Ill keep it as short as possible, apologies if i keep rambling(ill put my specs at the bottom)
Over the last yew years, i have used quite a lot of distros, from mint (currently my main again), to manjaro to solus to endeavouros and more i cant remember, one thing they all (minus solus) had in commong (for me) was the fact that pc gaming…was horrible on them.
Many hours where spend getting different games to work, or rather trying to get them to work at all, most of them had failed, steam, lutris, default wine, no matter what has been used)
As an example:
Anno 1404 history edition (best anno, fite me), i bought it on steam, tried launching it, didnt work, tried several proton versions, didnt work, lutris, didnt work, i downloaded a crack to see, didnt work either, using a different file format, nothing.
Sometimes i was able to make it work, once and than never again, solus was the only one where anno 1404 worked out of the box, i managed to make it work in endeavouros once by installing two packages i could never find again. (most recently, i bought space marine 2, didnt work and keeps crashing no matter what i do9
But this was the best case scenario, games really work.
Is it just my hardware?
Am i using linux just wrongly for years?
Is it my fault?
Am i missing something?
My specs:
prebuilt desktop: Acer Nitro N50-620
memory 64KiB BIOS
memory 32GiB System Memory
memory 16GiB DIMM DDR4 Synchronous 26
memory 8GiB DIMM DDR4 Synchronous 320
memory 8GiB DIMM DDR4 Synchronous 320
processor 11th Gen Intel® Core™ i5-
bridge Intel Corporation
display TU116 [GeForce GTX 1660 SUPER]
storage Micron_2210_MTFDHBA1T0QFD
bus Tiger Lake-H USB 3.2 Gen 2x1 x
network Tiger Lake PCH CNVi WiFi
bus Tiger Lake-H Serial IO I2C Con
If a game doesn’t run on Linux, I just don’t play it.
Life is too short, I don’t care anymore.
I need Linux for work and I have no interest in paying for an OS that doesn’t let me have privacy.
So fuck it, if companies don’t write there software well enough… I’ll live.
I’d rather spend time in a bar anyway.
Some games are trickier than others for sure. Are you using protondb as a reference?
Anno 1404 is a 15 year old game with aggressive DRM so I could tell right away that it would be one of the more tricky titles.
Worked ootb and smoothly for the 50ish hours I’ve put into in while on Linux. OP is defo cursed somehow
i actually did try using protondb in several gaming cases, i recall tweaks there working maybe once? if at all?
and i tried quite a few games, some where i went to protondb of course to check, but for me, it sadly never helped
Is it just my hardware?
It is not your hardware
Am i using linux just wrongly for years?
Not really
Is it my fault?
Not really
The main issue from what I can tell is you are trying to play older windows games which can be pretty hit or miss. More recent pc games often support the steam deck which is usually a good sign for compatibility.
Gaming on Linux has greatly improved over the last couple years (especially thanks to proton/steam deck) but if you are trying to run older games that were never designed to run to it or you want to play online games with aggressive anti-cheat it is still going to be a bit of a struggle.
I would recommend sticking to an Arch based distro like EndeavourOS (as it is similar to the SteamOS) or a Debain based distro and not swap around too much so you can get a feel for it without having a bunch of things change on you all the time like package names and the like.
All that said if your jam is older windows games and you have access to windows and are tired of messing with the OS and just want to play games just use windows, try linux another day.
I never seen that weirdest ram configuration ever. Its probably cursed. I never had any game that did not play at all, either i had to change some minor settings but it worked good. ( I am on Linux Mint Cinamon too )
I would guess the memory just freaks out some games that use more than 8gb ?
protondb is showing you if it is compatible with linux. If it isnt working on yours BUT it shows Gold or platinum on protondb its a YOU issue.
protondb is showing if it works at all yes, btu it also has a bunch of epople and possible tweaks showing it
neither protondb own ratings nor these tweaks did much to make any of the games i tried work (i dont recall any of them being native to linux)
my rig is a pretty common stock build (minus the increased ram)
so if it isnt a hardware issue, and i dont tinker with system files, or any funky stuff like that
why would it be a “me” issues?
Because if its gold then it says A LOT of people have no issues ( small issues ). Many people recommend to use GEProton.
The ram is not common, it is not recommended and could lead to crashes or incompatibilities.
- The sizes
- The different clock speeds
if a bit more ram (and no other hardware changes) actually causes so much issues with gaming, is it really a me problem?
that just sound like a rather trivial change
if you say that its truly that funky, i can remove the extra ram and make it a simple and ncie 16gb
Yeah please do that.
yee, 16gb is plenty enough as it is anyway
Its not about memory size its about the asymmetric sticks. It was a classic problem with OS memory management in the past. Modern OS are better at dealing with it but it is not the optimal set up.
You’re running windows game which use proton/wine that manage memory for the game and use linux for access to RAM. The asymmetry could conceivably cause issues you wouldn’t notice with native apps.
I’d try removing the 16gb stick (or the two 8gb sticks and keeo the 16gb stick; all that matters is whatever ram isnleft is the uniform) and see what happens with the games you’ve been trying. It might not he the issue but the only way to know is to test it, rather than dismiss it because its not what you expected.
i dont think i ever needed the extra ram anyway since i put it in, will remove them real quick
How did it go
the only other difference so far: when playing one single game: it makes the entire system sometimes freeze up and force me to reboot
a game that worked perfectly before
i didnt exactly stress test with a couple dozen games, the one game i tried had the same error message as before
Yes because again it’s the mismatched ram sizes and the different clock speeds. IMHO the clock speed issue is way more likely to throw things off than the different stick sizes, although neither are ideal.
The mobo should just be downclocking then all to the same speed. Should be, but who knows
The Anno games are notoriously hard to run on Linux. Protip: always check Protondb for Linux compatibility.
Also, if you find yourself missing Anno on Linux, check out Tropico or any number of city builders by Hooded Horse. There are lots of great resource production chain city builders out there that don’t force you to use Uplay
Running Steam (Windows) games on Linux (Fedora) has always been finicky for me. Sometimes requiring digging into logs to figure out what’s going on
I’ve been gaming on Linux for years. I do habitually avoid games that would be borked ootb by things like anti cheat. But typically I have very minor issues.
Do you check out protondb.com at all?
Yeah, been on Linux a bit over a year now, and have yet to run into a game that I’ve wanted/bought that didn’t work just fine. Including some that steam call “unsupported” (Like Dark Souls Prepare to Die edition with DSFix).
quite often actually, unfortunately:
i cant recall any tweaks people mention there ever working on any of the games i tried
Removed by mod
whats the difference between gaming on linux and running windows games on linux? isnt both of them gaming on linux
protondb as good as a resource it may be, i tried it often, with anno 1404 too, but i honestly dont recall tweaks there ever working for me (for games rated to be running of course, i dont try games that are rated in the red naturally)
I see that linux is pretty good in benchmarks and i believe it so too, however, that is not the case for me and im at a point where im torn between “something is wrong with me and my setup” and “what voodoo is everyone else using that they arent telling me?”
whats the difference between gaming on linux and running windows games on linux? isnt both of them gaming on linux
There are games that are native to linux that run just fine
It has always been gaming ready, but you lose a lot of performance if you play non-native ganes.
Try some non-Steam native Linux ideally coming with your distro. For example OpenAstroMenace, Warzone2100, OpenTyrian or nexuiz etc…
Also the older multiplatform Java MMO Spiral Knights should even run with Steam (and without) on high graphics settings, but maybe you will have to swap out its bundled Java for a 64bit one.
Using workarounds to attempt to get foreign software running on an operating system for which is was never built is always going to be fraught with problems.
If the game isn’t distributed compiled for your platform, then you are a second class citizen and no amount of API wrappers, translation layers, VMs or whatever will ever address the core issue.
Running a game in Proton (Wine) is not playing on Linux. It is your linux environment contorting itself and doing miraculous back flips in the hope of convincingly coaxing the Windows binary game into thinking that it is running on an actual Windows host.
Soft solution: Purchase games that are properly developed and released targeting your platform natively.
Hard solution: Graduate from playing games and move on with your life. (btw mine improved a lot after putting gaming behind me for good. + I can now use whatever computer hardware and software I damn well please)
Have you enabled Steam Play in the game options? Might be an easy step to miss/forget. Usually if a game won’t run for me it ends up being something simple like that!
i can see why, i always make sure its activated before i force a specific proton version to try, just to be sure
Ahh gotcha. The Anno series is great (same with Linux!) so keep at it - best of luck!
That setup is cursed and I wouldn’t recommend it for Linux gaming personally
First of all, what the hell is going on with your RAM configuration?
Your first stop should have been the protondb page for your game. Given that most other people report it as running out of the box, then the issue lies somewhere else.
Which proton versions have you tried? Since you have an Nvidia card, what is the driver revision? What desktop environment, and version of it are you using?
I hate to say it, but reinstalling your entire OS multiple times, without doing any troubleshooting, has been a waste of your time
whats going on with my ram configuration?
i tried using protondb several times, but it rarely if ever has worked with me, the tweaks people suggest i mean.
all between 9 to 5 on many games, sometimes proton ge too but i never noticed a difference when trying to use that one
whats a driver revision?
DE: cinnamon 6.2.9
i have done so much troubleshooting over these years that reinstalling or installing another distro became easier and quicker to do
Usually people have only same size RAM, but other configurations can work too. (I have 20GB of RAM running fine, for example.)
do you think that may somehow be the cause of so many problems? or part of it?
Unlikely. It won’t run optimally but it shouldn’t be the cause of crashes or bugs. If you’re not sure you can run a ram test (https://memtest.org/)
It’s unlikely to cause anything to outright fail, but it will certainly be creating bottlenecks and inefficiencies
Each nvidia card works better or worse with different version releases of nvidia drivers. Older cards usually need smaller version numbers. Since you are running mint, all versions you need to test should be in the default repos. Try different drivers and see if you can find the right one for your card.
apt-cache search nvidiashould give you a list of options, which you can install with
apt-get install.ngl, id rather stick with what is recommended before i go through hundreds of slightly differently named drivers
There’s usually only like 5 tracks. “What’s recommended” is nouveau, which works but not for gaming. It’s recommended because it’s open source and can do most things that the proprietary nvidia drivers can do. Nvidia is really bad at maintaining their drivers, and different drivers work better for different cards.
Nvidia sucks. Switch to AMD and never have a problem again. Or spend an hour testing each of the proprietary options maintained in the debian repos, and most likely find that at least one of them works. Until an update to the drivers or kernel comes along, and breaks it again, so you have to play around with driver versions and kernel versions to find a combo that works. That’s less likely to happen if you stick with a debian-based distro vs a bleeding-edge distro like arch.
And buy AMD for your next machine to send a message to nvidia that their driver support sucks!
idk man, mints driver manager do be saying nvidia is recommended
but besides that, i tried asking for an equivalent card on lemmy once, ill leave it at: im not inclined to try again
henceforth, if amd, prebuilt only
and regarding driver and kernel version, the moment i have to fiddle with either to get something working to the extent you are describing, im burning my pc
Please try versions 535 and 470.
See if either fixes your issues.
You need to reboot after switching. It’ll take you 30 mins max, even if neither works and you have to switch back.
i switched to 550 yesterday, it was 535 before that
It is not. It has gotten better but it still has ways to go. Unless you want to game while huffing copium, after spending a good chunk of your gaming time troubleshooting.
The thing with trying different distros drives me a bit nuts. If you’re getting consistently bad results across so many different ones, then you can see how distros don’t matter all that much after all. What really matters is your hw config combined with software config. Stop trying different distros expecting that some of them will maybe do something differently, stick to one and try to figure out the problem or ask for help. Only resort to other distro if you know that it will make something easier (eg provide more up to date packages).
You said what’s your hw configuration, but not much about how you handle NVIDIA drivers. By default, your GPU will run on open drivers built in Linux kernel called Nouveau, combined with OpenGL (and for your GPU that’s it for now) implemented in Mesa. This is enough for basic things to work, such as the desktop, video playback, office applications, but not necessarily games. For that you need the proprietary NVIDIA drivers. Check manual of your currently used distro for how to get those drivers in place. For your GPU even the newest drivers are available (560), so it’s good if your distro offers that. For drivers older than 555 series, use X11 session instead of Wayland.
What kind of gaming?
Single player or some older multiplayer games without anti-cheat programs running?
Probably ready for a lot of those.
Triple-A major games with anti-cheat?
Not so much.
I moved my Steam library over…or at least the games I could actually play. There’s a lot of games that just won’t work despite the Linux crowd constantly saying gaming is great on Linux. VR? Not a chance.
