Linux Gaming

Valve released a new update to the Steam Client Beta for Steam Deck and Desktop, with some Steam Input changes and some improvements for Linux too. It's the same across Desktop / Deck since it's a Steam Client update.

For those who want a summary; it's been going okay, but could've gone better. I decided to space out my tinkering and keep going with life, since these days my life is not so bound to my desktop. (It's also possible some details weren't recorded quite right. Many search tabs were closed)

I've been aware of the impending death of W10 in October 2025, with fears that hackers will start taking over the OS at that time. My main reason for avoiding Linux was game support, but Valve has been handling that well.

I decided to set up a Linux Mint 21 drive, which at first was difficult because my first USB stick had corrupted sectors (took some time to determine that was the issue). Then, when I booted in...it didn't support my wi-fi (it claimed it did, then couldn't connect, even when pairing with my phone). My first plan was to set up a nice, isolated 500GB partition on my nvme SSD (a drive I'd mostly used to store games) for Linux, and have it refer to the NTFS partition for games. (I would later learn this doesn't work well, and Linux is optimized for ext4).

Then, I learned this NVME had an "MBR" partition table, and I still had to convert it to GPT. While there's several tools for this, they complained due to the placement of my partitions, not leaving enough space for the table. I tried moving the entire gaming partition 1MB to the right...and got the same error.

After deleting the (backed up) partition to finish GPT conversion, I learned two things. One, that it was actually complaining because when giving the converter the target Device, I had given it the "Device:" labeled in the Disk management, which was "/dev/nvmen0p1". Guess what the P stands for at the end? So, gentle tip: The "Device" is not the "device", it's the partition - and diskpart does not present the resulting error well. Second thing I learned was that Windows had somehow put some of its boot setup on the NVME back when I had installed it on my computer; so now Windows wouldn't boot. (I'll see if I can fix this later. Windows' fault, not Linux's)

The good news is, I had downloaded a copy of Mint 22 (1 up), and THIS got full wi-fi and audio support. A little strange I had to go so recent for basic old-hardware support, but it could've been something else odd going on. I installed Steam, got a cryptic error about 32-bit NVidia drivers I ignored, and with my library moved back (and fixing ownership through chown, something Steam thankfully provided a relatively clear error message on) it's been able to run a few test games!

Having my browser and some basics up, I can kick back on YouTube and tackle whichever pressing things I think of first. I don't have replacements for 2 or 3 Windows products I like, but overall the setup has gone well, and a few of my annoyances actually go to my USB drive store, and Windows. Overall, much better than a decade past when I last tried Linux.

To keep Windows as an option, I'm planning to run a Windows installer repair boot to my original drive; but am admittedly worried whatever caused it to install boot info to the NVME against my instructions last time will, once again, screw up Linux. I may also try seeing if GRUB can locate Windows and boot it successfully. I feel somewhat blind on the topic of setting up / fixing the OS bootup.

I can tell this process is much simpler if someone has only one drive, backs things up to an external device, and then installs cleanly. Only on that vein, I wouldn't mind recommending it to others. Still, that's only in part because Microsoft has steadily made things worse and worse on the Windows front. (And, of course, I'll still be using it for work)

EDIT on day 3:

It's still been rocky. I became a bit pinpoint-focused on Hitman 3/"WoA" as my testbed to verify gaming was working; as it was more demanding and had proton dependencies ready. I selected a mission, got into the loading screen, and...got a black screen on the level, before a crash to desktop. Interestingly, the system was pretty unresponsive during the crash. Checked ProtonDB, nothing familiar about the issues. Failing so early felt like a dead end for Linux Mint as a gaming system, especially as it was one of my favorite games.

I had mentioned in prior comments I had skipped Bazzite worrying it would be the equivalent of RGB lighting and mostly unnecessary for gaming. But, if it's their claim to fame, I may as well try it. I had partitioned the OS away from the /home folder where I had copied my backup Steam games, so I went ahead with the reinstall. The Fedora-based partition selector was not so clear about its errors/required fields, or good at suggesting defaults for /home, /boot, and /boot/efit mounting; I ended up looking up recommendations (200MB boot? etc) on another laptop. To be fair, it's probably a less common use case, but still worth highlighting this part could've been clearer.

Bazzite worked! It was quick to put up a working Steam install, and Hitman levels loaded great. It took some time getting used to the new OS layout, but I'm not strongly opposed to it - it's a bit tablet-like, which makes sense since the OS targets ROGAlly users as well. That, in itself, is something I can live with. Of note, I wasn't terribly offended by Windows 8's largely hated tile layout and lived with it for years. I did not even need to compile the Xbox One dongle controller driver from source, as I had from Mint - worked out of the box!

Some things that stood out to me as annoying: The distro obviously makes efforts to cut down on options/buttons to simplify the experience and avoid overwhelming people. The biggest place I saw this is the file explorer, which insists on keeping you out of "/" and hopes 90% of your interactions will be with Documents / Pictures / Music. Given how many drives I had to interact with, this felt pretty crippling. Even after auto-mounting old drives I'd like to fetch things from, it still didn't show them in Open File dialogs within apps.

Bazzite tries to rise above the package managers of other distros by running any other necessary OS in containers. I'm no container pro, I've used docker for my job at times, but I tried going ahead with documentation. Treating it as an Ubuntu or a Fedora install, I had an extremely hard time getting VeraCrypt (a familiar app from Windows) working; using official .deb downloads on the website, or the package managers that had it listed. When I did finally get it installed off COPR, the "distrobox-export" command documented to add the app to my "Applications" did no such thing, nor did it explain what kind of filesystem entry it was trying to create.

As of yet, I still don't actually know where Bazzite's list of Applications is physically located, even after running some "find -iname" / locate commands. This might be nice to get to because the right-click menu on each one is sparse (again, simplified for users), and doesn't let me customize a few .desktop files not launching how I want them to. (A long time ago, something that really bothered me was Windows calling Steam's taskbar entry "Steam Runtime Helper" with no known way for me to fix it. But for Linux to also seemingly lock me out of solutions feels frustrating)

Some other things became worse. I set certain preferred keyboard shortcuts for window management, and Bazzite overwrote them to defaults - MULTIPLE times. That really set me off. When in the Activity View, many of the GUI apps did not have close buttons. I'm practiced with using tapping WIN+1 multiple times to go to the "third open Firefox window" - this is something apparently not supported on Linux, and I can't understand why. The OS takes a long time to recover from sleep mode, and needs ~10 seconds to re-discover my mouse. A few times, I came back to find the visuals garbled from some sort of display driver failure.

And, while Bazzite was very very good with games, as we all know falling just short of what we're used to niggles at our senses. Helldivers 2 worked - but a white-bar border at the edge only went away after tweaking launch options from ProtonDB. I launched Dead by Daylight, and while everything was visually fine, there was notable input lag, most visible on the game's reflex-based "Skill checks". I play a lot of games, and had gotten VERY used to "Install > Play > Done", so thinking about being so unsure on every game purchase worried me.

I have a number of small indie games that don't receive Steam's attention - often coming in from the web browser as .zip files with an EXE somewhere at their root. It's common for me to only spend less than 30 minutes downloading, trying it out, and maybe commenting on the creator's page. This is not a good workflow for Linux, given that launchers like Lutris make you fill out a long form with the position and title of the app before you can launch it - and give no immediate feedback or log output towards its launch failures.

I did research some of the many things annoying me, but of course Bazzite is still a niche offering and I was unsure at times whether to expand my searches to, eg "fedora disable screen anchors" or "gnome disable screen anchors". Often, I guessed I was the first person getting an issue.

When browsing the web, handling basic communications, even some games, I'm kind of comfortable with Bazzite. It's very very possible that a number of these issues would go away with some time and practice. But, I'm at an age where time is at a premium and it's VERY valuable to get a number of things "just working" without much concern. For those reasons, I'm definitely strongly considering going back to Windows.

I really hesitate to blame the strong array of choice for linux distros here - it's highly possible some comment will shout "Try XXXdistro!" and that would be the one where I'd magically run into zero problems, and all UI annoyances are things I could configure. But, getting that right so quickly seems unlikely. I may have shot myself in the foot with Bazzite, but I knew I wanted gaming as a focus, while as a consequence I got a lot of things locked down - to the point I couldn't even find configuration to tweak the things most breaking my workflow.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/20962151

Hello Linux folks, i would like to share one little hack which i have found.

On fedora, zram-generator comes installed and configured by default with lz4 algorithm i believe, and no disk swap, if you have 8gb of ram or more, that is fine, but if you have 4gb or less, systemd-oomd either kills you games when they use too much memory, or you face an OOMD and get your system frozen.

When configuring fedora, normally i would create an in-disk swap, so that my computer wouldn't freeze but face a MASSIVE slowdown when on way too high memory usage, i also set zram-generator to use the zstd algorithm so that zram compression rate is higher but slightly slower, like that i can use my low memory more efficiently with a lower risk of OOMD.

I was watching a bringus studios video once, where he tried to run counter-strike 2 on a ps4 using linux and proton; the game would always use too much memory and that would freeze the system before it got a change to actually launch, the strange ps4 linux was using in-disk swap, and so, increasing swapiness to 100 bringus tried to leverage that to make the game run. He was sucessful. In disk swap is very slow, so the performance was crap, but that does not matter...

So i saw that, and had the idea to combine it with zram-swap to avoid the in-disk swap penalty, also using zstd as the algorithm to make the most out of the memory, and it was a massive sucess! Some games which would make my system very unstable or straight up freeze on certain launch attempts started launching and working just fine! and without dumb in-disk swap slowdowns!

While running modded Victoria 2 i have noticed my system is using about 3.3 to 3.4GB of swap, and about 3.5 gb of ram, so about 100 to 200MB of real uncompressed memory usage, assuming zstd is running at level 1 of compression, and achieving at least 3.0 as compression rate, in thesis, my system has now the equivalent to 10GB of ram, well about it's weight! even more impressing considering how low are the numbers we are working here!

tldr: setting your swapiness=100 while using zstd as your zram-generator compression algorithm, and no in-disk swap will help your system use the most out of your ram with negligible performance penalty

Proton:

• import upstream makefile changes
• import upstream proton changes
• import upstream steam_helper changes
• import upstream vkd3d-shader changes
• update wine to latest bleeding edge
• updated dxvk to latest git
• update vkd3d-proton to latest git
• update dxvk-nvapi to e4bad70

Protonfixes:

• fixed issue with game_titles not being pulled correctly for UMU
• game_titles are now looked up as part of included umu-database csv instead of trying to send online website api call
• games run with UMU will now have /mnt,/run/media,/media/, and the user's home folder added as drives u:,v:,w:,x: respectively inside the prefix if they are not empty. This is to allow users to install or import games outside of the prefix more conveniently. A typical scenario for this would be if you have your games pre-installed on a different mounted drive, or somewhere else in your home folder outside of the prefix and you want to add them without reinstalling the game, OR if you want to install the game to one of those mounts instead of the C:\ drive inside the wine prefix. With steam, users don't really have to worry about this because steam handles the drive mounts and the install locations, however we found that outside of steam users were trying to use the Z: drive (which is symlinked to root (/)) -- which is of course containerized and read only, and therefore also unable to provide a proper drive size, resulting in users being told they don't have enough space. With the new drives added into the prefix it should fix this, allowing users to access their mount locations or existing game folders for installation or importing via the new drives instead of Z:.
• Mod support for various bethesda games has been added (Thanks Root-Core). If a mod executable is found for bethesda games it will launch the mod executable instead of the original: mapping = { '22380': ('FalloutNV.exe', 'nvse_loader.exe'), # Fallout New Vegas '22370': ('FalloutLauncher.exe', 'fose_loader.exe'), # Fallout 3 '377160': ('Fallout4Launcher.exe', 'f4se_loader.exe'), # Fallout 4 '22330': ('OblivionLauncher.exe', 'obse_loader.exe'), # Oblivion '72850': ('SkyrimLauncher.exe', 'skse_loader.exe'), # Skyrim '489830': ('SkyrimSELauncher.exe', 'skse64_loader.exe'), # Skyrim SE '1716740': ('Starfield.exe', 'sfse_loader.exe') # Starfield }.get(game_id, ('', ''))
• protonfix added for metal gear solid 2 (thanks FranjeGueje)
• protonfix for Kindom Hearts HD Remix added for steam version (already existed for egs version) (thanks Internetbestfriend)
• protonfix added for Gothic Playable Teaser (thanks Root-Core)
• Star Citizen protonfix updated (no longer requires EAC workaround)

Okay so I don't have Linux, i honestly don't know much about it. But I have dreamed for a while now of a future in which I could use 2 MMO gaming mice to bring my computer usage to the next level. Now I don't think that most computers would know how to handle 2 mice, and I don't think a single game would either, but if there is any that could, it has to be a Linux right? Is that even theoretically possible? Do you think we could ever have that future?

The KDE Goals initiative is working to improve support for input devices such as game controllers, fancy mice, handhelds — anything for your gaming needs.

This Sunday, Oct 20th at 18:00 (UTC), the KDE Goals champions will be answering your questions live. Post your questions here and I'll make sure they'll answer them.

We'll be streaming here: https://tube.kockatoo.org/w/2tAyknEQc8EhL2AyoAUE8M

You can get in touch with the community at the Matrix room.

In this video of work-in-progress circuit you can see some of the new developments the developers are working on, like the particles (smoke, sparks, dust...), and also the AI tuning... This track is under development. You can donwload it from the leillo's personal repository: https://codeberg.org/leillo1975/ardennen-spa

The version of the game used for this video corresponds to an internal development version. If you want to enjoy it you will have to build the source code from: https://sourceforge.net/p/speed-dreams/code/HEAD/tree/

You can find this game and more info about this Open Source project on: https://www.speed-dreams.net

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/20820565

Is there a service or knowledge base somewhere that can help you find the highest rated games for your hardware?

Background: I don’t have much time for games and just installed Bazzite on a few years old ThinkPad. I would like to play some games on it but don’t know what I can expect to be playable. I see tons of “will it run on steam deck” info but honestly couldn’t even figure out where this computers performance lies compared to a steam deck. This should be easy. Just type in specs, maybe filter genre and say “sort by meta score” or “sort by steam rating”.

Hello friends! I am back with another issue.

Recently I have taken on the task to get non steam games working on Proton. I have noticed that the performance is significantly worse with them on Linux then on Windows. More frequent stutterings and such. 100 fps consistently on Windows vs linux which it dips below 50 fps. Other "better performing" non-steam games get consistent micro stutters. I am using native steam because the flathub version because after installing dependencies with protontricks the game still would not launch.

The only possible thing I can think of is the games are on NTFS partition (yet steam regular games installed on it run just dandy). I dualboot with windows and access this particular drive between both os'. I am at a complete loss, any help would be appreciated oh Linux brotheren and sisteren.

Thank you!

(also the games drop audio consistently as well sometimes it wont come back unless I alt tab and come back to the game.)

EDIT: Hello everyone! thank you again for the help I think I have come to the conclusion that some of you suggested already. Wayland seems to be having the game perform significantly better than x11 but it still isnt quite up to par as windows. When I had tried it before I thought to myself "yeah this is better but it isn't up to par with my windows partition" so I kept searching for an answer. the conclusion I have come to is, I think this just comes down to the particular game being unoptimized. Thank you all for your suggestions! You all are truly moving mountains when helping people swap to this wonderful operating system. Hopefully one day I can get rid of my windows partition fully. (too bad I am a VR dweeb that needs windows for some applications to function 😭).

First of all, yes it's a hentai game. You can believe it's for my girlfriend or not.

I asked her if she'd like a Steam Deck and she said it fits how she'd probably play games, but she wants to play a bunch of games she got off MangaGamer and she wants to make sure they'd work on the Deck.

I have a thinkpad running Fedora so we installed one through WINE to try it out. Everything is working but all the text are these squares for missing characters.

Is there any easy way to install fonts and characters for WINE, or will we need to look at something like the ROG Ally instead?

Developers of the upcoming Civilization VII game, Firaxis, are looking for some feedback regarding the game. This is our opportunity to show them there are many players on GNU/Linux and that integrating Denuvo anti-cheat rootkit would be a big no-no (it's mentioned in one of the questions).

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/26344679

"A few developers have been building Nazi Zombies: Portable, a Call of Duty: Zombies demake powered by various enhanced forks of the Quake engine."

So I while back I made a post about making a game on Linux using mostly open-source tools. Someone suggesting open sourcing it, so here we are!

It doesn't have some content (mostly images, audio, and fonts) due to licenses and file sizes, but it has scripts, models, and more. And licensed under MIT. Hopefully someone makes use of it, or at the very least finds it interesting.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/20491286

For those unaware, about umu-launcher

This is a unified launcher for Windows games on Linux. It is essentially a copy of the Steam Runtime Tools and Steam Linux Runtime that Valve uses for Proton, with some modifications made so that it can be used outside of Steam.

I don’t spend much time on my desktop computer but if I do I tend to game a bit. OW II, CS, Helldivers, Tabletop Simulator mostly. And of course need Discord.

I am considering a minor upgrade to the hardware and would need a fresh install (currently Win 10). I’ve been out of the distro game for a while and currently only have one old thinkpad running Debian and an X1 Carbon gen7 I want to use for experimentating/ distro hopping.

I want a daily driver OS that can play games. I also edit photos and might to the odd “flash a CFW to an old phone” or similar light tasks. Where do I start?

I hear PopOS because “it just works” but also CachyOS because “performance, muh”.

I have experience with Ubuntu (first was 6.06) and Fedora mostly but have played around with a lot that came with at least a barebones UI (crunchbang anyone?). My life has changed so I have less time to nerd out with this than I used to. But I feel the itch to experiment now and maybe use Linux on my main desktop again after some years with that mentioned upgrade soon.