Linux compatibility or I send it back!
Close. It either natively runs well on Linux, or refund. No Proton, no Wine. Made natively for Linux and runs well, supporting X11 and that Wayland crap. Otherwise “gamers” will once again blame Linux… again. And there is nothing worse than whiny gamers blaming Linux.
Personally, if Wine/Proton is officially supported I am fine to pay. If they don’t support native Linux or official Wine/Proton support then I pass. I really don’t care what tools/libraries they use as long as the result is supported and the game runs well.
The problem there is Linux will get blamed when there is a problem. Best just not to have games at all, then.
If there’s a game that can’t run on Linux in the current year then that’s intentional and it’s not worth anyone’s money.
Yeah, there’s this very obscure match-3 game I wanted to play because of nostalgia. The series peaked with 3 and 4 (and those are the ones we played on the family computer circa 2015) and worked perfectly on Windows. Now 3 works perfectly (in terms of compatibility) but 4 was better (in terms of gameplay). 4 is marked as borked, last I checked. For anyone wondering, it’s The Treasures of Montezuma series.
You almost have to go out of your way to make a game incompatible with linux. Considering wine/proton and their various forks cover the vast majority of things at this point.
Even with ACs, the two most used ones completely support Linux. One is completely out of the box, maybe even as far as linux support being opt out. The other requires you to contact its developers to enable compatibility their end iirc.
I don’t agree. There are cases with Windows only root kits for DRM, but there are also games that don’t work because of bugs. You see games coming out that barely work on Windows.
To be fair, game programming is very often hot garbage. Most things I run do not respond for a while at startup. How difficult can it be to decouple your threads?
Don’t cross the streams
I was just thinking about this the other day…like games are optized for windows usually, but windows is not optimized for games. A fresh Windows 10 runs at 2gb ram on idle. It all went down hill for gamers when Microsoft killed xp
RAM is the cheapest upgrade possible, unless you’re trying to run a game on 8GB in 2023 idk why you’d be that concerned with RAM usage.
Trying on 6GB. As a Linux user I usually don’t need more RAM, so haven’t added any yet.
Me running on lxde using 512mb: 😎
…Boss man!
Then you’ll turn around and tell me to use Firefox even though Vivaldi runs on half the RAM.
Your guaranteed response?
“Well you have it, might as well use it!”
Cool, exactly how I feel about the OS. Who cares if it can’t run on less than a GB. I gave 32GB and can’t use all of it if I wanted to even with all my monitors full of applications. Don’t see a difference in the argument.
“Why would you want to run your entire DE in under 500mb ram?”
“Cuz it’s cool”
My arch install runs at 700mb without nothing opened. Yeah, I know I always have Thunderbird/firefox/telegram/mpv opened and my usage skyrockets to 10/11gb on medium, but knowing that my DE only occupies a very small portion of that is pleasant.
Sure, if minimizing the amount of hardware your OS runs on is fun for you go ahead. I’m not trying to tell you it’s wrong, I think it’s badass.
It just isn’t a factor in being “optimized for gaming” when the average system has 8-16GB to spare even under gaming load. That’s like saying your car isn’t “optimized for driving” based purely on MPG and eschewing all other metrics.
Perpetual software bloat should not be encouraged; idling at 2GB is fucking insane
Compared to what? And based on what advancement of technology and software? What should it take? Cause we can strip features all day long until we get there.
Cause we can strip features all day long until we get there.
Good? Okay? We need more minimalism
That’s an opinion, your OS can have whatever you want with however much bloat you want your hardware to have to handle.
your OS can have whatever you want with however much bloat you want
No, it can’t, because you can’t remove the bloat, dummy, that’s the entire point of the problem. People wouldn’t care if they could just remove the bullshit.
You want a Linux install to take up less RAM? Install a lightweight distro like Endeavor or regular Arch and go with an absolutely minimal build.
You want that with Windows? There are ISO’s that have Cortana and other preinstalled bloatware already removed, etc. Or you can do the same with PowerShell post-install.
The more I hear Linux purists talk the more it’s clear their knowledge of windows is either incredibly basic with no attempt to actually learn or fifteen years out of date. Usually both.
Compared to Linux which idle at half a gig with the most bloated DE. Hell, even Mac isn’t that bad.
Really? My arch install is idling at 2.8gb. Picom (310mb), XOrg (160mb) and pipewire (140mb) are big chunks, and kitty isn’t cheap either but the rest is mainly sub 50mb services that all add up. I’m not running anything heavy like Gnome or KDE either, just bspwm and 2 polybar instances (one for each monitor).
How heavy is your kitty? It usually averages at 40-45 Mb on a new window for me (with custom zsh with starship and some plugins, and customised neofetch)
Yeah that’s weird, after a
systemctl soft-reboot, both picom and xorg’s memory usage is way down. Either way, it’s still not that unreasonable to see Windows idling at 2GB.
Yeah that sounds fishy, a default KDE installation of Fedora would at least be under a gig for me
My fedora install idles at about 1.5GB.
Depends on settings and the amount of availlable RAM. Install fedora KDE spin on three systems, one with 4GB, one with 8 and one with say 16GBs of RAM. You should see, that the vanilla install of KDE uses different amounts of RAM on each system. KDE uses caching of all kinds of stuff to make the overall experience smoother. The amount and aggressivenes of the caching depends on distribution defaults. And KDE using, say, 8GB of RAM when idling isn’t bad. RAM is only useful, when it is used. When memory pressure increases (applications are actively using lots of RAM), KDE will automatically reduce cache sizes to free the RAM up again.
The entire notion of the system using as little RAM as possible is really weird and usually (imho) shows that people who say that don’t understand how the RAM is used. I want my system to make good use of my RAM, and as much of that as is reasonable.
Damn, you said it better than I could have. Unused RAM is like unused screen space.
Bragging you have three monitors but have mastered Alt-Tab and don’t use them.
RAM is the cheapest upgrade possible
Unless you use laptop with soldered-in RAM and insane pricing options.
I’ve never seen a laptop with soldered RAM, they’ve all been pop and swap in my experience.
GPU/CPU, yeah. Always soldered.
I’ll tell you more, there are even hybrids out there nowadays like this ASUS Pro Duo 15 SE with two sticks, one of which is soldered in. The Zenbook variant has both soldered in. And that’s why I’m burning 300w of electricity typing this message on Zephyrus…
Meh swap is pretty crazy, I am squeezing modded Minecraft in 4gb ram on win10, it takes about 10 minutes to load, but by the time the first few chunks are rendered I think most pages are swapped to disk, letting java take almost the full 4 gigs. Don’t ask why I’m doing this, exactly 😅
Ok, hear me out. Linux is not an easy platform to develop for because it’s in constant flux where systems and libraries come, change and go constantly. Linux itself is a somewhat slippery concept (if we expand from the kernel) where “works on linux” can really mean it’s been tested on one particular distro. Debian stable and rolling releases are not the same. Unless I am completely mistaken, I can see why major developers are hesitant to support linux, whatever it even is. Is Android linux?
Now, I’m all for this message. Given how OSs have been developing, I advocate for linux adoption and wish people would “vote with their wallet”. Otherwise things just will not change. Well, not for better, if recent history is anything to go by. I just feel that this problem has more prongs than we like to admit, being linux enthusiasts.
Please correct me if I’m wrong.
Valve should release their distro tbh
Not really the case anymore because of proton, game devs develop for Windows and proton and then it’ll run on anything that can run proton, Linux, android, Mac or otherwise in the future
From what I hear thanks to proton it’s incredibly easy to develop for Linux, as long as you don’t use one of the anticheats that doesn’t support it or intentionally prevent it from running in proton you’re fine
Well, yeah, but I think the issue is that the best way to develop for linux is to make a Windows binary. I don’t like that. Developers actively sabotaging Wine/Proton compatibility is kind of malicious though.
As a big Linux fan, it makes me said that Wine needs to exist. But, maybe it’s not such a bad thing. Linux is just a kernel, with no associated libraries for app developers. App devs don’t want to manually write system calls, so it’s always been the case thar they lick and choose which set of libraries to target for their Linux apps. A popular low level choice is the GNU standard C library, and a popular high level choice is the GTK/GDK/Gnome stack. But these aren’t the only choices. I mean you can use the MUSL standard C library if you want. You can choose between OpenGL, Vulkan, and WGPU for graphics already.
I see Wine and Proton as just being another set of standard apis to target. Maybe they don’t have the best design, but is traditional Unix really the best design either? Now the Valve and company are supporting Wine, it’s one of the Linux targets with the most actual developers. And of course it has a huge advantage over the glibc + Vulkan stuff: it retains binary compatibility forever.
Yes, Wine and Proton are great and they do actually solve a lot of issues with linux gaming. I don’t exactly begrudge anyone for choosing to go that route because linux is complicated. But I do wish we’d talk more about native linux gaming and didn’t always default to Proton. Valve has done wonders for gaming on linux, but I am not fan of Steam and their DRM policies.
I really appreciate programs like Bottles these days. Back in 2006 or so I beat Deus Ex on Wine and setting it up was a hassle. Today I’m amazed it was even possible back then.
I totally agree. The real problem for Linux gaming tho is that games are almost always distributed as compuled binaries, but Linux is built around open source. It you had a model where you paid for the source code of a game, and then it got compiled for your machine right when you downloaded, Linux gaming would probably work great. You’d have better fps too. (I actually really like this idea, somebody like GOG should make a client that does this).
I don’t think the best way to develop for Linux is by making a windows binary, I think the best way for game developers to make a Linux version of a game they otherwise wouldn’t is by making a windows binary compatible with proton
Problem is very few developers actively choose to make a Linux game and windows games if done right run at native speeds on Linux anyway.
I’m gonna be unpopular for saying this but it’s the same thing as using HTML for desktop/mobile apps, sure it’s not optimal performance wise but it’s a hell of a lot better than often nothing at all because companies can’t or won’t justify development time to support smaller groups of people on smaller platforms
If such a time comes that desktop Linux has a large enough market share for large companies to take seriously then I’m sure they’ll start developing native versions of maybe even make Linux-first games but sadly we’re nowhere near that point yet so best we can hope for is good cross compatibility tools
I think the issue is that the best way to develop for linux is to make a Windows binary
If it works, it works. Stop those bureaucratic inquisitions like “Stack Overflow says it’s not best practice” “Code review is not optional” “It’s gonna crash production” yada yada
Linux game devs should be targeting the Steam Linux Runtime which provides a stable environment.
You could bundle your specific versions of libraries. And link it statically. Like most games do anyways.
Pretty sure that’s not just a Linux thing either.
I’d think so, too. But afaik windows people don’t do so much dynamic linking anyways. Most of the times it’s Linux executables that are few megabytes in size and most windows executables are at least tens of megabytes because people prefer statically link things in that world.
Nobody stops you doing the same thing with linux executables.
But why? What libraries are causing problems? Zlib? SDL? Actually SDL better kept dynamically linked because SDL sometimes adds support for new interfaces(wayland, egl).
No libraries are causing problems.
it’s in constant flux where systems and libraries come, change and go constantly.
Same applies to every non-deprecated OS.
ngl i consistently have a better experience running games through wine than using their native versions. linux ports are often completely dysfunctional and it sucks ass
A reminder that on last steam report, Linux overcome Mac as second in usage operating system. They don’t have to excuse of only support the top 2 OS.
Instead to refund is to negative review, games companies are much more affected by losing a positive rating that a refund.
I’m all for Linux but IMO it’s not quite ready for general public yet. Even distros like Mint are buggy and requires multiple restart every day. I would install it on my dad’s computer, but it’s not stable enough yet. But I think it’s a question of a few years, maybe months before it’s there.
EDIT: since people are asking, here are a few bugs that I encounterd over the last week or so. I’m a audio/multimedia worker so obviously I push my computers farther then average user. Still, I’m happy to know many people have manage to get it stable
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2 days ago, Ssomething went wrong with cinnamon. At first all the dektop would not appears when waking up from sleep. Had to restart every time or disable sleep. At some point, even restart would bring me a window saying Cinnamon session could not be loaded. I had to reinstall it from Grub. I dont see average users being able to do that. *It’s actually not fixed, sleep will mess up Cinnamon.
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yesterday, I tried to get my DAW (Reaper) to work with one of my audio interfaces. Drivers would not work correctly, sound was glitching. I messed up with pulse audio for 2 hours but never got it to work.
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this morning, te infamous NVIDIA driver wouldn’t let me turn off the mirror mode (I have a projector connected to the computer), I had to reboot.
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This morning also, I discoverd that Timeshift now only launch from the terminal.
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Over the past week, I had to completly reinstall mint, because I installed and uninstalled some audio extension and it messed up the OS. Since then many apps that use to ne there dont show up in the software manager, updating the repo doesn’t work, so I had to manually install using terminal.
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I’ve been fighting to get Da vinci resolve to work, tho it’s supposed to work natively. Took me around 4-5 hours overall.
I ACTUALLY LOVE LINUX. Indual boot it on my main PC an even installed it on my old 2015 MacBook. I think windows is garbage and full of bloatware, I hate apple but consider macOS a pretty good OS, but I think both are more stable for your average user.
I sincerely wish I could install Mint on my dad’s computer but I’m pretty sure he would me need my help at least twice a week . I dont see him or your average user playing with the terminal to install a basic app. I know it’s getting closer, but IMO it’s not there yet.
what on earth are you doing that requires multiple restarts a day??
Look at my edit ! Many people asking the same question.
I recommend Fedora instead of Mint. It’s a much more daily ready distro oriented for Workstations.
I always had problems with Mint especially with the older kernels it uses.
Fedora uses gnome which is very stable.
In regards to audio. It uses pipewire and works well in my experience. Less latency and relatively plug and play. I use Bitwig however.
DaVinci is known to be difficult, however there are some automations for setting it up in Fedora.
Following this advice that came quite often, I’ve decided to give Fedora a try on my home system. I’ve read that Nobora is optimised for production and gaming so I’ve installed it this morning ,triple booting Mint, Win10 and Nobora. It’s really well done and comes with Gnome and preinstalled video and steam tools. But I’m still facing one significant issue: the multimedia codes wont install properly. I’ve just spent 2 hours on this with no luck so far. That means many games that worked out of the box on mint are not curently working…on a gaming oriented distro… plus video editing doesn’t work in Reaper due to Ffmpeg not working… So yeah, it look quite nice but a lot of troubleshooting required. I’ll see how it goes once problems are fixes.
Indeed I manage to manually install most of the codecs from rpmfusion and got Da vinci studio to work ! No video yet in Reaper but I have a few idea to get it working. After a few tweaks, all 5 games I’ve tried are now working flawless. So far I got one audio interface to work but not another, gonna neee to look into this also. Fedora definitely feels more stable, snappy and workstation oriented than Mint, so I’m probably gonna stick with it in the end. Thanks for recommanding it! Now if I could only get unreal to work with an Oculus Quest 2, I would deleted my windows install and never look back. To might come soon enough. Linux is still a bit challenging, but man, it does rock.
You need multiple restarts a day?
What are you doing?
See my edit!
I think you might have something wrong with your install. I do some heavy simulations (mostly Thermo and structural stress tests) with old hardware and haven’t had to restart ever.
I’m baffled as to how you can have so many problems.
I have to restart popos too, on my laptop, sometimes it doesnt start after opening it, idk doesnt really matter
Even distros like Mint are buggy and requires multiple restart every day.
There is something wrong with your installation. Other people just restart to update the kernel often once a week/month. So you might as well tell us what’s making you restart Mint so often.
I update my system once every half of year. Not Mint tho.
See my edit !
It seems to me that installing external audio drivers and changing Pulseaudio configurations is messing with the OS. Mint uses fairly old, stable packages. Newer distros have Pipewire for audio now. It’s a Pulseaudio replacement and might be useful in your case. Have you tried a newer distro? You can try Ubuntu 22.04 or Fedora from a USB stick to see if your audio equipment works out of the box. Then you won’t have to fiddle so much with the OS. Fedora Silverblue in particular is immutable and you can reset the OS to any current or previous state with one command, even without Timeshift. Another thing for testing software like DaVinci Resolve is Distrobox containers. You can change whatever you want inside a container and try different distros but you won’t break the underlying OS. Hacker’s dream.
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I respectfully disagree. In my experience, Linux isn’t any buggier than Windows, and hasn’t been for a decent number of years.
The main thing hurting Linux adoption in my opinion is that the best-known beginner distros (Ubuntu and Mint) just aren’t very good compared to most others.OpenSUSE is the best beginner distro in my opinion, with Fedora as a close second, and LMDE would be the best if it was feature complete.
I’ve only used Fedora and Mint so far. I might give a try to Opensuse soon. See my edit for more info on bugs encountered.
OpenSUSE Thumbleweed or whatever they call their rolling-release
Tumbleweed
What do those distros have that Mint doesn’t have? I’m not being rude, it’s just that I recently switched from Windows to Linux Mint on my laptop, and I can’t imagine what features I’m missing. It’s easy to use and does everything I need it to do so far. I haven’t experienced any weird bugs yet, and compared to Windows 10 it’s a much less frustrating experience overall.
Mint in my experience is one of the buggiest distros (after Manjaro and on par with Ubuntu).
I guess this is mostly caused by being a distro based on another distro based on another distro.
Mint doesn’t have the manpower to reliably fix bugs in their own distro, so the bugfixes need to be passed from upstream to Debian to Ubuntu to Mint.Considering I’ve had far fewer problems and frustrations with Mint so far than I had with Windows, this bodes well. I’ll save your comment and plan on giving OpenSUSE a try!
Latest kernel (hence driver), mostly. For most people Linux Mint is great distro that mostly works out of the box. However, for gaming, Linux Mint is one of the weakest since they tend to ship old kernel.
We have to understand that gaming in Linux is in very active development right now. Having out of date kernel can make you unable to use some device, or having less performace than those with latest kernel.
Hovewe, if you are happy with Linux Mint and see no problem, it’s okay to stay. It has great community and the developers are awesome.
Ah, that makes sense. Honestly, I haven’t gotten around to trying any games yet (which is what this thread is about, so I’ll just excuse myself :P)
I suck at tech and have never had to do this. What the hell are you doing to Mint?
See my edit!
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Who is “they”? Not all game companies can afford to support multiple platforms. You’re not entitled for developers to support your preferred platform nor does it make sense yo give a negative review unless they lied in the product description.
It does make sense if they sell in a store for with support to multiple platforms and they only support the paid one.
0 money, few lines of config and win/mac/lin/bsd/haiku support
Well, first of all I know multi-platform game exists and in some case it will just work out of the box. If it doesn’t though, not all companies have the money to hire QA for other platforms or devs to look into issues when stuff goes wrong on Linux. Most game companies fail and run out of cash, only the top survives. They don’t have that sort of money laying around to mess around a platform with 2% of users. My previous company certainly loss money on Linux and it was a cause of tension internally.
Secondly, a Minecraft prototype written in c++ and using native OpenGL calls is a terrible example. Even though I understand the dev volunteer his time so money isn’t an issue, it would cost a fortune and take years for your average studio to make a game from scratch like this without a game engine.
This game was made by student at age of AFAIK 17-19 and took less than year to make working 1.12.2 client with rendering and movement.
take years for your average studio to make a game from scratch like this without a game engine.
I wonder how many people are working at average studio and what their qualification.
A bare bone program with rendering and movement is not a game, it’s a prototype, and this demonstrate nothing about modern game development. Of course a prototype with nothing but rendering and basic inputs coded in c++ is gonna be multi-platform by default. Hell, it is just code on a repo, you don’t even need to build it and test it and deploy it for all platforms as it is up to the user. I don’t think you understand the scope of making a fully-completed game. I had dozens of unfinished prototypes on my computer, some of which I made decades ago, some are multi-platform because of the language and tech. Still, this means nothing. It still cost money to support multiple platforms. Only exception nowadays is if your game happen to be compatible with Proton. But yeah, supporting Mac and a bunch of other platforms? It is not free my dude.
A friend recently asked me to play a game with him that had an anticheat that Intentinay made it impossible to play the game on linux
I had both linux and windows on my computer, but windows was broken
I tried to make a virtual machine and install windows on it, but i couldnt install it
He blamed all the problems on linux
Unfortunately for him, the game devs are the problem
VB is easy to detect
One of the refunds reasons you can select is “the game doesn’t run on my PC”. This is completely valid.
For me Linux gaming is Steam/Proton. If is works with Steam/Proton, I am playing them. I find that native Linux games are not updated regularly or at all. And Steam wants games to run with the Steam deck. And they are willing work to make that happen.
And game companies know there are a lot of Steam decks out there. And it is not hard to put some effort to see that it runs on that equipment.
All this is a big help for the Linux community. Many gamers don’t know that they don’t need to buy windows to game. Linux/Steam/Proton is a great option. That is why I make a point to tell people that I am playing Baldur’s Gate 3 on my Linux Ubuntu gaming PC. This is how I found out that Linux can play games and switch from Windows. Another Linux gamer told me it was possible.
@Hairyblue @Uluganda yeah I care less about a Linux native game than a game that has DRM and anti cheat that works with proton. I’ve found that all the games I play on Linux that run on proton run so well on X11 (haven’t gone to Wayland yet).
Considering wine and thus proton don’t support Wayland the games will just run through XWayland so should perform the same as on X11. Personally haven’t encountered any issues outside of things that are caused by X11 limitations
If there is one, I tend to use the native Linux version when I can, just to do my miniscule part to encourage devs to support native Linux, though on one or two games I have noticed bugs in the native Linux version that were fixed in the Windows/Proton version. That said, I am still quite thankful and impressed with how well Proton works for anything I use it with.
As someone new to Linux the fact that I could just check a box on steam and suddenly I could install and run the witcher 3 blew my mind. I had no idea. Last I checked on Linux gaming the solution was install windows 😂
Yeah I announce it in my steam gamer tag.
Agreed. It’s just so sad to me that GOG to this day does not seem to understand their target audience. Seems to me that people who value DRM-free Games overlap vastly with the group of Linux users and still GOG Galaxy is not available on Linux. I would absolutely love GOG Galaxy natively on Linux with Proton integration. Sure we can run it with Lutris etc. but this has been asked from GOG for years. I tried buying everything on GOG instead of Steam until that point where that whole Proton and Steam Deck integration happened. Now I buy everything on steam, just for convenience. I would love to buy everything from GOG but there are just to many hoops to jump through.
Yes I think you’re right, there’s probably a significant overlap in the target audience of GOG and Linux users. I guess the reason why GOG hasn’t released a Linux version of GOG Galaxy might be because a large portion of their catalogue is Windows and doesn’t want to include something like Proton or Wine support. I don’t think it absolves them from criticism however.
If it’s anti cheat stopping it I blame the game. If it’s a bug or poor performance I just say oh well it will work one day.
Paladins is a pain for this. Game runs fine on proton, and all it needs is some work with EAC to enable linux on multiplayer but despite all the requests they’ve yet to bother.
Same thing with Post Scriptum, even though the devs other game, Squad, works perfectly fine with proton…
I’m pretty sure it’s rather simple for the developer to enable EAC for Linux. (https://www.protondb.com/news/steam-deck-eac-update)
I’ve noticed a lot more games that I can play now with EAC. I don’t know why some devs are dragging their feet on this.
Halo MCC devs complained the port to EAC is harder than Valve claimed but even they went to the effort to enable it.
I have no idea what could hold up other devs to do the same.
Ny friend, if you play Paladins, you have much bigger problems than EAC
It was a pretty fun game to play on the Switch ngl. Might just give in and play overwatch tho
Well, you can’t blame developers to not cater to their 1% player base. Especially since that group usually have the most problems and requires more development time.
I don’t remember exactly who, but there was one game developer who was all praises for that 1%. The Linux users were the most prolific testers who sent back detailed bug reports with ways to recreate the bug, logs and often core dumps even. That 1% helped the devs, as well as the other 99%.
Market share and earnings are not everything. We understand why game developers could not want to port their stuff, but the point is not to blame operating system that has nothing to do with it and focus trying to convience developers to support user-friendly systems at least out of principle even if it is not the most revenue generating decition.
