I’ve met enough Gamers™ at lan parties back in the day that I know this sort of unsolicited “advice” is realistic.
edit: People are acting like this isn’t realistic. I use to get comments like this because I was a Mac first gamer on my duel boot Mac Pro. Gamers are incredibility tribalistic. Just look at the “console wars” bs.
I dunno. I’ll probably get hate for this, but it’s not ready. It’s better. But Linux isn’t a good replacement for Windows yet. I love Linux. Love the customization, the *NIX filesystem makes sense, and it’s beautiful. Also no ads in my start menu!
I want to use Linux regularly, and I tried last week. It failed. Kind of miserably.
I need to pick a distro. Mint and Pop_OS were consensus recommendations.
Try mint: Installing dual boot alongside windows was beautiful. But no internet connection, says cable is unplugged (it’s not). Realize I downloaded an earlier version (20). Get the most recent version, and problem resolved. It’s kind of odd to me that even a pretty recent version wouldn’t support my adapter, but whatever. I tried to update and install Nvidia drivers: update fails because dependencies were not installed. Okay… Why not prompt me to install them? Why make me apt-get all the dependencies by hand? I don’t expect handholding, but some things should be. If I NEED something as a pre-req for what I’m trying to do, queue it up!
Fuck it. Let me try Pop_OS, instead - that has some gaming chops, right? Dual boot was more challenging to stand up, but it all worked. Nice. Fire up game: get ~20 fps drop compared to windows (108 from 130) with the same settings. I don’t want to troubleshoot the performance hit. It should just work. I want a tool not a project.
Never mind if you want HDR support. That seems to vary by distro. Variable refresh rate also seemed to be spotty from what I read in gaming distro recommendations. ALSO, do you need UEFI support? RIP. Enjoy toggling that on and off when you have to jump back and forth between Windows and Linux. Nvidia driver support I chalk up to those arseholes only now starting to open source some things.
And I don’t care that you were able to run everything fine. You had a flawless experience: great. Love that for you. I didn’t. I’m not a computer novice - I know to Google shit and how to implement it. I remember trying to fuck around with Ubuntu back in 2002.
I’m gonna continue trying to stand up Linux for everyday use because I love Linux and I want to use it, but it’s pretty clear that even as someone that wants to use Linux. I’ve been trying to switch to Linux every few years for decades. It’s still far short of being ready for average users.
This comment is tough because in its wrongness, it reveals a greater problem with Linux gaming. I think you’re right that it’s probably not ready outside of SteamOS. But it’s not correct to say it’s not ready in general. They are several distros that have all the latest features for modern gaming, the issue is you weren’t recommended even one of them. Pop_OS is currently outdated since they are working on their new desktop and mint is on the Ubuntu LTS version meaning they are both significantly behind. The community needs to take that into account when recommending things. That’s the reason I only recommend Bazzite. Cause it’s the closest to a SteamOS experience.
I appreciate your comment! I’ll take a look at Bazzite. How does it do with everyday tasks? Any other distros you’d recommend?
If what I said was so wrong, I feel even more like there’s a fragmentation issue with Linux (or something). This is especially true if some of the most well known distros have issues with gaming. It only fuels my urge to make a table of features for each distro and then evaluate pros and cons of what distro has what. But distro choice shouldn’t matter outside of UI, pre-installed programs, and maybe package management.
I was just super bummed that I didn’t have one of the perfect experiences that I had seen so many people talking about lately.
Honestly Bazzite does great with pretty much everything I’ve had it do. Some things were difficult in the beginning (I’ve been on it since nearly the beginnimg), but these days everything just works. It’s really matured. I’d also like to make an honorable mention for VanillaOS which would be my second pick for general stuff and my number one for development and sysadmin.
Distro choice really shouldn’t matter but unfortunately not all systems are created equal. There’s tradeoffs to everything. What you get by having the latest features you sacrifice in compatibility with older hardware. The stability benefits you get from waiting update packages may cause you to miss out on needed performances improvements or bug fixes. Tradeoffs to everything. Immutable distros handle most of those problems fairly elegantly, but lose out somewhat when it comes to ease of package installation.
I hope in the future you get to have a perfect experience friend.
Wrong? Is this about me using the word wrongness? In retrospect it was poor word choice but I did not mean to offend. I just meant that the situation is more complicated than what OP may have initially thought. You know what this explains the downvotes.
Maybe, but as someone who spent a summer school breaks worth of time in 2002 getting drivers for a Nvidia GeForce 2 card to run under Mandrake (oh the kernel panics…) to play counter-strike 1.X on wine… It’s come a long fucking way.
I use Debian for everyday work and on my private machine nowadays and struggle with the shitty experience of windows when helping someone out now and then. Granted, I don’t have much time for games these days, and often fire up the PS for that, but I feel experience can vary as long as you know what you want and manage expectations.
You can mod things on Linux, it’s just slightly more of a pain because you have to usually manually place files in the right locations, since the mod managers are kinda hit or miss on Linux.
That being said, I was recently able to mod Minecraft and Valheim pretty extensively with mod managers (I forget which one for Minecraft, but I used r2modman for Valheim which worked great), and I got the Mass Effect: Legendary Edition mod manager working enough via wine that I could mod that too.
If you run the game under wine, you should be able to run the mods under the same wine prefix. For example I run Battletech on steam and also run the BTA 3062 mod package and it works fine.
Made the switch this weekend :) From Win 11 to Mint 22. Haven’t run into any real issues really. I have the occasional screen tear on some videos in firefox though. Haven’t searched around enough yet to figure that out, but otherwise all good.
Is that a per-app thing that can be done in Mint? Pretty much only get tearing in firefox when playing video, and I tried the ‘layers.acceleration.force-enabled true’ setting in about:config for firefox, but that didn’t really make a difference.
Welcome to Linux. I run mint and had screen tearing issues as well. Turns out mint detected my monitor correctly, but it had the wrong refresh rate. Once I set that to the correct refresh rate, my screen tearing was fixed. So I suggest checking that.
I’m thinking its either nvidia on linux being nvidia on linux, or it not liking mixed resolutions and refresh rates. But really the only noticeable tearing I get is in firefox when playing video like youtube or something.
I also had screen tearing issues immediately on startup into the mint installer. Had to run the installer in safe mode to get mint going. Once mint was fully installed and rebooted to my desktop for the first time, had the same screen issues as I did with the installer not in safe mode. So mint only worked during install and only in safe mode.
Maybe our issues are similar (I’m Nvidia 1080 card), but I was never able to fix mine.
And you can run it on a used postage stamp! (Something, something Arch)
I remember playing Doom under DOS and being mesmerized by the game. And I still am to this very day. I morn the day I discovered my original Doom .WADs went missing.
I’m just waiting for better VR support (formerly WMR, now Quest 3), and my system (Thinkpad T15G) is Intel/Nvidia, occasionally with an Nvidia eGPU, and I’ve heard good support for that just isn’t ready yet. Linux would be great if I had a budget to build something entirely optimized for Linux, but right now it’s just not right for my system and budget.
I plan on trying it out again soon, but I just don’t have time for a new learning curve right now, even if I’m fairly tech savvy.
I switched over my steam and epic games to my Linux install and there’s plenty of games I can’t play because of the anti-cheat or other issues. Can’t install my EA games at all.
Still made the switch and hoping things will catch up as time goes on.
If that’s how you prefer to think of it I’ll let you have it.
I am legitimately not interested in playing PvP games against strangers on the internet because inevitably someone somewhere will have taken the game way too fucking seriously and is basically just griefing people. They use aim bots when they can get away with it. A game that comes with anti-cheat is basically an admission that this game has that glaring flaw and that someone somewhere is getting off on ruining pubs or casual for everyone else.
To be fair there still is a lot of tinkering involved to get gaming on Linux working properly (unless you’re on the steamdeck, but even them you’ll have to tinker for anything that’s not verified). Switching proton runners, changing launch options, fighting updates. It’s definitely more than most people are willing to deal with. For me personally, I’ve had to stop updating my video drivers because Nvidia 555 causes all Proton games to crash for me.
I enjoy the experience of tinkering and troubleshooting, so I’m okay with all that, but I completely understand why most people wouldn’t want to use Linux for gaming.
I honestly cant remember the last time I bought a game and it didnt just work with no tinkering on proton. Though I am on AMD not Nvidia which makes things a lot easier.
Ive had a handfull of games that work on steam deck but had to tinker on my laptop. Cyberpunk would crash on the first splash screen and stormworks would only run on my igpu and not dedicated. But also im also using nvidia.
I guess this could also be based on the distro you use as well as your graphics card. For me, I use EndeavourOS, which is very close to base arch, so I had to do some extra setup to get proton working on it. For some reason, Proton refused to work on the Arch repo’s Steam package, so I had to use the flatpak version instead
The only thing really preinstalled is basic stuff like desktop environments and a few tools to help with updates and manage the system (eos-update, etc). Even almost all the package repositories are the ones maintained by arch.
I’m on EndeavourOS with an Nvidia gpu. I’ve not had to do anything extra for the the version of proton that comes with steam to work besides install the os with the Nvidia proprietary drivers. And then running eos-update --aur --nvidia
I did notice that I got a lot of screen tearing if using Wayland and that more recent versions of proton didn’t work if either Force Composition Pipeline or Force Full Composition Pipeline were enabled; which should have fixed the screentearing so I just use x11 for now.
There are some things I did to make my experience better however. Like installing an proton-ge. Here is a list of what I installed.
<span style="color:#323232;">nvidia-dkms
</span><span style="color:#323232;">nvidia-settings
</span><span style="color:#323232;">libva-nvidia-driver </span><span style="font-style:italic;color:#969896;"># required by vlc to play mkv files with nvidia gpu
</span><span style="color:#323232;">nvidia-tweaks </span><span style="font-style:italic;color:#969896;"># https://github.com/ventureoo/nvidia-tweaks
</span><span style="color:#323232;">lib32-nvidia-utils
</span><span style="color:#323232;">gamemode
</span><span style="color:#323232;">proton-ge-custom-bin
</span><span style="color:#323232;">lib32-libudev0-shim </span><span style="font-style:italic;color:#969896;"># fixes Steam runtime's super old 32 bit version of libnm
</span><span style="color:#323232;">lib32-libnm </span><span style="font-style:italic;color:#969896;"># required if using systemd 253.5-2 or newer
</span>
I would also install nvidia-dracut-hook if you are using both Nvidia and dracut. Dracut is the default on recent versions on endeavorOS.
For proton ge, I also added myself to the games group with
<span style="color:#323232;">sudo usermod $USER -a -G games
</span>
I also like to prepend the following to my games launch options in steam
Mostly that for me on Nvidia (proprietary drivers), although 555 broke my 2nd DVI-D monitor (which is admittedly old, but I don’t have any reasons to replace the little guy).
Nevertheless, I’m very set on getting an AMD GPU whenever I have to replace my GTX 1080 from 2017.
Speed. Unfortunately (at least the last time I looked into it) NVENC still beats the socks off of VAAPI in render times and I’m sure Nvidia likes it that way.
Yup. I know exactly what you mean. I bought Nobody Wants to Die, which is rated platinum on protondb, and it just crashes within 1 second of startup for me. 3h of fucking around with proton versions, launch arguments, even tried lutris, nothing. The only error I could see took me to a stackoverflow thread about vga to dvi adapter issues and the fix was not relevant. My protontricks is apparently also broken which I have no idea why or when it broke.
I got it refunded, it is what it is. I’ll look into fixing my protontricks when I have more time…
Funnily enough, I’ve had almost this exact same thing happen… On Windows. More than once. Spending days getting it to run hardly at all and weeks trying to figure out how to make it run well. On modern hardware, with both old and new games alike.
I’ve not had that much trouble yet with Linux gaming, with only a few exceptions where I needed to tweak a couple things stuff has pretty much just worked.
I’m on Mint with a nvidia card, I haven’t really had to do any tweaks since I stopped trying to install games on an NTFS-formatted drive and nearly every game works perfectly out of the box. There’s a lot of very loud voices complaining about nvidia/tinkering but it’s definitely not universal; you won’t necessarily need to put in a lot of effort to get games to work on Linux.
I made the same statement you did a while ago about having to tweak stuff to get it to work. I just don’t have the time and patience to do it, and I got voted down for saying Linux isn’t for me. I work tech, the last thing I want to do when I get home is mess with more settings and drivers etc.
The Linux and steamdeck forums EVERYWHERE constantly make apologies and excuses for having to tweak things to get gaming to work.
I just want Linux to be an out of the box great gaming experience, and I would sing to the rafters it’s praise. It just isn’t, and unless developers make their stuff work for 3-5% of an install base, I just don’t see it happening. I want it to, I really do, but it’s just not for the masses.
Linux isn’t for the masses because it was never meant to be and still isn’t made to be. You have to install it rather then it being installed by default and most Linux software targets power users who were disappointed by Windows.