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Comment by kentonv | Hacker News Reader

These games are all rated gold or platinum on protondb, indicating that they work perfectly for most people.

Hard to say what might be going wrong for you without more details. I would guess there's something wrong with your video driver. Maybe you have an nvidia card and the OS has installed the nouveau drivers by default? Installing the nvidia first-party drivers (downloaded from the nvidia web site) will fix a lot of things. This is indeed a sore spot for Linux gaming, though to be fair graphics driver problems are not exactly unheard of on Windows either.

Personally I have a bunch of machines dedicated to gaming in my house (https://lanparty.house) which have proven to be much more stable running Linux than they were with Windows. I think this is because the particular NIC in these machines just has terrible Windows drivers, but decent Linux drivers (and I am netbooting, so network driver stability is pretty critical to the whole system).

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> Personally I have a bunch of machines dedicated to gaming in my house (https://lanparty.house)

Woah, that is extremely cool. Very nice work, sir.

AoE2:DE is rated gold even though multiplayer is broken for everyone, and it lags. By now someone has posted a very complex workaround to the MP issue, but it was gold even before that.

BeamNG (before a very recent native Linux beta) was gold despite a serious fps drop and also a memleak to crash any time there's traffic.

So I don't trust the ratings.

> Installing the nvidia first-party drivers (downloaded from the nvidia web site) will fix a lot of things

Interesting. I saw somewhere else you're using Debian. Is it as opposed from Nouveau or the proprietary drivers from the Debian repos?

I'm currently testing to daily drive my desktop with linux on an NVIDIA GPU, and the Arch wiki explicitly recommends drivers from their repos. However, arch is rolling and the repo drivers are supposedly much more up to date than Debian's ones. Though, I'll keep your comment if I run into anything.

I am not familiar with Arch, so my advice might be wrong for Arch.

But I have a lot of experience on Debian and Ubuntu trying to use the packages that handle the nvidia driver installation for you. It works OK. But one day on a lark I tried downloading the blob directly from nvidia and installing that way, and I was surprised to find it was quite smooth and thorough, so I've been doing it that way ever since.

> Installing the nvidia first-party drivers (downloaded from the nvidia web site) will fix a lot of things.

Crazy—it used to be that nvidia drivers were by far the least stable parts of an install, and nouveau was a giant leap forward. Good to know their software reputation has improved somewhat

NVIDIA on Linux is a pain, either path.

Whereas, AMD just works and is thus standard recommendation.

Everyone says this but it is not my experience at all. Every time I try AMD cards I run into weird problems. The Nvidia drivers are a pain to install and tend to break randomly on kernel updates, but once built properly they always just work for me...

Did you use the proprietary AMD drivers? You need to use the open source drivers. As far as I know these should be the default on all distros, so just click through the OS installer, install Steam, and start gaming. Don't touch the drivers.

In my most recent attempt to use AMD, my problems were:

1. I needed to install a bleeding-edge kernel version in order to get support for the very new AMD card I had purchased, which was a bit of a pain on Debian. (With NVidia, the latest drivers will support the latest hardware on older kernels just fine.)

2. AMD can't support HDMI 2.1 in their open source drivers. Not their fault -- it's a shitty decision by the HDMI forum to ban open source implementations. But I was trying to drive an 8k monitor and for other reasons I had to use HDMI, so this was a deal-breaker for me. (This is actually now solvable using a DP->HDMI dongle, but I didn't discover that solution at the time.)

But every time I've tried to use AMD the problems have been different. This is just the most recent example.

Obviously I'm using the open source drivers, since the entire point of everyone's argument for AMD on Linux is the open source part.

The root problem may just be that I'm deeply familiar with the nvidia linux experience after 25 years of using it whereas the AMD experience is unfamiliar whenever I try it, so I'm more likely to get stuck on basic issues.

Oh yeah, those are just problems you learn to live with. I guess these are as obvious to me as the Nvidia problems are to you.

This has been my experience too, when I upgraded my GPU, I wanted to switch to Linux full time, so I went with AMD because everywhere people kept saying NVIDIA GPUs had a lot of issues, but it turned out to be the opposite. With my old card, I just have to install the proprietary NVIDIA driver, zero issues.

I think people are still clinging onto old "wisdom" that hasn't be true for decades, like "updating breaks Arch", go figure.

> but once built properly they always just work for me

If you figure out how to reliably do this, you're a rich man

I used an Nvidia card for about a year, and I did get it working for the most part, but there was definitely some glitchiness I don't encounter with AMD.

For example, I use the Gamescope/Tenfoot interface on my system, and the actual menu for that is extremely glitchy on Nvidia drivers. On AMD it's absolutely perfect (I suspect because Valve develops this interface around an AMD card).

Nouveau has never been good for gaming. Not their fault (they had to reverse engineer everything), but it was only really ever viable for mostly 2D desktops in my experience.

Sure, but nvidia has always been seen as a liability for basic operation of the computer. Their driver quality is notoriously as bad as it gets. Nouveau fixed this.

I keep hearing people assert this but I've been using nvidia drivers on Linux for 25 years and aside from the pain of getting them installed, they have always just worked with no issues at all.

Whereas every time I install Debian fresh and temporarily get the Nouveau drivers temporarily, basic desktop graphics are slow (no hardware acceleration) and crash-prone.

FYI the ProtonDB medal system is not a good measurement of a game’s performance. The founder has admitted in the past that he would have used a different rating system if he had to do it again. That’s why he created the newer “Click to Play” rating system. Only 13% of the top 1,000 games are rated Tier 1, and even that doesn’t guarantee Windows-like performance, as there are tens of thousands of issue reports across those games.

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