1y ago

I heard it's starting to get better

98 comments

With proton, this is less and less the case.
- Indeed, God bless proton
- Basically, I tried proton and I'll never go back.
  The overhead of windows is so heavy
- I just made the jump again and I don't think I'll be going back to Windows. I'm getting improved performance in many of my favourite titles.
  Very happy to be free of windows finally.
  
  If rainbow 6 ever gets Linux support, I think I can fully uninstall windows. Unfortunately if I need to have windows installed for something, I might as well compartmentalize Linux for productivity, and windows for gaming
  
  I've been working on a NixOS setup over the past few days and I just got BG3 to run a couple of hours ago. I had to switch from the Mesa driver to the AMD one, I can't login to the launcher (CORS issue lmao), and it sometimes doesn't launch at all. It's still a bit of a WIP, but it did seem to run at least as well as it did on Windows when it worked. I'm hoping that having an ephemeral, config-based setup will save me a lot of this trouble in the future.
- Was amazed at how good this is.
- what is proton? what does it do?
  
  Proton is a translation layer that uses Wine and other tricks to allow you to run Windows games on Linux. It's a Valve project that is making a ton of progress on compatibility. It's a huge part of the success of the Steam Deck.
- if only I could multibox.
  turns out a compatibility layer takes up system resources. who knew.
  edit: also fuck minimize on focus loss, I'm not even sorry for my Windows partition while that's a thing.
- It’s just a even more evil cheating if still do it
- I think the real gamechanger was Vulkan. OpenGL was just not suited for this.
- I've recently installed Linux. Have a hdd full with steam games (for windows) Is there any way to get that to work without needing to format the drive and install the games again? Looked a bit at it but every article seems to suggest formating the drive to get it to work with proton.
  
  It's technically possible but not recommended as the NTFS format has some quirks under Linux. Give yourself the best chance at everything working and do full reinstalls after a format.

If only. Usually my Manjaro partition is chill, but the moment I step foot in Windows 11, it throws a pissy fit and breaks something it shouldn't even have access to.
If Linux just calls you a cheater, Microsoft sets you and everything you love on fire to make a point.
- Windows: "Looks like your bootloader was corrupted. I went ahead and reinstall it. No need to thank me, I was just doing my job. What's that? Grub? Nope, never heard of that guy."
  
  Windows: "While updating I found out that some weird thing was set as first boot priority. I fixed that by setting it to myself. You are welcome!"
  
  Yes, precisely! Haha
- Garuda / win11 dualboot here.
  When I go back to Garuda I find my display settings out of whack. Usually 800x640 resolution and desktop image back to default.
  When I go back to win11 i find the timezone changed.
  So dual boot is annoying for both in my experience
  
  https://feldspaten.org/2019/11/03/windows-10-clock-in-utc/
  
  Haha, I forgot it also broke the clock. But as others explained, it's fixable.
- Lol, I killed manjaro twice 😂 it’s just too easy for Noobs to enable AUR
  
  In my case, I got a little too confident and messed around with drivers to get stable situation to work. Oops.
  But in the times windows kills something... aside from messing with my boot loader (always install windows first, then Linux), it also managed to break my wifi drivers to the point that it would blue screen my windows AND prevent Manjaro from booting (and once fixed, not connect to Internet via Wi-Fi).

Meanwhile, my Windows partition back in 2017:
- Same, right after Windows 10 nuked my network drivers via any automated update that happened while I wasn’t home
  
  I never sullied my computer with Windows 10. The last version of Windows I used was 7, and I ditched it for good when Microsoft started trying to backport 10's malware (euphemized as "telemetry") to it.

Everything I want to play runs on Linux and the couple that don't are because of EAC, which I can't be bothered with. I've completely cut Windows out of my life.
- I'm in the honeymoon stage but I've left win 11 behind earlier this week. Jump full into it I am loving pop_os... the tiling feature is a refreshing thing I didn't know I needed. I'm hooked to it already. Flatpak is something else new for me that I'm really enjoying the thought of. Really like all the seamlessness of the virtual desktops too. Pop calls them workspaces. I can send windows to another workspace. Keep selectef ones on all workspaces. I'm a devops that has been using wsl for anything I needed Linux locally for since it came out. Now that I know how to interact with Linux and my remaining Windows infrastructure at work (primarily Ad) I am full into it. The only game I've spun up on it so far was cyberpunk 2077 and it runs great on it. Got Plex going, virtual machines, docker/podman, the foss possibilities are awesome. Really enjoying freetube right now too.

This is fake, where is the wrong system time? 😂
- timedatectl set-local-rtc 1
  
  Windows is in the wrong, not Linux.
  reg.exe add HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\TimeZoneInformation /v RealTimeIsUniversal /t REG_DWORD /d 1 /f

My Windows partition is a vm that has its own 4060Ti and that I use via looking glass.
So it should behave or the host will just kill it off.

When you don't use windows for a few months, you'll feel like that on first boot. 'Oh, you haven't used this program on your desktop in a while (lists entire desktop). You want me to clean it up into a folder, because you don't use it anyway? I would also like to attend you to some urgent updates you need to install right now, and after that I have updates for your updates waiting, like 3 increments in a row with reboots each.' And of course, during the chore of updating, Edge appears and becomes your default browser. Take that you dirty cheater!
- That just reminds me why I left in the first place. Bye!
- Edge appears and becomes your default browser.
  I have to use Edge at work and after a recent update it disabled the adblocking extension I used because "it might have been tampered with". It also offered a nice Repair button which...uninstalled the extension completely.
  Edge is hostile to its users and should never ever be used.
  
  It is not hostile it is abusively helpful! It will force you into the best experience of the web, just sit still you silly goose!

Jokes aside, are there still games that doesn't work on Linux? I haven't met one in over a year.
- Some games with intrusive DRM or anticheat. Also VR is pretty bad
  
  I bet that wife wishes she has anti-cheat.
  
  denuvo ricochet
- I've had issues with vr games, mostly playable, but way less consistent and I've gotten motion sick when I haven't on windows. Though I last tried a year or so ago, so it could have improved
- I'm very proud to announce that 98% of my steam titles play perfect on my gaming Linux setup. I main Pop!_os and I love it so much.
  Tarkov runs perfect but its 3rd party anti cheat doesn't support Linux so it's not playable online.
  Certain games from the Xbox Microsoft store like halo wars 2 cannot run on Linux, PC or Xbox only. Very few exceptions. Couldn't he happier. I highly recommend it
- Same here. Ended up deleting my windows partition altogether after a few months.
- Games that calculate a lot of pathfinding or similar in the GPU will end in a CPU-melting stutter fairly soon when run on Vulcan.
  Satisfactory is a good example or this: It quickly becomes unplayable with any halfway complex setup.
  If you've got a Linux native version, then you're fine.
  
  Huh, I haven't had any issues with satisfactory

Windows-free since ‘93…
- Has a nice ring to it… … ‘23 be free. It’s never too late.

Committed loyal Linux users here. I don't even have my Linux dress up to role play Windows via a virtual machine. We still get kinky tho 😜
- Same. I have a boot partition and a user partition, and they get along just fine.

In my experience, gaming on linux has been better than on windows
- Actually. I recently started using Linux for the first time, I play a wide variety of games and my laptop I was trying it on, 1 game didn't work on Linux that (barely, buggy as hell and abandoned by devs) worked on Windows, but 2 other games that didn't run smooth enough on Windows to be playable, ran fine on Linux, all the others were about the same. Gaming experience has far far exceeded my expectations going in and expecting lots of headaches and issues.
- It‘s really sooo much better. But it lacks in one area: PCVR. SteamVR for Linux feels a bit more janky, but that’s not really the main issue.
  The issue is that, to stream from PC to the quest line of devices, you need oculus’s software, which only runs on windows.
  ALVR exists, but its compression and latency are considerably worse in my experience.
  So I have a small separate SSD for windows :(

I started to get better 5 years ago. These days it's at least 60-70% where Windows is with respect to gaming. According to protondb.com, 78% of the top 100 steam games (and 75% of the top 1000) are directly playable on linux with no or very little tweaking required.
- Actually except for one eac game (Hunt) I don't have to switch anymore.
  Stellaris, Zomboid, Splitgate, ...
  Though getting the best "quality" for some of the games was challenging (struggling with differing monitor Hz on X11 and nvidia)
  
  Hunt is why I'm still rocking windows too 😭
  Well that, and some work stuff that doesn't work on Linux, bleh

I have a Quest 2 VR headset that I use for playing sim racing like Assetto Corsa, and flight sim on Xplane 11. To use that I have to open up Meta's Quest app, connect the headset to the computer over the WIFI, and it sorta functions like a monitor. In that I can view the whole Windows desktop environment on a virtual screen floating in VR space. When you open a VR game like Xplane you stop seeing the floating monitor, and it takes over the whole VR eye space for the duration you play it.
Is this type of thing also possible on Ubuntu? If so, I'll shitcan Windows ASAP.
- Quest 2 owner here, your best bet is trying ALVR as virtual desktop straight up doesn't support Linux, but honestly YMMV. I daily drive linux and have done so for awhile now, I've found performance for most games these days, usually runs on par with Windows. But I found the performance for VR much much worse (with a 6700xt}. . Not to mention I was getting a long standing bug that valve hadn't fixed in fucking years on SteamVR in linux the last time I tried it. Although maybe that's changed since SteamVR 2.0.
  I'd happily try again if my quest 2 didn't have mad stick drift and no amount of cleaning the contacts seems to be fixing it :(

On pop_os I had great success with proton until I had to wipe my os and reload. Before, most of my games worked well. Cyberpunk 2077 actually ran faster than on Windows. After the wipe, I literally cannot get a single game to run and I really don't feel like troubleshooting so I keep returning to windows. I hate it. And yes, I have an Nvidia card and have tried several driver versions
- Maybe check your kernel version? Is it the same major version like the one before the wipe? Nvidia drivers can behave differently on different kernel version (assuming you use an Nvidia card).
  
  This is a good point. Would the version numbers displayed from apt list --installed be what I'm looking for?
  As it happens I do keep a git repo that keeps a log of that information. I see that after reinstall, linux-image-* and linux-headers-* packages have the same actual version numbers but there are some other values in that same listing that have changed a bit. Some look like git commit hashes. I dunno.
  I did start with a different, updated Pop!_OS image this time. I've considered wiping again using the older image which I still have. I figured that using the new one would be best and just avoid the need for a few GB of updates but looking at the diff of the installed packages (and looking at differences in how I was able to resolve some random issues, for example previously I had pulse installed for audio stuff, now I do not, it's a different app), it seems like a lot of the OS internals are rather different...

I wish I could fully abandon my windows partition, but sadly my sim racing peripherals don't all work on Linux, and I bought those before I started thinking about switching.
- What sim racing stuff? It was a pain, but I got my thrustmaster working. Logitech and fanatec I believe both have drivers too
  
  Not OP but a curious lurker, how hard was it to get your Thrustmaster to work on Linux? I've been hoping to buy a racing wheel for some racing games I play and I assumed all of them worked fine on Linux (mostly since my knockoff third-party PS4-style gamepads worked immediately), is that actually not the case? :/
  To be fair, I was mostly aiming to buy a Logitech wheel, so I'm not sure how the experience will differ frrom Thrustmaster. But the older G27 wheels are more affordable and I'm not sure if they'll have trouble or not.

Nah Linux is too cool to care if you use other operating systems or not. It's Windows and Mac that react like this.
- So you're saying Linux is a cuckold?

Back in 2010s, I had to open Windows to game. Now all games work out of the box with Linux, thanks to wine, vulkan and dxvk.

I really want to jump but dual boot. I can’t seem to get my games to work. I just don’t know how to get past the issues I see.
- Using steam and proton, the supported games just work. You can also set steam to try proton on games with no known support, and it often also just works. If a game do not work, I just return it.
  My steam backlog is enough for a liftetime of playing.
- Did you try Lutris? Most of the games works like a charm.
  
  my biggest gripe with gaming on linux is little issues all over the place even in simple games. Like in celeste, older versions of terraria and most other FNA/XNA games (linux-native) steam overlay doesn't render at all on amd gpus. Kinda annoying, especially with big picture mode...
  Stormworks (wine/proton) crashes if minimized or resized, but only sometimes
  
  In my experience wine is unstable as fuck. And as a result all forks and gui variants are also unstable. Also performance on even AMD gpus is far from ideal. Even with natively built games like cs:go there is way more stutter and some texture glitches. It is like downgrading your gpu an entire performance class. Ideal it is not.

But PKHeX is a .exe! What am I supposed to do, figure out Wine? XD
- What is there figure out? You install wine and double click the exe. It's not 2003 anymore.
  
  PKHeX actually does not work on Wine out of the box, it's one of those programs that are esoteric enough to not run on Wine even with today's advancements. You need to do some tricks to get it working - namely installing an old build from late 2018 and manually install .NET Desktop Runtime 7 without using winetricks.
- Assuming you actually had trouble getting PKHeX to work on Wine, thankfully I managed to get it working! (Well, okay, I followed some instructions someone on Reddit posted long ago lol)
  Basically, you need to install an old build of PKHeX (22.12.18, you can download it here: https://projectpokemon.org/home/files/file/1-pkhex/?changelog=6855), and manually install .NET Desktop Runtime 7 (i.e. not from winetricks, but from the actual Microsoft page). It will then work normally, even if you do the trick of renaming it to PKHaX. Hope this helps!
  
  Thanks for the help!

Coming back to Linux at home after using Windows all day.
'But baby, they forced me to!'

Has anyone got Apex Legends running smoothly on Linux ?
I run xfce on debian 12 and when the game loads - it's not smooth enough for me to play.
My hardware is - i5 10400f , GTX 1660 Super, 16GB RAM

Lol I laughed at this more than I should've.

the games i play work perfectly, although i don't play multiplayer (other than Minecraft) so i guess thats why

Nowadays I felt dirty whenever I boot into Windoze, that's why get rid of it

98 comments