it runs my games better than Linux and I’m really lost.
You already answered your own question/experience – do some “duckduckgoing” (even if it means falling back to the basics once again, “How to run a windows game on linux”) and then come back here. Because yes, GNU/Linux is 100% viable for gaming and can even run games better than on Winblows – if you know how to setup things properly.
A word of advice however, Linux tend to be a bit “sensitive” regarding some system elements/packages – you’ve got to provide all possible info to everything – theres no “ready out of the box” in these lands.
Some games, others run worse. It’s usually within 10% either way, which isn’t something I’d personally pick an OS over. You can probably tune things to eek out an extra percent or two, but imo that’s not worth it unless you’re really into that kind of thing.
theres no “ready out of the box” in these lands
That’s just not true. Most of the time, Linux works great out of the box, but there are some common areas where that’s not the case:
laptops with dGPUs - Linux just doesn’t handle graphics switching as well as Windows, but the solution is easy as OP found out
crappy WiFi cards - just buy Intel NICs
crappy sound cards - less of a problem these days, but sound can still be a massive pain
And that’s pretty much it. If you buy quality hardware, your OOTB experience is probably going to be great! If you buy an AMD GPU, it’ll be even better since you don’t even need to install graphics drivers! I had zero issues on my desktop switching between distros (everything just works), and my only issue with my laptop was using very recent hardware, which was fixed with kernel updates (there was a known bug with sound over HDMI on my AMD laptop).
Imo, Linux is much more likely to “just work” than Windows, assuming you’re installing the OS yourself. Every time I’ve installed Windows, I’ve had to track down a bunch of drivers, downloading Wi-Fi drivers on my Linux computer and installing them with a USB stick. That sucks.
Fedora or Nobara if you’re lazy are a good option. If an immutable variant appeals, I have a good time on Kinoite. There is a gaming centric ublue version now too IIRC
Bazzite is a project of uBlue, which is Fedora Silverblue with a lot of gaming stuff on top, similar to Nobara or the tweaks on the Steam Deck.
It has the same big advantage of every other immutable distro, that you don’t have to manage your system yourself. It updates without you noticing, will never break, you can easily roll back if something doesn’t work as intended, and so on.
The cool thing is, that you can just rebase to another atomic variant if you don’t like it, or when you realize, that every gaming distro is just as capable for gaming as every other conventional distro too.
Yeah you can Google how to install wow on Steam deck and follow the guide, with a caveat that on the steps between installing battle.net and creating a launcher for it on Steam after it’s installed, I suggest moving the contents of the proton bottle to a shared space so you keep you credentials. Let me get on my pc in a few minutes and I’ll get you some instructions.
Add it to Steam from the Games > Add a non-steam game to my library…
Right click on it from Steam library, Properties…, Compatibility, check “Force the use of a specific Steam Play compatibility tool” and select Proton Experimental. Close the window.
Run the installer by double-clicking it in your library. Go through it as usual, make sure you uncheck to start it with Windows, and to mark Keep me logged in.
Install WoW (don’t need 100% installation, just start it), and click on the cog icon and Create a desktop shortcut (no shortcut will be created in your desktop)
Open Battle.net settings and in App, On Game Launch, set to Exit Battle.net completely.
You can also mark When clicking X, Exit Battle.net completely.
When done, close it fully (from tray and etc).
Navigate to ~/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/compatdata and find the folder with the Battle.net installation (it’s going to be the one with a longer name, and most recently modified).
(Optional, see footnote) Move the contents of the pfx folder somewhere else like ~/.local/games/proton_prefix/pfx and create a symlink from ~/.local/games/proton_prefix/pfx to ~/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/compatdata/XXXXXXXX/pfx:
Footnote: The reason for moving the proton prefix folder away is that this way you can have a shared proton prefix for all your non-steam proton games with the advantage of keeping a shared login state and etc between the apps since the registry is stored inside the pfx folder, but have a separate shortcut for each in your steam library by always creating this symlink back to the shared folder, and the ability to tune proton settings to each different application separately as those settings they are kept in the parent folder.
This seems promising, but if I may ask how would I do something like this for a private server client (1.12.1)? Also I managed to get battle.net installed through bottles. The only caveat is that I needed to change its runner to caffe latest version.
Right, I guess if you already the wow client, you could skip it all and just add wow.exe as a non-steam game to your library and try that, it should work.
Otherwise if you’re dealing with the old school wow installer wizards, I guess you can follow the steps in a similar way except use the wow installer where it mentions the battle.net installer.
what i could understand from there is , Qt has bugs that pissed the dev, bugs that occur in wayland, gnome pissed the devs don’t doing sane things and following what everyone is doing, nvidia pissed the dev, tobe fair is nvidia always doing shit, and also wayland bugs, well, it happen, software etc what i don’t understand why he want the global coordinate on the app?, where it could help?
edit: the emulator want to save the local of the window and re-open it again, i give them the credit, there is merge requests being worked tho.
i don’t think they are being unreasonable, they are getting complains that aren’t their fault(aka gnome) i could be pissed of too, and disabling for now until nvidia, qt, etc fix the bugs isn’t a bad thing too, also the code isn’t removed, you can enable wayland with the flag on flatpak
If this is a gaming only computer and you don’t want to go off fussing with installing packages from other sources and maintaining a hybrid system, just install Nobara Linux.
Doesn’t look…very user-friendly? As a lazy ubuntu/deb user, I’m a bit concerned about jumping to rpm/arch…Isn’t there any other alternatives that are ubuntu/debian-based with KDE?
That’s kinda why I said “if it’s a gaming-only computer”. Nobara is the best and simplest out-of-the-box experience for gaming. Do everything through the GUI, treat it like an appliance-ish. Updates, packages, it’s all got its own GUI.
My gaming PC runs a mix of Debian testing with some stuff pulled in from sid and some stuff from experimental (just Mesa, really), plus a Xanmod kernel which updates frequently (I’m not convinced the patches make much difference).
I did all this because I’m a long time Debian user (going almost 3 decades) and I wanted the computer for a bit more than gaming. It’s not without its issues though, and I find myself frequently tinkering and troubleshooting.
I still have a Nobara partition that I can boot into, update and trust that it will be game-ready without fuss.
So…how did you get that damn partition working?? I’ve just tried it. Which required me an EFI partition of at least 600MB. I already had it at 500MB but apparently it didn’t think that was enough…So I had to reinstall all of windows in order to resize the EFI. Then Nobara installer was happy when I chose the EFI partition as “/boot/efi”, and 500GB at the end of the same SSD as “/”. After a reinstall, reboot…and it goes to Windows. Ugh. Manually choosing from the BIOS the new “Fedora” entry I get a grub crash. start_image returned “not found”…Wtf? For a “simplified” installation, this is resulting quite the PITA.
EDIT: OMG…figured it out, but holy cow. The installer is rather borked. It demands 600MB for /boot/efi, which at least this, it warns you of. BUT. It will install without warnings a full system and then crap out, if you ignore a very specific requisite not mentioned anywhere during the install! You need at least a 1GB ext4 partition somewhere for /boot. Ignore this, and you’re crapped.
Oh wow, that sounds fucked up. I don’t remember the ext4 requirement for /boot but after reading your comment the EFI stuff came back to me. I also thought it was weird and painful.
Anyway, glad you sorted it out. It should (hopefully) be smooth sailing from here.
Sigh…Thanks. I wish it was. I just ran the same Alan Wake install on the provided Lutris and well…the Textures are indeed fixed, I can see the FBI jackets and the faces look better…but now performance is abysmal, with frame drops to 10-15fps (1080p all max)…and RT is not even enabled (still grayed out), checked both in Wayland and X11. I think for a 7800XT I should be getting much better as long as RT or Path Tracing is not running.
EDIT: Seems this happens only with AW2. Cyberpunk and Starfield seem to have similar performance as before. So there’s something going on with AW2 in Nobara.
It…took some adapting on my case. Quite a few bits and bobs don’t quite work the way I intended at boot…but it’s starting to settle after a week of fiddling with it.
I have Garuda and love it. Big things to note: my monitors and it don’t get along great, updates are frequent and can be weird, and learn to use the chaotic aur
How has nobody recommended Supreme Commander (Forged Alliance)? It’s the inspiration for other games in this thread like Planetary Annihilation and Beyond All Reason. It’s so good that when the official servers shut down the community banded together and formed their own server and dev team to continue regular balancing and updates. It’s on steam and works on Linux with minimal tinkering. You can either play the campaign on the Steam version or head straight over to Forged Alliance Forever, the community-hosted server, to access the campaign (with added multiplayer support!), all the new patches and mods, and play some multiplayer games too.
Hardware support for GPUs in based on compositor. X11 supports them better but Wayland is faster, both are available on most popular distros and swappable via a logout login.
Modern looks can be done with desktop environments like KDE and Gnome. Both are good, but KDE is more customisable.
If you don’t want to compile stuff yourself every now and then then choose Ubuntu or Fedora based distro.
Having the freedom to install anything you want is a fun requirement. If you mean literally anything then Vanilla OS might suit you since you can use all package managers but you get less modern features with it. This gives you 20 year old apps stuff that only works on some fringe dead on. If not that extreme then Ubuntu based is a bit better than Fedora based in those situations.
Ubuntu is nice and all but you’ll have to follow a guide to add flatpak support otherwise a very good distro.
So here’s a suggestion list from me:
KDE Neon (Ubuntu based on LTS versions)
Fedora (Gnome or KDE variants)
VanillaOS (if edge cases)
PopOS (New kid on the block. It’s just nice)
I recommend downloading whatever interests you and start them up in a VM.
I personally use arch with i3 window manager. Before anyone says anything, no, this isn’t another “I use arch btw” gag. It is fast, highly customisable, barebones and in my experience i3-wm works great with games which have fullscreen/windowing issues as it is easy to toggle between full screen and move windows about. For example, Gmod kept sticking in between my two monitors on Ubuntu and wouldn’t let me move the window. With i3, you can move containers around with ease. Plus if your arch installation breaks it is almost always your fault. I also have better performance than when I was using Ubuntu.
Welp, I was about to rant about it in here. Thanks for the heads up, hopefully it gets fixed by the weekend. Can’t wait to be absolutely rolled by Cunduit’s ult.
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