It's not even that. I have zero interest in multilayer games even less so "seasonal" games. Basically all the stuff AAA says is dead I like and all the stuff they say I should like I dislike
I will say that in general I also agree, but there are games where I have been completely okay with it, like DRG. But those updates are always free and really just define (formerly) time period in which a long-term event is contained within. I do love that the latest season is really more of a chapter than a season since you can pick and choose whenever you want to jump into whichever season you want to play and progress through. Only seasonal events have time constraints now.
This is particularly nice since my DRG group has moved to playing Grounded instead, with the occasional DRG night and don't want to feel tethered to a release schedule.
Aren't most seasonal content updates in other games free? The way I tend to see it is, they put out new gameplay content to attract attention, then entice people to pick up related cosmetic/extra items during the event.
More like asking for access to your email and keys and phone pin code, or (if people have it) their password wallet, to make sure you aren't hooking up with other guys on the side.
I love my Steamdeck so much. Been like 2 years now? still rocking every game I want to play.
Playing through ZenlessZoneZero rn which isn't even officially supported in any extent and runs flawlessly! Also it's a real computer that you can do real work on.
I bought like 200 games since I had mine though mostly indie and actually played a lot of them! I spend quite a bit of time traveling and it's awesome to play some strategy with the trackpad - the trip just flies by!
I upgraded my PC and now I barely touch my steam deck. The money spent on it is still VERY worth it. Even if I never touched it again, I use it when traveling, I would still be unbelievably satisfied with my purchase.
I’d use a Steamdeck mini if was available. The current size for my needs makes me classify it as a non-portable. Hope the next version they have a smaller variant along with the larger one.
Resolution scale, not resolution. On my monitor I run a 4k resolution with a 125% resolution scale. When I undock the resolution scale stays at 125% so everything looks too large on the decks display.
Same. I was very impressed by the games that work despite being unsupported. Heck, I’ve got Rainbow Six: Vegas working on it with gamepad support. I couldn’t even do that in Windows.
Linux is amazing for games thar don't have anti-cheat and I don't play those games. Saying that Linux gaming isn't ready is just stupid at this point. And for emulation it might be better than Windows.
It's just too bad that Riot seems so inherently against supporting Linux. I still enjoy playing ARAMs for watching YouTube on the side and the occasional Val session. Obviously for Val I can just boot over but I do play league about daily.
Inb4 "just don't play league, it's bad anyway" yeah thanks, solid solution
The good thing about Valorant is you can just play (the better) Counter Strike instead and it doesn't try to install a rootkit. I guess for LoL you could play one of the alternatives too, but I don't know if any if them are good. They aren't my thing.
Fun fact, the Steam Deck discord has subcommunities designed for indie developers to group with Deck-owning volunteers; since not all indie devs own a Steam Deck, they can take a look at preview builds and inform the devs about any particular issues.
I've been experimenting recently and while most games run fine and VRR & HDR & Multimonitor somewhat work after some experimenting & tweaks I still have problems with a few games.
Some recent examples would be Noita stuttering and running in slow motion.
Getting anything from Ubisoft running (when it does run it runs great though).
And modding is very hit & miss.
If Dual Boot with windows (especially if running Bitlocker) wasn't such a PITA I would likely use Linux as my main OS.
The "quit having fun" meme is ironically becoming as cringey as the thing it is originally complaining about.
You will help the community more by telling non-Linux people why Linux gaming is better, and this meme is doing the exact opposite of it -- "oh Linux can't play some games, yada yada. But we are still better! Switch over!" -- like what's the logic of it?
What's the purpose of this meme other than circlejerking?
Disclamer: I am a Linux user myself, started with Debian and is now using Arch Linux.
I will share some advantages I experienced in Linux gaming:
Alt-tabbing old fullscreened games won't mess with my monitor.
The compatibility of Wine when it comes to some older games is wild. SimCity 4 actually crashed less when I played it on Linux.
Better performance across the board. Granted it's just a mere 5% difference but I will take it, why not.
Linux's main selling point has become "It's not Windows". That was a boring line five years ago, but Microsoft has eagerly been trying to invent new ways to make their flagship OS worse and worse.
I have absolutely no problem gaming on Linux. I do have a problem with Rusty's Retirement not letting me use my desktop while the game runs though. Nothing I can do about that one.
I've met enough Gamers(tm) 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.
Except a lot of anti cheat now supports Linux. Destiny 2 doesn't run on Linux only because Bungie refuses to allow it, their AC supports Linux just fine now
Exactly this, the community has proven it will put the effort to make it work, and a lot of things that don't still are because the companies resist it intentionally
Unfortunately there is a lack of awareness how Microsoft treats Windows for desktop PCs and notebooks and how the future strategy looks like. Otherwise many people would move away faster.
I have a buddy who kept asking me to install windows in order to play one of those rootkit games. Had to disappoint him every time. No fucking way am I doing that. Fuck that.
I'm trying to cut back on proprietary software until I'm only using free software but I make a small exception for some games (usually bought by friends, or to play with them).
Nah. It's just projection. Even though I use Linux myself, it's nearly always the other way around with the lecturer trying to tell Windows users to switch to Linux while the average gamers are just happily gaming away on what works for them.
Hell, you could take many of the comments in this post and turn them into things the guy on the left is saying while Windows gamers are having fun.
I know this won't work for everyone, but I just quit playing games that don't work or even from publishers that do shitty things and there's still plenty of games out there. There's a lot of shovelware out there, but there's also a lot of good stuff out there.
I think it's worth advocating for quitting shitty games, though.
Out of many friends I've had who (used to) frequent games like PUBG, Dota 2, League of Legends, Valorant, Overwatch, etc., most were just having a bad time, all the time. Granted, some of these work on Linux, but the point is, those of my friends that still play Overwatch ("2", lol) just seem to be happier and more functional when they have to quit for some period of time.
I've been having a much better time with my life once I went for the good old enjoyment rather than chasing rank or wins or skill, finally making time to play amazing single-player titles again or just screwing around in online games.
And curiously enough, the online games I actually want to play and have fun doing so are the ones that work on Linux, while the rest thankfully refuses!
Well, conflict is, pretty much, the backbone of any story, narrative, or motive. Has been for long.
Still, I'm not sure it's all that relevant and necessary for a video game, I agree. Some of them just let me do things I can't in real life, like building my stupid base on different planets and moons, or transforming the landscape for the sake of it.
Linux is great, everyone should use it! No, not you, we don’t have the software you want to use like windows. Why doesn’t everyone use Linux? It’s great!
If everyone used Linux it would be the exact same user base as windows.
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.
I've switched for over a month now and did had problems with 2 games out of the 6 I tried so far (all of which were both games installed via Lutris and I found solutions to fix them both).
Funnily enough one of the games I got via Steam which did not work before in Windows now works in Linux. Further, I was running Windows 7 (yeah, I know it was a bad idea security wise), so there are AAA games whose minimum Windows version is 10 which I now can play in Linux that I couldn't before in the Windows I was using.
All in all it has been great and I have no intention whatsoever to go back to Windows.
Even if there are games that won't work in Linux, there are so many good games out there that can entertain me for hundreds of hours that I won't miss the handful I cannot get to run in Linux.
I have a couple games that were Windows 98 and Windows XP games that don’t work on Windows 10/11, but work just fine on Linux. It’s funny that Linux is sometimes better at running Windows games than Windows is.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Add Steamtinkerlaunch to your steam proton list with protonup‐qt
Then, select it under the force compatibility menu.
From there, just click the run vortex mod manager button.
You can also run steamtinkerlaunch standalone, which is what I did for cyberpunk2077, but I feel like I did more manual file moving than I had to.
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.
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.
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.
nvidia-dkms
nvidia-settings
libva-nvidia-driver # required by vlc to play mkv files with nvidia gpu
nvidia-tweaks # https://github.com/ventureoo/nvidia-tweaks
lib32-nvidia-utils
gamemode
proton-ge-custom-bin
lib32-libudev0-shim # fixes Steam runtime's super old 32 bit version of libnm
lib32-libnm # required if using systemd 253.5-2 or newer
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
sudo usermod $USER -a -G games
I also like to prepend the following to my games launch options in steam
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 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.
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.
Maybe if you used VR Chat all the time, but there's vfio for those cases, if needed. I just learned about it from another user, and so there's really no need to keep Windows as your primary boot partition or even have a dual boot setup.
My Quest 2 has been running VR fine. ALVR's latest update made me finally nuke my Windows partition I kept for VR.
Other than Angry Birds VR needing to have the recenter button hit after it's first launched, so far it's been fine for HL: Alyx, Beat Saber, Budget Cuts, and a few others I've tried. Literally the only workaround quirk I've found so far.
It's a dumb reason to get banned from an instance. I don't see anything wrong with making an observation other programmers have already made. Thanks for the warning though.
I know, I'm one of them😆🤙. I try not to be annoying though, hope you didn't take it wrong.
Edit: sorry, though this was a comment on my response to someone being weird about rust.
If anyone truly cares about the community and want people to switch. They need to be understanding and willing to accept the fact some people have good reasons not to switch. Being pushy or insulting isn't going to win them back and will most likely sour their perception of linux.
I remember how much hate I got for using an Nvidia graphics card on linux. I also remember helping other people get Linux running on their graphics cards. There were so many toxic individuals that would scold new users for "supporting Nvidia, that evil company" despite the fact most people switching from windows probably already owned that Nvidia card.
There were also others that long since given up because of all the hate they received. I want that to be uncommon and thankfully it seems to be more the case nowadays.
So I'm missing out on Destiny, PUBG, CoD, Siege, Battlefield, and Lost Ark... Yeah I'm totally okay with that personally. There are thousands of other games I'd rather be playing and they all work great.
I still rely on Windows for a few important things (namely a Club Penguin Singleplayer Client that I'm not sure works on Linux), but I absolutely will switch to Linux as soon as I'm fully ready to take the leap.
Debian seems like a nice distro (am I the only one who calls it "deebian"?)
I heard Houdini has a Linux version. I might try that out, especially since it does have ActionScript 3 support (which Club Penguin started using in 2011)
Mfing world of goo 2 offers an appimage file instead of a flatpack, so I have to monkey around with the console or lutris to get it to work on steamdeck.
I just want to play my puzzle game, not puzzle how to play my game.
Ah well
I'm quite sad as a VR and HDR gamer because I really do want to switch. I have a steam deck, it works great for flatscreen gaming, but general HDR support across the linux ecosystem is apparently lacking and my headset manufacturer told me that they don't support linux and couldn't until the VR ecosystem they rely on supports it
What e-sports have kernel level anti-cheat? Isn't it just the crap published by Riot? I know both CS and Dota 2 work on Linux, I'm pretty sure you can get Overwatch 2 running. You can't exactly play Smash on a Windows PC either, but I think the other major fighting games like Tekken and Street Fighter work. Are there any other serious contenders for a major esport I'm just forgetting?
Anti cheat preventing gaming on Linux is honestly an outlier at this stage. It just means the devs don't want to deal with working with an additional OS which several other devs and valve itself has shown is not a major issue anymore. Both EAC and BattleEye have had linux userspace clients for years, and both support WINE now.
Also because they probably can't convince linux users to install a kernel level anti cheat as if that isn't rootkit spyware lol. Akmod and dkms devs would probably laugh if Riot tried such a thing.
Personally, I see incompatibility with kernel-level anti-cheat as a feature rather than a limitation.
People can still cheat without involving any software on their PC because the game needs to display something to the user (which can be analyzed by another device, either intercepting the stream before sending it along to the monitor or even by using a camera to grab the pixels from the monitor, if there's encryption used on the signal to prevent mitm). And it needs to accept input from the user, which another device connected to the device analysing the display can adjust to improve aim, prevent friendly fire, or just auto shoot when you're pointed at a target. You could even write a full bot using that.
On the other hand, kernel level anti-cheat can be an attack vector to get into your machine in a way that existing malware detection will have a hard time detecting. Kernel modification is the level rootkits work at and an arbitrary code execution flaw could mean your hardware is forever compromised, or at least anything with flashable firmware storage (especially if that firmware also implements the flash capabilities, since it could then add its own code to any new firmware you try to flash).
I just don't play many multiplayer games these days to avoid the cheating. And if I do get back into multiplayer games, I'll either do it on a console where I don't care as much about the kernel getting exploited or I'll play a game where the servers are managed in a way that cheaters will get banned because an admin can see what they are doing.
I don't think anybody ever told someone else not to use Linux when they are already using and enjoying it. This argument is often used as a defense against switching to Linux. And of course, if you just want to play your games without messing with all the bottles and Proton versions, Windows is still the way to go, especially for older games.
As a challenge I tried getting several older games to work on Steam Deck, and while it was fun for me, I like tinkering, I can totally see how it can be a huge hassle for others.
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 remember seeing someone in a comments section say why bother use linux for gaming bro got destroyed by the replies lol
he also called linux users ekittens 💀
Wow, that's more stable than it was on my Windows machine. It crashed, like, 6ish times during my playthrough but this was immediately on release, so it might have gotten better since then.
I have been playing through Elden Ring again with a friend using the seamless co-op mod and my friend on Windows gets (what we assume is) shader compilation stutter in every new area while my game has been smooth as butter.
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.
Oh yeah. For me, it's a Match-3 game that I stopped playing specifically because it didn't support Linux. Too bad it's also the best release from the franchise imo (The Treasures of Montezuma 4).
Years ago I bought a ps4 controller to play in my Linux pc, but the games didn't recognize the controller input, I had to use some program to map the keyboard to the controllers but it didn't work well, so I installed steam and with it ir worked perfectly. Because work and college I had to stop gaming for a couple of years, and I tried again some weeks ago with Lutris, to my surprise that the controller got recognized and worked perfectly without the need for steam.
I can get some old ass terminal based JRPG and Sims 3 which can barely run on windows working using bottles but I can't get the linux version of Hearts of Iron IV to recognize dlc wtf is this
I haven't played HOI4 on Linux yet, but I've played other PDX games. They have just worked for me. I don't know if you're doing something different, but I just install the DLCs and they are instantly recognized.
Anticheat will have to just come from other methods that people will also hate.
Imagine, for example, if they required a form of government issued ID and the account was tied to you specifically. Despite privacy nightmare that it is (plus other issues, especially around globally accessed games), bans would have significantly larger impact if they're tied to a real-world identity.
I used to kinda complain about this but being unable to play lol or lostark has greatly improved my life. I don't mind being unable to play these games.
I am very grateful for proton and all of the technologies that allow me to play majority of my games. linux gaming in 2015 was painful.
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.
I'm thinking about getting a handheld and putting Chimera or Bazzite on it. It's gonna replace my main gaming PC (so it needs to support egpu) once it bites it.
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.
I am slowly chugging through the weird issues I have with trying to use Bazzite as my primary OS, but it will replace my Windows install soon, I can feel it. I still miss HDR, but my newest and most inconvenient issue is that Firefox just keeps crashing as soon as it launches now. No luck fixing it so far, and I installed Edge just to have a working browser.
If you really want to have a go of it you should either buy well supported hardware next time you buy or even better buy hardware that actually comes with Linux by an OEM that has already done the research and selection and then don't run a kernel older than your hardware. Stick with boring well supported stuff neither bleeding edge nor ancient.
It's great that you can at this point pick hardware out of a hat and have a lot of it supported by Linux but it doesn't mean you should buy hardware this way if you want to have a good experience.
Man i wish, to this day, no matter the distro its like russian roulette with a revovler loaded with 5 bullets
So there are absolutely millions of Linux users. Either we are all masochists living in constant frustration because we are brothers in brokenness or few long term Linux users have an experience that is similar to yours and are simply trying to help you avoid non-obvious pitfalls that may otherwise lead to a shitty experience
A) First off "well supported" herein means that your hardware is known to be well supported by Linux not that its common, good, expensive, or useful. If you are having a shit experience then there is a good chance its actually not well supported.
B) Lots of "stable" distributions ship with old kernels often as old as 2-3 years old. This means that hardware that came out within the last 2-3 years isn't supported at all and even older hardware for which support was added recently wont work as advertised. There is no profit in running either the kernel that came out 10 minutes ago or the one that came out 3 years ago. This to me seems to be a common issue. Just run a recent kernel.
C) The barrier to entry to create your own distro is incredibly low. The effort required to make a good one is a lot higher. If you stick to the major distros that have stuck around over the years you will have a more consistent experience.
D) X11 is less experimental than Wayland and less hassle
E) Simple environments like XFCE and Cinnamon and window managers are more consistent and predictable than gnome
F) Flatpaking all the things brings exciting new challenges not forseen by the developers who don't actually distribute flatpaks. Stay away from unofficial flatpaks and if the developer suggests a system package or an appimage use whatever the developer recommends.
If all this advice seems awfully complicated it could be shorted to buy hardware that comes with Linux and run Mint.
What is supported is ... what is supported. Wherein the manufacturers assert that their hardware supports Linux, OEMs assert that it supports Linux, Linux developers assert that it is supported, or user reports assert that it is supported. The old school way is to plug the exact model of hardware and the word "linux" into your favorite search engine but there are actual hardware compatibility lists too.
For something to be "stock" has no meaning whatsoever and one doesn't have to guess if something is supported one can usually find out.
Then don't install Linux, if Linux doesn't work for you then don't use it. Nothing Linux has to offer is worth the pain you've gone through. As for the system, Linux has to build itself around hardware rather then the other way around which is why problems occur.
If you want true freedom, no spying, and you want to own your computer then I reccomend installing Linux. Sadly most people dont care which is why I gave my previous suggestion. I recommend installing Pop_OS as its going to make gaming the easiest and installs drivers out of the box.
Good thing I have no interest in playing online with randos (or with anyone else at all, really) or paying through the nose for AAA games full of bugs, then!
If it’s not open source then it’s an advertisement not an esport
If someone goes to host a tournament and they can’t choose the patch or modify it then it’s not an even playing field between organizers. Think like 2 people go to host on consecutive weekends and there’s a patch between them now the person who hosted first has an unfair advantage in game quality as the players know how to play it
Also if the studio/publisher is hosting an event it’s just an advertisement
What? So if a sports federation changes the rules all independently organized events are disadvantaged? By that logic the Olympics are just an advertisement for the sports not a competition, as the federation usually don't change rules 6 months prior.
Nope, the leagues are allowed to have different rules
Sports are open source, for instance not every football competition has to use blue cards or a competition made a patch to use blue cards…depending how you want to view it
especially if all those windows dual booting experiences from over 10 years ago which is now misinformation wasn't kept commented like every time someone brings up dual booting
It should be, but I've had too many issues with windows somehow updating and ruining my boot partion/grub.
If I want to run windows, I only run it on a VM with hardware passthrough or on a totally different machine since physically unseating my Linux M.2 from the motherboard is too much hassle and I don't want to move it to a PCIe card.
That's cool games thar require anti cheat measures or have sports are generally speaking games I'm not interested in as a rule.
"We need kernel access to prevent cheaters from ruining our game" is the dating equivalent to a guy asking for your phone password on the first date.
It's not even that. I have zero interest in multilayer games even less so "seasonal" games. Basically all the stuff AAA says is dead I like and all the stuff they say I should like I dislike
The season nomenclature is fucking stupid and I hate it. If a game makes its DLC or quarterly updates and calls them "Seasons" I am revolted.
I will say that in general I also agree, but there are games where I have been completely okay with it, like DRG. But those updates are always free and really just define (formerly) time period in which a long-term event is contained within. I do love that the latest season is really more of a chapter than a season since you can pick and choose whenever you want to jump into whichever season you want to play and progress through. Only seasonal events have time constraints now.
This is particularly nice since my DRG group has moved to playing Grounded instead, with the occasional DRG night and don't want to feel tethered to a release schedule.
Aren't most seasonal content updates in other games free? The way I tend to see it is, they put out new gameplay content to attract attention, then entice people to pick up related cosmetic/extra items during the event.
This is what made Clash of Clans alien to me.
More like asking for access to your email and keys and phone pin code, or (if people have it) their password wallet, to make sure you aren't hooking up with other guys on the side.
Just as crazy
Anti Commercial-AI license
sudo give me your phone password
0000 It's the same as my luggage!
Hell yea brother!
My beef is with the machine.
I love my Steamdeck so much. Been like 2 years now? still rocking every game I want to play.
Playing through ZenlessZoneZero rn which isn't even officially supported in any extent and runs flawlessly! Also it's a real computer that you can do real work on.
My Steam Deck has been awesome, money very well spent.
And Valve has made a good chunk of money off me since buying it too lol. I keep getting games specifically for the Deck.
I bought like 200 games since I had mine though mostly indie and actually played a lot of them! I spend quite a bit of time traveling and it's awesome to play some strategy with the trackpad - the trip just flies by!
I upgraded my PC and now I barely touch my steam deck. The money spent on it is still VERY worth it. Even if I never touched it again, I use it when traveling, I would still be unbelievably satisfied with my purchase.
In a similar boat. However I now have games strictly for the Deck and games strictly for the Desktop.
I’d use a Steamdeck mini if was available. The current size for my needs makes me classify it as a non-portable. Hope the next version they have a smaller variant along with the larger one.
I've been playing OG PS2 San Andreas. Absolutely loving it ❤️
I find that happens if my docked and undocked resolution scales are not the same.
Resolution scale, not resolution. On my monitor I run a 4k resolution with a 125% resolution scale. When I undock the resolution scale stays at 125% so everything looks too large on the decks display.
Same. I was very impressed by the games that work despite being unsupported. Heck, I’ve got Rainbow Six: Vegas working on it with gamepad support. I couldn’t even do that in Windows.
Linux is amazing for games thar don't have anti-cheat and I don't play those games. Saying that Linux gaming isn't ready is just stupid at this point. And for emulation it might be better than Windows.
Personally haven't encountered a game that wouldn't run, so as far as I'm concerned it runs anything. I'm not going to shed any tears over Fortnite.
It's just too bad that Riot seems so inherently against supporting Linux. I still enjoy playing ARAMs for watching YouTube on the side and the occasional Val session. Obviously for Val I can just boot over but I do play league about daily.
Inb4 "just don't play league, it's bad anyway" yeah thanks, solid solution
The good thing about Valorant is you can just play (the better) Counter Strike instead and it doesn't try to install a rootkit. I guess for LoL you could play one of the alternatives too, but I don't know if any if them are good. They aren't my thing.
Val was one of the reasons I still dual boot Win10 (plus VR gaming), but now that it released on PS5, I'd rather just relearn the game for controller.
Fun fact, the Steam Deck discord has subcommunities designed for indie developers to group with Deck-owning volunteers; since not all indie devs own a Steam Deck, they can take a look at preview builds and inform the devs about any particular issues.
I've been experimenting recently and while most games run fine and VRR & HDR & Multimonitor somewhat work after some experimenting & tweaks I still have problems with a few games.
Some recent examples would be Noita stuttering and running in slow motion. Getting anything from Ubisoft running (when it does run it runs great though). And modding is very hit & miss.
If Dual Boot with windows (especially if running Bitlocker) wasn't such a PITA I would likely use Linux as my main OS.
The "quit having fun" meme is ironically becoming as cringey as the thing it is originally complaining about.
You will help the community more by telling non-Linux people why Linux gaming is better, and this meme is doing the exact opposite of it -- "oh Linux can't play some games, yada yada. But we are still better! Switch over!" -- like what's the logic of it?
What's the purpose of this meme other than circlejerking?
Disclamer: I am a Linux user myself, started with Debian and is now using Arch Linux.
I will share some advantages I experienced in Linux gaming:
Alt-tabbing old fullscreened games won't mess with my monitor.
The compatibility of Wine when it comes to some older games is wild. SimCity 4 actually crashed less when I played it on Linux.
Better performance across the board. Granted it's just a mere 5% difference but I will take it, why not.
Linux's main selling point has become "It's not Windows". That was a boring line five years ago, but Microsoft has eagerly been trying to invent new ways to make their flagship OS worse and worse.
I have absolutely no problem gaming on Linux. I do have a problem with Rusty's Retirement not letting me use my desktop while the game runs though. Nothing I can do about that one.
This meme is a cringe within cringe. The original situation is unbearable and the meme itself too. Quit laughing.
...who actually says this, because it sounds like pretend anger to me
i think it's a joke about how much Linux users talk about Linux to people who don't care but reversed.
I might be taking it too literal.
I've met enough Gamers(tm) 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.
Except a lot of anti cheat now supports Linux. Destiny 2 doesn't run on Linux only because Bungie refuses to allow it, their AC supports Linux just fine now
there is also other games that dont run on linux
Roblox (sober works which is a workaround),Fortnite (Tim Sweeney hates linux from what i heard),and more
Exactly this, the community has proven it will put the effort to make it work, and a lot of things that don't still are because the companies resist it intentionally
true but ngl linux has a low market share but its slowly growing tho
Unfortunately there is a lack of awareness how Microsoft treats Windows for desktop PCs and notebooks and how the future strategy looks like. Otherwise many people would move away faster.
Hmm how about the non tech savvy
They should listen to the tech savvy.
agree
True
Are there people telling linux folks to stop enjoying linux gaming...? I say ask as a linux person
I doubt that literally is a significant concern.
When I can't join others is when I hear confusion as to why I use GNU+Linux, and disappointment when I refuse to use Windows to play a certain game.
Been there. They coolly suggested "why don't you dual boot?".
Windows literally cannot be run on my CPU architecture.
What CPU architecture are you running? Windows supports x86 and ARM.
RISC-V surely can’t run any games?
What games are you running on this?
https://wiki.raptorcs.com/wiki/Games_Compatibility
But lately just a mix of DS emulation, Arx Libertatis and Minetest. Boring maybe, but it's what brings me joy.
I have a buddy who kept asking me to install windows in order to play one of those rootkit games. Had to disappoint him every time. No fucking way am I doing that. Fuck that.
Anti Commercial-AI license
I'm trying to cut back on proprietary software until I'm only using free software but I make a small exception for some games (usually bought by friends, or to play with them).
Nah. It's just projection. Even though I use Linux myself, it's nearly always the other way around with the lecturer trying to tell Windows users to switch to Linux while the average gamers are just happily gaming away on what works for them.
Hell, you could take many of the comments in this post and turn them into things the guy on the left is saying while Windows gamers are having fun.
Maybe I'm vain, but I posted a post a couple days ago celebrating my success with Linux gaming. So many games are like here.
You know it's not ready for VR yet. yeah I played VR for about a month 4 years ago and that was enough.
You can't play games with anti cheat personally I don't play many of those, but obviously if you do that will play into your decision
Anyway, people are always negative about everything, especially against things other people like
For real though I'd like a VR system (modern) that can use the steam store natively.
The SteamDeck subreddit is full of Windows shilling.
The Finals subreddit during beta was full of complaints about SteamDeck users asking for them to allow Proton.
There's def a vocal minority out there that will die on the Windows horse, infected with rootkits and all.
No. I visit there frequently, 1 in maybe 50 posts are about Steam Deck running windows.
Its not the posts its select few in the comments section.
I know this won't work for everyone, but I just quit playing games that don't work or even from publishers that do shitty things and there's still plenty of games out there. There's a lot of shovelware out there, but there's also a lot of good stuff out there.
I think it's worth advocating for quitting shitty games, though.
Out of many friends I've had who (used to) frequent games like PUBG, Dota 2, League of Legends, Valorant, Overwatch, etc., most were just having a bad time, all the time. Granted, some of these work on Linux, but the point is, those of my friends that still play Overwatch ("2", lol) just seem to be happier and more functional when they have to quit for some period of time.
I've been having a much better time with my life once I went for the good old enjoyment rather than chasing rank or wins or skill, finally making time to play amazing single-player titles again or just screwing around in online games.
And curiously enough, the online games I actually want to play and have fun doing so are the ones that work on Linux, while the rest thankfully refuses!
The pervasive idea that games must necessarily be about conflict, competition and overcoming enemies.
It took me too long to realize that I basically just want a Star trek holodeck experience.
Well, conflict is, pretty much, the backbone of any story, narrative, or motive. Has been for long.
Still, I'm not sure it's all that relevant and necessary for a video game, I agree. Some of them just let me do things I can't in real life, like building my stupid base on different planets and moons, or transforming the landscape for the sake of it.
This is the way. If we don't stop buying those games the publishers will never recognize how shittu they are.
Average Linux user when you tell them you actually like using Windows.
Agreed, tried linux 6 months back, decided it wasn't worth my time, will try another distro in another 6 months.
And this is from someone who installed and used mint through junior high.
Average Linux user > average windows user.
Plus Linux doesn't track you (depending on distro, I suppose.)
But I kid. People should use whatever the fuck they want.
Linux is great, everyone should use it! No, not you, we don’t have the software you want to use like windows. Why doesn’t everyone use Linux? It’s great!
If everyone used Linux it would be the exact same user base as windows.
Nobody want to use Windows actually
Can't play league on linux
Actually a good thing
I've been gaming on Linux exclusively since 2016.
DXVK was an amazing improvement. Steam play makes everything so much easier. And the Steamdeck was a revelation.
I don't like to play games with other people anyways so Anti-Cheat is no issue for me.
Anticheat is just a sign that the devs are insecure about their game.
Anti-cheat is just a sign that this game is designed to be ruined for you by other players.
That's one of the weirder ways I've seen to say "I don't enjoy competitive games and everyone who does is stupid."
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.
I've switched for over a month now and did had problems with 2 games out of the 6 I tried so far (all of which were both games installed via Lutris and I found solutions to fix them both).
Funnily enough one of the games I got via Steam which did not work before in Windows now works in Linux. Further, I was running Windows 7 (yeah, I know it was a bad idea security wise), so there are AAA games whose minimum Windows version is 10 which I now can play in Linux that I couldn't before in the Windows I was using.
All in all it has been great and I have no intention whatsoever to go back to Windows.
Even if there are games that won't work in Linux, there are so many good games out there that can entertain me for hundreds of hours that I won't miss the handful I cannot get to run in Linux.
I have a couple games that were Windows 98 and Windows XP games that don’t work on Windows 10/11, but work just fine on Linux. It’s funny that Linux is sometimes better at running Windows games than Windows is.
Wine and Proton manage to be better at both forward and backward compatibility with Windows than actual Windows.
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.
Hey! Sorry you had these bad experiences.
My setup is on Debian
testingand is documented on this blog post: https://blog.c10l.cc/09122023-debian-gamingI don’t have an Nvidia card but other than that, this should give you a head start, including virtual surround on headphones if that’s your thing!
I promise it’s not a lot of work and I tried to make it all easy to follow (feedback welcome though!).
If you decide to give it a go, let me know how it went!
Thanks, I'll take a look!
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 will check out Bazzite over the weekend. Someone told me about Pop OS but this seems less of a tinkering hassle
Shouldn't Arch be the recommended gaming distro? Not because any focus on gaming but because it is the distro SteeamOS is based on?
thanks, your objective experiences are wrong too
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.
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.
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.
I haven't had any problems running my Steam library under Linux Mint. Older games, like Deus Ex and Giants: Citizen Kabuto I can run directly in Wine.
If I could get Vortex Mod Manager working properly under Linux, I wouldn't need Windows at all.
You can!
Add Steamtinkerlaunch to your steam proton list with protonup‐qt Then, select it under the force compatibility menu. From there, just click the run vortex mod manager button.
You can also run steamtinkerlaunch standalone, which is what I did for cyberpunk2077, but I feel like I did more manual file moving than I had to.
Edit: can't spell today
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.
I'm on Nvidia and have had the same experience as you. Everything just works.
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.
I'm unfortunately stuck with Nvidia for the time-being because I need NVENC.
What does NVENC do that VAAPI doesn’t?
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.
Isn’t that only on NVIDIA cards?
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
Pure Arch here, no issues with Proton whatsoever.
Any chance this could have been related to EndeavourOS in any way? Like with something pre-installed?
I'm just being curious and throwing ideas here.
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 --nvidiaI 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 PipelineorForce Full Composition Pipelinewere 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.
I would also install
nvidia-dracut-hookif 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
I also like to prepend the following to my games launch options in steam
And I set proton-ge as my default proton version on the steam options.
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 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.
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've
neverrarely ever had that except one or two games in the last 15 years...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.
On my Ubuntu system, I installed Steam. That was it, the things I want mostly work.
agree
deep rock galactic, stardew valley, and minecraft work on linux.
what more could you possibly need?
Not to mention Terraria and Don't Starve (and many more).
Project Zomboid too!!
Great! I tend to avoid DRM'd games by buying from GOG. Don't use their launcher, lutris tends to have auto install scripts for games.
Its not ready for VR. Thats why my vr headset is collecting dust.
The tech is cool but evidently not worth it to find motivation to go back to win.
If you have a headset that works on Linux, everything works just fine. A lot of headsets are just missing the drivers.
Maybe if you used VR Chat all the time, but there's
vfiofor those cases, if needed. I just learned about it from another user, and so there's really no need to keep Windows as your primary boot partition or even have a dual boot setup.My Quest 2 has been running VR fine. ALVR's latest update made me finally nuke my Windows partition I kept for VR.
Other than Angry Birds VR needing to have the recenter button hit after it's first launched, so far it's been fine for HL: Alyx, Beat Saber, Budget Cuts, and a few others I've tried. Literally the only workaround quirk I've found so far.
I'm one of the guys on the couch.
Based
Just switch over, if you like! I want you to feel comfortable with the decision and feel motivated to give it a good shot.
If it's not for you, I understand. Maybe in a few years it'll be a better fit but it's no rush.
Careful, comments like they might get you banned from Lemmy.
It's a dumb reason to get banned from an instance. I don't see anything wrong with making an observation other programmers have already made. Thanks for the warning though.
It was a joke about how fanatical people are about Linux on Lemmy.
I know, I'm one of them😆🤙. I try not to be annoying though, hope you didn't take it wrong. Edit: sorry, though this was a comment on my response to someone being weird about rust.
If anyone truly cares about the community and want people to switch. They need to be understanding and willing to accept the fact some people have good reasons not to switch. Being pushy or insulting isn't going to win them back and will most likely sour their perception of linux.
I remember how much hate I got for using an Nvidia graphics card on linux. I also remember helping other people get Linux running on their graphics cards. There were so many toxic individuals that would scold new users for "supporting Nvidia, that evil company" despite the fact most people switching from windows probably already owned that Nvidia card.
There were also others that long since given up because of all the hate they received. I want that to be uncommon and thankfully it seems to be more the case nowadays.
Checks ProtonDB
So I'm missing out on Destiny, PUBG, CoD, Siege, Battlefield, and Lost Ark... Yeah I'm totally okay with that personally. There are thousands of other games I'd rather be playing and they all work great.
Same most of the games that dont work on linux/proton are pretty bad and boring anyways
Steam deck has entered the chat.
It successfully convinced me to switch over.
I don't even own one and it convinced me.
I still rely on Windows for a few important things (namely a Club Penguin Singleplayer Client that I'm not sure works on Linux), but I absolutely will switch to Linux as soon as I'm fully ready to take the leap.
Debian seems like a nice distro (am I the only one who calls it "deebian"?)
what's the club penguin client called?
It's just CPSC. It requires a very specific version of XAMPP to be installed (the latest version won't work).
Only way to find out is to try it. Something like Club Penguin shouldn't give you much trouble especially if you use a launcher like Lutris.
I heard Houdini has a Linux version. I might try that out, especially since it does have ActionScript 3 support (which Club Penguin started using in 2011)
I'm buying a new laptop to test out a Linux environment and make sure all my shit works and everything is backed up, then I'll port it to my desktop.
I would never install a rootkit on my system to play a video game anyway.
Bazzite is awesome 😎
Seconded.
VR though :(
Works on plasma Wayland. At least for the index with steamvr
Any issues setting it up? I keep reading horror stories
The Quest 2 works with alvr on plasma wayland too.
I don't know if Linux Gaming would exist if it wasn't for OpenGL and Carmack using it for Quake.
Unfortunately we are in the Glide era of VR. OpenXR exists, but someone needs to create a killer app which uses it.
Mfing world of goo 2 offers an appimage file instead of a flatpack, so I have to monkey around with the console or lutris to get it to work on steamdeck.
I just want to play my puzzle game, not puzzle how to play my game. Ah well
I'm quite sad as a VR and HDR gamer because I really do want to switch. I have a steam deck, it works great for flatscreen gaming, but general HDR support across the linux ecosystem is apparently lacking and my headset manufacturer told me that they don't support linux and couldn't until the VR ecosystem they rely on supports it
I'm all up in that VR and sad the way it's been treated.
What e-sports have kernel level anti-cheat? Isn't it just the crap published by Riot? I know both CS and Dota 2 work on Linux, I'm pretty sure you can get Overwatch 2 running. You can't exactly play Smash on a Windows PC either, but I think the other major fighting games like Tekken and Street Fighter work. Are there any other serious contenders for a major esport I'm just forgetting?
It's just the usual "AAA" suspects
Valorant Battlefield 2042 Rainbow Six League
Even CS technically if you play competitive on faceit, which is still pretty dumb.
There's plenty that actually work though, even with anticheat: https://areweanticheatyet.com
Anti cheat preventing gaming on Linux is honestly an outlier at this stage. It just means the devs don't want to deal with working with an additional OS which several other devs and valve itself has shown is not a major issue anymore. Both EAC and BattleEye have had linux userspace clients for years, and both support WINE now.
Also because they probably can't convince linux users to install a kernel level anti cheat as if that isn't rootkit spyware lol. Akmod and dkms devs would probably laugh if Riot tried such a thing.
Personally, I see incompatibility with kernel-level anti-cheat as a feature rather than a limitation.
People can still cheat without involving any software on their PC because the game needs to display something to the user (which can be analyzed by another device, either intercepting the stream before sending it along to the monitor or even by using a camera to grab the pixels from the monitor, if there's encryption used on the signal to prevent mitm). And it needs to accept input from the user, which another device connected to the device analysing the display can adjust to improve aim, prevent friendly fire, or just auto shoot when you're pointed at a target. You could even write a full bot using that.
On the other hand, kernel level anti-cheat can be an attack vector to get into your machine in a way that existing malware detection will have a hard time detecting. Kernel modification is the level rootkits work at and an arbitrary code execution flaw could mean your hardware is forever compromised, or at least anything with flashable firmware storage (especially if that firmware also implements the flash capabilities, since it could then add its own code to any new firmware you try to flash).
I just don't play many multiplayer games these days to avoid the cheating. And if I do get back into multiplayer games, I'll either do it on a console where I don't care as much about the kernel getting exploited or I'll play a game where the servers are managed in a way that cheaters will get banned because an admin can see what they are doing.
I don't think anybody ever told someone else not to use Linux when they are already using and enjoying it. This argument is often used as a defense against switching to Linux. And of course, if you just want to play your games without messing with all the bottles and Proton versions, Windows is still the way to go, especially for older games.
As a challenge I tried getting several older games to work on Steam Deck, and while it was fun for me, I like tinkering, I can totally see how it can be a huge hassle for others.
I see this as an absolute win.
There are still good options for mainstream competitive gaming. CSGO, Rocket League, Apex Legends to name a few.
I'm missing PUBG though.
I found Squad as a good alternative to PUBG for slow military gameplay even tho it's not really same concept
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.
You should take a look at alvr
I remember seeing someone in a comments section say why bother use linux for gaming bro got destroyed by the replies lol he also called linux users ekittens 💀
Good work is being done and I hope more and more games start to get native support as well.
Elden Ring works. Crashed on me for the first time yesterday. I went to bed immediately. Thanks Elden Ring.
Wow, that's more stable than it was on my Windows machine. It crashed, like, 6ish times during my playthrough but this was immediately on release, so it might have gotten better since then.
I have been playing through Elden Ring again with a friend using the seamless co-op mod and my friend on Windows gets (what we assume is) shader compilation stutter in every new area while my game has been smooth as butter.
How funny Starfield was much more stable for me on proton than Windows as well.
For all 8 hours it was able keep me engaged...
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.
Sounds like you need to turn on hardware acceleration.
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.
Shouldn't have to go that far. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/performance-settings?as=u&utm_source=inproduct
Wow I feel stupid lol. That fixed it. Thank you :)
Don't feel stupid you're new to Linux. Welcome to freedom 😁🐧
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.
FreeDoom and KPatience forever!
Love me some FreeDoom.
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.
It's more about that small old indie game instead of AAA games tho
Oh yeah. For me, it's a Match-3 game that I stopped playing specifically because it didn't support Linux. Too bad it's also the best release from the franchise imo (The Treasures of Montezuma 4).
Dang, Alawar getting mentioned.
Years ago I bought a ps4 controller to play in my Linux pc, but the games didn't recognize the controller input, I had to use some program to map the keyboard to the controllers but it didn't work well, so I installed steam and with it ir worked perfectly. Because work and college I had to stop gaming for a couple of years, and I tried again some weeks ago with Lutris, to my surprise that the controller got recognized and worked perfectly without the need for steam.
I can get some old ass terminal based JRPG and Sims 3 which can barely run on windows working using bottles but I can't get the linux version of Hearts of Iron IV to recognize dlc wtf is this
I haven't played HOI4 on Linux yet, but I've played other PDX games. They have just worked for me. I don't know if you're doing something different, but I just install the DLCs and they are instantly recognized.
didn't mention its pirated
are you using bottles or wine or something like that?
Delete ".local/share/Paradox Interactive" WARNING this will delete all saves, verify files on Steam, try again.
The sheer power of instantly switching desktops in Linux makes the windows user afraid.
But I have seen a lot of old windows heads look at Linux for gaming performance where Microsoft is failing them with bloatware such as copilot.
I don't think the rootkit anti cheats would ever work to a level windows games developers want it to on Linux though.
Anticheat will have to just come from other methods that people will also hate.
Imagine, for example, if they required a form of government issued ID and the account was tied to you specifically. Despite privacy nightmare that it is (plus other issues, especially around globally accessed games), bans would have significantly larger impact if they're tied to a real-world identity.
Yeah, AC overall is very anti OSS philosophies
It doesn't matter to me if games that use rootkit anticheat don't work on Linux. I would never install anything that requires a rootkit.
I used to kinda complain about this but being unable to play lol or lostark has greatly improved my life. I don't mind being unable to play these games.
I am very grateful for proton and all of the technologies that allow me to play majority of my games. linux gaming in 2015 was painful.
I hope steam can fix big picture mode with nvidia. It’s sooo slow.
That's nvidias burdon. But I'm sure RedHat/Canonical will coach them to an ideal outcome.
Just wait until Vanguard pulls a Falcon and we'll never see those anticheats again. But still 4 years clean of LoL next year I get the medal.
I like linux but this is stoopid.
I play with Mods, unfortunately. It's the one thing keeping me back atm.
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.
I'm thinking about getting a handheld and putting Chimera or Bazzite on it. It's gonna replace my main gaming PC (so it needs to support egpu) once it bites it.
Well it’s not wrong.
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.
The only EA game that is worth playing is C&C Generals anyway.
You're the person in the meme
Yes. How did you figure that out?
I am slowly chugging through the weird issues I have with trying to use Bazzite as my primary OS, but it will replace my Windows install soon, I can feel it. I still miss HDR, but my newest and most inconvenient issue is that Firefox just keeps crashing as soon as it launches now. No luck fixing it so far, and I installed Edge just to have a working browser.
If you really want to have a go of it you should either buy well supported hardware next time you buy or even better buy hardware that actually comes with Linux by an OEM that has already done the research and selection and then don't run a kernel older than your hardware. Stick with boring well supported stuff neither bleeding edge nor ancient.
It's great that you can at this point pick hardware out of a hat and have a lot of it supported by Linux but it doesn't mean you should buy hardware this way if you want to have a good experience.
So there are absolutely millions of Linux users. Either we are all masochists living in constant frustration because we are brothers in brokenness or few long term Linux users have an experience that is similar to yours and are simply trying to help you avoid non-obvious pitfalls that may otherwise lead to a shitty experience
A) First off "well supported" herein means that your hardware is known to be well supported by Linux not that its common, good, expensive, or useful. If you are having a shit experience then there is a good chance its actually not well supported.
B) Lots of "stable" distributions ship with old kernels often as old as 2-3 years old. This means that hardware that came out within the last 2-3 years isn't supported at all and even older hardware for which support was added recently wont work as advertised. There is no profit in running either the kernel that came out 10 minutes ago or the one that came out 3 years ago. This to me seems to be a common issue. Just run a recent kernel.
C) The barrier to entry to create your own distro is incredibly low. The effort required to make a good one is a lot higher. If you stick to the major distros that have stuck around over the years you will have a more consistent experience.
D) X11 is less experimental than Wayland and less hassle
E) Simple environments like XFCE and Cinnamon and window managers are more consistent and predictable than gnome
F) Flatpaking all the things brings exciting new challenges not forseen by the developers who don't actually distribute flatpaks. Stay away from unofficial flatpaks and if the developer suggests a system package or an appimage use whatever the developer recommends.
If all this advice seems awfully complicated it could be shorted to buy hardware that comes with Linux and run Mint.
What is supported is ... what is supported. Wherein the manufacturers assert that their hardware supports Linux, OEMs assert that it supports Linux, Linux developers assert that it is supported, or user reports assert that it is supported. The old school way is to plug the exact model of hardware and the word "linux" into your favorite search engine but there are actual hardware compatibility lists too.
For something to be "stock" has no meaning whatsoever and one doesn't have to guess if something is supported one can usually find out.
Then don't install Linux, if Linux doesn't work for you then don't use it. Nothing Linux has to offer is worth the pain you've gone through. As for the system, Linux has to build itself around hardware rather then the other way around which is why problems occur.
If you want true freedom, no spying, and you want to own your computer then I reccomend installing Linux. Sadly most people dont care which is why I gave my previous suggestion. I recommend installing Pop_OS as its going to make gaming the easiest and installs drivers out of the box.
Good thing I have no interest in playing online with randos (or with anyone else at all, really) or paying through the nose for AAA games full of bugs, then!
If it’s not open source then it’s an advertisement not an esport
If someone goes to host a tournament and they can’t choose the patch or modify it then it’s not an even playing field between organizers. Think like 2 people go to host on consecutive weekends and there’s a patch between them now the person who hosted first has an unfair advantage in game quality as the players know how to play it
Also if the studio/publisher is hosting an event it’s just an advertisement
What? So if a sports federation changes the rules all independently organized events are disadvantaged? By that logic the Olympics are just an advertisement for the sports not a competition, as the federation usually don't change rules 6 months prior.
Nope, the leagues are allowed to have different rules
Sports are open source, for instance not every football competition has to use blue cards or a competition made a patch to use blue cards…depending how you want to view it
For the vast majority of people, that isn’t easy at all.
especially if all those windows dual booting experiences from over 10 years ago which is now misinformation wasn't kept commented like every time someone brings up dual booting
It is simple but not convenient. I don't want to dual boot. I'd rather not play the game at all if that is my only option.
It should be, but I've had too many issues with windows somehow updating and ruining my boot partion/grub.
If I want to run windows, I only run it on a VM with hardware passthrough or on a totally different machine since physically unseating my Linux M.2 from the motherboard is too much hassle and I don't want to move it to a PCIe card.
"What, you don't like retro yet proper gaming on a 1W device?"
-- Me, if I were that lone guy holding a controller
No