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
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
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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Usually people have only same size RAM, but other configurations can work too. (I have 20GB of RAM running fine, for example.)
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Unlikely. It won’t run optimally but it shouldn’t be the cause of crashes or bugs. If you’re not sure you can run a ram test (https://memtest.org/)
It’s unlikely to cause anything to outright fail, but it will certainly be creating bottlenecks and inefficiencies
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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
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.
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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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.
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: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3Aopen+“anno+1404”
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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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.
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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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. More recent pc games often support the steam deck which is usually a good sign for compatibility.
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.
Worked ootb and smoothly for the 50ish hours I’ve put into in while on Linux. OP is defo cursed somehow
I usually recommend zorin as a windows replacement as it emulates windows as much as can be and comes with a lot out of box, however, if the goal is gaming I think I would try steamos. I mean its what is on the steam deck and has a company actively working to make it work.
I had a dual boot for six weeks this summer with Linux Mint. Approximately 2/3 of my games worked fine on Linux.
I had to troubleshoot it almost every time I booted up, though, 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. I’ve also read that there are distros other than Mint that play nice with NVidia chips, so I’ll probably go with one of those when I switch back to Linux.
Still, you can blunt most of the negative aspects of Windows by running O&O ShutUp.
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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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Shutup still works but I wouldn’t trust it to prevent all telemetry. I wouldn’t trust Microsoft not to have other telemetry that’s not part of their services that can be turned off.
Just my 2 cents: I dual boot Windows and Linux. I only start up Windows when I want to play a game, use Linux Mint for everything else. Some games run perfectly fine under Linux (I play a lot of Factorio for example. No Mans Sky I’ve had no issues etc.) but some are just a pain. For those I switch to Windows and then immediately switch back when I’m done playing.
It’s not ideal but this way Windows has next to no information about me at least. And as times goes on I’m seeing more and more games running just fine under Linux. Maybe one day I’ll be able to drop Windows completely.
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It’s simpler than you think. Watch a few YT tutorials on it and see if it’s a good fit.
This is the way to go if you’re a gamer. It just didn’t work in my specific case.
Using workarounds to attempt to get foreign software running on an operating system for which is was never built is always going to be fraught with problems.
If the game isn’t distributed compiled for your platform, then you are a second class citizen and no amount of API wrappers, translation layers, VMs or whatever will ever address the core issue.
Running a game in Proton (Wine) is not playing on Linux. It is your linux environment contorting itself and doing miraculous back flips in the hope of convincingly coaxing the Windows binary game into thinking that it is running on an actual Windows host.
Soft solution: Purchase games that are properly developed and released targeting your platform natively.
Hard solution: Graduate from playing games and move on with your life. (btw mine improved a lot after putting gaming behind me for good. + I can now use whatever computer hardware and software I damn well please)
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“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.
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.
Arch linux user here. Gaming totally works. Sometimes even better than Windows when playing native games. Even Proton works good most of the time. Sometimes I play Brawlhalla with Proton Experimental and it runs better and less laggy in Linux than Windows despite Windows having a native build. Check ProtonDB to find out how well games work on Linux. Linux gamers review games there.
Thanks to Valve, the Steam Deck is getting Linux popular and basically makes devs build their games for Linux as well.
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
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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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).
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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You can actually get the terminal output from your game by setting the launch options to
%command% 2>&1 > /tmp/log.txtWhich will write the terminal output of the game to the file /tmp/log.txt
