Is linux actually gaming ready or is it just not for me?

Submitted ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨Mandy@sh.itjust.works⁩ to ⁨nostupidquestions@lemmy.world⁩

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

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

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Comments

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dinckelman@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
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

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- Mandy@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  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
  
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  - lurch@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Usually people have only same size RAM, but otger configurations can work too. (I have 20GB of RAM running fine, fir example.)
    
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  - anindefinitearticle@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    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 nvidia
    
    should give you a list of options, which you can install with apt-get install.
    
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Rooki@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
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.

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- Mandy@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  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?
  
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  - Rooki@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    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.
    
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CMDR_Horn@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
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?

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- Mandy@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  quite often actually, unfortunately:
  
  i cant recall any tweaks people mention there ever working on any of the games i tried
  
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- prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  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).
  
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azvasKvklenko@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
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.

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bionicjoey@lemmy.ca ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
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

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BananaTrifleViolin@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
The common denominator in your issues would be your PC. If games are working according to protonDB and you’re unable to get them to work on multiple distros that suggests its your PC.

There are two candidates in your specs - your RAM and your Graphics card.

As others have said, asymmetric RAM is unusual and it certainly was warned against in the past as it caused system issues. While OS may be much better at managing RAM bow, that doesn’t mean all scenarios can tolerate it. Given what Proton is doing is complex (running Wine, which is essentially a windows layer) I would not be surprised if the memory configuration is just a step too far - you have windows software using a windows compatibility layer for memory asking a linux is for memory access.

An obvious way to test this is to remove the 16gb stick from your machine and see what happens.

The other side is your graphics card - are you using the latest nvidia drivers?

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- Mandy@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  for linux mint, i do the suggested driver (probably not the latest)
  
  for others like endeavouros it was always the latest nvidia driver
  
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FergleFFergleson@infosec.pub ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
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: github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/issues?q=is%3Aiss…

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.

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- Mandy@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  thank you for your own detailed response
  
  when i say didnt work, it usually means two things, it either:
  
  didnt launch at all, no window, no nothing no error message
  
  window does open and it shows a error message/only shows an error message
  
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  - kurcatovium@lemm.ee ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    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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DiabolicalBird@lemmy.ca ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
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.

nobaraproject.org

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- Mandy@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  i tried nobara, i dont remember why but for one reason or another the install was kinda borked
  
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  - DiabolicalBird@lemmy.ca ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    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.
    
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- InternetUser2012@lemmy.today ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  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.
  
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tempest@lemmy.ca ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
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.

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- HeckGazer@programming.dev ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Worked ootb and smoothly for the 50ish hours I’ve put into in while on Linux. OP is defo cursed somehow
  
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- Mandy@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  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
  
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  - tempest@lemmy.ca ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    
    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.
    
    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.
    
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Feyd@programming.dev ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
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…)
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- Mandy@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  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
  
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deuleb_biezelbob@programming.dev ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
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

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- Mandy@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  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
  
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Metz@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
“Synchronous 26” and “Synchronous 320” sounds super weird. Are you combining RAM with different clock frequencies / timings? that can and often will cause problems like instabilities and crashes. i would take out the one you added and try the games again.

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linearchaos@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Is it ready for primetime supporting everybody’s random hardware and everyone’s software without crashes, stutters and slow downs or be free of the requirement for weird configuration tweaks?

Probably not.

Can it work perfectly well with a lot of hardware and a lot of situations for a lot of games Yes.

Is it ready for primetime on a steam deck? Yes.

Last OS change I threw bookworm on a random laptop asked it to install steam, enabled proton for my games and everything just worked. But that doesn’t mean it will work for everyone and for every game.

Mixing ram is one of those no-nos that a lot of us do anyway. Ideally everything just slows down to the slowest piece of RAM and everything runs fine. And you wouldn’t think that the board would care if you have 16s in one side and eights and the other. But if you’re having problems with your stability that’s absolutely the first place to look. Even if all the RAM is perfectly matched, from a stability standpoint it’s better to run two sticks than four. I’d pull it back to 16 and see if it stops crashing. If it stops doing that so all your RAM and get two 16gb sticks.

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Ibaudia@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
That setup is cursed and I wouldn’t recommend it for Linux gaming personally

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Randomgal@lemmy.ca ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
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.

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RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
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.

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zeephirus@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
old.lemmy.world/c/linux_gaming@lemmy.ml might be a good place to visit

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- Mandy@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  i actually posted in there once, with anno 1404 even sh.itjust.works/post/9489662
  
  im aware i wasnt the nicest person in it tho, i posted at the height of the annoyance meter at the time
  
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x00za@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Well, you aren’t really talking about gaming on Linux. You’re talking about running Windows games on Linux. Wine and Linux are absolutely amazing for gaming, but it’s mostly up to the developers at this point.

About waht you are saying about Anno; I have a feeling you’re not fully understanding Wine/Proton and how it works. By learning a bit about it you’ll probably start to understand what actually is not working. A good place to start is always the ProtonDB page.

Linux is beating Windows in some gaming benchmarks btw :)

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- Mandy@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  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?”
  
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  - index@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    
    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
    
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FlashMobOfOne@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I had a dual boot for six weeks this summer with Linux Mint.

I had to troubleshoot it almost every time I booted up, 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.

Still, you can blunt most of the negative aspects of Windows by running O&O ShutUp.

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- Mandy@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  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?
  
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  - FlashMobOfOne@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    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.
    
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lurch@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
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.

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JoMiran@lemmy.ml ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Most reports for it 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.

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- Mandy@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  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
  
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statler_waldorf@sopuli.xyz ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
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.

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- Mandy@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  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
  
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  - statler_waldorf@sopuli.xyz ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    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.
    
    extensions.gnome.org/extension/…/dash-to-panel/
    
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Artemis@lemmy.ml ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
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!

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- Mandy@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  i can see why, i always make sure its activated before i force a specific proton version to try, just to be sure
  
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  - Artemis@lemmy.ml ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Ahh gotcha. The Anno series is great (same with Linux!) so keep at it - best of luck!
    
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nijave@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
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

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- Mandy@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  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
  
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Sivecano@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
You can actually get the terminal output from your game by setting the launch options to %command% 2>&1 > /tmp/log.txt Which will write the terminal output of the game to the file /tmp/log.txt

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Sivecano@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Tbh I can recommend nobara linux. For gaming especially it’s often nice to have access to recent drivers / proton versions. But maybe that’s not even relevant in your case.

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Hawk@lemmynsfw.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
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.

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Protoknuckles@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I’ve been doing a majority of my gaming on a steam deck lately, running Linux. Check my deck says that anno 1404 is not supported on the deck though. In general, I’d say that Linux gaming has gotten a LOT better, but it is not yet perfect.

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