That version number doesn’t look right and probably isn’t the driver (given it’s well before the 7xxx cards were released). Make sure you have a recent version of mesa and the kernel (and vulkan drivers) and that amdvlk and amdgpu-pro are not installed.
You should be using flatpak everything you can in any modern Linux distro, to be honest. Flatpak packaging and dependencies ensure that everything that you’d have to hunt down and optionally install then configure on your bare system is just provided and works by default.
Fedora Silverblue is awesome for taking that to the extreme.
SteamOS is based on arch linux, and I joke that when someone merge a pull request on github, Arch starts to build their package.
EndevourOS is basically arch linux for beginners, they have their own repositories but just for some tools, just cool stuff.
About Manjaro I would recommend to not use it, not because of the reasons’ ppl common raise, for me, it was actually good when I used it, but they try to be “stable” as PopOS in their default branch, so you will never get the latest stuff.
I don’t like Nobara because it is based on Fedora, a semi-rolling-release distro, so some packages don’t update regularly and wait until next release, they probably update everything related to graphics and games but I do not only play games on my machine, I never used Nobara tho.
Said that, I play a lot more than I should, and I use EndevourOS.
As someone that was on a straight Arch install for years I’ve come to appreciate Manjaro + their holding back of non-critical updates for a couple weeks for additional testing. Between that and sticking to LTS kernel versions I’ve run into way fewer issues (not that being on the bleeding edge for updates was that bad, but problems certainly came up occasionally).
I recently bought an nvidia gpu and I won’t do it again. Forget nvidia and linux. They work together at this moment but very much meh. Proprietary driver and lots of little issues with games. Maybe those also surface with amd but I doubt it.
And Guild Wars 2 is nowadays also on Steam, making it even easier to get into it. Note for anyone who previously played GW2 before it came to Steam: You can also use the Steam version if you add “-provider Portal” as a launch parameter.
I haven’t tried this myself, but do you happen to know exactly which model of MacBook you have?
I did some searching and found a (very old) Debian Wiki article saying that the MacBook 1,1 and 2,1 require 32-bit UEFI, and in the case of the 2,1, this is despite the CPU being 64-bit. Though that’s unlikely to be the case here given that those Ubuntu variants reach the boot screen.
Although it doesn’t get many updates anymore, feels like it’s on maintenance mode. It supports installing both Linux and Windows versions of games and even launching the Windows version with Wine, although without any DXVK/VKD3D options, it’s kinda bare-bones, but for the generally simple indie games on the platform it usually works fine.
Windows redistributables are installed in each game’s Proton (Wine) prefix directory, not globally. However, I have seen an example of Proton continually forgetting that it had already installed .Net for a certain game, which turned out to be due to a registry entry not getting set during install. If you’ve found a situation like this, it’s probably worth reporting on the Proton issue for that game.
people are really big on flatpaks right now but avoided that due to issues with like the two native linux games that still exist in Steam (mostly joking).
I don’t know what issues you encountered, but if you’re interested in the Flatpak, it might be worth trying those games again, possibly with Steam Linux Runtime manually set in the game’s compatibility options. Recent runtime versions have changed how they provide libraries to native linux games.
Somewhere late in the Proton 5.x cycle (I think it was 5.13) Valve introduced Steam Runtime version 2: Soldier, which uses bubblewrap containers to solve various problems with host system libraries, but also broke some things. For example, it wants a newish version of bwrap and no longer works inside most other containers (except for Flatpak, which added special functionality to accommodate it).
If you’re not using your own containers, I imagine upgrading to a recent version of Linux Mint might help, by giving you a newer version of bubblewrap, and/or enabling user namespaces (which bwrap uses) if they weren’t already enabled.
Alternatively, if you’re comfortable running code from Flathub, you might consider using the Steam flatpak instead of your distro’s native package.
Once upon a time, Flathub also had community-built versions of Proton that were stripped of their container functionality. I don’t know if those are still maintained.
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