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.
Iam using a Laptop with a thunderbolt connected gtx1070. Does someone have experience or tips using linux and gaming with a setup like that. That and (solidworks) are the last reasons i didn’t switch already.
because @clegko mentions shit support :( , maybe look at the framework laptop for your next upgrade? they are doing some stuff with replaceable parts, and the newest one even swappable gpu’s.
Sadly my current laptop is kinda new (half a year) and I searched way to long, because I have a weird taste. (I am used to hardware mouse buttons, so thinkpads are mostly the only option. I also dislike the odd haptic gummy feeling of premium thinkpads, which only some models don’t have (for example T490s, T14sG1 and G2) or the Yoga X1 series which is aluminum, which I gladly found a nice deal of the 2019 model.
This search went on for about a year. :O
Thunderbolt support in Linux is shit. I tried similar (but with an AMD card) and it was problem after problem when it came to the Thunderbolt stuff.
Thats sad to hear.
It really is. I want to use a laptop and dock with a good GPU to keep costs/power, etc down but damn its hard on Linux to do so.
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.
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.
Im kind of that guy. I use Windows solely to run Arma 3 and have it up to date.
I run Arma 3 on Mint just fine.
Isnt Arma 3 Linux on a different game version then Arma 3 Windows?
Not sure, was tunning the windows version through proton.
Cope harder, if I want to play a game, I only need to install it and play.
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.
mindlessly install
Imagine being so deep in the bullshit, that a good user experience is seen as bad.
I’m that guy.
Unfortunately, Siege and MW2 are the only two games that a large segment of my friend group plays.
And also no alternative for Visual Studio (especially WPF and Xamarin)
And also no alternative for Visual Studio
Jetbrains Rider
I do like rider, but I’m most comfortable building GUIs in WPF, and VS has a great drag-and-drop interface for that.
Unfortunately, I don’t have free time like I used to, so learning a new framework that’s cross platform like Avalonia has been slow.
What do you mean no alternative to VS? There are many IDEs on Linux. What does VS do that nothing else can?
It has a very good GUI for building WPF and Avalonia interfaces drag-and-drop style.
Although it’s been a while since I used rider, maybe it has it too. I should probably check it out again.
But my main reason for staying on windows is still those damn anticheat software for some games my friend group play.
To be fair though, windows is doing everything in its power to push me towards dual booting again.
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.
GUI builder.
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.
Good point, for most people at least.
Although for me specifically, with the kind of work I do, it’s not really an option.
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.
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.
Faster than Windows? Is that based upon that one post with the single hardware configuration that used proton optimisations to basically calculate less in game? The one that can’t be replicated because of missing info?
Gee, I wonder why calculating less improves performance.
Next you going to tell me lowering the render distance also improves fps…
Yeah until you find a game which doesn’t run only because of its dogshit Anti Cheat System Service.
Punkbuster, VAC and EAC support Linux now.
It’s the truly invasive anti cheats like Vanguard, GameGuard, etc that won’t run.
Fuck anti-cheat, the bane of gamers everywhere.
I think they’re a necessary evil, nothing ruins multiplayer more than cheats.
Then multiplayer should be its own app. Making a whole single-player game unplayable just so you can push anticheat cruft into everything.
Still can’t run MS Office well /s
I never thought we’d see MS Office on Linux, and then they released Outlook for Android.
They have their Entire suite on Android. They just hate Linux
For real, though, I really wish I could easily run Office with Bottles or something like that. Never managed to make it work
The fact that there’s a competitive Excel scene makes this comment infinitely funnier to me.
Yeah, it’s crazy and pretty interesting.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.youtube.com/live/qfDq5dlp2o4
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Wait why only the href changed and not the text?
Crazy. Never heard of it till now.
I hope it never will. Genuinely.
But there is no good drop in replacement.
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.
Short time? Proton is built around Wine, which is 30 years old. 30 years is not a short time.
Remember the wine days where proton didn’t exist? Barely any game was playable.
We got from unplayable to “download and play” within 5 years
Or you went from hell and back trying to install all the dependencies with winetricks
Warcraft 3 worked better then on win. At that time more then half of games worked (newest aaa-est usually had problems). Just before proton almost all games worked (with some winetricks black magic). Valve did help, but there’s more to the story.
I had the opposite experience. WarCraft III would frequently soft lock my PC forcing a reboot, plus you couldn’t use the mouse to move the camera because the game couldn’t detect the mouse going to the screen edge, forcing you to use the arrow keys.
Some versions of Wine also wouldn’t allow you to connect to Bnet, requiring a rollback to a previous version from months prior.
I put -opengl on the end of it and it worked great. Wasn’t on release, but later when dota was popular.
Of course I would’ve forced OpenGL. DXVK didn’t exist at the time and DirectX 8 or 9 games were unplayably laggy back in 2007. Apparently you could run DirectX apps with near-native performance by sourcing the necessary Windows DLL’s but that would involve piracy?
bullshit, you are either young or you got bad memory
Guys, actually this stuff was written in C which has been around for 50 years. But yea, this happened quickly.
Don’t you people have something better to do than unironically doing the ackchyually meme? Follow the fucking post and its fucking intent, you fucking internet weirdos. You’re not as smart as you think you are.
You just provided my daily dose of sanity, thanks
linux games, always reminds me of Tux Racer when I finally got X11 config right. https://www.google.com/search?q=tux+racer
ew i spot a google
it’s the url. did the internet declare a boycott or wha.
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.
Anyone still remember when this came out?
God I feel old now.
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…
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
I feel like the boss casually droping i’m gaming from linux and some people being like what how ?
How is mod support on linux for games? Does it work as usual via Proton?
Cyberpunk 2077 mods work great from Nexus Mods. World of Warcraft mods work great from Curseforge.
It would be weird for a mod to break compatibility of a game unless it’s a DLL hack
I was able to add a couple of mods that I created myself to Rimworld just fine.
Stardew Valley and Minecraft modder reporting in with no issues. In general, anything Steam is moddable without issues.
Minecraft is cross platform and has been perfect with modding on Linux for a long time.
Anything that’s steam workshop should just work for the most part.
There’s also steam tinker launcher which you can use as a shim between steam and your proton in order to hook modloaders like modorganizer for Skyrim.
Anything that’s “drag and drop” should also work seamlessly.
Worst case scenario you can add your mod organizer as a non-steam game and browse to your game folder in the mod tool.
It varies but generally if there is a will there is a way. Sometimes it just works, sometimes intervention required.
Typical things that may or may not be needed depending on game:
Windows packages and/or Dll overrides via launch arguments or winecfg/protontrick
Separate wine prefix with specific weird wine build to run mod managers or editors etc. with links to relevant directories in game prefix
Case insensitivity which can be set per directory on empty directories on ext4 (poorly made mods only usually)
Searching “[game name] mods [steam deck or linux]”
Regretting all of that to find that there is a Linux mod loader that works 100% but google stopped giving meaningful search results decades ago and the reddit trick doesn’t work as well post api-suicide.
For terraria tmodloader works no issue, I think forge has a native client for WoW, and Minecraft is linux native anyway EDIT: I only ever modded terraria and minecraft so idk about any more
I think forge has a native client for WoW
Did you mean World of Warcraft?
+1 for everything you mentioned - I’ll add Stardew Valley. Flawless mod support with SMAPI on Linux. I do love my mods.
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.
Windows can run all games
Tell that to some of the games I want to play. Splinter Cell - Blacklist, I’m looking at you.
It can run all the telemetry and jankyass untested updates, too
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.
Bad OS is bad ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Just like Linux! But sadly Windows doesn’t deliver 3rd party backdoors and viruses automatically yet.
…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.
And it looks like it’s being handled decently by Canonical. I don’t like Snap, but I gotta say they’re doing a good job overall
Proton has better 32 bit compatibility than windows itself
in my case pretty much all heavy games work much better on Linux than on windows(laptop came with windows, so tested before putting Linux on it and then compared). in many cases I get around 1.5 to 2 times the performance, stability is also much greater, this is both for new and old games. that said I tend to avoid those games with insane mallware(drm) in it.
system uses a apu and has only 16gb ram and 1.5tb nvme ssd. so might also be it has a much bigger effects on APU since Linux handles ram much better. but if a system suffers from other similar bottlenecks like: storage, ram, compute, TDP and thermal, etc. problems should also result in much better performance when switching to Linux. I guess the only exception would be if the GPU compute power would litterally 100% be the only bottleneck, or close to that, but in a APU(where one might assume games to be heavily bottlenecked by GPU compute power) GNU+Linux gives much better performance.
also this was tested on Garuda Linux KDE Dragonized edition, and changed the kernel to a newer one since by default it will use a kernel optimized or first gen ryzen. which gives some issues and lower performance.
And now I heard that official client of Genshin Impact was fully compatible with Proton at that time.
I prefer the unofficial client as it also allows you to mod the game to run at 120FPS.
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.
That’s the neat part. You don’t install the anti-cheat with the custom client. That’s why you can also mod the game to run at 120FPS
Couldyou link
Search for “Anime game launcher” on Github
