Comment by kentonv
1 day ago
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).
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.
> 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.
> 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
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.
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...
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