I am like you but a year behind. I hope to get there too at some point. Switched to Linux for the majority of my pc use and a lot of games. But my VR flight sim and the occasional racing is holding me back. I have an HP Reverb G2 (Windows Mixed Reality) headset which doesn’t work very well on Linux (yet?) and an Nvidia RTX 3080.
There doesn’t seem to be an ideal Linux VR setup yet, now that SteamVR still does not work with Wayland. Hoping they’ll fix it and then I can sidegrade to a Valve Index and an RX 6900 XT and be set. I don’t like the complexity and latency of wireless streaming.
I also recently made the switch and was pleasantly surprised at how many games I could still play, even “Windows only” titles. Though my requirements are nowhere near yours as I don’t have VR or HOTAS.
I’m still rocking an NVIDIA 1060… What’s the Linux community consensus on NVIDIA vs AMD? Because I think it’s about time to upgrade.
AMD is generally a much better experience overall, but a handful of things are worse than NVidia (off the top of my head, Ray Tracing, AI, and Emulators. AMD cards tend to have graphical glitches in emulators even on Windows. They can be mitigated, and aren’t universal but they are an issue).
In my experience, AMD is the way to go. My old GTX 1080 was a beast and put in great work, but just had too many naggling stability issues that constantly got in the way of enjoying it. Been really happy with my AMD.
AMD being preferred was my sense of the situation so it’s good to have that confirmed. Looks like I need to get more familiar with that family of cards.
AMD’s naming scheme is honestly similar to Nvidias. They have X600, X700, etc (the “X” being the generation of card, the second digit being the model).
So for example, the current gen is the 7000 series, with the 7600 being the lowest, and roughly analogous to the 4060, and the 7900 to the 4090. There are also XT versions which is AMD’s version of the Ti line. They have more VRAM, higher clocks, overclocking, etc.
I’d look at the 6700XT, or the one I have which is the 7600XT. Both have similar specs, the 7600XT is more recent with better performance in a couple areas, but the 6700XT is tried and true, and you’ll be more likely to find a good deal on it. The 7600XT only came out a couple months ago and isn’t anywhere near as well established, but IMO it performs excellent at good temps without any tweaks. Both are great for 1080p or 1440p with modern games.
> Runs at a solid 80fps at 1440p on high settings, the only graphical issue I noticed was flickering volumetric clouds. This game ate my old card (the venerable GTX 1080) alive even on Windows.
No idea where is that in Linux Mint (Cinnamon) but you probably have a “focus follows cursor” setting somewhere. If you manage to disable it, you will only switch focus by clicking.
Personally I use bspwm and instead of switching between windows, I switch between workspaces. I also have focus follows cursor setting enabled and it’s essential for my workflow, however it can be disabled.
I do not experience the behaviour with the cursor, but when a game in fullscreen doesn’t play nice, I move it to the second workspace (with a keybind) and then quickly switch to the first workspace with another keybind. Both are easy to remember and as fast as alt + tab.
Good. So you’ve confirmed that games can and do run on your system, both natively and using proton.
Next, I would try deleting the corresponding compatdata and shadercache folders for the games, to reset the games prefix and shaders. These are one folder up from the folder where the actual game files are, and the folders within have numbered names that match the ID of the game. (Which you can see in the update tab in game properties).
Simply delete the correct folders and steam will redo the proton setup for a game and recompile the shaders.
On a sidenote, I recommend installing proton-ge-custom from the AUR, it installs, keeps up to date, and makes available proton GE for you to use in steam and heroic, should you ever need a version with fixes that valve proton doesn’t come with.
At this point I’d be looking at logs. Two ways to go about this.
The first is to launch steam from a terminal (close it, then just enter steam in a terminal) and then try to launch the game. Steam will spew out lines about what is going on into the terminal.
The other way is to enable proton logs, which can be done by adding PROTON_LOG=1 %command% in the launch options for the game. Then when you attempt to run the game, a logfile should appear in you home folder.
I’m also assuming you’ve tried multiple proton versions? If you haven’t, do that.
Those 2 games are extremely solid in my experience, haven’t had a crash ever in either of them.
I’ve played Borderlands 2 for 744 hours over many years with different hardware without a problem, except that I can’t get SHiFT keys to work in the Linux version, so if I want to use SHiFT, I switch to Proton for that. Both work flawlessly otherwise. I have only tried Portal native though.
I’m currently using the Manjaro distro with an old Ryzen 5 1600 CPU, Radeon RX 6800 XT GPU, and 16 Gig Ram.
My wife however uses Nvidia GTX 1080 ti and earlier GTX 970, and both games worked perfectly for her too using Debian with both cards. My wife also played lots of portal both 1 and 2 with Nvidia cards.
In short those 2 games should work fine out of the box, with both Nvidia and Radeon. So maybe you have some hardware problem? Or something with your installation was screwed up somehow?
Which GPU do you use? I believe mint defaults to the nouveau drivers for Nvidia GPU’s, which generally has significantly worse performance compared to the proprietary driver.
As mentioned above, usually, it is preferred to try installing the recommended driver. In order to do that, you just type in: sudo ubuntu-drivers autoinstallIf you want something specific, type in: sudo apt install nvidia-driver-450You just have to replace “450” with the driver version that you want and it will install the driver in the same way that you install an application via the terminal.
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