Comment by surgical_fire
1 day ago
> Then I ran into a game I really wanted to play but it didn’t run well with Proton
Out of curiosity, which game?
I promise I am not asking as a gotcha. Just genuinely curious.
I don't play many new games on PC (normally I play recent games on consoles). What I play on PC is older/niche games.
I have a couple of oddballs that I could not make work on Proton. Others had weird issues that got fixed over time.
Sometimes there is a fix, such as fiddling with different Proton versions, etc. Lutris makes this somewhat straightforward.
The game is called HROT it’s an indie “boomer shooter”. The game was first locked to 30fps which is horrible for an FPS. Then I got that figured out, but FPS was all over the place and it felt basically unplayable to me even though I was often getting 100+ FPS. Frame pacing was absolutey FUBAR’d no matter which version of Proton or Wine, so even though frames were high it still felt terrible to play. So I just decided to create a Windows dual-boot just for the odd game. Now I can get a locked framerate to my monitor refresh and the game feels great to play.
It’s basically “Soviet Quake”. Very moody atmosphere with just weird random details in the game. Amazing level design.
On the flip side. The original Max Payne does not play on Windows but it works perfectly on Linux for me.
I wonder if this might be some odd library issue that could be fixed in the WINE prefix.
I knew a guy that wanted to play a Japanese version of a JRPG on Linux and he figured out he needed some weird libraries there to properly render the font, which was causing the game to not start.
Anyway, for older games and emulators, playing on Linux has been a magnificent experience for the most part.
Out of incessant curiosity and borderline obsession - I installed KDE, then I enabled the experimental Wayland support for Proton and tried the game again.
It runs great now. The Wayland support didn't seem to do anything when I was using Gnome but it's a noticeable difference on KDE. As long as I disable vsync which locks the framerate at 30fps for some reason. But overall the game is very playable on Linux now.
Guess I'm switching to KDE.
Part of it was the game just didn’t play nice with Wayland, and since I use Gnome I don’t have an X11 session available. I could’ve tried on a different DE but didn’t want to install a bunch of extra bloat; yet I installed a whole other Os…sigh
shrugs
Maybe I’ll try switching to KDE and see if it works better under X11 there.