Hacker News Reader

Comment by morshu9001 | Hacker News Reader

I don't play video games much, so maybe it's law of small numbers, but recently putting Linux on my spare PC, I didn't get how people say it's fine for games now. Proton didn't work right for my one Steam game BeamNG, and Gamecube controllers had unfixable input lag for Dolphin (Slippi). Nvidia GPU + Intel integrated spelled trouble for Xorg to the point where I had to change to Ubuntu just to have Wayland, and that worked.

On top of the game stuff, this PC is under my TV, so I kinda wanted a way to remote in. VNC is surprisingly jank, and Chrome Remote Desktop somehow never worked. So combined with 0/2 of my games working, I just gave up and went back to Win10.

View on HN

Interesting; I haven't played BeamNG but it looks like it should work according to the ProtonDB https://www.protondb.com/app/284160. Sample size of one, but I haven't really had any issues with Proton on Linux, particularly within the "SteamOS" tenfoot interface. I don't play online games, and admittedly most of my games are several years old, so I can't tell you how well modern games play (though a friend of mine didn't appear to have too much trouble getting Pacific Drive working on full blast).

Not trying to diminish your struggle, and if it didn't work for you then obviously you shouldn't use it.

I don't own a Gamecube controller anymore, but I haven't noticed much lag with a wireless Switch Pro controller with Dolphin. I played through Tony Hawk's Underground and Tony Hawk's American wasteland on my laptop a few months ago using Dolphin, and as far as I could tell my terrible scores had nothing to do with lag, and I was able to finish them.

Definitely have had issues with Nvidia drivers though. It cost me an entire weekend getting one working a few months ago and I didn't enjoy that process.

Yeah this is why I don't trust the ProtonDB ratings. It says gold, but everyone else has the same problem as me where it's slower and crashes if you spawn traffic. Also had to wait like 30 minutes to generate vulkan shaders. AoE2:DE's ProtonDB page says gold but there are a bunch of comments saying multiplayer doesn't work at all... I feel like that's not gold either.

The GC thing is specifically the Wii U adaptor. There's an overclock kmod, but it's known (on gh issues) to be finicky and didn't work for me. Regular controllers have no lag but also don't work quite the same; on Win and Mac the standard is that Wii U adaptor.

Totally fair, sorry you've had such issues. I've been fortunate enough for Steam's compatibility to have never been an issue, but as I said I don't play a lot of newer games.

> Also had to wait like 30 minutes to generate vulkan shaders.

Yeah I'll grant that, that seems to happen for pretty much every game. It doesn't usually take thirty minutes but it can easily ten minutes which is quite annoying.

> The GC thing is specifically the Wii U adaptor.

Fair enough. I guess I've been happy enough with using other controllers.

Appreciate it. Makes total sense your older games work, cause those even worked somewhat well in plain old Wine on my Mac. My M1 Mac could run GTA IV, a 32-bit Intel Windows game, but ironically can't run a lot of Mac-native software built for older OSes or 32-bit.

> but recently putting Linux on my spare PC, I didn't get how people say it's fine for games now.

It is because there are way more games that work than games that do not work at all. Also in general the "golden path" is really an all AMD PC (since that is where most of the testing and open development goes).

That said sometimes you may need to tinker/tweak things but this applies to Windows too, hence the existence of pcgamingwiki (which recently has added Linux info, though that is still dwarfed by the Windows info). I've been gaming on Linux for a few years now and was gaming on Windows before that and i do not find Linux any worse at all when it comes to getting stuff working (this was certainly not the case before ~2021 or so though).

This stuff and other games I played in the past worked without any tweaks in Windows, though. Unless you're modding ofc.

BeamNG runs just fine for me, it sounds like you're trying to play on a potato laptop... it needs a 16gb video card bare minimum.

The game runs fine in Windows on the same machine. The ProtonDB page has a lot of comments about AI traffic crashing the game, reportedly cause of a memory spike, but it seemed more like a leak since it took a couple of minutes.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com