• xkforce@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Unfortunately gaming is about the least Linux friendly hobby there is. For most tasks you can find software that will make it relatively painless to wean people off Windows but many games, especially new ones, dont work out of the box on Linux. Most of the time, theyre going to have to fiddle with things to get games to work, if they can work and youre going to have to justify to them why they should do that.

      • TimeSquirrel@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        This literally happened to me:

        1. Install Kubuntu 22.04 and Steam on my kid’s PC.

        2. Download Brickrigs, his favorite game.

        3. Crashes on title screen

        4. Spend the next week sporadically troubleshooting when I get a free few minutes here and there.

        5. After week 2, I finally decide for shits and giggles to download and install the “official” AMD driver from AMD’s website instead of using the built in kernel one like every goddamn reply on every forum post has been telling me to use, because the PC’s GPU is about ten years old at this point and the driver that came with the distro doesn’t work with it.

        6. Lo and behold, Brickrigs works.

        THIS is how Linux “works”, a LOT of the time.

        • ZeroHora@lemmy.ml
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          1 year ago

          To be fair, a friend of mine had blue screen playing LOL on windows for a month until he found the solution: rename a random .dll of the NVIDIA driver and than reinstall the driver.

          Weird stuff happens with PC, with Win, Linux, Mac or anything but people always point to Linux. Yeah on Linux we see more of these things but PC gaming in general is not so user friendly like people think it is.

        • voxel@sopuli.xyz
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          1 year ago

          uhh brickrigs works perfectly for me?
          on the built-in amdgpu kernel module (since my laptop is like 8 years old i had to force amdgpu instead of radeon drivers)

          radeon is hilariously broken, even firefox breaks (won’t start sometimes) while it’s in use

      • sorrybookbroke@sh.itjust.works
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        1 year ago

        3: try every proton version
        4: try proton GE
        5: (proccessing Vulcan shaders)
        6: change launch arguments
        7: use protontricks to install some weird dependancy
        8: sacrifice your pets firstborn at an alter to achieve a running state

        Not that hard lol, get good bitches. Also fuck you for wanting to play rainbow 6 siege. All my homies hate rainbow 6 siege.

      • lesteross@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        What if game is not on steam and it’s online game that I’ll get banned if I use 3rd party client?

        • ipkpjersi@lemmy.ml
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          1 year ago

          That’s becoming less and less common these days, thankfully. Especially since the Steam Deck, gaming on Linux is just becoming better and better.

          • lesteross@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            Sure, but still multiplayer games that are not on steam and have some sort of anticheat or other stuff like that are unlikely to show up on deck. Unless company steps in and release version for steam deck/Linux (which they don’t cause it’s probably a lot of work for minimal returns), you have to play it on windows. At least I can dual boot on my deck to play those games.

        • Cethin@lemmy.zip
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          1 year ago

          What online game do you want to play besides maybe Counter Strike?

      • spaxxor@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Get booted out of said game because the anti cheat freaked out thanks to Linux.

      • transigence@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        Wrong. Also master a bunch of Proton configuration and extra parameters and then deal with abysmal performance compared to Windows.
        Out of the box, Proton+Wine works on surprisingly little.

    • j891319@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I used to also think gaming and Linux are not really that compatible, but Proton being built into steam makes it easy to run pretty much any game out of the box now.

    • AnUnusualRelic@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      It’s really a bit like what we used to do when we poked at autoexec.bat and whatnot when running DOS games back when dinosaurs roamed the land.

      It’s not really complicated, you just have to prod here and there until it works (unless it just doesn’t because some kind of anti-consumer software lock just won’t play nice with Wine, although that’s becoming less common nowadays).

      OTOH, things that aren’t Linux friendly… corporate accounting, an awful lot of dedicated software for niche industries… There’s no lack of things that are still complicated in Linux.

      • xkforce@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        The problem though is that we are in 2023, a good 32 years after Linux came out. It shouldnt feel like you are in the DOS era. One of the problems that dawns on me is the real issue is a lack of consistency. Sometimes things work great, sometimes they dont. A lot of people arent having the same issues I and many others do which is frustrating because of how the community reacts when someone brings up those inconsistencies. There are a lot of people that dont run into them for one reason or another and all they see is people bitching about from their POV, seemingly nonexistent problems.

        • AnUnusualRelic@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          You also have to remember that you’re running software designed for an entirely different operating system. It’s not at all like moving from xp to Windows 10. We’re not comparing apples to oranges, but apples to hedgehogs.

          That it works most of the time is a fucking miracle in itself.

          • xkforce@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            Yes it is a miracle that it ever works. HOWEVER it doesnt really matter to most people why it doesn’t work sometimes. It isn’t fair but the reality is that as far as most people are concerned, their PC is basically a microwave in that they have little interest in how the internals work as long as they work and if they can’t do x or y, they dont really care that it isn’t Linux’s fault. All they see is that they installed this new OS that looks really cool but cant run certain games or run certain software. Now if Linux were popular, it wouldnt be an issue because almost everything would have been written for one distro or another (like android is dominant on phones) but it isn’t. Steam is doing a lot to change things and hopefully Linux is better supported by other companies as well in the future but right now there are still enough gaps that I would be very hesitant about recommending Linux to a heavy gamer unless I knew that they basically waded in the steam ecosystem and the vast majority of their games could be run via proton.

            • AnUnusualRelic@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              You’re saying that as if Windows “just worked”.

              The time I spend fixing the Windows machines of the people around me seems to indicate that it’s not the case.

              • xkforce@lemmy.world
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                1 year ago

                Back when I used windows regularly instead of sparingly, I cant remember a time when I ever had to go into the registry files or command prompt to fix anything. You might have to install newer drivers or something but effectively do surgery on the dll files etc? Nope. And you have to remember that the average windows user is… not very skilled with computers. Theyre going to need hand holding a lot more than the average Linux user. Which is why windows is more or less designed for the lowest common denominator. And itd be weird if all the effort spent writing stuff primarily for windows didn’t result in an easier experience.

                It used to be that the community acknowledged the harm Windows’ dominance caused Linux. Microsoft didnt change. They still leverage their monopoly to harm Linux.

    • grandkaiser@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I use both Linux and Windows (Linux professionally, windows personally)

      Got a buddy of mine that will wax on for hours about how windows is pointless and should have been replaced by Linux years ago. I’ll then go “Cool, so uh, did that game download yet? Lets play!” Then start up the game. Four hours later and he’s still trying to get the sound to work or make the graphics display while continuing his rant on how user friendly Linux is.

      Like, Linux is great and all, but fuck me, it’s not user friendly.

      • yokonzo@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        right and wrong, games play nowadays, but good luck getting the same accessibility and flexibility as windows, you wanna download a cool new mod? No problem! Oops but the mod loader is only windows based and gives wine a seizure, you can probably do it, but not without an hour or more of work, not exactly casual user friendly quite yet. And god forbid the game uses a special pheriphal

      • Moc@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        No, they are right.

        It took an enormous amount of fiddling for me to get games working on Debian 12

    • HughJanus@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      I’m a harsh critic of Linux but gaming is very easy on Linux these days. At least as easy as Windows. No fiddling required.