this post was submitted on 11 Sep 2023
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Unfortunately gaming is about the least Linux friendly hobby there is. For most tasks you can find software that will make it relatively painless to wean people off Windows but many games, especially new ones, dont work out of the box on Linux. Most of the time, theyre going to have to fiddle with things to get games to work, if they can work and youre going to have to justify to them why they should do that.
This literally happened to me:
Install Kubuntu 22.04 and Steam on my kid's PC.
Download Brickrigs, his favorite game.
Crashes on title screen
Spend the next week sporadically troubleshooting when I get a free few minutes here and there.
After week 2, I finally decide for shits and giggles to download and install the "official" AMD driver from AMD's website instead of using the built in kernel one like every goddamn reply on every forum post has been telling me to use, because the PC's GPU is about ten years old at this point and the driver that came with the distro doesn't work with it.
Lo and behold, Brickrigs works.
THIS is how Linux "works", a LOT of the time.
The new
amdgpukernel driver only launched in 2015 and it was buggy and unstable for a while. GPUs from around that era default to using the olderradeonkernel driver which lacks Vulkan support.Polaris (Radeon RX 400 series from 2016) and newer just work, older cards can take some prodding.
I've seen this exact situation so many times.
I've been in this situation myself so many times. I like fiddling with my system but even I ended up dual-booting Windows just for gaming.
Let's get this image then fixed.
Linux gaming works (most of the time without any issues)
What you should know before you switch to Linux:
Not every Hardware is supported as well as on Windows. Old Hardware may work better or worse than on Windows. New hardware may not work at all. Don't buy sth. that isn't at least half a year on the market.
Check protondb if your games do run on linux. For some people even silver there isn't an enjoyable status. Gold should be working as on windows with minor issues and platin is works just fine.
Be ready to learn a new operating System! Linux isn't Windows and the terminal is key to fix issues.
Or Nvidia either according to all the people telling me my problems aren't valid.
So if you want a good time with Linux you need and AMD GPU or integrated graphics, and it can't be too new, and it can't be too old.
I think linux's image is pretty accurate
Also "Be ready to learn a new operating System! Linux isn't Windows and the terminal is key to fix issues." I agree. I think that's not a good idea for a lot of people though. So I think posts like OP's are kinda stupid. People shouldn't try to push Linux on people who shouldn't use it.
I mean most people don't have issues with their gpu. But if you do then get ready for day long trouble shooting.
But if you can't fix problems that my arise don't use Linux.
On the other hand if you only use Internet and occasionally a text Editor like libre writer you won't notice the difference between Linux or Windows
But I thought tenant #1 of the cult of Linux was that Linux is always superior to Windows and everyone should be pushed to use it, no matter what?
Correct, but only as long as you are willing to fix things for them
I'm a long-term Linux user living mostly on the terminal, knowing quite a lot about the operating system. And sometimes I enjoy tinkering to get a game running even more than playing it. But in the end for some games it just doesn't work. Of course it depends on the game and hardware and what not, but in the end if I can't play all my games on Linux I have to bite the bullet and check for alternatives. And for me this statement is hard as hell.
yeah the radeon module is hilariously broken.
couldn't even get Firefox to work until I forced amdgpu.
uhh brickrigs works perfectly for me?
on the built-in amdgpu kernel module (since my laptop is like 8 years old i had to force amdgpu instead of radeon drivers)
radeon is hilariously broken, even firefox breaks (won't start sometimes) while it's in use
Reading this made me flinch and this hasn't even happened to me
To be fair, a friend of mine had blue screen playing LOL on windows for a month until he found the solution: rename a random .dll of the NVIDIA driver and than reinstall the driver.
Weird stuff happens with PC, with Win, Linux, Mac or anything but people always point to Linux. Yeah on Linux we see more of these things but PC gaming in general is not so user friendly like people think it is.
3: try every proton version
4: try proton GE
5: (proccessing Vulcan shaders)
6: change launch arguments
7: use protontricks to install some weird dependancy
8: sacrifice your pets firstborn at an alter to achieve a running state
Not that hard lol, get good bitches. Also fuck you for wanting to play rainbow 6 siege. All my homies hate rainbow 6 siege.
What if game is not on steam and it's online game that I'll get banned if I use 3rd party client?
That's becoming less and less common these days, thankfully. Especially since the Steam Deck, gaming on Linux is just becoming better and better.
Sure, but still multiplayer games that are not on steam and have some sort of anticheat or other stuff like that are unlikely to show up on deck. Unless company steps in and release version for steam deck/Linux (which they don't cause it's probably a lot of work for minimal returns), you have to play it on windows. At least I can dual boot on my deck to play those games.
Still common enough for plenty of people to be put off by it
Getting banned is still common?
Oh yeah, I might've misread. I thought the comment I replied to was just about anticheat support in general
Get booted out of said game because the anti cheat freaked out thanks to Linux.
So far I've only had an issue with one game (easy to fix, I just restarted steam). I'm relatively new to Linux. (Switched because I didn't feel like paying for windows when I built my PC). To be transparent, I did use Linux a bit 5 years ago in school. But I don't think that counts.
I used to also think gaming and Linux are not really that compatible, but Proton being built into steam makes it easy to run pretty much any game out of the box now.
It's really a bit like what we used to do when we poked at autoexec.bat and whatnot when running DOS games back when dinosaurs roamed the land.
It's not really complicated, you just have to prod here and there until it works (unless it just doesn't because some kind of anti-consumer software lock just won't play nice with Wine, although that's becoming less common nowadays).
OTOH, things that aren't Linux friendly... corporate accounting, an awful lot of dedicated software for niche industries... There's no lack of things that are still complicated in Linux.
The problem though is that we are in 2023, a good 32 years after Linux came out. It shouldnt feel like you are in the DOS era. One of the problems that dawns on me is the real issue is a lack of consistency. Sometimes things work great, sometimes they dont. A lot of people arent having the same issues I and many others do which is frustrating because of how the community reacts when someone brings up those inconsistencies. There are a lot of people that dont run into them for one reason or another and all they see is people bitching about from their POV, seemingly nonexistent problems.
You also have to remember that you're running software designed for an entirely different operating system. It's not at all like moving from xp to Windows 10. We're not comparing apples to oranges, but apples to hedgehogs.
That it works most of the time is a fucking miracle in itself.
Yes it is a miracle that it ever works. HOWEVER it doesnt really matter to most people why it doesn't work sometimes. It isn't fair but the reality is that as far as most people are concerned, their PC is basically a microwave in that they have little interest in how the internals work as long as they work and if they can't do x or y, they dont really care that it isn't Linux's fault. All they see is that they installed this new OS that looks really cool but cant run certain games or run certain software. Now if Linux were popular, it wouldnt be an issue because almost everything would have been written for one distro or another (like android is dominant on phones) but it isn't. Steam is doing a lot to change things and hopefully Linux is better supported by other companies as well in the future but right now there are still enough gaps that I would be very hesitant about recommending Linux to a heavy gamer unless I knew that they basically waded in the steam ecosystem and the vast majority of their games could be run via proton.
You're saying that as if Windows "just worked".
The time I spend fixing the Windows machines of the people around me seems to indicate that it's not the case.
Back when I used windows regularly instead of sparingly, I cant remember a time when I ever had to go into the registry files or command prompt to fix anything. You might have to install newer drivers or something but effectively do surgery on the dll files etc? Nope. And you have to remember that the average windows user is... not very skilled with computers. Theyre going to need hand holding a lot more than the average Linux user. Which is why windows is more or less designed for the lowest common denominator. And itd be weird if all the effort spent writing stuff primarily for windows didn't result in an easier experience.
It used to be that the community acknowledged the harm Windows' dominance caused Linux. Microsoft didnt change. They still leverage their monopoly to harm Linux.
I use both Linux and Windows (Linux professionally, windows personally)
Got a buddy of mine that will wax on for hours about how windows is pointless and should have been replaced by Linux years ago. I'll then go "Cool, so uh, did that game download yet? Lets play!" Then start up the game. Four hours later and he's still trying to get the sound to work or make the graphics display while continuing his rant on how user friendly Linux is.
Like, Linux is great and all, but fuck me, it's not user friendly.
Just how a significant portion of the community wants it. Nice and obtuse.
right and wrong, games play nowadays, but good luck getting the same accessibility and flexibility as windows, you wanna download a cool new mod? No problem! Oops but the mod loader is only windows based and gives wine a seizure, you can probably do it, but not without an hour or more of work, not exactly casual user friendly quite yet. And god forbid the game uses a special pheriphal
It is literally happening with Kubuntu 22.04.
No, they are right.
It took an enormous amount of fiddling for me to get games working on Debian 12
I've been using Steam in FlatPak on NixOS for a couple years now.
The only games I've found that didn't work were due to anti-cheat rootkit stuff, which would probably be a bigger deal if I cared about online gaming. And I've had to change the Proton version a couple times, because the beta (default) seems to break a game occasionally. Overall: it's astoundingly good compared to where it was 5+ years ago.
I agree with you, but it’s just not ready for the average person.
Case in point: regardless of which version of Steam I install it goes into a crash-restart cycle if I open it from gnome. The only way to run it is to type “steam” in the console.
The issue persists regardless of whether I use the .deb or flatpak.