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
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
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
As with most things in life, it’s probably a combination of factors. But please don’t beat yourself up over it.
There’s a lot of good advice already in this thread; no reason to repeat it. One thing you might look at the Proton Github issues list. Occasionally, when a game otherwise has a gold rating but I have problems with it, I can find some interesting corner-case details here. Here’s a link that you could use to find Anno 1404 issue, as an example: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3Aopen+“anno+1404”
The other thing I would suggest is that you be more verbose when describing problems. You did a great job sharing the high-level issue and your system’s details, but what do you mean by “didn’t work”? Does it fail to launch? Does it launch but not do X? Those details can go a long way towards troubleshooting (though I do understand that your post was meant to not be game-specific).
Oh, and stay away from Cracks. Unless you’re VERY sure about what you’re doing, it’s just inviting trouble.
thank you for your own detailed response
when i say didnt work, it usually means two things, it either:
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didnt launch at all, no window, no nothing no error message
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window does open and it shows a error message/only shows an error message
When either of those things happen it is a good idea to run steam (lutris, bottles) from terminal to see what it’s trying to do while “not working”. Helped me couple times.
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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.
It’s better today than it was a year ago, and WAY better than it was 3 years ago, and is still improving. There are a few categories of games where you are likely to have problems though.
- competitive multiplayer games [kernel level anticheat, that one will probably remain a problem]
- very old games [getting better all the time, because wine is getting better all the times]
- very new AAA games [they mostly use one of a handful of game engines, so they tend to get fixed in batches]
I would say whether linux is ready for (windows) gaming depends on is different per person predicated on:
- What categories of games you play
- Any specific problematic game that is a dealbreaker for you
For me, I tend to play some older games, and there are a few that don’t work well. I don’t want to boot windows, so I just decide I can wait for it to get there for them.
For some people, “ready” means will run every windows program as if running on windows. We’re still a ways off from that, if we ever get there (it’s a moving target, as windows is still being developed…)
I havent played much of any multiplayers games in years actually (does honkai star rial count?
for old games, most vividly i can remember having some trouble with dawn of war so i used soulstorm and a mod to play the og campaign in it
i tend to stay away from triple a games, one of which is because they dont play nice with linux, space marine 2 is a different case for me cause, well, i really like the universe (boltgun worked for the msot part so that was nice)
game categories: well, i dont have too many category i stay away from, but
favourite older games: advance wars series, age of mythology (retold i tried but doesnt work for me either), castlevania aria of sorrow/SOTN, elite beat agents, pepsiman, orcs and elves, punch out wii, katamari series, ace attorney trilogy, dawn of war
favourite never/ish games: hyrule warriors, lego lord of the rings, boltgun, kingdom hearts BBS, patapon
Linux gaming was always slightly buggy for me for a while. Then I tried Nobara, and since then everything has been more or less plug and play.
AC Odyssey was a bit more work to get going but that was because I had bought it through Ubisoft Connect. But even that just needed me to install it in Lutris which comes preinstalled and made the setup nice and easy.
Nobara is developed by the guy who makes ProtonGE, as a side note.
I switched from PopOs to Nobara, and it worked great but after a while my sound quit and I missed how switching workspaces worked in PopOs. I tried Mint and surprisingly I had a hell of time trying to get gaming working like it did, so I back to PopOs and I have zero complaints. Everything just works. I have a bunch of games that say no on the steam deck but they work great. I’ve been told the kernal is outdated but honestly, I don’t care, everything works. In my household we have 5 pc’s. My wifes is the only one left on Windows and she has more issues than me.
i tried nobara, i dont remember why but for one reason or another the install was kinda borked
When I switched I had to use Windows (gross) to make the boot disk. Turns out that was my mistake, Windows fucks with the drive just a tad and made the verification fail on the installer.
Using a live usb Linux stick I was able to download the ISO and write a new install disk. Worked flawlessly from there.
I had a dual boot for six weeks this summer with Linux Mint. Approximately 2/3 of my games worked fine on Linux.
I had to troubleshoot it almost every time I booted up, though, which is why I reverted to Windows setup. I plan to go back when I get a new PC and I can run linux only on a machine, but I think it’s fair to say that there are some hardware incompatibilities sometimes. I’ve also read that there are distros other than Mint that play nice with NVidia chips, so I’ll probably go with one of those when I switch back to Linux.
Still, you can blunt most of the negative aspects of Windows by running O&O ShutUp.
before i went to linux that was one of the several tools i used
but im such a paranoid woman now that i just cant really bring myself to go back to windows
linux also just feels nicer to use to me you know?
Don’t get me wrong, I loved Linux.
I just hated having to troubleshoot almost every time I booted up my PC. It was abundantly clear there were hardware incompatibilities in my case.
is the old shutup method still good to go for win 10?
while i am always paranoid i am considering the switch fairly often recently
Shutup still works but I wouldn’t trust it to prevent all telemetry. I wouldn’t trust Microsoft not to have other telemetry that’s not part of their services that can be turned off.
Just my 2 cents: I dual boot Windows and Linux. I only start up Windows when I want to play a game, use Linux Mint for everything else. Some games run perfectly fine under Linux (I play a lot of Factorio for example. No Mans Sky I’ve had no issues etc.) but some are just a pain. For those I switch to Windows and then immediately switch back when I’m done playing.
It’s not ideal but this way Windows has next to no information about me at least. And as times goes on I’m seeing more and more games running just fine under Linux. Maybe one day I’ll be able to drop Windows completely.
This is the way to go if you’re a gamer. It just didn’t work in my specific case.
i never tried dualbooting ebfore
two reasons mainly:
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i simply find it too bothersome
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im 100% certain ill screw something up
It’s simpler than you think. Watch a few YT tutorials on it and see if it’s a good fit.
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Most reports for Anno 1440 History Edition on ProtonDB say that it works.
I use ProtonUp-QT to keep my Wine and Proton versions up to date. It has worked well for me, especially when I need to try different versions on a game.
EDIT: Space Marine 2 is too new. Give it a little time for the reports to come out and for GE to release a ProtonGE that supports it (if needed).
i think i used protonup twice perhaps? i dont think it really did anything for me
anno 1404 and space marine 2 are just two examples, the case of all games i tried not working, if i had to put it into % id give it a 6ß to 70% easily
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
I’ve had good luck using Pop!_OS to game on Nvidia systems. Can’t speak specifically for those two games, but several other games that gave me trouble on other distros worked smoothly on Pop.
i tried it once actually, i dont know what it was but it never really stuck with me, probably cause of gnome
i do love my “old school” menu bar
I’m not a fan of Gnome either but Pop was the most stable distro I found for an Nvidia card.
This Gnome extension let’s you move everything down to the bottom panel.
Why didnt you just to fucking try removed the wacky ram and adding one by one to see if it changes anything? Its like 30 minutes max
having differently sized ram sounded like something so trivial and inconsequential of a thing it didnt exactly cross my mind that it would problems to begin with
and some games do work so it isnt consistent enough of a thing to be noticed to me
im also not a computer wiz grandmaster
Bro above got an attitude but he does make a valid point re RAM matching.
Trying use a proper paid. Also maybe as other have pointed out more gaming focused distros
Nobara, bazzite and popos come to mind. Although popos is not gaming per se
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 tried to install fedora a few times, but it was borked at a system level the 3 times i did
im not the smartest woman around the blog, but when i tried to see what the terminal says sometimes with borked games, i dont think it ever helped me get a game to run, i chalk it up to simply not being knowledgeable enough
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.
Arch linux user here. Gaming totally works. Sometimes even better than Windows when playing native games. Even Proton works good most of the time. Sometimes I play Brawlhalla with Proton Experimental and it runs better and less laggy in Linux than Windows despite Windows having a native build. Check ProtonDB to find out how well games work on Linux. Linux gamers review games there.
Thanks to Valve, the Steam Deck is getting Linux popular and basically makes devs build their games for Linux as well.
