Have you seen protondb? A pretty impressive number of games just work. Really we are at the point now where games that don’t run are more the exception, and usually it is due to Anti-cheat incompatibility or some very specific issue.
what does “few” mean in this context? With proton the number of games (developed for Windows) now simply work. And without a bloated OS full of spyware they seem to run actually faster.
However, seeing as everyone has chosen to give me a tuneup with so many downvotes, I’m switching my Linux dual boot from Debian to Manjaro, a supposedly more game-friendly distro. So far Steam has installed just fine, but now I need to rearrange some partitions to make space to try out a few non-steam games and see if they work (stuff from EA/Origin and Epic).
Could you perhaps give us some examples of these games that don’t work? There aren’t really that many of these days, thanks to valve’s work on proton and thanks to the steam deck making developers want to at least not actively break their games the majority work out of the box. Even non-steam games and launchers
EA’s Battlefield franchise right off the top of my head. Tons of effort to get it to start, when it finally did start the sound was a wreck, couldn’t get the resolution set right and the FPS was probably 12-20.
I think I tried Elite: Dangerous, and that wouldn’t start at all.
Lutris appears to have installers available for both of those games. And I know some people that play Elite dangerous on Linux I asked them and they said they didn’t have any issues with it. Was that perhaps very close to its initial release or something? It could just be better now
I tried out all of this a couple times, most recently few years ago before COVID. While I realize nobody here on a pro-Linux sub wants to hear it, Linux is still a minefield of different distros and versions, many of which don’t work quite the same in various subtle ways that can be infuriating to someone trying to grab something off a repository that should work, but doesn’t for the aforementioned reasons. Whereas people here scoff at the premise that this is a flaw, for the vast majority of people it’s the very reason Linux isn’t mainstream outside the IT world. Yeah, unpopular opinion, but it’s from someone who’s been trying to love Linux for 25 years and gets put off by all the little issues.
i won’t argue with you there. i fucking hate people who push mint,Ubuntu, popos, or anything based on apt. it’s literally not designed to be up to date and rolling. People try to band-aid it on with repos but it just leads to systems eating themselves.
valve went with arch Linux on the steamdeck for a reason, it’s designed, from its core, to be rolling. which gaming needs. you need the latest drivers, libs, wine, etc. and there are easy to go arch installers. my favorite is EndeavorOS. sadly you get a similar problem in reverse with shit like manjaro. where they take a perfectly working rolling system and attempt to “stabilize” it with custom repos that arbitrarily hold packages back. and it tends to break a lot.
it’s the double edged sword of open source. i can do what i want, but so can everyone else. and the voice of the stupid is almost never a minority
Mines just a bit worse by that measure, and on the clickplay measure was about 20% tier 1, 20% tier 2, about 15% tier 3, and about 8% each tiers 4 and 5.
I feel like click play is a better measure for average users you’re trying to convert since it’s “how well does it work if I just try to start it” as opposed to “how well can it be made to work if I tinker with it enough”.
no, especially not. After messing/locking down gaming for 2 decades and people having doing the job in porting/reverse engineer their API, etc… they will simply exploit it without any effort.
MSFT is evil, it does not “love” opensource (which is only TS and .NET), it just came with their massive war treasure and eat the effort of people while having been the MAIN responsible of slowing down innovation!
They pretend they love FOSS. “Look, we own GitHub, the biggest FOSS code sharing platform!”. Of course, because you bought it you morons.
For the love of God, please Valve never sell out. I love the current state of things and every day I dread someone might get a bad idea and fuck it all up for the rest of us to enrich himself.
I am not sure if there are any failsafes in the BoD at Valve, but I am sure as long as Gabe is at the helm, we are all safe.
only millennials and JS soyboy devs think that MSFT is good opensource boy, they didn’t grow up during while Ballmer/Gates were in charge and didn’t notice how nasty MSFT was for the computing and still is.
Yeah, I’d be worried about Apple if they ever got serious about gaming other than mobile games. Netflix and Amazon are medium concerns, though there’s a good chance they’d go for mobile games for any sort of gaming push. Google just lost any trust they ever might’ve had with game developers by killing off Stadia.
Yeah, the mess Google made of Stadia pretty much guarantees that, even if they try to get into the games industry again, nobody will have any trust or goodwill towards them.
I’ve been gaming on Linux for a while now. The pace of improvement in Proton has been staggering since the steam deck was released. I noticed the other day that I’ve gotten so used to games just working now that I don’t even bother to check to protonDB before I purchase. I’m sure that won’t bite me any time soon -_-
I agree, I haven’t experienced the stereotypical “WiFi doesn’t work” (except for a college network), but I have had issues with screen brightness not working (though seems to be fixed in newer versions), and issues with the Nvidia graphics card that I can’t just swap out with an AMD because it’s a laptop and I don’t want to buy a whole new one.
No idea why you’re being downvoted. I wish I could daily-drive Linux on my laptop, but that would come at the cost of slashed battery life, permanently on keyboard backlight, no more fingerprint sensor, issues with speakers and so on. Even after years of honourable enthusiasts trying to reverse-engineer the Windows drivers, it’s just still not there. Laptops will take a while to follow suite, but Linux really does need to take a larger portion of the market before manufacturers start being interested in Linux support.
And before I also get downvoted, yes you can get a 10 year old ThinkPad and happily install Linux on it, but please realize that not all people want to limit themselves in their choice of hardware and it’s the software that should adapt to the hardware, not the other way around.
I switched to linux on my laptop i had to do 4 reinstall to get my nvidia gpu to work and as of late my speaker arent recognised anymore, despite reinstaling pulse and alsa. One of my informatitian friend that has a linux laptop had gpu issue too, the laptop at work need frequent overseeing by the it to work properly etc etc…
I love linux and I truly think we NEED to get our hands back on our tech, and understand better the technology we use, but yeah… If you really need your laptop to be fully operational quickly and you’re not tech savvy well think twice…
For stability? A missing feature or software you need I get, but stability? Which distro/DE are you using? Please don’t say you’re running Gentoo and some crazy TWM setup or something like that lol
Stability to me was one of the biggest reasons to use Linux - it does exactly what I expect it to do, never breaks, updates never break shit.
I’ve not had a single breakage in the past ~4 years I’ve been on Fedora Workstation, despite me often moving to the beta channel. Pretty nice for an up-to-date distro.
Granted, I’ve also been on some less stable distros/DEs (in my case, it used to be Manjaro’s KDE version). Perhaps yours is similar, since you claim to have extreme stability problems?
I cannot say the same for Windows, where things randomly stop working, I still occasionally get bluescreens, it shits the bed when I change hardware, etc. the last time I booted into Windows my audio stopped working entirely, and no matter how many times I reinstalled audio drivers or did a system restore, nothing would fix it. I ended up having to buy an external DAC.
I’m was talking about game stability. This is a gaming related topic right? Linux is stable but games had some issues.
Truthfully nothing major that stopped me from playing but I had to mess with proton in steam from time to time. Most recently the Last of Us crashes on start, not sure why it was fine previously. Also, there were some games anti cheat did not work and I needed to play in Windows.
Also, I have consistently had issues streaming to my steam Deck. Windows isn’t perfect either but it’s more likely to work the with windows. Sure maybe it’s my Nvidia GPU, but saying switch to amd does make my setup more stable.
They also sell non-DRM software. And most importantly they invest the money they make from selling those games into developing Linux so it’s better for everyone, I’ll take a corporation that uses my money to make things better for myself than one that sells “only” DRM free" games (when it’s convenient, because GoG also sells DRMd games in case you didn’t knew)
I don’t get why people find that funny, he’s absolutely right. It’s gotten better but Linux is still requiring a lot more tinkering compared to Windows, and mainstream doesn’t do tinkering. Let me give some examples as well.
I have windows and fedora dual booted. I also have 4 physical drives in the PC, 1 for windows, 1 for Linux and then 2 separate drives to keep windows data and Linux data. If I do a clean install of windows and want to play steam games all I need to do is let windows update run, install steam, direct steam to access the downloaded games on my secondary drive and the rest is “Steam magic”. If I do a clean install of Fedora and I want to play Steam I have to do system update, then manually install graphics drivers, then install steam, then mount the secondary drive then direct to steam to the secondary drive and the rest is “Steam magic”. If I don’t want to do the last two steps again, because Fedora doesn’t automount secondary drives, I need to also set up automounting by messing with the terminal and confog files. Honestly, you lost the mainstream gamer the moment they had to manually install graphics card drivers (because you need to do it through a terminal).
Another less important example, but one I still found funny, is when I wanted to make a new distro installer. I’ve used balena etcher to flash my stick on Windows, but I didn’t want to reboot into It Windows so I installed it on Fedora, downloaded the image I wanted to flash, started balena and added the file. I get some header error. I didn’t feel like troubleshooting so I reboot into Windows, download the exact same image, started balena and added the file. No errors and I could flash without any issues. Same file and (in theory) same software but it works on Windows and doesn’t work on Linux.
And of course there’s the Nvidia cards sucking thing, which is not at all suitable for mainstream considering almost 80% of steam users are using Nvidia cards. I get that’s almost entirely Nvidias fault but it’s still an issue with Linux. When your entire system black screens as KDE plasma is booting up even an above average user is not going to know how to troubleshoot that.
Linux is still requiring a lot more tinkering compared to Windows
As a long time windows user who’s just got a side install of Mint for funnies until.a faster drive I can dedicate to it arrives: lol, no. That’s why people are laughing at them.
I use fedora and have to…
Pick a less annoying distro then, babe. I installed Steam in one click (during OS setup actually) and then logged in, enabled proton, and started using it with the games on an external drive. Literally easier than windows cuz Mint installed it with the OS and I didn’t have to go to Steams website.
nVidia cards sucking thing
My 2080TI has worked flawlessly on Mint without any tinkering. Used the Nvidia driver manager thing and boom, running games. They even run at a bigger fps on average (about 10%).
Sounds like you used a specific distro and think those problems exist with every version of Linux. They do not, and there’s a reason why Mint is most often the recommended distro for those unwilling to tinker
And I’m not even gonna pretend that Mint is perfect, it’s not! For example my sound card just doesn’t work in it despite the OS being aware of literally every aspect of it. But the issues I’ve had daily driving it have been LESS than daily driving windows 10 even after said win 10 install has already had years of customization and tweaking done to it.
You do realize that just kicks the ball down to a different problem that prevents from mainstream use, picking the wrong distro?
That said I’ll give mint a go. EDIT. Right, no HDR support not even in sight, that’s why I went with Nobara and Fedora in the first place because KDE is at least trying. But at least it reminded me that it’s not just the tinkering that’s preventing mainstream adoption, it’s also the lack of features.
It’s ready for a lot more than that, can you tell me something that Linux can’t do without mentioning a third party company that refuses to support Linux?
He means they have a problem with Linux users. What other reason would there be to buy up games and remove native Linux support the second its removed from the steam store? (Rocket League for example)
The Epic Games Store doesn’t have a Linux client, so it’s understandable from a business perspective to not develop a product no new customers will be able to buy.
It’s a middle finger to existing customers though, especially with the outdated Linux version being downloaded by default. They should prioritize proton to enable online play on multiplayer game, but as established, they don’t care about Steam Linux users
Yes, those launchers are great. But I don’t think Epic will ever acknowledge third-party clients exist, so their existence makes no difference from their perspective.
Eh… “gaslighting 101” – swears randomly (against the victim/target), throws in a (non-random) praise to “raise the fire even more”, refuses to elaborate.
Unless you’re on a good downstream like SteamOS, I’d suggest switching to something stable cutting edge (Fedora or Nobara if you want to put in zero effort).
Arch by itself will give you way the hell too many possible problems. You could waste hours on DKMS alone.
Mint will also work, but it has the downside of having slower updates to software packages.
Huh, interesting. I thought that Fedora was following the Debian stable model. Well then my next recommendation would be Fedora based I think.
But I disagree that bleeding edge means you are an alpha tester. That means developers are releasing alpha willy nilly. I’d even argue that at a certain pace of Hardware and Software development, the latest version of software you have the better, since it has a certain possibility that the Hardware will already be supported.
Fedora is what I’d describe as cutting edge, but not bleeding edge. It’s still behind from source, and is semi-rolling release, so it’s further behind than Arch but way ahead of stable/fixed release distros like Debian
DirectX is a Windows thing, so you’ll just have those calls translated to Vulkan under the hood (DXVK). You’ll probably get better performance from just setting it to Vulkan directly.
Edit: As some others say, for BG3 specifically, DXVK does a really good job. My personal experience is that “the best” option is very patch dependent. At launch Vulkan was best, then after a few patches did DXVK ran better, but personally I’m back to straight Vulkan, for no other reason than wanting to be a +1 in the statistics.
OpenGL is a bit like Vulkan, but discontinued since… 2014, with a single update since then. It was actually stopped because Vulkan seemed better, and both API’s were maintained by the same organisation.
In general it’s more likely to work on older devices, but would be less performant than Vulkan.
If you have an Nvidia GPU definitely pick DirectX. On AMD it’s more of a tossup, depends on the game and the features in question but generally it won’t need to translate OpenGL, so it has higher maximum performance potential.
To expand - DirectX is a proprietary Windows solution. Any time you pick it on Linux, it will run through a translation layer
OpenGL/Vulkan are cross-platform
OpenGL is to DirectX 11 as Vulkan is to DirectX 12
Microsoft kept the same branding, but also followed in Vulkans/Metals footsteps of using lower level calls to the hardware. This makes the graphics drivers simpler, and can be way more performant because the CPU doesn’t have to do as much
That shouldn’t be a problem, both Gnome and KDE gave decent accessibility features as far as I’m aware. Or at the very least, it’s got zoom, and the cursor can easily be changed to something of your liking. I think KDE’s also got the macOS “shake cursor to make it extra large so you can spot it” available.
I’m more concerned about
I also only have some 2 hours a week for videogames. I can’t afford the time to tinker, after the transition and setup period.
That’s not a lot of time, and if you’d rather not spend it tinkering I would stick with Windows.
I would at least make it a dual boot setup, so you can switch between Windows and Linux as needed. Don’t have time to tinker? Just do it in Windows until you have time.
It’s an older interface than DP and has “better” support for audio (I.e. all of those proprietary passthrough audio formats that home theater setups support) so it became dominant in TVs. Monitors are still DP first but likely have a HDMI port as well.
That kind of makes sense though. I figure they assume you’ll have one computer hooked up and then a bunch of consumer devices that all use HDMI. And if you need a second computer hooked up you can also use HDMI if needed. Probably makes the most sense to the most people as having more DP in place of HDMI would just mean the average user couldn’t hook up as many devices since (almost?) no consumer devices use DP unfortunately.
That also includes money to upgrade, for example, display equipment in virtually every office conference room, classroom, home theater, etc. It took a long time to shake VGA in those settings and now that that’s largely been dropped in favor of HDMI it’ll be a tall order to chase after the next best thing with no benefit noticeable to 99.9% of people.
I know it’s probably for cost cutting. But the monitor does indeed have a DP input option. Maybe the HDMI is included because it has inbuilt speakers and as far as I know those aren’t usable thrpugh DP and I don’t know if it has a separate audio input.
In my experience, its cause monitors are already over priced, and adding a display port to it seems to add at least another 100 on top of that.
Which is why I prefer HDMI. Less cable headache too, since I only have to keep one type of cable in stock and so i can easily switch for testing/diagnostics/layout change purposes.
I didnt say they did, I said they seem to, since in my experience every monitor that had similar spec, but had a display port, was about 100 dollars on top of whatever the hdmi only one had.
If you’re looking for an indie alternative, Roboquest seems like a good recent shooter for two players. It’s on both Steam and GOG. Gunfire Reborn also seems fun.
These aren’t indies, but there’s also Deep Rock Galactic, L4D2, and of course the original Helldivers.
Awesome! I can’t wait to generalize the average of 10 cherry-picked games with tons of Linux work against the 2k+ in my library! I bet I can pick up CS2 with this knowledge and get 10%+ better performance!
The video is pretty neat. I’m just not sure what we gain from it.
I really like that you are benchmarking. I feel like there should also be something actionable here. What do I, as a Linux gaming consumer, need to look for? What are the things that will tell me a game will run better or worse?
Usually on an AMD GPU things run better. Then you look at the API. If it’s a DX9/DX10/DX11 game it will most certainly run better on Linux. On the other hand if it’s a DX12 game you will probably get the same performance most usually and ±10% in a few cases.
So the main thing to remember is to use an AMD GPU on Linux. If you’re on Nvidia you’re better off with Windows most probably, unless you care enough for the workflow benefits Linux offers.
I’m sorry, but if you see a 25% difference in a benchmark, that means your methodology is somehow flawed. A few percentage in either direction would be believable, but this difference would be so comical if true, that extra wariness is needed.
There’s a few thing that look a bit off to me, but most importantly it seems like your OBS settings are wildly different between systems. It’s a bit hard to make out, but it seems like you’re doing CPU-based encoding on Linux and GPU-based encoding on Windows.
I am not doing CPU Encoding on any system but there is a difference indeed.
Linux is Gstreamer VAAPI H265 and Windows GPU Encoding H264. In fact, Windows should have had an easier time encoding, I didn’t realize that until now. Also asI have commented on the video the game is on a 980 Pro on Windows and on an HDD on Linux so Linux can be much faster. I will rectify that by getting an SSD to put all my games on in the future.
Beyond that, the methodology is not flawed, if you can even believe that. Everything is on the video for comments exactly like this one.
I see. As I said, it was a bit hard to make out in the video.
In fact, Windows should have had an easier time encoding
Granted, I don’t know too much about AMD’s video encoding solutions, but from a cursory glance on the internet, it seems like their H.264 solution is quite bad compared to H.265. Given that the game is GPU-bottlenecked and your CPU isn’t stressed at all anyway, I’d recommend recording these tests using the CPU to eliminate more variables.
Beyond that, the methodology is not flawed, if you can even believe that.
Well, yeah. As much as I’d like to believe, these differences are way too big for me to do that, even with everything you’ve shown in the video. Occam’s Razor would suggest that it’s much more likely that the benchmark/setup is simply flawed in some way, rather than multiple teams of OS-, hardware-, and game developers not realizing a gigantic 25% performance improvement on the table that’s somehow more or less “accidentally” fixed just by using Linux/Proton/DXVK.
Not saying you’re wrong, but it’d need a good chunk more evidence for me to believe that.
I just edited my comment right as you posted, so I’ll put it as a separate comment now:
It would also be interesting to see this game running through DXVK on Windows. That way the calls made to the GPU should be virtually identical, eliminating possible problems with DX11 in the AMD driver.
Yeah I'm a grey-beard, my first experience was Slackware in the nineties. I've been using Linux since but usually on servers and in VMs only. Recently I've been able to go 100% thanks to Proton. I really enjoy the progress made with tech such as systemd, wayland, btrfs, proton and flatpak. Though a lot of grey-beards are very resentful of these I feel they represent real positive progress. There's also support for kb backlight and other features of my laptop.
I'm also really enjoying PRIME rendering on my laptop, using Intel and Nvidia at the same time for different things. It works beautifully/seamlessly and even more so that I can just type "yay" and get a new Nvidia driver or a matching driver if there's a kernel update without having to do any babysitting manually.
I do everything on Linux now, Office work, Rustdev and I play games like BG3/Guildwars2 simply by launching them from Steam.
The only pain is that I have to configure each application manually to use Wayland, that's a bother.
I’m 100% Linux on a 5950x and a 5700xt. I’ve had pretty much no trouble at all. The GPU works out of the box, and with the exception of enabling Proton for non-verified games, I’ve only ever had to click install and play. To be fair though, I only play single-player/non-competitive games, so I don’t worry about anticheat at all.
These days Windows games give me less grief on Linux than they ever did on Windows.
I’ve run an rx580 and am currently running a 7900xtx. I have very few issues. Every once in a while a few games will break when I update Mesa, but I’m on a rolling release distro, so that’d probably happen less often on something like Ubuntu. Honestly I probably have fewer issues on Linux than I did on windows.
I’m team red on Linux all the way. Ryzen 5 2600 (soon upgraded) + 6750XT. Mesa works out of the box and hasn’t broken yet. The only thing that caught me off-guard is having to manually enable VKD3D for newer DX12 games – I recommend using a launcher like Heroic (very easy, Steam-like front-end for several stores) or Lutris (universal, exposes more advanced options) to manage your games. You should also look at ProtonDB for compatibility and tweaking tips, and Lutris install scripts in case a game needs a specific framework to be installed.
There are still a lot of games that expect some XWindows stuff. I’ve run into it, but not too frequently.
Generally, the fix is setting an environment variable that tells a library backend to expect Wayland - something they could do in code with minimal effort. It kinda makes me wonder if there’s some common ‘port your game to steam/Linux!’ tutorial that they’re following.
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