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
Is it ready for primetime supporting everybody’s random hardware and everyone’s software without crashes, stutters and slow downs or be free of the requirement for weird configuration tweaks?
Probably not.
Can it work perfectly well with a lot of hardware and a lot of situations for a lot of games Yes.
Is it ready for primetime on a steam deck? Yes.
Last OS change I threw bookworm on a random laptop asked it to install steam, enabled proton for my games and everything just worked. But that doesn’t mean it will work for everyone and for every game.
Mixing ram is one of those no-nos that a lot of us do anyway. Ideally everything just slows down to the slowest piece of RAM and everything runs fine. And you wouldn’t think that the board would care if you have 16s in one side and eights and the other. But if you’re having problems with your stability that’s absolutely the first place to look. Even if all the RAM is perfectly matched, from a stability standpoint it’s better to run two sticks than four. I’d pull it back to 16 and see if it stops crashing. If it stops doing that so all your RAM and get two 16gb sticks.
Most reports for Anno 1440 History Edition on ProtonDB say that it works.
I use ProtonUp-QT to keep my Wine and Proton versions up to date. It has worked well for me, especially when I need to try different versions on a game.
EDIT: Space Marine 2 is too new. Give it a little time for the reports to come out and for GE to release a ProtonGE that supports it (if needed).
i think i used protonup twice perhaps? i dont think it really did anything for me
anno 1404 and space marine 2 are just two examples, the case of all games i tried not working, if i had to put it into % id give it a 6ß to 70% easily
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.
i actually did try using protondb in several gaming cases, i recall tweaks there working maybe once? if at all?
and i tried quite a few games, some where i went to protondb of course to check, but for me, it sadly never helped
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’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?
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).
quite often actually, unfortunately:
i cant recall any tweaks people mention there ever working on any of the games i tried
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
whats going on with my ram configuration?
i tried using protondb several times, but it rarely if ever has worked with me, the tweaks people suggest i mean.
all between 9 to 5 on many games, sometimes proton ge too but i never noticed a difference when trying to use that one
whats a driver revision?
DE: cinnamon 6.2.9
i have done so much troubleshooting over these years that reinstalling or installing another distro became easier and quicker to do
Usually people have only same size RAM, but other configurations can work too. (I have 20GB of RAM running fine, for example.)
do you think that may somehow be the cause of so many problems? or part of it?
It’s unlikely to cause anything to outright fail, but it will certainly be creating bottlenecks and inefficiencies
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/)
Each nvidia card works better or worse with different version releases of nvidia drivers. Older cards usually need smaller version numbers. Since you are running mint, all versions you need to test should be in the default repos. Try different drivers and see if you can find the right one for your card.
apt-cache search nvidiashould give you a list of options, which you can install with
apt-get install.ngl, id rather stick with what is recommended before i go through hundreds of slightly differently named drivers
There’s usually only like 5 tracks. “What’s recommended” is nouveau, which works but not for gaming. It’s recommended because it’s open source and can do most things that the proprietary nvidia drivers can do. Nvidia is really bad at maintaining their drivers, and different drivers work better for different cards.
Nvidia sucks. Switch to AMD and never have a problem again. Or spend an hour testing each of the proprietary options maintained in the debian repos, and most likely find that at least one of them works. Until an update to the drivers or kernel comes along, and breaks it again, so you have to play around with driver versions and kernel versions to find a combo that works. That’s less likely to happen if you stick with a debian-based distro vs a bleeding-edge distro like arch.
And buy AMD for your next machine to send a message to nvidia that their driver support sucks!
idk man, mints driver manager do be saying nvidia is recommended
but besides that, i tried asking for an equivalent card on lemmy once, ill leave it at: im not inclined to try again
henceforth, if amd, prebuilt only
and regarding driver and kernel version, the moment i have to fiddle with either to get something working to the extent you are describing, im burning my pc
Please try versions 535 and 470.
See if either fixes your issues.
You need to reboot after switching. It’ll take you 30 mins max, even if neither works and you have to switch back.
i switched to 550 yesterday, it was 535 before that
https://old.lemmy.world/c/linux_gaming@lemmy.ml be a good place to visit
i actually posted in there once, with anno 1404 even https://sh.itjust.works/post/9489662
im aware i wasnt the nicest person in it tho, i posted at the height of the annoyance meter at the time
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.
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 tried nobara, i dont remember why but for one reason or another the install was kinda borked
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.
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.
If a game doesn’t run on Linux, I just don’t play it.
Life is too short, I don’t care anymore.
I need Linux for work and I have no interest in paying for an OS that doesn’t let me have privacy.
So fuck it, if companies don’t write there software well enough… I’ll live.
I’d rather spend time in a bar anyway.
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.
thank you for your own detailed response
when i say didnt work, it usually means two things, it either:
-
didnt launch at all, no window, no nothing no error message
-
window does open and it shows a error message/only shows an error message
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.
-
“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.
Why didnt you just to fucking try removed the wacky ram and adding one by one to see if it changes anything? Its like 30 minutes max
having differently sized ram sounded like something so trivial and inconsequential of a thing it didnt exactly cross my mind that it would problems to begin with
and some games do work so it isnt consistent enough of a thing to be noticed to me
im also not a computer wiz grandmaster
Bro above got an attitude but he does make a valid point re RAM matching.
Trying use a proper paid. Also maybe as other have pointed out more gaming focused distros
Nobara, bazzite and popos come to mind. Although popos is not gaming per se
The common denominator in your issues would be your PC. If games are working according to protonDB and you’re unable to get them to work on multiple distros that suggests its your PC.
There are two candidates in your specs - your RAM and your Graphics card.
As others have said, asymmetric RAM is unusual and it certainly was warned against in the past as it caused system issues. While OSs may be much better at managing RAM now, that doesn’t mean all scenarios can tolerate it. Given what Proton is doing is complex (running Wine, which is essentially a windows layer) I would not be surprised if the memory configuration is just a step too far - you have windows software using a windows compatibility layer for memory asking a linuxn system for memory access.
An obvious way to test this is to remove the 16gb stick from your machine and see what happens.
The other side is your graphics card - are you using the latest nvidia drivers?
for linux mint, i do the suggested driver (probably not the latest)
for others like endeavouros it was always the latest nvidia driver
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
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
