Windows or Linux?

[Wee-jordan]

I’m building a gaming pc and I would like Linux as it is more reliable but windows is more popular, I’m thinking about uBuntu as my OS.

any thoughts?

[Slottr]

If you're comfortable with linux and its ecosystem go for it, its personal preference really

 

Windows is easier to game on, and I'm a moderate linux user- so I don't really follow your reliability remark

[Worstcaster]

Proton for Steam has made gaming much easier on Linux then it used to be.  Where you might run into problems is on a game like Fortnite.  Online mutiplayer games that use easy anti cheat sometimes flag Linux as inappropriate software.  If all you play are single player games, then Linux can be fine.  If you have specific games you are worried about you can check to see how they run in Wine/Proton/Lutris.  The various Linux communities can be very helpful solving any problems you may run into with specific games.

 

https://ubuntu.com/community

 

https://www.protondb.com/

 

https://lutris.net/

 

The nice thing about Linux is it is free to install, so you lose nothing by trying it out to see if you like it.

[-DevNull-]

The links that @Worstcaster linked are your best bet.  If you want to know if you even have a chance at running something, ProtonDB and Lutris are the place to look.

 

Just be aware that (in general) you will need slightly beefier hardware than you would to run the same app/game under Windows.

 

It's gotten better, but obviously going through a compatibility layer.

 

The way I look at it though, the more you have to work for it, the more gratifying those head shots will be. 

 

[Nayr438]

If you have a AMD Graphics Card, I would look at a rolling release based distro such as Manjaro or Arch. If you go this route there are a couple of packages I can recommend to get the most out of your card.

If your on NVIDIA, your distro will probably make little difference.

Typically NVIDIA takes more of a performance hit than AMD. This is due to the open-source nature of AMD Drivers and the amount of work that goes into them from the community, including valve.

 

You will lose performance on Linux in gaming, though there are exceptions. I have had Windows titles perform better under Wine+DXVK under Linux and some that perform noticeably worse. I also own a couple that just don't work at all.

 

Anything with an anti-cheat software will probably fail to work on protected servers. Some games that rely heavily on it, may fail to start at all.

[Lady Fitzgerald]

7 hours ago, Worstcaster said:

...The nice thing about Linux is it is free to install, so you lose nothing by trying it out to see if you like it.

Even nicer is that you can try out Linux without installing it on a computer or even removing the existing OS on the computer. It can run from an optical disk or from a USB flash drive. If installed on a USB stick with persistence, you can even save tweeks you make to it from boot up to boot up. It will be a little slower running but it's a great way to try it out.

[lal12]

On 4/10/2020 at 5:09 AM, Slottr said:

If you're comfortable with linux and its ecosystem go for it, its personal preference really

I would say that there are many really good reasons to switch to linux (beyond personal preference). And even if I really love it I wouldn't recommend Linux (as the best choice) for someone who wants to game. Even if it is much better to game on linux and there are tools which let you install the game basically with one click nowadays, there are still many issues. So if you choose Linux be aware of the following:

• Most game will have a worse performance (5-10% sometimes more). Only in rare cases you have better performance.
• Many games won't work out of the box, even with one click tools like lutris or Steam Play/Proton there are times where you have to get your hands dirty. Usually googling how people patched it. I had this relatively often, mostly on my notebook where the hybrid GPU thing is not as well supported on Linux (even if it got much better the last month), but sometimes also on my PC where I run a pretty standard setup (i7-8086k + GTX 1060).
• Often when new games are released it can take a while (sometimes day, sometimes weeks/months) until they work at all.
• There might be some glitches or smaller issues like some specific materials are not displaying, video sequences not playing or no sound in certain situations and often more crashes. For example when Shadow of the Tomb Raider released I was pretty happy to be able to play it right away on Linux, however the climbing walls were always black. I reported it to dxvk (I think it was a tesselation problem with vulkan) and it got fixed but it took a while. Even if gets fixed in the source code quite quickly, if you don't want compile yourself and then get it to work with steam, you will have to wait for the next release.
• Sometimes games will never work at all.

[Slottr]

33 minutes ago, lal12 said:

 

Which is why I had more than that comment in my post.

[lal12]

Just was referring to the "personal preference" aspect and that I think that there are many objective reasons for linux ^^. The rest wasn't meant as a reply to that quote

[Snowarch]

i have a similar setup to @lal12 8086k + p106-100 6gb on ubuntu nvidia drivers 418, and 384 (cause some games only work on older one, and driver 430 steam doesn't launch on. in my expirence, gaming on linux isnt so bad, if you know the right "hacks" if you wanna call them that, and drawbacks with the good.

 

 • by hacks i mean things like older games like mk9 work on driver 84, but not on 418.

   • theres a lot of googling. adding the right wine librearies can help you run cirtain games by clicking the .exe. not really a hack but winecfg is your friend on this.

 • drawbacks. 

   •launchers break games.

for some that require a "first time configure" like injustice 2 qnd otherwise, and then do not make a default config itll never launch. for the ones that do make a default config, kill the launchers first launch, and close steam then launch the game via steam, or the .exe file and itll work.

 • anti cheat systems will flag as cheating sometimes

  •some games will be faster, and or slower, depends on the game. so be a little above requirements of what you want to run.

    • and last but not least, some games just will not work at all.

         -borderlands 3 is bricked for me.

       • android emulators are a pain.

 

[Nayr438]

4 hours ago, Snowarch said:

i have a similar setup to @lal12 8086k + p106-100 6gb on ubuntu nvidia drivers 418, and 384 (cause some games only work on older one, and driver 430 steam doesn't launch on. in my expirence, gaming on linux isnt so bad, if you know the right "hacks" if you wanna call them that, and drawbacks with the good.

 

 • by hacks i mean things like older games like mk9 work on driver 84, but not on 418.

   • theres a lot of googling. adding the right wine librearies can help you run cirtain games by clicking the .exe. not really a hack but winecfg is your friend on this.

 • drawbacks. 

   •launchers break games.

for some that require a "first time configure" like injustice 2 qnd otherwise, and then do not make a default config itll never launch. for the ones that do make a default config, kill the launchers first launch, and close steam then launch the game via steam, or the .exe file and itll work.

 • anti cheat systems will flag as cheating sometimes

  •some games will be faster, and or slower, depends on the game. so be a little above requirements of what you want to run.

    • and last but not least, some games just will not work at all.

         -borderlands 3 is bricked for me.

       • android emulators are a pain.

 

For Game launchers, Usually the only one I really have issues with is Rockstar. However most launchers that provide a in-game overlay, the overlay has to be disabled for Games to launch.

• I have had good luck with Proton-TKG-Git, the only repository I know that provides is is the chaotic-aur for Arch based Distros. https://lonewolf.pedrohlc.com/chaotic-aur/
• A lot of others have decent luck with Proton-GE https://github.com/GloriousEggroll/proton-ge-custom/releases
• It usually takes steam awhile to push out updates for its Proton, so you could be stuck waiting longer.

Borderlands 3 needs https://github.com/z0z0z/mf-install and https://github.com/z0z0z/mf-installcab

 

Use the Android SDK. The Emulator it provides works fine and is very responsive.

 

The rest is more of drawbacks to the NVIDIA Drivers. Though I have heard NVIDIA is has been improving.

 

[Snowarch]

borderlands 3 on linux? what a joke. 

proton version+ nvidia driver swaps: failed me

winetricks: really bad expirence.

i even baught, since the 15 day trial did not work, crossover and added the required libs in winecfg after doing this with regular wine. all the attempts ended in it turning green on steam with running for less than a minute then none. also one of the "hotfixes" broke the game, bur before that, i still couldn't play. so thats off the table. i got the game during steam release sale. was so happy to play after waiting for epic exclusive to end only for everything to fail.

 

as for your nvidia driver comment, well its only bad if 2 things. youre on a laptop, and or you've got a really insane gpu. (2080 or really recent) 

 

with the remove gpu trick on desktop, and graphics team ppa its pretty good. have a 1060, if a game works it handles what i throw at it.

 

android emulators: tried them all

android studio/sdk: worst. no apps install in it. no matter what device i set it to.

anbox: amazing! could run crazy well even on my laptop's igpu, but some games only played sound even with arm architecture on, unfortunatly the one game i wanted to play needed a vpn, but you cant use that on anbox.

android x86 in virtual box: worse remix, but at least i could even install an app, so beats sdk.

remix in virtual box: 2nd best(after anbox performance wise, but the game i needed/need the emu for was playable...) could run the game i wanted to play, but slower than anbox. you need to install remix a vary spasific way or this doesn't work. i lost the link to a guide that actually did this correctly, so i cant use the system in my signature.

genymotion: expensive, and their free trial is only for ubuntu 18+.

 

so, no android emulators in my case unless i ever find that guide that lets you install it right/save between sessions. anbox or android x86 may be a good solution tho, but avoid portrait apps in one of them. also you'll need the enable arm script if going anbox. these were all tested on my laptop. 

 

 

[Nayr438]

1 hour ago, Snowarch said:

borderlands 3 on linux? what a joke.

 

https://imgur.com/8z1jfIX

I do however have the Epic Games store version, but https://www.protondb.com/app/397540

 

For the Emulator, If your using x86, the app would need to be compatible. If your using an ARM image, there is a large performance penalty. Never had a problem side loading apps or using the app store on x86 versions. I have personally never had any luck with Anbox, but your experience may come down to the specific apps you use.

[Dutch_Master]

What's often overlooked, and it happened again in this thread, is that Linux has tons of games ready to play natively from the repositories! But no, these are NOT the latest AAA+ titles marketed hyped up heavily in the gaming world. There's FPS, RTS, Sims, card- and board games, whatever you fancy playing, it's probably represented in the repo of your distro. You may or may not need to enable additional repo's (contrib, non-free) on certain distro's, but overall, these are readily available, if you spend time finding what you'd like playing.

 

just me tuppence m'lads! :)J

[WereCatf]

Just now, Dutch_Master said:

What's often overlooked, and it happened again in this thread, is that Linux has tons of rather terrible games ready to play natively from the repositories!

FTFY.

[WereCatf]

Personally, I wouldn't recommend Linux for gaming, but if one insists on going that way, older titles and indies should be perfectly fine. If one is into those kinds of titles, I would recommend digging through GOG -- they've got lots of both older titles and indies and they're all without any built-in DRM, which could cause trouble.

[Dutch_Master]

6 minutes ago, WereCatf said:

FTFY.

I totally disagree. What do you expect from free games for which you've paid ab-so-lute-ly nothing? The very same "deep emersive gaming experience" as for a 100+ dollars worth of AAA+ just-released-yesterday gaming title an entire company spend years on writing while the free games are made by volunteers, or at least people who don't get paid to contribute? For gaming on Linux, set your expectations right, it's not the same as on Win-OS (or Mac, for that matter) as many vendors don't bother with Linux clients because its marketshare is too small.

[WereCatf]

14 minutes ago, Dutch_Master said:

What do you expect from free games for which you've paid ab-so-lute-ly nothing? The very same "deep emersive gaming experience" as for a 100+ dollars worth of AAA+ just-released-yesterday gaming title an entire company spend years on writing while the free games are made by volunteers, or at least people who don't get paid to contribute?

A game being free doesn't make it good, they are not mutually exclusive things: a game can be both terrible and free.

[Dutch_Master]

1 minute ago, WereCatf said:

A game being free doesn't make it good, they are not mutually exclusive things: a game can be both terrible and free.

But, a game can be free and still good! Those are also not mutually exclusive. "Free" does not equate to "bad/terrible game". It really is all about expectations: for 100+ dollars, yes, I'd expect a very good game. But when I haven't had to pay anything, I don't expect the same level of gaming experience in that game. It might be a personal thing, but I'd find it rather unfair to all those volunteer game writers/devs to dismiss their effort just because they make their work available for free.

[WereCatf]

4 minutes ago, Dutch_Master said:

But, a game can be free and still good!

Sure, I just am not aware of any such.

 

5 minutes ago, Dutch_Master said:

It really is all about expectations: for 100+ dollars, yes, I'd expect a very good game. But when I haven't had to pay anything, I don't expect the same level of gaming experience in that game

For me, it's nothing to do with expectations or the cost. A bad game is a bad game, regardless of what it costs.

[Snowarch]

as i said. wine cfg command doesnt work with proton and wintricks was terrible. bl3, and lanoire is the only completely unlaunchable games ive seen so far. epic store is already an anti linux platform. its the exaxt same game, but you need to install extra stuff to even make that launcher work.

[Nayr438]

32 minutes ago, Snowarch said:

as i said. wine cfg command doesnt work with proton and wintricks was terrible. bl3, and lanoire is the only completely unlaunchable games ive seen so far. epic store is already an anti linux platform. its the exaxt same game, but you need to install extra stuff to even make that launcher work.

This may be of some use https://github.com/Matoking/protontricks, its pretty much a wrapper for winetricks+proton

 

Though, Anything that requires Media Foundation libraries still needs to be installed via the links above.

 

Epic Launcher is iffy, There is a lutris install script for the Launcher on the lutris site. However the wine version it pulls has always had issues on my end and I have always had to change it to my system wine install after it finishes setting everything up, chaotic-aur/wine-tkg-staging-fsync-vkd3d-git. Has always worked fine with that, but your mileage may vary. For people not on Arch, a GloriousEggroll build may work, seems to be a common choice.

 

My entire Game Experience is with TKG Packages that are built around Arch, so I can't really speak for other Distros. This also includes the kernel I run, which also makes a difference in some titles such as ARK  https://www.protondb.com/app/346110