The gaming support is what got me to completely switch to Linux for daily driver. Havnt used windows in 3 years thanks to proton. My computing experience has never been better.
Can I ask what got you initially interested, and were there any speedbumps you had to deal with on the way? As a long-time Linux user, I see a lot of pushback against it from gamers online, and I’m curious to hear about your pathway.
Not OP, but personally i got bored of windows and wanted more control over my OS, especially as internet surveillance and data harvesting continue to be on the rise.
In my opinion a lot of the pushback comes from the fact that most distributions(especially recommended starters like Mint) don’t come with the packages you need for gaming out of the box. Things like Lutris/vkd3d/gamescope/dxvk/gamemode/mangohud/WINE/ProtonGE, etc.
As someone who shifted to linux over the past year or so there was a metric fuckload of things i needed to learn and things i needed to tweak, especially when things went wrong. To the point i have over 10-20k character count tutorials i wrote for myself whenever i need to reinstall from scratch. These days i can get everything up and running fairly quickly, but that initial learning experience wasn’t all fun and games for sure.
I had a leg up by already having my feet wet in linux server/virtual machines, but for someone who’s coming directly from windows with zero experience and wants things to just work out of the box i can see why so many aren’t interested. It doesn’t help nvidia drivers are still horrible(in terms of desktop feel) for one of the most popular desktop environments for windows converts out there, KDE. Don’t get me started on how you somehow need to know to disable compositing(or toggle via hotkey constantly like i do when i’m forced to use xorg instead of wayland) if you have more than one monitor in KDE or else your FPS will effectively halve itself.
Linux as a whole has a MASSIVE user experience problem if you want to do anything outside of basic office work and web browsing. Distributions like Garuda(my personal choice) help a lot because they give you the ability to have all of that stuff in the OOBE or an easy to use GUI, but that still only goes so far when little niggling issues crop up and you effectively need to relearn your entire workflow. It’s just not something everybody is willing to do for the sake of not having Satya Nadella know when and where they poop.
My biggest hope is valve finally publishing SteamOS as an actual desktop OS. Because i know they could do it well as they seem to be keenly aware of the needs of the average gaming user, unlike most distribution maintainers these days which just assume you’re a linux intermediate by default and have completely forgotten the long and arduous path to mastery the OS requires compared to rock-dead-simple windows.
Did you try the Nvidia version of PopOS? IME the “out of box” experience is loads better than Windows, and the install/configuration takes like 1/4 of the time.
I see – arch just seemed like a huge management pain to get all of my different software stacks working and playing nicely together when I last played with it. It’s also pretty easy to switch desktop environments regardless of your distro, but I don’t mind gnome (plus gnome-tweaks).
I’m as happy as you all, but having a teenager that starts to mod games, I realize the whole modding ecosystem of many popular games is Windows only.
Many peoples say you should play on pc because of modding. I would say from a Linux perspective, having the modding community switching to Linux is the next big step.
What kinds of things are you having a hard time modding in Linux? I generally stay away from AAA games and especially AAA games that don’t have mod support. There’s gimp. There’s blender. There’s audacity. There’s an abundance of good text editors. Almost every file explorer is easier to use and more powerful than the one in Windows. Java development kit kind of sucks in Linux with that export path variable nonsense that never ever works correctly but other than that, I don’t think I could do half the modding in Windows that I do in Linux.
When the game has no official modding support you need base modifications probably already compiled by someone else with who knows really what exact modification.
An example is Grand Theft Auto San Andreas. Base, unmodded game is actually Platinum on Wine’s AppDB. But when you mod (by running injecting scripts via a modified dinput8.dll file) the game gets very unstable no matter what mod unlike on Windows.
You mean mod managers? A lot of those actually still work under WINE and you can even run them in a game’s prefix using Winetricks and Protontricks (which is how a lot of us do it)
It performs exactly as expected, all mod managers really do is automate putting files where they need to go.
Maybe you should have asked that in a regular Linux community. Not really game related.
I would, in general, not recommend to modify any existing operating systems. Better get yourself a small SSD exclusively for Linux. Much less risk of damaging anything.
I agree with this sentiment. Dual boot on a single drive (or raid0 in this case) can be done but Windows has a tendency to rewrite the boot partition which makes you unable to boot into Linux. I’m sure there are workarounds, but having them seperate is just much easier.
If you install Linux in it’s entirety to a seperate SSD, you select to boot by default into that SSD which should give you the option to boot Windows instead. The other way round is more difficult and tends to break by reasons mentioned above.
I’m not sure if having a raid is related in this situation, but if you have two drives on the machine and one already has windows then all you needed to is boot into a distro live session and install it on the empty drive. That’s all. Also, I wouldn’t start with Arch Linux. Try something more user friendly to install if you’re new to Linux.
I found this to be more or less impossible on my AM4 platform. The AMD RAID kernel module didn’t work under any distro. Fire up an Ubuntu live environment and see if you can detect and read the contents of your Windows environment. That should give you a good sense for what is possible. Otherwise I recommend installing to a separate NVME as I have.
All 4 games that I have installed, and they used to work fine but then I switched from Debian 11 to Fedora 38 and this issue started.
Somewhere along the loading process a “wineboot.exe” blank windows appears depending on the wine version (Happens with Proton) and stays for a while. (I will add this to the post)
I’ve seen lots of issues mentioned with F38 and gaming for some reason. Maybe try Lutris as well so you can quickly switch wine profiles and try different things out. I believe Heroic also let’s you debug with different profiles as well.
Dual booting to a single drive(or an array) is a recipe for disaster. You’d be much better off putting each OS on it’s own separate drive, and setting arch as the boot distro since grub will allow you to switch to windows if need be. Windows has a tendency to screw with boot partitions so it’s more trouble than it’s worth to install it “alongside” on a single drive/raided drives.
RAID0 on nvme barely does anything anyways(especially for gaming,) if anything it’s worse as it makes some of the lower que depth operations(and latency) slower.
So to your question, you can in theory, but ideally you shouldn’t.
I’m committed right now to a Win 10 AME and EndeavourOS Dual Boot, and back when I first started running such a setup, Windows (8, 8.1, 10) would always overwrite the boot sector with it’s own loader when installed. You can get a dual boot from grub working by deliberately partitioning before installing Windows, then whichever Linux, making sure to install grub during. I gave up on that hassle after one round and now I just use separate drives for each OS.
Which is why you generally don’t want NVME raid. You’ll never, ever use that much sequential in a consumer environment, and game loading mostly uses random reads rather than sequential. What makes an OS feel snappy and responsive is the lower que depths(i.e q1t1,) which actually get worse or stay about the same when you raid flash together.
The only time i feel like raiding them together is worth it is if you’re lazy and want one big storage blob, or if you have unique circumstances that demand ridiculous amounts of ingest speed, like with 4k footage.
If Steam can recognize the input from the controller, but the other program cannot, it means the OS is getting the input, and this Chiaki program either doesn’t have permissions to read the input, or it’s looking in the wrong place. I’m not seeing much documentation for it unfortunately, but you can try starting it from a terminal to try and get some debug output when it runs and see if it’s throwing any errors.
Well, you COULD, but very few companies port now due to Apple refusing to update their OpenGL drivers in favor of Metal. Nowadays it’s a bit better, with MoltenVK providing Vulkan support, but you’re still mostly limited to Apple Arcade games and emulators for your gaming needs
MacOS still has horrible support for wine. Linux’s implementation of proton has become so good, that r/wine_gaming essentially has become nothing but MacOS helpdesk tickets now!
Those devs have a boner for huge corporations for some reason. They hate anything that is “community driven”. Fuck’em, we will manage without them like we always have.
Those devs have a boner for huge corporations for some reason. They hate anything that is “community driven”. Fuck’em, we will manage without them like we always have.
SteamOS isn’t a community project. It’s a corporate project. It’s just that Valve themselves aren’t even pushing for native SteamOS games. There was an interview once with one of the SteamOS guys who merely said in passing during an interview that native games are better but that remark was lost in pretty much all reporting. Even developers of games based on Unity don’t care to export Linux builds because Windows builds work just fine (until they don’t because a Proton update breaks something).
Quick search shows only like 30 of developers as a whole use Mac’s and I’m sure share is lower there because I know plenty of devs using macbooks that are running Linux or Windows. If we are talking game developers as a whole then that percentage of osx devs is far far smaller than the general usage. Windows using devs still dominate as a whole, Linux is not far behind, MacOS is a very vocal yet, smaller in reality group.
@emergencyfood@UnaSolaEstrellaLibre I would spend money on a great Linux laptop that could game at 1440p max settings but I have not found the one, yet. Any recs?
We don’t bother with Linux ports anymore, instead they just added directX and win32 application support to Linux so it can just run the native Windows application.
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