Hacker News Reader

Comment by foxhill | Hacker News Reader

i’ve been using linux as my daily driver for just over a year. steam on linux has been great, and proton (wine) has been indispensable. big title games i’ve played with _no_ issues at all:

* Cyberpunk 2077 (ok that has issues, but it has the same issues for windows users..)

* Dying Light

* Titanfall

* The Division

along with _many_ other indie/small games.

honestly the only thing left is titles that include invasive anti-cheat. when that day comes, i don’t know if most of my friends will have any reason to remain on windows.

and who could blame them? finally, they won’t need to deal with a company that collects data from them without their knowledge, runs ads in their taskbar, demands they have a useless microsoft account, restarts their machine on a whim for updates, etc.

i hate that i’m going to say this out loud, but could 2022 really be the year of linux on the des- why does it feel so wrong to say that? :)

View on HN

Same here. Switched 2 months ago after using WSL all the time & being annoyed over many things, including "failing updates" on windows. Did a dualboot but haven't used windows since. Game to add to your list: - CS:GO

well, strictly speaking CSGO isn’t using proton, it’s a native port, which is why i didn’t count it.

but i play that, too. probably too much..

FWIW I get about 10 more FPS in Ubuntu vs Win10 for CS:GO.

I’ve played Cyberpunk, Skyrim, Fallout 4, Halo Master the chief Collection (games 1, 2, 3 and Fall of Reach) plus EUIV and Stellaris just in the last year. I haven’t used windows since the vista era

One issue i have with Proton is that it seems to run these popular games fine, but when faced with something more obscure there are issues left and right.

For example recently i installed Arch on my GPD Win 1 (which is essentially a much weaker Steam Deck that comes with Windows 10) and tried:

* RoboBlitz - it needed Ageia's PhysX installer which always failed to install at startup

* Clive Barker's Jericho - Didn't start at all

* Cherry Tree High Comedy Club - Worked fine (but it is a very simple 2D game so i kinda expected it)

* Mars: War Logs - It started but 3-4 in the game (actually during a cutscene but was rendered using the game engine) always crashed at random points

* Blood Knights - Worked fine

* Marlow Briggs - Didn't start at all

* Chaser - Didn't start at all

All of the above work under Windows 10 fine which makes me suspect that Valve is just going to make game-specific patches for the next Proton in Steam Deck. After all being able to play "the entirety of your library" sounds implausible when you can't do that even under Windows :-P (many games - especially older games - need custom fixes, etc).

The Outer Worlds is one of the big AAA titles I ended up playing on Linux. I've historically played a lot of them on Windows out of pessimism but The Other Worlds was dying in the opening cutscene on Windows for no explicable reason so I gave it a go on Linux and so far it's worked perfectly.

99% of games I play work with Proton, or Lutris, which is great most of the time. However, it's the small amount of time when something stops working or needs small config tweaks that really annoy me, as they cut into my gaming time.

Also, setting up games can be a little bit of a faff. For example, wanting to play FFXIV, well, nothing worked at all. I had to go into the config file and skip the cutscene, and also change the launcher to the old launcher. Now, that doesn't seem like much, and it isn't, but the first time I had to do that took me hours to figure out.

Setting up FFXIV parser is also annoying on Linux

ACT works by poking around in the memory of the ffxiv process, I imagine it's tricky for the same reason anti cheat is.

Ay, fellow Titanfall player o/

Noticed any difference between Windows and Linux for that particular game?

It's on the list of my most played games so making sure it runs properly is really important for me to make the switch ^^

well, Titanfall is essentially a source engine game (although the engine is heavily modified), so i'm a bit annoyed there isn't native linux support - but afaik all source engine games do well through proton (this includes apex legends, but EAC is its only undoing).

i've never played it on windows, so i can't give you a 100% answer. i've never had any issue with it, and i don't think you'd be able to tell it wasn't a linux native game.

speee is life!

> The Division

Division 1 or 2?

Division 1 was built in a way that would be very hard to run on Linux, Division 2 however was ported to Stadia which is basically Ubuntu.

If it wasn't for Stadia that effort would never have been spent, I was a huge advocate for linux on those projects for years.

https://www.protondb.com/app/365590

> Division 2 however was ported to Stadia which is basically Ubuntu

the division 2 isn't on steam, because ubisoft. and hence - as far as i know - isn't generally available on linux. there's some irony there i think.

Division 1 works fine.

That’s really heartening to hear!

I had assumed, if nothing else, that easy-anti-cheat would have prevented it.

The only thing I'm missing: streaming with audio from discord. If someone at discord could fix this I would be so happy. I'd actually pay for nitro.

i've used discord without any noticeable issue (except that their "magic" noise cancellation algo is missing from the linux version) - what do you mean by streaming audio, out of interest?

During the pandemic I've been playing puzzle and story games with friends by streaming the game to them over discord. Discord cannot capture the audio of a game in Linux for some reason.

On windows it can capture the audio from that specific window.

You should be able to work around this yourself using a pulseaudio null sink and some loopbacks. You send the game audio to the sink, and loop the audio from the sink back to your main output device. I've done this in the past for OBS, but you should be able to add your microphone input as well using another set of sinks and loopbacks I think.

Sadly this causes discord to noise cancel the game audio and it sounds horrible

Yeah, also the audio codec for voice is really low bitrate so even if you turn off all the filtering in the UI it's still pretty bad, while the proper streaming setup has better audio

Steam also has a bunch of titles with native Linux support. I believe Dying Light is one of those titles.

What hardware have you had that experience on? Probably going to build a new Linux box this year, and I'd like to pick hardware that's as hassle free for wine/proton as possible.

So far I’ve had no problem with my Ryzen+Nvidia 1660x.

I’d maybe try to find an AMD GPU but I bought one of those first but need tensorflow and AMDs GPU support for ML was almost non-existent.

Personally I've had no end of problems using an nvidia GPU on Linux.

For example, some driver packages support Steam but not CUDA, while others support CUDA but not Steam [1, 2].

And I found some instructions online that let me "fix" it to work with both - but thereafter, any time I used CUDA I would lose audio when I next resumed from suspend.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/ocuqtm/can_i_...

[2] https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux/issues/5778

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28035581

what distro? pop_OS?

Why would it matter?

Because if you have laptops with Nvidia Optimus, distros like pop_os make your life much easier since nvidia doesn't give two shits about Optimus on linux, hence the famous "nvidia, f*ck you!" quote from Linus Torvalds.

Or if you have a brand new laptop with the latest Ryzen CPUs and the latest Radeon 6800M GPU with switchable graphics then you absolutely need a distro with the latest kernel to have a good experience on this new hardware.

Maybe I underestimate how difficult some distros make it to have some semblance of control, but my model of Linux is that distros are nothing more than bundles of packages as a starting point from which you can add or remove whatever you want.

So I asked why it matters if its 'pop_OS' or not since if that happens to bundle some driver, or Steam, or whatever, I assume I can continue not using 'pop_OS' and still install whatever it is if I want?

It just seems like an irrelevant detail, (and potentially not even a valid one? the more you do subsequently the less it 'is' that distro) outside of saying 'everything worked out of the box, didn't have to install a thing', which may or may not have been true, but wasn't what was claimed.

If you're using Ubuntu LTS, for example, you're going to have the kernel version it shipped with and the Nvidia driver version is shipped with. When Nvidia releases a new driver with fixes for specific games, as they do every couple of months, there's no guarantee that this driver version is going to be compatible with the relatively fixed version of the kernel that Ubuntu LTS is using so you'd have to wait for the next release to play those newer games.

Of course you could forgo the packaged kernel and build your own then grab the Nvidia driver from nvidia's website, but then what is Ubuntu buying you?

Ubuntu LTS with its 2 year minimums lifecycle is kind of a worst case here among desktop distros, but different distros among the 6 month crowd can run into this depending on how conservative they are about putting the newest core packages into each release.

There's also the question of the method of obtaining third party software. There's basically a divide here between the ports method (see the AUR for the most well known example) where users distribute a build script to other users that in most cases should be pretty simply cloning the upstream source and running their build script, or the third party package repository approach where you download a binary package and install that. The port has the advantage of being very easy to audit the packager's code (if not helping for the developer's) and generally not needing it to be rebuilt every time the dependencies do, but the third party package repositories have convenience and you could argue that relying on launchpad's moderation is not any more or less safe than relying on Nexus Mods moderation which Window gamers happily do.

Pop OS power management is great. If you’re on compatible hardware it’s fantastic.

i went for ubuntu, actually. i want to give arch and pop a try though.

FWIW, I'm running Steam on Arch and it's working great. I remember that there were occasional issues with library version mismatches when I first started out with it, but I have not had any problems in the last... 3 years at least.

However, it should be noted that I don't play much AAA stuff. Most of my playtime is actually on the Nintendo Switch. The playtime that is in Steam is mostly in Linux native games (Tabletop Simulator, Cities Skylines, Unrailed, etc.), but the few Proton games that I've tried have all worked great.

used ubuntu for a longer while & gave arch a shot, the initial setup might seem ugly, but its not that hard and the distro is just gold, just need some time to set everything up

> restarts their machine on a whim for updates

That's the thing, it's not their machine if they are running Windows on it. It's Microsofts. They can even wake up your machine to apply updates whenever they want.

For hardcore gamers, the added stability of Linux and choosing when to update, could be a big plus. Provided, hardware compatibility (there's always a caveat!).

I'd say Windows 10 VS NixOS unstable, Windows is more stable, has better functioning drivers. I still use NixOS to host a Windows VM because I like the userspace more, but the "WiNdOwS iS L3Ss StAbLe" meme doesn't hold very true for consumer hardware. Servers will be more stable on Linux because the manufacturers incentives aligns with yours, you buy our hardware to run Linux, we make sure it runs well on our hardware.

Mint works consistently for me now. Of course, there were fixes I had to implement myself. But I get to decide my own upgrade cycle, and can always timeshift everything back (like System Restore). The OS convergence of features are high, so differences are small today. Hopefully Pulseaudio and such stuff that often break can become better.

I would like to recommend pipewire over Pulse, it's compatible but actually really good, also ALSA compatible

Reply on news.ycombinator.com