mirror/obfreport.pdf
https://www.iacr.org/archive/crypto2001/21390001.pdf

sugar_in_your_tea ,

A few options in my personal order of priority:

  • allow private servers - you can still have competitive play, just with people you trust to not cheat
  • anti-cheat on the server only - would require human moderation as well (users could submit reports, which could be compared to server logs)
  • increase cost for cheating - maybe have players ante up, and lose their ante if they’re caught cheating (e.g. pay for game licenses and have the license revoked); to be fair, this would require independent review
kilpatds ,
@kilpatds@mastodon.social avatar

@sugar_in_your_tea Private servers exclude MMOs as a class of game. That works well for death-match style (or BG3 style) 4-player games, but doesn't work for 30-300-3000 people games.

Anti-cheat server-only allows too many cheats. There's already enough trouble distinguishing someone using wall-hacks from someone with good headphones in a game that does 3d-spacial-sound... trying to do that on the server side ... just won't work. Same applies for other ways of increasing the costs if detected

sugar_in_your_tea ,

Private servers exclude MMOs as a class of game

Why? There are some massive Minecraft servers (thousands of players), and Palworld is self-hostable (closer to other MMOs), so I honestly don’t see the issue. You’d have a different set of characters on each server, but that just increases the risk for cheaters who get booted.

wall-hacks

Part of anti-cheat is not sending the data cheaters use to cheat in the first place. A wall hack is possible because the client is aware of what’s beyond the wall, and that doesn’t need to be sent for anything that’s not visible. That increases computation on the server, so games tend to send more game state than is necessary for smoother gameplay.

Same applies for other ways of increasing the costs if detected

There should be a mix of elite players among the “tribunal” for determining whether someone is hacking. Players report other players, and the server should log enough to recreate the play session so moderators can review the gameplay to make a determination. A lot of cheating is pretty obvious to detect algorithmically, so this would be in a “review” scenario where it’s not so cut-and-dry.

But this takes a lot of resources, which cuts into profits, so I think studios tend to just throw on anti-cheat so they can shift blame (hey, anti-cheat didn’t catch it, we’ll forward your report). But I do sincerely believe it’s feasible for serious competitive games where real money is on the line (e.g. tournaments for prize money and whatnot) without clientside anti-cheat. For more casual games, a higher error rate is probably fine.

kilpatds ,
@kilpatds@mastodon.social avatar

@sugar_in_your_tea Your response about wall-hacks is my "don't tell the game anything" comment. It's really really damn slow. You typically don't want to do frame-by-frame determination of if an opponent is just in view or not (because that's a full render), so you send the info to the client once it's possible... at which point the client knows.

Even if the game isn't hacked, the video pipeline "knows", and hacks have moved to be outside of the game space (thus the move to kernel-based)

sugar_in_your_tea ,

Yup, “don’t tell the game anything” is slow, I’ll give you that. But anything that exists on the client can be hacked, even on a completely locked down console. People still cheat all the time with anti-cheat enabled, and I don’t expect that to change just because they put it in the kernel.

frame-by-frame determination

A couple thoughts:

  • can be predictive - clients already do a ton of prediction, this just moves that to the server
  • can run in parallel to normal game update logic
  • the server should have the (simplified) geometry data and can do a (relatively) cheap visibility check

The data would need to be sent a few frames ahead of time for performance reasons, so there’s risk there, but if someone can wall-hack within a few frames, that’s a good indicator that they’re cheating anyway. I’m no game dev, so I’m probably missing some significant considerations here, but it seems like this is feasible, just expensive when the alternative is a much less expensive anti-cheat service.

And I agree with your reply, this is a hard problem to solve. I just think game companies are pushing the problem onto anti-cheat devs instead of really trying to solve it themselves in a privacy and security respecting way because it’s cheaper and easier to offload a large share of that liability.

A_Random_Idiot ,
kilpatds ,
@kilpatds@mastodon.social avatar

@A_Random_Idiot That's basically a form of @sugar_in_your_tea 's suggestion about making cheating more expensive: "We'll find your cheat program later, and retroactively find that you were cheating and ban you. Well after the match ended and everyone else's game was ruined"

A_Random_Idiot ,

You are going to always be reactive to cheating.

If you are pro-active, you’ll just make it easier for cheaters to iterate and experiment and find ways around the pro-active… and what happens then? You’re back to reactive. Not to mention, pro-active anti-cheat tends to be rife with false positives, resulting in very public ban waves against innocent people.

It cant be helped, No amount of giving your butthole over to big daddy game company and their rootkits will make a game cheat-free. all they can hope for is to catch the cheaters, drop the hammer on them in bulk, so they struggle and panic to try and find out how it was detected so you can increase their cycle time before they have a new working one out.

kilpatds ,
@kilpatds@mastodon.social avatar

@A_Random_Idiot That's .... not entirely wrong, but doing more to raise the barriers higher keeps the game fun longer before the cheaters ruin it.

(Again, ... limiting discussion to competitive PvP-style games)

melpomenesclevage ,

But if youre banning people based on operating system, of what’s now the only viable consumer operating system, youre basically sacrificing 100% of ‘keep the game fun longer’ for those players.

So if that’s the philosophy, it would be wildly counterproductive to even put that on the table.

kilpatds ,
@kilpatds@mastodon.social avatar

@melpomenesclevage sacrifice 100% of 2% balanced against 5% of 98%? Are you sure that's math you want them doing?

(And based on my 2nd hand experience, "5% enjoyment" kinda seems low. The cheaters do ruin things)

melpomenesclevage ,

But people only refuse to switch to Linux because the anti cheats stop it.

And you can’t quantify joy like that. What’s your investment in windows?

kilpatds ,
@kilpatds@mastodon.social avatar

@melpomenesclevage (my personal investment in windows? 0%? I don't have a windows PC, at home or work. I've been Linux primary since ... shit, 1994 or something? I've got some "bought in store" style linux games? I remember when pre-compiled packages were a feature. I'm an old.

I'm trying to help explain the incentives driving the behavior toward kernel-level anti-cheat so that arguments against it can be well formed. I don't want that stuff infecting linux gaming)

melpomenesclevage ,

Oh. Yeah I’m not in favor of kernel level anti cheat. That’s fucking unacceptable. That’s like the third to last thing I’d ever want to give that level of access.

A_Random_Idiot ,

That’s … not entirely wrong, but doing more to raise the barriers higher keeps the game fun longer before the cheaters ruin it.

If you are pro-active, you’ll just make it easier for cheaters to iterate and experiment and find ways around the pro-active… and what happens then? You’re back to reactive

kilpatds ,
@kilpatds@mastodon.social avatar

@A_Random_Idiot Yes, I think everybody has a reactive component to their plan? In the current situation, being reactive in some form appears to be table stakes.

But keeping higher barriers (is believed?) to make it easier to do that, and keeps some of the initial noise down, and pushes the timing off.

AND PUSHING THE TIMING IS A GAIN (to the makers of competitive PvP games)

melpomenesclevage ,

Strong moderation? Shadow banning habitual cheaters to cheat leagues?

kilpatds ,
@kilpatds@mastodon.social avatar

@KrokanteBamischijf @hperrin (my wife suggested auditing suspected cheats in games like battlefield by forcing them to play in real world paintball tournaments.

I think her experience as a teacher is impacting her suggestions)

A_Random_Idiot ,

To be fair, the people at the cutting edge of modern computing are statistically very likely to be Linux users. Therefore it’s not entirely unreasonable to have some prejudice against Linux users.

Can we drop this “linux is hackerman territory for cheats” stereotype?

Most people cheat on windows. Not cause they are technical or knowledgable… but because they have a credit card

cause they buy cheats designed for windows.

The overwhelming majority of people out there cheating are cheating using tools they bought and use on windows.

So if anything, its Windows that should be treated as the pariah dog of hackers. Cause its where the credit swiping script kiddies are.

KrokanteBamischijf ,

Can we drop this “linux is hackerman territory for cheats” stereotype?

I don’t see this as a negative thing and it is absolutely true to some degree. Most of the incredibly talented low-level developers in the world (you know, those that are actually capable of making non-script kiddie hacks) have a tendency towards Linux.

So no, I’m not dropping the “Linux is a sign you might mean business” thing, especially if their idea of a desktop environment is just a collection of terminal windows neatly tiled together. We should be proud of the fact that some the most talented coders in de world choose freedom of software over anything else.

But luckily most of those people focus their efforts on different subjects. So yes, the problem is definitely on Windows with all the 14 year olds buying cheats off the darknet using their mom’s credit card (dramatized for effect).

Hadriscus ,

People buy cheats ?! Is that how this works ? So there are cheat developers making a living off this ?

A_Random_Idiot ,

Yes. Thats why cheaters are so rampant in certain games.

its not because each cheater is a elite linux hackerman, using unique and custom cheats personally created by them.

Its because they are dumb idiots with mommies credit card buying a product that some asshole has made and put up for sale to ruin everyones fun.

xkforce , in How are you all partitioning your setup?

I dont even want to think about how many partitions there are on my PC. windows has 4 or 5 just existing, then there’s root, home and swap plus 2 more for the 2 other drives. So… 9 or 10? its been a while since I had a reason to care.

As for what you should do, if you are replacing windows, it wont really matter what the format on the windows part is because youre going to need to back up the save data and reinstall those games eventually anyway. You cant really run the same game installs on both OSes.

jimmy90 , in Linux is officially at 99% for me.

i only switched over quite recently (a few years ago)

i swear there has been significant improvements in wifi, bluetooth, gpu support, gaming over the last 10 years that made me think it was now good enough

also there was areas where linux was outdoing windows for quite some time; system wide audio equalizer, customization generally, home services and self hosting, development tools

bigmclargehuge OP ,
@bigmclargehuge@lemmy.world avatar

Linux audio is really under appreciated. I’m one of the nutjobs that still uses a PCI sound card and I’ve never had to install a third party driver. I can manually adjust the output and EQ for every port, disable or enable them on the fly, etc. The only thing I’m missing is hardware EAX support for older games but I’ve kind of accepted that’s just a dragon I’ll always be chasing.

Urist ,
@Urist@lemmy.ml avatar

What EQ do you use? I’ve been using Easy Effects for a while, but have been plagued by crackling and stereo sound only playing on one ear lately.

bigmclargehuge OP ,
@bigmclargehuge@lemmy.world avatar

Give alsaequal a try. I actually haven’t fiddled with it a whole lot so I can’t vouch too much but it seems worth a shot.

UckyBon ,

This somehow reminds me of my first Ubuntu installation (Dapper Drake). One of my friends gave me a PCI TV Tuner card. They couldn’t get it to work for some reason, drivers that wouldn’t install or something. I got the box and the CD 💿 (drivers for Windows) too. The card worked out-of-the-box after first boot. I only had to install some frontend from the default repo to use it for recording. Amazing times!

jimmy90 ,

so true and it’s not just equalizers, it’s compressors and all the other tools for solving audio problems

SkabySkalywag ,

Noice. Still to chicken too go full into the deep end of the pool. lemmy posts have been slowing talking me into it more and more!

Empricorn , in How are you all partitioning your setup?

My GPT setup:

  • sda (SSD) ntfs 477 GiB Windows
  • sdb (SSD) ext4 224 GiB Linux
  • sdc (HDD) ntfs 931 GiB Windows Storage
  • sdd (HDD) ext4 931 GiB Linux Storage

I only use half of each drive for its stated purpose. Then I backup onto a different drive in case of hardware failure. (This obviously does not protect against fire or theft.) Not exactly what you asked, but I’d already started copy/pasting…

VinesNFluff , in How are you all partitioning your setup?
@VinesNFluff@pawb.social avatar

Nvme ssd, 480 gigs = Linux root ext4, with a smol /boot/efi/ partition

Sata ssd, 480 gigs = windows install

Hdd, 1 Tb = Linux home ext4

External usb3.0 2tb Hdd = shared storage exFat

wax , in Linux is officially at 99% for me.

Many hardware manufacturers unfortunately require windows for firmware updates. Fwupd isn’t nearly used enough unfortunately

sugar_in_your_tea ,

Most (all?) motherboard vendors have a separate download you can put on a USB to load directly. Other hardware may have something similar.

wax ,

Indeed, motherboards are usually ok. I’ve had to switch to windows for SSDs a few times, as well as a monitor and various peripherals

markus99 ,

dont buy them? Or are you their bitch?

cholesterol , in Linux is officially at 99% for me.

If AMD wasn’t already cheering to Valve, they have to be at this point

russjr08 , in Linux is officially at 99% for me.

Hey OP, could you give a brief rundown on what settings you’re using for ALVR? I was gifted a Quest 2 and would love to get it running on Linux. I got the ALVR app sideloaded on the Quest, but the performance seems to be atrocious. I also haven’t been able to get the audio routed to the headset properly, not sure if that’s something you got working either - if so I’d love to know the secret sauce for that one too!

bigmclargehuge OP , (edited )
@bigmclargehuge@lemmy.world avatar

I left most things default. When I first set it up I played with all the settings and made everything worse lol.

I can tell you that I set the resolution to the highest setting, the refresh rate to 120hz and the bitrate to the quality settings. Everything else, I left default. I found that this resulted in the best clarity while not really making the artifacting/lag any worse. I’m still playing with it though.

If you have the option in SteamVR’s game specific settings to enable “Legacy motion smoothing”, apparently that improves things noticably. For some reason motion smoothing is completely unavailable to me though so I can’t personally attest.

I’ve heard audio was an issue, but in my case (Arch plus KDE6), it was as simple as picking my audio output in the system tray dropdown. I could stream it to my headset or send it out of my headphones I have plugged in.

Edit: I’m gonna link this becaust I found it while looking into why motion smoothing was unavailable. Apparently disabling async reprojection via a config file can give a noticable performance boost. I’ve yet to try it but I’ll add another edit when I’m back at my rig long enough to test it out.

russjr08 ,

Interesting, I’ll give it another go and try out your recommendations - thank you!!

bigmclargehuge OP ,
@bigmclargehuge@lemmy.world avatar

No worries, good luck with it

bigmclargehuge OP ,
@bigmclargehuge@lemmy.world avatar

Adding a little update. Recently reinstalled my system as things were getting cluttered. For some reason, I was unable to install ALVR (or the git version) from the AUR. When building the AUR package manually, I’d get to 99% and the terminal would just close, yay resulted in the same error.

However, the portable .tar release of the latest version works perfectly. Performance is even better, I’ve had fewer bugs/connectivity issues, and once I followed the official Settings Tutorial and this article on how to disable SteamVR Async Reprojection things have been working 99% as well as they were on Windows. I have noticed occasional quality degradation, but it was never detrimental to the experience overall. And, it’s worth noting that ALVR can function over USB with a link cable, so that should eliminate any issues caused by wireless streaming.

Just thought I’d report my experience and hopefully give some folks a push to try it out. This is a huge step for the overall Linux experience IMO, as it’s very quickly opening up an entire aspect of gaming/computing in general really that, until a few months ago, was effectively not viable outside of Windows.

russjr08 ,

Thank you for the update! I just gave it another go and don’t seem to have any audio, and it still seems quite jittery - I’ll have to play around with it some more and see what I can get working on it :)

bigmclargehuge OP ,
@bigmclargehuge@lemmy.world avatar

Yeah im not sure about audio. I’m using pipewire and it seems to work fine OOTB with both the built in Quest 2 speakers, and my sound card audio

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