I remember when Proton launched it was like magic playing games like Doom and Nier Automata straight from the Linux Steam client with excellent performance. I do not miss the days of having the Windows version of Steam installed separately.
Serious question: how do nvidia drivers perform on Linux? I’ve heard they’re not very good and missing features. Anything I should know about? I have an RTX 3060ti that I use for both games and stuff like blender, substance designer/painter, etc.
In my experience, not great. I have a 1080ti and run 2k ultrawide. A bit dated but still a pretty powerful card. Some games weren’t too noticably different but on cyberpunk for instance I took a huge performance hit and had to adjust my game to look basically terrible to get it playable compared to windows. I think I did this by setting superfx to performance.
I have to say though, I am running a pretty old processor (barely meets win11 spec) so that could be contributing to my issues.
Thanks! I’ve been looking harder at Linux, but the thing that’s holding me back is that I’m not sure how well the modeling and texturing tools I use will run on Linux and dual booting is a headache.
Have you ever tried running windows in a vm, and if so, how well does it run? Only reason why I’m considering this is because I’ve heard some vm tools can do hardware passthrough to significantly increase vm performance. If the stuff I need to run works on Windows in a vm, then I might do that.
Edit: you might check cyberpunk again, I’ve heard the new update currently has it performing significantly better on Linux than in Windows.
Sorry for the late reply, I have tried running windows in a VM and it kinda worked. Big pain was forwarding peripherals, I ended up having to use a ghetto KVM switch setup to get it working at the time. Hardware passthru can work well, but was a huge pain to get working right. Once its working though you get pretty damn close to bare-metal performance. Haven’t tried that in years tho cuz all my friends made fun of me for being so masochistic lol
I’ll have to try again soon. Honestly thinking of downsizing and seeing if I could possibility use my steam deck with a dock to play some desktop games that aren’t too crazy.
Ey! No problem. Thanks for the info, I might check it out this week or something. One of my biggest concerns is mainly with weird drm schemes or niche games not playing nice with compatibility layers. That said, I’ve heard some drm can tell when it’s in a VM, but I’d hope that hardware passthrough would be able to fool it. Not sure I’d be running anything that could tell the difference though.
I think most anti-cheat won’t care a lot, especially with a lot of them actually supporting proton now. Off the top of my head tho I could guarantee that Valorant anti-cheat probably would not work or you would eventually get banned. Their shit runs like a rootkit basically
For Blender, Nvidia is currently the only way to go on Linux. Cycles is horribly slow on my 6750XT, and Eevee shaders take way too long to compile on Mesa (although version 23.3 should include a patch to fix that).
Its not nearly as bad as people make it out to be. I do think its distro specific. PopOS was rock solid with nvidia drivers. I had a 3070ti that worked really well with it. I ended up getting a 6700xt because I wanted to go full-tilt into linux land and everyone raves about the open source amd drivers. I figured if I was going to be all-in on linux, why not get a radeon card.
I traded some minor issues for some fairly significant limitations. Nvidia had stutters every once in a while on the desktop. Like maximizing a window would occasionally (1 time in 50) ‘hang’ for a half second then complete. For Apex Legends, there was a semi-manual step to pre-cache shaders to prevent stuttering in the game. That was actually fixed over a year ago with a proton and steam update. That was about it. It also ran everything else flawlessly.
When I switched to Radeon, I thought it would be smooth sailing. Its really just different issues. You obviously dont have the nvenc encoder. The radeon encoders all suck, but AMF, their new hottness, is supposed to be really good. Well, you can’t use that with the open source mesa drivers that everyone raves about–the big draw for using radeon on linux to begin with. You have to use the proprietary ones if you want to use AMF. Cool, but if you do that your game performance can suffer because the amd proprietary drivers aren’t as good as the mesa ones. Oh, and you can get occasional stutters on your desktop…
You can’t mix and match so if you want to stream your games on twitch or record your gameplay, tough shit. Get used to throwing CPU cores at VAAPI.
Also, AMD absolutely sucks when it comes to AI/ML. Cuda is king and ROCM is trash. If you are doing anything with AI/ML stick with nvidia. I literally bought a used 1080ti and threw it in my server (ubuntu) to do some AI jobs, because I got tried of fighting with radeon, trying to get rocm to work.
All that said, my next build will very likely include an nvidia card --even though I plan on running linux exclusively.
Genshin being paid by Apple to withhold 120 FPS from other devices (and controller support from other mobile devices), plus their invasive anti-cheat, plus the fact that Mihoyo is a Chinese company (which makes the aforementioned anti-cheat even more scary to touch) makes me not want to touch the game with a ten-mile pole.
Honest question: if you’re not a Steam user, what does Proton do that wine doesn’t just as easily? I’ve played games in wine prefixes for years now, but haven’t bothered with Proton or PlayOnLinux or any of the other wine front ends. Are they worth it?
If you’re happy managing Wine prefixes, you aren’t missing out on much. Running a game on Steam with Proton is going to be about the same quality of experience compared to running a non-Steam game with Wine + DXVK + D3DVK. Proton is great because it’s already in Steam so everything “just works” if that’s where your games are, but Valve upstreams basically everything they do so everyone benefits.
Proton is essentially a fork of wine thats fine tuned by devs bankrolled by Valve/steam to optimize it to work for any and every game they can (so that it works with the Deck which is linux and relies on proton alot). AFAIK regular ol’ wine is more of a general emulator that in my exerience is hit or miss when it comes to getting games running. Proton almost always succeeds where regular wine fails especially if its a big bulky AAA game with multiplayer and stuff such as Elden Ring. Someone on github maintains builds of wine based off cutting edge proton experimental for Lutris. You can find it here
I think another point worth mentioning is that some anti-cheats allow proton, which is nice if you wanna play online with others in a competitive game.
I believe they do this by checking the hashes of a lot of the system32 type stuff, I’m not convinced it would just work in vanilla wine.
Steam is a dependency for official proton builds at least, but there are wine builds with the proton patches added in. Base wine will end up getting a lot of them too.
In the case that proton works, you install game via Linux steam and just play. Maybe override proton version and add launch arguments like dll overrides if needed for things like mods or nitpicky performance tuning.
Base wine will generally get the same improvements eventually. I use it via bottles for the odd windows program. I often need to use other custom wine builds for some of the more annoying programs. For games outside of steam, builds like wine-ge have all the relevant proton additions without the steam dependency.
Proton tends to work better because steam games are identified by an AppID and it has a list of tweaks/settings required for games that need them (protonfixes). If you install a game on steam and launch it, it just works, because it knows that you’re trying to run game X and it needs patches Y and Z. On wine it will probably work the same, but you’ll have to install winetricks or change settings yourself.
Wine builds for Lutris made by GloriousEggroll are based on proton and include most of the extra patches along with newest versions of things like VKD3D or DXVK. You just need to install redistributables by hand via winetricks.
It “just works” 95% of the time with no tweaks. That’s the benefit. Games in your library will install and run with zero intervention, just like on Windows and at times with better compatibility because the tweaks and dependencies are already configured. It’s nice not having to manage wine versions and prefixes.
If i’m correct proton adds a lot of gaming specific patches that increases game compatibility fixes in steam. Outside steam i’ve been using wine-ge which i find better than normal wine because it adds the proton patches and more which you can read about in the wine-ge-custom github.
Correction: Rust doesn’t run properly on Linux because the developers fear an uptick on cheaters caused by EAC being less invasive on Linux than on Windows.
Okay I can definitely back up the second claim. World of Warships, a DirectX only game, runs and loads better on Linux with Proton. I tested both on SSD and HDD, and in both scenarios the game runs at a higher FPS and loads faster. I legitimately have no idea why.
I originally tested on HDD and guessed that ext4 was just much better with the IO speeds because NTFS would fragment like hell. But then it also was the same with an SSD and now I’m not sure.
I’ve gradually gone from being peeved at Proton for not being able to support certain brands of anti-cheat, to actively avoiding games with anti-cheat solutions that are fundamentally incompatible with Proton.
It hurts my soul to see windows simps say the only reason they won’t transition to linux is because ‘GaMes!’ Like every game i’ve played with proton on linux mint has run perfectly smooth for years now, even before the deckening. If you’re willing to be cucked by microsoft because one or two games you play is a competative shooty that uses a garbage anticheat (cough rainbow6siege cough) even though every other game in your library works just fine, you deserve what you get.
To be fair though, windows is doing everything in its power to push me towards dual booting again.
I just have separate PCs but similar situation, and I’ve been a linux sysadmin for over a decade. A lot of games work fine on linux, but when you get in to things like specialty peripherals and mods/addons things can get messy. Desktop running Windows Enterprise (with so much disabled) for audio production and games, laptop running debain for everything else, and all my servers are debian or raspberry pi devices.
I feel like a lot of people don’t know you can, or know how to, disable most of the shitty Windows features and addons. There’s all kinds of automated scripts for it like “Reclaim Windows” but you can basically turn a lot of this stuff off through powershell. Most people are running Windows like a user and not like an admin.
Yeah, windows is still the best (or at least the most compatible) for games, but all my servers use linux too. I played around with windows server a bit, but it’s no contest.
Thankfully, with WSL you can do a lot (but not all) of the stuff I love linux for.
I mean I even automated the backup of my windows PC with WSL, and it works great.
Thankfully both of those games are crossplay. Anything that requires anti cheat seems to have crossplay oddly enough so I just play those on my ps5 or Xbox series s. My Xbox is the only Windows based device I use. Haven’t touched Windows 11 in months.
Oof someones salty! Enjoy your next forced windows update and being constantly spied on. But hey, at least you can mindlessly install and play all teh games without being inconvenienced.
Games and audio production. I’m the only one in my linux sysadmin group that still keeps a Windows SSD for booting games and for media creation, I’m also the only one who doesn’t suddenly have games break because an update had conflicting library dependencies or something, or a mod broke the game. I also don’t have to spend hours combing through debug logs to find out why the game and mods that worked for years suddenly crashes on launch. So instead I can sit there and game while they fix their linux games. We only really have a lan party once a year so Windows SSD + Steam and old game installers makes it thoughtless. Someone running linux for their games inevitably has had to sit out the lan party, or spends the whole time trying to get whatever game working, that for some reason only isn’t working for them and works for everyone else.
Basically linux is quite good for gaming, enough that linux bros can feel assured in superiority, however in practice every time I’ve done a LAN with 10-20 linux sysadmins and we all try to use linux, it’s never gone smoothly for everyone. I actually maintain my previous laptops as Windows machines for this case, just so we can help a linux gamer get in on the games when their games break.
The main challenge with linux compatibility, is the variety and inconsistency of linux systems, it’s strength can be it’s weakness. It used to be Windows GPU drivers that were the bane of gamers back in the 00s-early10s, now it’s trying to coax a meaningful error log out of a game that just crashes for no apparent reason on linux out of the blue.
Games, music, photography are all still legitimate use cases.
I pretty much exclusively play anticheat games and have 0 interest in single player games. I’d quit gaming overall because I’m simply not interested in playing the type of games that end up working on Linux.
But as a person who uses both windows and linux, Windows is a super stable os if you do some powershell tweaks (for bloat, ads, updates) and you can also bring the best things from the linux world like package managers, stability etc.
Windows can run all games and i dont have to worry if a game is going to have proton problems.
…yeah, Windows prefers delivering 1st party backdoors and viruses.
Jokes aside, what are you referring to with that, where are you pulling your packages from not be vetted?
Thanks, that’s actually valid!
I think one of the commenters there said it best:
It’s almost like the maintainers who curate a distribution repository have an important role preventing such a thing…
Repositories where anyone can release packages to the end-users may be convenient for developers who want more control over what the user gets, but it has a host of negative consequences for the user. It always ends in malware and anti-features getting distributed eventually.
I would have know this when i said this on Lemmy + linux community. I would actually consider my phone running android/ios to be a greater threat to my privacy than my gaming pc
With a powershell tweaks you never have to worry about those broken updates.
I run grapheneOS for that reason, though that’s besides the point. One thing being bad doesn’t make another less bad. And you’d still have to worry about janky updates, you’re just minimizing the risk, and mitigating the risk of bad updates by putting in a delay and only doing critical and security updates comes with a compromise to increasing vulnerability.
Publishers who do this make shit games anyway. I see the publishers slowly fading while indie studios continue to shape the new standard of video games.
Are we watching a “changing of the guard” where the studios that used to bring out the hits are dying, shedding their talent and new indie projects are blooming in the fallout? I remember Bioward being a fantastic studio during the Mass Effect (and prior) years. They’re a shell of their former selves now. I see this happening with Bethesda now too, although Starfield is not that bad. It’s just nowhere near as epic and fun as Skyrim was. Then you have studios like CDPR that seemed poised to take the crown with CP2077, and although it’s a great game, they certainly fumbled hard at launch. It’s an interesting time in the game industry.
Hey pro tip, if a game isn’t nearly as epic and fun as one that was released like 12 years ago, then its OK to call it a bad game. Cuz that’s certainly not good
To be honest, I think if I were to go back and try Skyrim now, I’d probably feel pretty similarly about it as to how I do about Starfield. I still enjoy gaming, but it doesn’t enthrall me quite the same as it used to. Part of adulthood I suppose.
I would say the same, but only because the standards of current Gen games has definitely gone up since then. There just weren’t games like Elden Ring and TotK around when Skyrim was released
Should I give TotK another chance? I just find the building mechanic very tedious, even with Autobuild. Is the storyline really worth it? I’ve gotten as far as beating the first four temples, if that helps.
It’s not about the storyline at all. If you don’t enjoy the mechanics, you won’t enjoy the game. I’m in the same boat - I’d really like to like it, but I play games mainly to tell a story, BOTW and TOTK don’t deliver on that front.
I liked BotW, I just can’t get into TotK. It’s like they took an okay thing, and heard all the complaints about that, then turned those into features. I wish I hadn’t downloaded it, at least if I’d gotten a physical copy I could get some money back.
Indie Devs haven’t even begun to fully leverage all the new tools offered by recent Blender / Unreal / Godot.
And AAA studios are too big to leverage them effectively.
I think we’re going to see continuing leaps forward in workflow and tools, allowing smaller teams to make whatever they want at any scale. We’re kind of already there honestly, it just about applying it all meaningfully.
You know, I really do too. I actually had a lot of fun with CP2077 when it came out, but had to quit on the last 1/3 of the game because of a permanent sound glitch. I am very excited to jump back in.
I’ve recently picked up CP2077 again and let me tell you the experience is night and day. The gameplay is actually fun now and the story is also enjoyable since they got rid of the game breaking bugs. While the current version does not excuse the extremely subpar launch version I don’t think CD Projekt Red deserves a spot on your list.
A company that definitely fits your criteria is Blizzard. All the people I know that worked there quit and a lot of them told me about a huge brain drain that was happening which judging by what we know about the code of Diablo 4 sounds reasonable. At this point the company only exists because of nostalgia and even the gamer dads are getting more and more frustrated with them.
As someone who really wants to see desktop Linux grow, I try not to think like this because I know others care about these games…but goddammit if I don’t completely agree with you on the inside. I do not understand the obsession with these games products, they’re exclusively designed to keep you playing and paying for as long as possible to avoid fomo for digital garbage.
There are a tiny handful of non-live service games that still use anti-cheat, and most of those have already enabled support for Proton. Dragon Ball FighterZ is literally the only exception that I can think of, and even that’s playable offline IIRC.
There’s yet to be a good major fps game from an indie studio. Once that happens maybe there’s a chance, but fps games make up a massive portion of the industry
I have to stick to windows only because of VR, once performance and UX improves I will nuke windows out of my PC but I still absolutely love linux, been hopping around distros like a madman almost 2 years ago until I settled on arch, couldn’t leave the damn thing.
That’s a weird one. I’ve been running a 165hz primary monitor and a 144hz secondary for a while on AMD, Nvidia, and Intel GPUs. I’ve never had any trouble with them.
Honestly don’t remember which I was running. Was a new install of testing Endevour OS with an Nvidia card. Changed the refresh rate through the display settings to 144 and it went black and never came back. Fixed it back to 60 through cli boot eventually but it never liked changing it off that.
Borking an entire install by pressing buttons on a monotor is pretty difficult. What exactly were you doing? Did you ask your OS’ community for support?
If only Linux wouldn’t Bork my whole install when I try to switch to 144hz on my monitor.
If he says his install is borked I believe him. If he says it's "just" because he tried to switch to 144hz on his monitor, eh...
Edit: Also sounds like nvidia binary blob driver. Odd to me that he didn't get the "do you want to keep these settings" prompt, and that it didn't revert when he didn't click yes though.
Setting any of my monitors to 4k or 144hz just resulted in a completely black screen that persisted through reboots. Only solution I found was to plug into a completely separate, lower resolution monitor.
No clue what caused it, but it’s not isolated to just op
All I did was on first install go to display settings and change to 144hz in the OS and screen then goes black and never came back. Force a shutdown and boots back to a black screen after login.
I was eventually able to change things back to 60hz and working through booting to cli but 144 never wanted to work (am admittedly using Nvidia card).
Ah yeah nvidia can be painful, especially if you want wayland. But this seems to be a simple modesetting issue, I’m sure there are some known workarounds. You can also report driver bugs directly to nvidia, but I don’t know if that will do much.
Somewhat true, but the truth is that the CPU scheduler on Windows is just awful. It literally wastes performance because it doesn’t optimize instructions as efficiently as schedulers on other OSes.
Without going into details, we ported an application that I worked with that did complex scientific calculations to Linux. All the calculations code was done in C and C++ so it was 99.9% OS agnostic. We consistently got at least a 50% performance increase when running on Linux as opposed to Windows. We tested just about every edition of Windows from Windows 8/Server 2013 to Windows 10/Server 2019. The version of Windows that did best was Windows 7 and Linux was 50% faster. All the other editions were slower.
And the distro of Linux didn’t matter much. A few percent difference here and there, but all of them were astonishingly faster than Windows.
The only similar issue I faced seemed to be due to multithreading. I don’t know enough about the underlying architecture to point my finger at a specific ‘thing’ but I was beating my head against the wall seeing the same 50% drop in performance. The one way I was able to get comparable performance was if I limited the cores on the machine to 1. Windows was only a couple percent slower in that case. When I upped the cores windows couldn’t keep up. The weird part is that the utilization in task manager looked like all the cores were being utilized but the performance certainly didn’t reflect that. I was finally able to get the program manager off my ass but how they handled the situation really soured me on staying with the company so I left, feel bad for the next person to get hit with “get this application off Linux so we can be a 100% windows client shop” garbage.
They contracted the companies developers at over 600k for six months of support, I was dedicated to the effort for a year, and the CIO apparently instructed a PM that nothing else mattered and if it didn’t work I was personally responsible. Like MFers, I didn’t design the hardware, operating system, or the application, I’m doing everything I know how, how exactly is this shit my fault?!
Oh they do, but I don’t know what the real reason it stays that way. The only things I could come up with is that they simply don’t care, backwards compatibility (that one doesn’t really make sense to me), or finally that they can’t come up with a better version due to the mathematically good ones already exist in Unix and Linux systems under the GPL.
I’ll be honest, I can’t see that last reason stopping them, but who knows.
It’s a bit old now, but the point still stands. I’m sure the schedulers across all systems have improved since, but it’s a fact the Unix/Linux systems are still better and more efficient.
This is my biggest gripe with developers. More often than not the native version either has worse performance or poor compatibility whereas the windows versions just seem to work. It seems like they aren’t putting effort into making their games compatible with newer compositors or something because proton “just works”.
For some reason DXVK makes the lava disappear in this game, at least at the final boss. If you’re a new player who knows nothing about this boss you’ll die not knowing why
I had faced all sorts of issues with compatibility of files while using LibreOffice. And LibreOffice looks ugly. OnlyOffice doesn’t support doc/xls/ppt files afaik.
LibreOffice Writer follows Open Document Format, unlike MS Office Word. This is intentional by MS, because they have significant market share. So, any broken files is “because of LibreOffice”, even though the inverse is true.
So, I consider Office Word to be a dangerous and harmful product, and I’m glad that it isn’t available on Linux/Wine. It just isn’t good, and LibreOffice works for 99.9% of what people use that kind of software for.
True. Governments and respective institutions should however not. Some countries understand this. Other have had their ISO standard committees bought out by MS in more than shady circumstances. I remember when this was discussed in Norway. Everyone in the panel concluded to use ODF. They were ignored. They all resigned.
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