this post was submitted on 02 Dec 2023
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Linux Gaming

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Discussions and news about gaming on the GNU/Linux family of operating systems (including the Steam Deck). Potentially a $HOME away from home for disgruntled /r/linux_gaming denizens of the redditarian demesne.

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[–] [email protected] 25 points 11 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 16 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (3 children)

I'm jumping on the mint ship during the holidays. See you never windows!

[–] [email protected] 6 points 11 months ago

Every penguin is an ally!

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

Enjoy I use mint 21.1 Victoria 21.1 xfce on my gaming laptop myself

Little tip make a second drive with a backup so that if it ever gets a bit to complicated you'll have something to come back to also you could duel boot as well if you need windows for work or smth although tbh I hardly have any issues with mint it normally works outside the box . Mints an all-round decent distro in my expirence

I also recommend you install neofetch onto your system when you do install Linux you can customise neofetch to look however you want you can also rice neofetch as well

sudo apt install neofetch

https://github.com/dylanaraps/neofetch

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

Thanks for the tips! I've actually been using mint on my work pc for two years now and I love it, no problems whatsoever.

Now it's time to jump ship on my gaming pc as well. So excited about it!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago
[–] [email protected] 21 points 11 months ago

I'm doing my part!

[–] [email protected] 20 points 11 months ago

My positive experience with my Steam Deck got me to take the plunge and now I'm happily gaming on Mint.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 11 months ago (2 children)

2024 is gonna be the year of the Linux desktop, I can feel it!

[–] [email protected] 9 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

psst

Every year is the year of the Linux desktop. Linux rocks.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Wayland on its way to wreck everything because of compatibility and funni Nvidia drivers

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago

I've been running Wayland for a while on my amd rig and haven't had any problems with xwayland in regards to compatibility. Nvidia on the other hand is problematic but the drivers seem to be improving with every release.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 11 months ago

I'm doing my part. Had a 2nd desktop worth of parts and put latest Ubuntu on it, trying out games that I have already installed on Windows. Once my game pass sub expires next year I'll probably fully switch over.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

Just made the switch to Linux Mint today. It has been fairly easy and painless thus far.

I'm doing my part!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago (3 children)

I'm genuinely concerned about https://github.com/Whisky-App/Whisky (wine for mac). If they make games run well on mac, there'll be less of a chance for mac users to want to switch to linux in order to game.

And when windows users get burned by windows 12, they'll most likely switch to a Mac if gaming works on it.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

I don't think Mac uses will switch to Linux for playing games, they'd either use Windows or play whatever is available on macOS.

But yeah, if gaming on macOS ever gets close to gaming in Windows, I can see some Windows users moving to macOS. But honestly, I also see that as a good thing for Linux gaming since the lower Windows market share is, the more game devs need to cater to the smaller platforms. Also, Apple hardware is expensive enough and hardware limited enough that I don't see macOS ever really catering to high end gaming, so people who don't want Windows but do want a higher end gaming experience would flock to Linux. That said, I don't know how their SOCs compare to discrete GPUs, so I'm not sure where exactly that l line.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Steam Deck is the ideal companion device to a Mac.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Agreed. It's also ideal as a companion to pretty much anything, it's a fantastic device.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I meant Mac users specifically. Regular Windows users would probably be less annoyed by Windows on a ROG Ally but SteamOS is the closest thing to an Apple experience for PC games.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Perhaps. I haven't used the ROG Ally or any of the Windows-based PC handhelds, so I can only speak for how much I enjoy my Steam Deck.

That said, the "Apple experience" would be a Switch. It just works, looks sleek, and it costs way more than it should given the hardware specs. Yeah, it's not a PC handheld, but that's where I'd expect most Apple users to go for games.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

Obviously I've meant for PC games. True video game consoles are on yet another level.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 11 months ago

Given just how good apple's SOCs have gotten, more power to them if that's what they want. If they're willing to switch to apple they were never seriously interested in linux.in the first place

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

The GPU portion of the M chips is still crap by comparison to what AMD offers. The CPU part they genuinely deserve credit for but that's it.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Who knows, maybe they'll all of a sudden decide to invest in that if Maccies find out they can play games, but are unsatisfied with the performance. Anything can happen.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

From what I've heard the GPU in the newest, most expensive iPhones is okay and a good step up but the chip in Macs is basically the same as in iPhones, just more cores, more memory, and not power constrained because of cooling. I think it's pretty clear that Apple develops these for iPhone first and Macs are just an afterthought.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

If that's the case, then there is no danger - for now. But if Apple's CEO wakes up on the wrong side of the bed and says "I want to tear up the gaming industry", he totally could.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (5 children)

Looking to reinstall Linux on my dual-boot. For legacy robotics reasons, I still have ubuntu 18.04 on it.

Which distro would be the best for gaming + CUDA software dev?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I’m using Fedora and it’s been great, a bit iffy with nVIDIA out of the box though.

OpenSUSE Tumbleweed has the most up to date nVIDIA stack. Mainly because the packages are controlled by nVIDIA directly.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I'll check out Tumbleweed. Any downsides to it compared to Ubuntu forks?

It has been a while, but nVidia drivers have always been a pain to install, especially when you also need an older version of CUDA. If tumbleweed has a better compatibility/easier installation process, it is a big win.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago

Tumbleweed is rolling release (kinda like arch), although they have a pretty rigorous testing process. So that could be a pro or a con depending on who you’re asking.

If what you’re specifically after is older CUDA toolkit compatibility, then I’d recommend using distrobox instead. That’s what I do for ML workloads. (If you plan on redistributing binaries then you’ll have to strip them with binutils though)

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago

I recommend Ubuntu 22 don't recommend pop despite all the articles you will find saying it is great for gaming

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

Honestly: Any Ubuntu Fork (such as Mint, Kubuntu, etc) is fine, Arch as well(but harder). Vanilla Ubuntu is ok.

This is not the definitive answer, and you should reevaluate after a time, what you like and don't like, but for a starter, give those a spin.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

That take depends on what you need from Ubuntu 18.04. I'm not to familiar with how robotics stuff works, but perhaps a docker image would work? That way you can keep whatever libraries you need, and run it on whatever base OS you need. That said, I don't know how much of CUDA or whatever is in the driver vs the userland library, so I'm not sure if it would work.

As for distro, it doesn't matter as long as it's relatively decent. I recommend Linux Mint Debian edition, but I personally use OpenSUSE Tumbleweed.

I saw a question below about Tumbleweed, and you may want to look into OBS, which is OpenSUSE's way of building whatever libraries you need in a repo. So you'd basically find or build a recipe for your version of CUDA and install that alongside whatever else is in the system (assuming the Docker option doesn't work). If you're using a relatively popular stack, chances are someone has already gotten it working.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

Check out Garuda