This is a solid guide to help people who are not familiar with all the tools we use. I have some suggestions for you to perhaps improve (these are small details that, in my case, have been helpful to me):
You say this about compatibility layers: “Expect a minor performance hit as a result of running them through a compatibility layer.” According to what I’ve read about and experienced, using compatibility layers such as Wine and Proton can give you a wide variety of results, depending on the game. Sometimes you get a performance boost. Sometimes you get the same performance. If the compatibility layer is missing something the game might need - like a specific dll file - you can have a performance issue. Anyway, the benefit of using a compatibility layer over an emulator is that yes, indeed, sometimes the software works better in the compatibility layer.
Maybe make people a little less fearful of using Proton in Heroic Games Launcher? I would recommend, based on my experience, to give Proton a try before using a Wine prefix. I’ve had so much success with Proton in Heroic Games Launcher, especially using the Proton Experimental branch. You can always try Proton and see what happens (the Proton DB has user experiences from using Heroic Games Launcher, not just Steam). If it sucks, you can try something else. Also, there are ways to use Proton in Lutris and Bottles. There are plenty of instructions out there on how to do it. It’s actually very helpful to have this option. My point: make it clear to people that they have options. There is more than one way to make a Windows game work which is a good thing. Different Wine versions, different Proton versions, different ways to set them up for each individual game. If one way doesn’t get you the desired results, you can try a different method. There’s always hope and there are plenty of people online that might be able to help you if you can’t get something to work.
There are distros designed for gaming that come with lots of stuff already packaged with the installation. These include Garuda and Nobara. I’ve recently switched from Fedora to Nobara (which is essentially Fedora with modifications) and I’m very happy. I honestly believe these distros are very friendly to gamers who are not too familiar with Linux. For example, when I installed Nobara, there was nothing for me to do after. No installing launchers, etc. I did have to enable Proton on Steam, but that was about it. It’s really amazing how user-friendly Linux has become in some distros. Anyway, I also enjoy Arch Linux and I like having control over everything, doing things myself. Maybe you could change your text to explain that there are different distros to make a variety of people happy? If you like to tinker a lot, you can choose Arch. If you want an “out of the box” approach you can use a distro targeted at gamers. Maybe you’d prefer something in between, like Fedora, which needs some tinkering after installation.
Maybe add something about Steam and its offerings of native Linux games. People would be surprised if they payed more attention. Quite a few games that people usually play on their Windows machines are also available for Linux, which means those games don’t need Proton at all to run. You could get lucky, do you know what I mean? If your Steam library already has games in it for which there’s a native Linux version, you can assess whether or not you need a dual boot system at all. I’m one of the lucky ones. I no longer need to run Windows (recent development, I’m so happy). All my games work in a Linux environment now. It feels friggin’ great to get rid of Windows completely.
Anyway, sorry for the huge comment. Although I’m making suggestions for improvement, please know that my comment is this long because I’m very enthusiastic about your guide. A nice overview of everything a gamer needs to learn about is all there in your guide and this is something that people need if they’re migrating from Windows. You are very generous in taking the time to write this and I’m sure you’re going to help a lot of people who feel lost or don’t know where to start. Great job and thank you!
According to what I’ve read about and experienced, using compatibility layers such as Wine and Proton can give you a wide variety of results, depending on the game.
I agree with this but I generally find that performance is a bit worse, so I’m just setting expectations. One thing Proton does offer is pre-caching shaders which can help games not stutter compared to Windows, so you might get way less stutters even if your FPS is a bit worse than Windows.
I’ve had so much success with Proton in Heroic Games Launcher
You definitely can use Proton with Heroic but you generally shouldn’t need to. Wine-GE’s performance is very comparable to Proton and usually Proton can cause issues when ran outside of Steam, which is why it isn’t recommended to do so and why all these launchers prefer Wine-GE. I tried to make the guide as simple as possible, so I decide to list the best option rather than a list of options.
There are distros designed for gaming that come with lots of stuff already packaged with the installation.
Definitely. I actually do use Nobara which you might tell from one of the screenshots’ background. I might do another post on distro choice but I felt like it’s a big topic that can get too opinionated, especially with recent Fedora controversies. I didn’t want to recommend Nobara only to have a lot of “Well, actually…” comments.
Maybe add something about Steam and its offerings of native Linux games.
I thought about it but didn’t feel like it warranted talking about. If there’s a native Linux version, you’d hit install and it should work. It didn’t really need elaborating so I decided to focus on the things people can need help with.
Well, with regard to the whole “Proton outside of Steam” controversy, it’s not hard to do it safely outside of Steam to avoid breaking things. As far as WineGE goes, I have a couple of games in Heroic that will not work with it, but they’ll run really well with Proton. So, there’s some little difference between them that is haunting my games library. Anyway, my point was to emphasize more the fact that there are options, which is the beauty of using Linux. You have a whole bunch of ways to do something. If you look up stuff, you can even figure out how to do things you’re not supposed to do safely. It’s your guide, and it’s darn good as it stands. I think my way of lowering expectations is different from yours, it’s all about life experience. I’m more like, “lower people’s expectations letting them know that they might have to try different things and spend time on it, things might not work on the first try with the first method they use.” I recall, a few years ago, fighting with a windows game for weeks to get it to work in Linux. Things have improved remarkably since then. If, in general, you’re noticing you have lower performance on your games, you can probably fix those issues. My system has zero performance problems with windows games, they all work the same or better than on Windows. I have old games, new games, brand-new games, and middle-aged games. They’re all smooth sailing or a little better. So, keep learning and keep up the good work on your blog! It’s a never-ending learning experience with this stuff. I’ve learned that I’m never going to buy a game from Epic ever again. I have four games on Heroic. That’s enough hassle for me! I don’t think I even want to bother with the free ones anymore.
Someone from Fedora’s development team has proposed to add some user-habit telemetry, this has triggered an immediate reaction of the community, in majority against such a feature.
I switched from windows to Garuda about a month ago and as others are saying it’s very usable out of the box, even stuff like steam and proton come pre installed.
That said, if you’re using multiple monitors you’re probably going to want to right click on the desktop of all non-main monitors and add (iirc) the default panel. Out of the box only the main monitor has the bar at the top of the screen that allows you to enlarge/close/move windows that are at full screen. I get the aesthetic choice there, but it was bad for my usability.
Other than that, if you’ve got an Nvidia graphics card make sure you’re using the right drivers for it otherwise sometimes it might go wonky (though I’m hoping my recent update fixed that).
Also, learn how to use AUR and terminal at your own pace, but don’t neglect it. As a new linux user there’s a lot more in terminal than I expected but the more I use it the less scary it is. Similarly there’s a lot that’s only available for Debian/Ubuntu or fedora based distros, but AUR often has an arch hack to it
Hiya, tbh I don’t think there’s much to do besides installing specific software that your require out of the box, I think garuda is basically plug and play so not much fiddling to do, which version of garuda you got ? I think even the ones like the qtile versions come with mostly everything ready to go but I’m not sure. Myself I’m used the sway flavor but removed almost everything sway related and replaced it with hyprland and there was not much to do, also remember that if you are really newbie you can use the garuda assistant to install software from a gui
I agree with top comment. The point of Garudo is to be usable out of the box. Only thing left to do is install software, games and optionally tools to manage Proton/Wine versions. To summarize: Steam + ProtonUp-Qt (to download protonGE for Steam), Heroic Launcher for Epic+GOG games and/or Lutris/Bottles for everything else.
As great as AMD is with open source (comparatively), RADV has been a singular source of headaches on distro that install it by default. Many vulkan games wouldn’t launch and I hear performance is worse than the community Vulkan driver.
RADV is the default community Mesa driver, made by Valve engineers.
AMD's own Vulkan implementation is called AMDVLK, which is just a port of their Windows Vulkan libraries repackaged for Linux. AMDVLK usually moves faster than RADV and got raytracing much earlier. And even though RADV added raytracing as well, RADVs raytracing is much slower than AMDVLK. Maybe this changes will finally close the gap?
RADVs raytracing is much slower than AMDVLK. Maybe this changes will finally close the gap?
One of the commenters claims this:
the perf uplift from this PR is huge in a few games, out of the ones I own lego builders journey gets a 2x improvement in performance. Control gets an additional ~5 fps at 1080p, Minecraft RTX (education edition) gets ~10 fps more. When paired with the monolithic pipeline MR it completely blows amdvlk out of water.
Tested on my rx6800.
So hopefully that is the case. I’ll add that AMDVLK vs RADV has been pretty mixed over the years, and there have been times where RADV has been ahead (particularly with vkd3d-proton support) and usually catches up to and exceeds AMDVLK performance, with the exception of RT.
Ideally IP laws would be such that this would be considered public domain by now. The game came out in 1995, so it’s almost 30 years old and Sony isn’t selling it anymore. Surely that was a long enough legal protection.
Back in 2016, a new version of X11 (shipping with the latest Linux distros) killed my AMD graphics because driver support was dropped and open source drivers were not available for my particular model.
That’s unfortunate. Which model was it out of curiosity? I know they’ve had open source GPU support for a long time, so it’s surprising that one fell through the cracks.
Yeah, I also remember, my particular model did worked with open source drivers, but it had a shitty performance. That’s why 2011 was the last time I bought an AMD GPU, however since today their driver is open I’m seriously considering buying an AMD next, exactly because what happened with AMD back then can happen to NVIDIA now (but not to AMD since their drivers are open and can be community-maintained if they dropped support in the future)
I had enough of Nvidia when they dropped support for the GTX 460 in windows and Linux and I had to swap out the card to do anything meaningful on the computer. Nvidia, keep your taint away from my kernel!
I’m just waiting for the new AMD mid range cards. I have had some weird problems with Nvidia because of drivers over the years, so I’m finally switching camp for the next card to see how it is.
mesa-vulkan-drivers are installed? You should check journalctl output when you launch the games that don’t work. It should give you more info. AFAIK RDR2 should be working fine.
Yeah, vulkan drivers are installed. Oh well, I’ll just keep booting Windows whenever I want to game.
I did however just play Northgard with a couple of friends, and it ran perfectly fine on Fedora. First time playing it on Linux, and it ran smoothly with zero issues, so that’s cool I guess. A taste of Linux gaming lol.
You know, I haven’t revisited this game since switching to Linux. Now I kind of want to spin it up and see what happens. I’ll report back if fail or succeed.
The topic of market share, and ports and lack of them, are nuanced but I highly doubt Linux won’t overtake macOS even more each year unless Apple wakes up. Valve and Linux community are a force to be reckon with. There are other individuals in the scene as well, who are chipping away at improving the gaming ecosystem, such as System76, Redhat and Canonical.
I have been looking in the steam store hoping it would show up since a lot of other Blizzard games are. Steam makes running games on Linux very easy, what did you do to run it, add battlenet as non steam game?
I’ll find you the guide I used, but in essence yes, you add battle.net as a non steam game. I think there’s a better method than the one I used where you can even have the games separately be added as non steam games as well instead of just the launcher
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