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.
This week I decided to try dual booting with OpenSuse again and see how much I still need Windows for gaming. Turns out: not much. For VR. And maybe for Game Pass games if cloud gaming turns out to be crap and I cannot get a VM performant enough for games.
I also decided to dual boot Linux when I did a fresh Windows install this past weekend.
Because I hate myself I’m running Arch, but I was able to get Apex running well enough without too much fucking around. Problem is, I haven’t been able to get OBS capture to run nearly as well as I can on Windows. I record at 1440/90 with high bitrate, and I haven’t been able to get that working on Linux yet.
I really wanna jump full-on into Linux now and try living without windows, but sometimes I just need things to work without having to try 4 differently compiled versions of a program, and I don’t know if I can get all my games running (Halo Infinite is giving me issues, if anyone has proton tips).
Hi, I used a Linux PC 10 years ago and have been waffling on getting a Linux build now that Windows is essentially started coming with pre-packaged adware and Spyware. What’s Proton?
For some reason people really hate Google. Some may have valid reasons, some may not, some may just dislike their results. Most just hate Google because it’s the “cool” thing to do. Ignore the idiots and use what search engine you like.
If you’re serious about the Internet you’ll just ping icann and get the indexes directly, search the content, and use the results. You casuals might still use Google but I’ve built my own engine, and it literally only takes a few hours to get a search result.
Also, that person calls themselves royalty in training so if the issue is Google’s hegemony then I feel like there might be some cognitive dissonance.
If you hate google but still want to use it there are search engines that query google and scrape its data for you without google servers ever touching your connection. SearXNG instances are my favorite as they are open source, decentralized, has bangs like duckduckgo, is highly customizable, and self-hostable. paulgo.io is a good searxng instance for most queries, and if you really need google just put !!g in the query. Otherwise startpage.com scrapes google but they’re starting to go hard on the ads.
was 30 something about then invading a windows-centric IT dept. they feared linux as it replaced all their basic services. email, file servers, DB2 servers, online courseware…
In the time I have been a Linux gamer, it has gone from “here is a list of games that work in Linux” to “here is a list of games that do not work in Linux.” Which some dictionaries define as “progress.”
That’s crazy! When I was last trying to run Linux full time in ~2014, you had WINE and then a commercial version of WINE (not by the WINE devs, but because WINE is licensed the way it is and is open source…) that would run a few more things, but I don’t remember what it was called.
So glad to hear it’s progressing this quickly and far.
That would be CrossOver by CodeWeavers. They’re actually a huge contributor to upstream Wine and have worked with Valve (and I think Collabora?) several times over the past few years. I’m kind of tempted to buy a copy of CrossOver to support them even though I’d never use it, lol
I think that a good chunk of Apple’s GPTK is based on the work that CodeWeavers have done, which has made me tempted to shell out for Crossover too. £60 is a fair old chunk just to play games on my Mac though.
I started out in 2014, and pretty much what I did was look to see if there was a Steam logo on the Steam store page to indicate Linux compatibility. With Proton in the last few years, I just don’t really worry about it. I will say my tastes have just about always lined up with the kinds of games, the kinds of studios, that are likely to publish for Linux, the nerd shit like Kerbal Space Program and Factorio. I don’t play Call of Fifa, Modern Fortnite or whatever.
In 2003, it was my dream to play FF7 in Linux. In 2019, my dream came true. Thanks Proton, Codeweavers, Wine, Valve, et al for helping me finally put down Sephiroth right.
Unfortunately, the game I mainly play, apex legends, has started giving me all sorts of trouble this past year. I’m on PopOS so part of me wonders if it’s related to their focus on cosmic (or maybe they aren’t prioritizing fixing bugs?) But I also have no idea where the issue sits? Steam flat pack? Proton? Apex itself? PopOS? A weird config/setting on my machine?
But it actually highlights this point of this post because instead of playing apex I have played starfield with a single crash around launch.
Ive tried so many, but right now I am on Proton Experimental.
It’s been working, hilariously, since I made my post.
It looks like the issue is with how it updates. The errors I get are all failed to load .pak. the fix usually requires me to validate the integrity of game files, where it inevitably finds some files that fails validation and redownloads them. The irritating thing is that that doesn’t always work. Sometimes it just stays broken.
This last attempt at fixing it I validated(needed to download some failed files), completely exited steam, relaunched, new update, exited steam, relaunched, new update, exited steam, relaunch and finally it had no updates. I did one last validation and launched and its worked since then.
Edit: so it said there was an update after my last session. I updated. The next time I launched (5min ago) I got an error:
I did the “verify game files” and wouldn’t ya know it. Failed to validate 2 files.
As noob, who is not interested in learning the core of linux, but only want it to just work, I would recommend the new openSuse slowroll (based on own experience with tumbleweed which should in theory be less stable than slowroll) and for apps I recommend going for flathubs. I’m not sure if slowroll already released.
Linux Mint is often touted as the most similar looking GUI to windows, so if you want Linux, but looking like windows that might be your best bet. You will find many guides for how to install Linux. If you want to just try it out first (and not just overwrite windows), you’ll need to free up some disk space and create an empty partition to install Linux on.
Linux mint is just nice to deal with. I distro-hopped to see what was out there but I came back to mint. It plays my games and runs my AI and works with whatever old garbage i plug in without needing to download shifty drivers from a shifty site like with windows.
If I had to guess OP is probably talking about DLSS 3+ which is not supported on Linux at the moment. And what other reason is there to buy an Nvidia 30 or 40 series card if not for that?
Honestly, your question will get a ton of different answers because it’s so open to people’s preferences. It’s like asking “I want to start using a car, which one should I buy?” There will be so many different answers that it’s practically useless, from people recommending a toyota aygo since it’s cheap, easy and reliable to people recommending a Abrams tank “because it can handle everything”.
imo, try Linux Mint or Ubuntu since they are accessable and bring most software out of the box. But it’s up to you, you cannot really lose when picking a distro.
If you go down this route, even as a noob, whatever tech issues you may run into, it will likely be easier to find command line interface [CLI] solutions that you can copy and paste into your terminal aka console.
I know it seems extra and harder because it looks like something a hacker would do. But telling someone where to click a mouse over and over again is so much harder than “copy this into a terminal app, and send back the output”
As a fellow older gamer who is also technical, I’m using Fedora with KDE, and I install the Steam client and the Bottles app for non-Steam games.
If you’re not technical, then I would suggest something like Linux Mint or Ubuntu, but KDE gives you the closest experience to a Windows desktop regardless of which version of Linux you’re using (vs Gnome).
But as others have said, it doesn’t really matter (for the most part) which version of Linux you use, it really comes down to using Steam and Bottles for the game support.
Proton is not an engine, it’s a compatibility layer and thus would decrease performance compared to native. However, sometimes it’s still faster on Linux because it has less overhead.
I know that the vulcan-tools package has vkcube in it. Someone did make vulkangears as an example, along with some other examples, but I don’t think its a published package in any distro repos so it’d need to be manually compiled to run it.
Steam Deck is the main reason for this and reasonable WINE emulation of DirectX & other APIs.
I bet the experience outside of Steam Deck depends a lot on the dist, the graphics drivers & card and someone’s personal knowledge & willingness to screw around making everything work. Drivers are the biggest issue by far - open source drivers tend to be more limited, while binary drivers tend to be quite fragile, e.g. breaking after a kernel update & requiring reinstallation.
It’s easier than you think. You can just download an exe, point lutris/steam to it (ie, just paste the path into the gui), and run the game. I have yet to find a game that doesn’t work. Troubleshooting is rare, and in my experience only involves changing proton versions. I have never had to mess with drivers, aside from initial installation when I installed the OS.
I bet the experience outside of Steam Deck depends a lot on the dist, graphics drivers and card and someone’s personal knowledge/willingness to screw around making everything work
In my experience, it’s been about the same. Then again, I also use an Arch based distro on my desktop, but I dunno, even when I distrohopped a lot and used other distros and hadn’t replaced some of my specs, gaming wasn’t a pain to setup or do in general unless it was something that specifically didn’t work with Linux (maybe modding was hard at first, but once I found out what worked for me, I was golden).
open source drivers tend to be more limited, while binary drivers tend to be quite fragile
And thank you for telling everyone what GPU you are using. Most mainstream GPU manufacturers support open-source drivers(AMD, Intel) and for some of them open-source dricers are the only option(Intel).
I remember using bare wine to play games before proton. You would have to go and find the exact libraries needed to run the game, install them one way or another, pray a bit, and maybe the game will run with acceptable fps. If it ran at all.
And these days its just plug and play. Dont remember the last time I had to install a game dependency with proton, from steam or otherwise.
Freaky to read your account. I switched to ubuntu desktop like 3 weeks ago, bought a gpu, installed steam (ok, I had to reinstall from apr since snap didn’t work well), 2 days ago I installed cyberpunk and it runs at 80 fps mostly high-ultra settings without one crash so far, no special boot parameters. (I had to edit the exe today so it wouldn’t force controller config though)
It’s insane how far linux has come in the last 5 yrs. I hope it goes on like this. In opposition to amd, linux actually is our friend. :)
@Haui@Dizzar wdym by in opossition to amd? As far as I know amd is better than nvidia. I recently built a new pc from ground and choose to use both amd cpu and gpu and I had 0 problems so far. Back when I had a nvidia gpu it used to cause more headaches by simply breaking once every few updates
I was wondering that too. As far as I know, when it comes to Linux, AMD and Intel are the way to go. Nvidia are the ones who generally tend to suck on linux (although I never had problems with my nvidia gpu, its pretty old tho)
In this case, you need to take my comment more literally.
AMD does a lot better than nvidia but amd still makes a lot of business decisions that are not consumer friendly. For example pricing their gpus a lot higher than they used to instead of more competitive to nvidia.
They do good but in opposition to open source, it is still a company and therefore not our „friend“. Open source in contrast is made by us, therefore undeniably more our friend.
It was a figure of speech, not meaning to dump on amd.
I still remember installing the sims 3 on wine. This was before proton, before the sims 4. I started by looking the game up on winehq - the results were not promising. The rating was not exactly garbage, but still runs with problems. Some brave soul had come up with installation instructions though.
So I try to install the game using those instructions. Took me about 40 minutes of installing things like ms c++ runtimes. Then when I tried to run the game? Crash. Doesn’t work. So I went back to WineHQ and found another instruction (luckily there were multiple ppl that made the game work)
After following it for another hour, the game still didnt work. After googling the error for some time im pretty sure I just downloaded some random dll that was missing from runtimes and put it with the game. Voila, the game ran! Laggy, but playable. Took only about 3 hours of research and tinkering.
Today? I’m pretty sure I can just download the game and it will run, just like that, no config required.
I remember back in the day I thought one of my favorite games, Elite: Dangerous, would never run on Linux. I dualbooted for a while just so I could play it. After a while I stopped playing it much and figured I could get rid of Windows, so I did. About a year later the community came out with a complicated setup you could perform to get it running on Linux through wine. It’s just as you said, lots of manually finding and installing libraries, tweaking environments, and eventually got it working (jankily) at a pretty mediocre framerate. I thought that was the best I was going to get. Another two years and it was running seamlessly on proton with no configuration or tweaking at all. It really is incredible what Valve has done for Linux gaming.
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