3 ms·

Is it actually any good for gaming?

mococa 2y ago
Pretty good. There is only one exception, RDR2, there is a mission where it was crashing for me. Switching to proton experimental solved the issue and I am about to finish it (again, love this game)
Alupis 2y ago
Gaming on Linux is actually pretty great these days - thanks in no small part to Valve and their momentous efforts in the space, proton included. If you run into an issue, it's almost always the Anti-Cheat software to blame. There are many games that run very well in single player modes, but then force-quit if you try to join multiplayer (as-in the anti-cheat kicks you or deliberately crashes the game). I'm not aware of any work-arounds that are reliable for this - and you risk a ban in trying so. They detect you're not on Windows and refuse to work. Games that don't use aggressive Anti-Cheat work fine, even in multiplayer. There's a huge catalog of games that work natively these days, and proton takes care of just about everything else. Steam mostly "just works" with all games. There's Lutris, Bottles and more for everything else.
gkhartman 2y ago
I've been playing Baldurs Gate, and Guidwars 2 without issue. I originally started out on endeavorOS which lasted a while, but eventually needed the stability of PopOS since I have dev work on the same machine. Pop has a version that ships with Nvidia proprietary drivers which made things easier (RTX 4080). Only thing missing for me is HDR support. I'm very happy to give that up to avoid Windows.
- Alupis 2y ago
  Regarding the stability issue on a dev machine - you may be interested in playing with one of the immutable-os distros, such as SilverBlue (fedora based). The high-level take-away is you can't break your actual OS since it's root filesystem is read-only, and you use "pet" containers (on docker, podman, whatever) to do your work in. Applications are either sandboxed via Flatpak, or installed/run inside your pet containers. If your pet container dies, you cry about it for a moment, and when you're ready you get a new one - your actual os and other containers remain unaffected. I use distrobox[1] to create/run the pet containers. [1] https://github.com/89luca89/distrobox https://github.com/89luca89/distrobox
  - navjack27 2y ago
    I was unable to use silver blue on my comet lake based laptop with a Nvidia Optimus secondary card. Once I finally got nvidia's proprietary drivers installed and I tried using parsec to remote to my windows desktop using hardware decoding for video I was getting 80 milliseconds decode time as opposed to 8 milliseconds on software decoding. I gave up on Linux and reinstalled windows 11 and everything's working perfectly without a hitch.
    - Alupis 2y ago
      I'd wager this had little or nothing to do with SilverBlue itself, and more had to do with your configuration. Did you experience this issue on another distro too?
- pndy 2y ago
  > Guidwars 2 I had to replace gpu because nvidia did something at some point to the drivers and I couldn't load Shattered Observatory and few other places without crashing, no matter whether I launch the game by Lutris or Steam
  - gkhartman 2y ago
    Yeah, I had a few driver versions cause issues. I'm usually able to get around it by switching proton versions. Sometimes the experimental version works when others don't. There was a driver version a month or so back that broke gw2, but it seemed to be fixed by next driver release. I think about picking up a cheaper amd card for those unstable periods when Nvidia can't seem to get it right. I know its nowhere near the top of there todo list, but really wish they'd give more attention to the Linux driver.

Pretty good. There is only one exception, RDR2, there is a mission where it was crashing for me. Switching to proton experimental solved the issue and I am about to finish it (again, love this game)

Alupis 2y ago

Gaming on Linux is actually pretty great these days - thanks in no small part to Valve and their momentous efforts in the space, proton included. If you run into an issue, it's almost always the Anti-Cheat software to blame. There are many games that run very well in single player modes, but then force-quit if you try to join multiplayer (as-in the anti-cheat kicks you or deliberately crashes the game). I'm not aware of any work-arounds that are reliable for this - and you risk a ban in trying so. They detect you're not on Windows and refuse to work. Games that don't use aggressive Anti-Cheat work fine, even in multiplayer. There's a huge catalog of games that work natively these days, and proton takes care of just about everything else. Steam mostly "just works" with all games. There's Lutris, Bottles and more for everything else.

gkhartman 2y ago

I've been playing Baldurs Gate, and Guidwars 2 without issue. I originally started out on endeavorOS which lasted a while, but eventually needed the stability of PopOS since I have dev work on the same machine. Pop has a version that ships with Nvidia proprietary drivers which made things easier (RTX 4080). Only thing missing for me is HDR support. I'm very happy to give that up to avoid Windows.

Alupis 2y ago
Regarding the stability issue on a dev machine - you may be interested in playing with one of the immutable-os distros, such as SilverBlue (fedora based). The high-level take-away is you can't break your actual OS since it's root filesystem is read-only, and you use "pet" containers (on docker, podman, whatever) to do your work in. Applications are either sandboxed via Flatpak, or installed/run inside your pet containers. If your pet container dies, you cry about it for a moment, and when you're ready you get a new one - your actual os and other containers remain unaffected. I use distrobox[1] to create/run the pet containers. [1] https://github.com/89luca89/distrobox https://github.com/89luca89/distrobox
- navjack27 2y ago
  I was unable to use silver blue on my comet lake based laptop with a Nvidia Optimus secondary card. Once I finally got nvidia's proprietary drivers installed and I tried using parsec to remote to my windows desktop using hardware decoding for video I was getting 80 milliseconds decode time as opposed to 8 milliseconds on software decoding. I gave up on Linux and reinstalled windows 11 and everything's working perfectly without a hitch.
  - Alupis 2y ago
    I'd wager this had little or nothing to do with SilverBlue itself, and more had to do with your configuration. Did you experience this issue on another distro too?
pndy 2y ago
> Guidwars 2 I had to replace gpu because nvidia did something at some point to the drivers and I couldn't load Shattered Observatory and few other places without crashing, no matter whether I launch the game by Lutris or Steam
- gkhartman 2y ago
  Yeah, I had a few driver versions cause issues. I'm usually able to get around it by switching proton versions. Sometimes the experimental version works when others don't. There was a driver version a month or so back that broke gw2, but it seemed to be fixed by next driver release. I think about picking up a cheaper amd card for those unstable periods when Nvidia can't seem to get it right. I know its nowhere near the top of there todo list, but really wish they'd give more attention to the Linux driver.