Tl;Dr: Proton GE has extra game specific performance and compatibility patches that Proton doesn't target for whatever reason.
Too long but I typed it out so might as well post it anyway: This is how I understand it goes like—
Now, we know Proton: a Valve-maintained fork of the venerable Wine project with many many gaming and game specific patches, made for Steam.
Proton can be used outside of Steam, of course, but it isn't really designed to be, there be quirks. Plus, Valve maintains what goes into Proton, so if anyone really wants to play a certain Windows game that doesn't quite run well enough on Proton and put in the work needed to make the necessary changes, it's probably not getting added to Proton just yet (I frankly don't know how or whether Valve accepts PRs at all). And Wine does not really want game specific patches in the runtime. Wine wants to be as generally compatible as possible.
That's why most Proton variants exist. A certain Glorious Eggroll maintains this one, which has quite a few patches for games that aren't targeted by Proton either at all or well enough, as well as making sure it can run outside of Steam (there are other variants of the patches for vanilla Wine or for use in Lutris as well, I think?)
Glorious Eggroll is also behind a database called ULWGL that will get all the game launchers that use his proton (heroic, lutris, bottles…) to use the same game specific patches because at the moment they maintain them independently for the most part. The project seems to be taking off pretty quickly because it’s already formed an organization around it and recentered itself to even be Proton-GE independent if needed.
Yeah we all know Manjaro is ass but a 16:10 screen that’s 120hz is cool. I’d get one if it had adaptive sync. When I saw OrangePi I thought I’d be an ARM device using box86/64 to run Steam games, as inefficient as that sounds.
Are you sure you’re putting your saves in the right folder? I’ve moved my saves back and forth on many games and they work fine. Binding of Isaac has cloud saves on Steam.
When i installed Isaac on linux i didnt get any of my old gamefiles, do i somehow need to activate the Streamcloud? Also is there a another savegames folder on linux?
They do a decent job of piggy backing on Arch’s work, and loading quite a few things OOB for gaming. That being said, I don’t recommend them due to their instability and issues with the overall project (failing on cert renewals, their withholding of stable packages from Arch but allowing AUR access and causing breakage, poor release schedule, and cherry picking of newer packages for “shiny things” without the diligence to maintain their library compatibility, etc etc).
That being said, their theming and UI taste is actually really good. It was a much more robust project back in 2019 and 2020, but on the technical side they’re lacking severely despite having great taste from a theming standpoint. They’ve fallen pretty far in the court of public opinion.
hey, I see people talking a lot about the problems on Manjaro. What do you recommend as an alternative? I used EndeavourOS but an update broke my pc. I then tried debian but the games ran poorly and crashed, then I changed to Manjaro because I didn’t know any better.
To be honest, the default themes for many DE’s are actually pretty tasteful. Just vanilla Arch isn’t bad if you don’t mind running the pacman update command. I honestly recommend Nobara for people who want stability and point/click updates.
Endeavor is more like hobbyist UI purist, and not that well optimized. Arch is insanely optimized, as well as Nobara. I would recommend Ubuntu but, Snaps. Pop would be great if their major rebase was further along, so options are pretty limited. We’re in a weird transition right now as far as the major distros and overall performance metrics.
I'm currently running Nobara and personally cannot recommend it due to a lot of annoying issues. Can't even drag & drop shit out of the FF download window into Dolphin, even though that was working fine on any other distro I used before (including Manjaro, which was still the most stable distro I used).
That to me sounds like their wayland by default setup, which is really more about the wayland ecosystem and reliance on xwayland (although firefox is suppose to launch wayland native on Nobara with KDE).
I’m aware of a few quirks, but that sounds pretty specific. My experience with all DE’s right now has me pretty negative on Linux overall until we get fully migrated to wayland sessions with explicit sync working…and that’s a year off at least.
Wayland is generally a huge mess. At least I can disable Fsync now, which caused my screen to go black for brief moments, especially when playing. Lots of other game or app specific issues remain as well...
Manjaro ran without breaking for me for almost two years. EOS also nuked itself after a few months for me. I think Manjaro's reputation is worse than the actual distro because a lot of people circlejerked about their failed cert issue (which affected only the website) and the "scandal" about the laptop thingy some years ago.
I’ve not had problems but nothing is fool-proof and I have proved myself a fool in the past.
In all seriousness I followed the Manjaro - Endeavour - Arch pipeline and don’t see much value in the other flavors outside of a little handholding that can introduce problems of its own.
Thanks for the info! This is really useful to know and definitely puts me off a little. I would hope installing another OS would preserve the device features. I started to look into “Manjaro Gaming Edition.” It all looks to be from a few years ago and based on XFCE. However on the device’s website it mentions a Plasma desktop so I wonder if they did a special version for this. One can hope it’ll be a better kept version of the OS from what you said.
Manjaro Gaming Edition was a community thing and has been abandoned for 5 years now. All Manjaro editions are listed on their website: https://manjaro.org/download/
The certs were for their website, it had nothing to do with the OS. I used Manjaro for almost two years without any issues. Meanwhile, EndeavourOS broke completely after a few months due to an update and their toxic community just gaslighted & trolled me to the point where the admins closed & hid the thread (can't have people see that huh?) and suggested I create a new one if I still needed support.
It sucks you had an experience like that with the community. There are elitists and then just big jerks. What communities often fail at is a groupthink issue where they have a solution to a problem that’s extraneous to most people, but they accept it as “well duh, RTFM”.
Their project’s goal seems to be the adoption of use, broad use and in turn contribution. The problem is their attitudes toward problems that still need to be resolved, and the release management combined with stability is a common problem in much more than just Endeavor’s community. You see the issue in Pop!, Nobara, Arch, and even Ubuntu. You even see this BIGTIME in Gnome and to a lesser degree KDE.
A Gnome developer will tell you that you should just use it their way, and not expect basic shit to work, where at least KDE puts it for consideration on their own end to fix or develop.
What I’m getting at in short though is the prevailing attitude of elitism being shitty. That being said, there are people who fall into the “time vampire” group of people who will get pointed toward a solution, but not have the capacity to intuit other basic functions and it pisses people off. Nobody deserves to be treated poorly, but the fine line is out there where it’s up to a user to figure their stuff out. From what you describe, updates breaking the user experience falls solidly on their package maintainers fucking their release schedule in the ass, then having an elitist attitude about how to fix it. They’d just as well keep on trucking and treat people poorly for stuff that their own teams broke, to which I respond, fuck those asshole motherfuckers.
I have never been able to get VA working on Linux. I’ve learned to play without it – much as I’ve learned to play without eddb.io (RIP). There are some funky solutions involving VMs and passthrough that I’ve stumbled across before, but nothing that I’ve been willing to try worked well.
I found voice2json, though it looks like you’d have to do quite a bit of configuring.
Don’t bother with VoiceAttack. It relies on the microsoft speech recognition engine, which is an ancient POS voice to text engine. I fiddled with it at one point and I never got it to work well. It’s nowhere near accurate enough to be pleasant to use.
I won’t play any game that has a rootkit, even if it worked on Linux or I had a windows machine. With the permissions they have, they are capable of updating firmware. That means they could infect the computer with malware that would survive wiping or replacing the hard drive.
It’s something I can’t avoid, however I can limit it a bit. Elden Ring shipping with EAC is unfortunate, but I trust From Software a lot more after they took down DS3 to fix an RCE exploit. Sure EAC could turn on them, but I feel like a good publisher would be lawyering up the second that happened, especially if it resulted in their game damaging their customer’s hardware.
Edit: not suggesting anyone should install rootkit DRM games, just sharing how I justify living with the ones I already have.
EAC is honestly pretty standard at this point for multiplayer games. It’s used by some really big companies like Epic for Fortnight, Mihoyo for Genshin Impact (iirc), and obviously Elden Ring. I couldn’t find anything reputable saying it is a rootkit, just that it reads and monitors kernel-level processes.
Unfortunately not since Valve is (understandably) keeping pretty quiet about how they implemented anti-cheat.
However, due to Wine/Proton always running as the current user, it is impossible for it to run anything in kernel space outside of the user-accessible part of the kernel API. Meaning it cannot install kernel modules, access memory of foreign processes or read anything your user does not have access to. It can’t even get a full process list if the process does not want to be listed by users.
If you use Wine/Proton inside of Flatpak it cannot even read most of what your user has access to or any processes outside of the current Flatpak sandbox. So your Steam flatpak has no idea that you are running the Firefox flatpak on the same system with the same user.
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.
I loved the first one and both magickas enough that I’d buy it first day otherwise. I’just have to play one of 700 other games in my library for a few years until they decide it’s not worth it anymore.
Depending on the hosting of things by the game, anti cheat can make sense. Payday 2, for example, is almost entirely peer to peer in games, and cheats allow you to be quite mean in game, even if you’re not the host.
But I can’t help but think PvE anti cheat is more about locking people out of skins/events/dlc/things than actually being to prevent cheating. Else you could just have a button that invalidated the gains of the cheated match.
But I can’t help but think PvE anti cheat is more about locking people out of skins/events/dlc/things than actually being to prevent cheating. Else you could just have a button that invalidated the gains of the cheated match.
Absolutely, the original sin of computers is that the concept of scarcity is totally foreign to the way computers work and it is nauseating how much work is put into trying introduce scarcity into software and games.
HELLDIVERS 2 is a co-op/PvE game, why do we even need Anti-Cheat?
That’s a great question, and there’s two related but separate points to it:
First, we want everyone to have a great time playing HELLDIVERS 2, with friends, ex-friends or randoms. What we’ve seen in some of our and others’ games is that rampant cheating tends to have a very negative effect on players openness to playing, especially with randoms.
There’s an anecdote from HELLDIVERS 1 I’d like to share:
When we released HELLDIVERS 1 on PC there was effectively no anti-cheat implemented. Additionally HELLDIVERS 1 uses a peer-to-peer networking model, and that means, from a security perspective, each game client will blindly trust each other.
Shortly after release we noticed there was a cheat going around which granted 9999 research samples. Unfortunately any non-cheaters in the same mission would also be granted 9999 research samples. These non-cheating players now had their entire progression ruined through no fault of their own.
We were able to deal with a lot of these early issues without using a third party solution, but it took a lot of work, and most of it was done reactively.
Incidentally HELLDIVERS 2 also uses a peer-to-peer networking model, but this time around we’re trying to be more proactive and make sure everyone can play the intended experience.
Second is the Galactic War. There’s this huge metagame going in the cloud which all players (and game clients) participate in. Even though we have other countermeasures in place, a cracked game client could make it easier to disrupt the Galactic War, which would sour everyone’s experience
I think those are reasonable explanations for anti cheat having a place in their game. I’ve been hit with that example scenario before in other games and it just ruins the fun entirely for a lot of progression-driven players, like me.
What I haven’t seen a good answer for is the reason for this AC solution specifically. It seems like they could have gone for something much more popular and compatible than what they did. If it was for cost reasons, I think that’s a short sighted decision. Regardless, it has me thinking twice about a game I was fairly certain about trying, so that’s disappointing.
I’m also a progression-driven player yet I’m suspicious of a game that introduces anti-cheats alongside microtransactions. When microtransactions are involved, the pace of progression tends to be affected to incentive people to pay, and at that point I’d rather play in a hacked server that has a more reasonable progression.
If it was just about letting the player maintain the pace of progression however is most satisfying, I’m sure there are better ways to do that client-side. But these days game companies are all too happy to equivocate “company controlled” with “fair” or “fun”, and it’s curious that in this framing nothing is unfair as long as they get money.
Hey, I’m not arguing that mtx are a good thing for consumers or anything like that, and I’m with you that they’ve had an adverse effect on progression systems. I just see the logic in their reasoning for having anticheat. Anything client side could be subverted by those same cheats, and it still wouldn’t address the second issue of the impact on the shared galactic conflict feature. All that said, this was a poor choice of implementation and I don’t think it will pay off for them. I don’t think you’d be seeing the same backlash if it was something like EAC. Maybe from the techy crowd on Lemmy, but not from the average consumer.
Just because we don’t usually see backlash it doesn’t mean it’s a good thing. The average player puts up with absolutely rigged games which treat paying for advantages as fairness.
Personally I only see cheating as a problem if it affects people who haven’t agreed to it, but the solution is not preventing all modification. Games are better off for modding and customization. They could cut off modified games from having matchmaking or any input on a global game mode while still allowing players to run their own servers however they want.
I’m not arguing that anything is good or bad. I’m all for people modding their single player games. I’ve played Frankenstein Skyrim myself many times. I’m a big fan. All that said, this game has a multiplayer element through Galactic Warfare and matchmaking co-op. I think anticheat is entirely reasonable in those scenarios. You can say the multiplayer-lite GW feature isn’t worth the limitation (I would probably share that view), but AC is not evil in all situations. It’s just kind of entwined with certain online multiplayer features, to avoid the equivalent of “Boaty McBoatFace” happening when trolls hit critical mass in your game.
In my spare time I work on some networked applications, and so have had to look into security and all that. The one thing they tell you is to NEVER FUCKING TRUST ANYTHING AT THE OTHER END OF A NETWORK CONNECTION. No, anticheat rootkits doesn’t allow you to ignore this, and it’s massively irresponsible to rely on anticheat as your main way of ensuring security.
If someone gets past rootkit anticheat on a “normal” game where it is being used as a replacement for proper server side anticheat, it’s no big deal. Just have a reporting system in place, and ban them. The worst you’ll get is people on Reddit complaining about “rampant cheating” or whatever.
If someone gets past rootkit anticheat on a game where it is used as a replacement for network security fundamentals, you’re suddenly going to have to find a way to explain to all your customers (and possibly lawyers) that due to your negligence, other people have had full access to their computers.
I’m a DevOps engineer by trade, and do a lot of work with network security. “Never trust anything on the other side of a connection” is fine and all as a rule of thumb, but real solutions have more nuance than that. What is “trust”? Should I just never connect to anything? Obviously we have to, so we’re already assuming some level of “trust”. There are always degrees of trust, and a peer to peer game server is a higher degree than browsing a site hosted by a server, is what I think the developer meant.
Now, I agree with you, this shouldn’t be some full substitute for proper network security or whatever, but I don’t think they’ve given any indication that’s the case. I can also speak from experience that certain choices in tooling are thrust upon dev teams at times, for cost or “political” reasons. It’s also fully possible it’s just a bad call from a techie who worked on a prior project with it or something.
It should be obvious from the list shown in the window that pops up which Wine versions you have installed, and which versions you’re actively using. Get the name of one that’s installed and copy it into the wine.yml file; keep the formatting that’s already there, with a hyphen between the version and the architecture.
Save the file, restart everything, bam, games galore.
Could sadly not find the wine.yml, but your reply still helped me to find the problem. The used wine version in the options was specified as “wine-ge-8-25-x86_64 (standard)”. Changing that to “wine-ge-8-25-x86_64” and restarting fixed the problem. For whatever reason it now changed to “lutris-7.2-2-x86_64”, but it still works, so I will not touch that again-.
Naming convention bug. It happened to me a long time ago back when you had to manually add anything “GE”.
The Wine & Proton packaging isn’t supposed to have (random bs description) in the name else lutris won’t be able to recognize it.
As for wine.yml, if you’re using a system package & not a flatpack try :
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