
Linux is now a viable OS for PC gamers, thanks to Steam's Proton initiative - reddotX
https://www.windowscentral.com/gaming-linux-has-come-long-way
======
spystath
It's interesting to see how Valve alone changed the landscape when it comes to
gaming on linux. For once someone, no matter their motive, put their money
where their mouth is and actively contributed towards that effort. I know,
they're standing on top of years of effort of the open source community but
still, they managed to bring things together and ship a more or less painless
experience with Steam. Between Steam supporting linux, contributions to
various related open source projects, linux VR support, employing the author
and DXVK and streamlining the use of Wine if there is anything as customer
loyalty, hey they got it from me!

That being said it's not all roses. There are lots of titles are using weird
anti-cheat methods that are so intimately integrated with Windows that is
unrealistic to expect them to work at some point with Wine, if ever.
Unfortunately these titles also tend to be fairly popular so if you're into
these competitive games, no luck.

On a separate but related note I see lots of people complaining about NVIDIA
GPUs. Although personally I've never had a problem with their cards their
stance and drivers are problematic at best. I'm fairly certain that a good
quality open-source driver for NVIDIA is possible but given how unwilling
NVIDIA is to cooperate I wouldn't hold my breath. Seeing how far AMDGPU has
come the last years my next GPU won't be NVIDIA (voting with your wallet and
all that).

~~~
justinclift
> There are lots of titles are using weird anti-cheat methods ...

Yeah. Crysis (original version) seems to be one of those. No-one seems to have
gotten it working through Proton, which is unfortunate as it was the best/most
enjoyable release in the series (my opinion obviously).

That one aside, many other titles do work well. Even Enderal, the full
conversion mod for Skyrim that has it's own Steam game entry now, works well:

[https://store.steampowered.com/app/933480/Enderal_Forgotten_...](https://store.steampowered.com/app/933480/Enderal_Forgotten_Stories/)

For that one though, some mucking around with paths needs to be done first
time around to get it to launch. ;)

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phren0logy
I've been running PoP!OS (despite its stupid name) as my daily driver because
it supports Nvidia drivers and all the CUDA libraries for deep learning right
out of the box, as well as a pretty large number of sane defaults and
preinstalled codecs, etc.

I was pleasantly surprised that Steam was a one-click install, and probably
90% of the Windows games that I have tried work without issue.

~~~
saagarjha
> Pop!_OS

It’s actually even worse: Pop!_OS.

~~~
saagarjha
…I just realized I copied the same thing twice. The quoted portion should be
“PoP!OS”.

------
soulnothing
I've been amazed with what proton can do and how well it runs. A number of
games run very well, and performance is generally very good.

But I'm planning a new SFF build and I'm trying to figure out how to get two
gpus in an ITX build. VFIO is still the best option to me for gaming on Linux.

Several nights ago I signed up for the origin pass. Reading on Lutris it
worked relatively well with Battle field and others. Single player only, not
worried about online. First night was fine. Then next day BF1 forced an
update. The game no longer worked. Then origin updated, that stopped working.

I just bought the new Resident Evil 2 remake, which had a gold proton db
rating. Booted it got past the intro then it crashed. It was a documented
issues, but none of the fixes I saw worked.

I don't game in long stints any more. I use it to relieve the stress. Every
couple of days in maybe thirty to forty minutes spurts as a break. Essentially
today I spent the time I wanted to take a break debugging a game issue.

This is not in a negative manner to the developers. Either open source or the
game companies. Just there are fringe issues / edge cases. With VFIO I just
have an external VM that does one thing and encounters little issues. I trade
continual trouble shooting, for an initial troubleshooting phase.

~~~
ptomato
Assuming you aren't going to be gaming on Linux directly (only in the Windows
VM), PCI-E bifurcation can do this. Going down to x8 from x16 only loses you a
few FPS, generally speaking, and something like Sliger's SM560
([http://sliger.com/products/cases/sm560/](http://sliger.com/products/cases/sm560/)
\- no relationship but I have a SM550 and am pretty happy with it) would allow
you to fit a 2-slot Nvidia card for the Windows VM (recommended over AMD; Vega
& Navi AMD cards cannot don't do pcie FLR or full reset properly so you'll
have to do full machine reboot per VM restart if you're using one of those for
Windows), and a 1 slot AMD workstation card for desktop usage. Note that
you'll need a motherboard with BIOS that supports bifurcation; Gigabyte &
ASrock tend to, ASUS rarely if ever does, other brands YMMV, but regardless
you should check mobo manual before purchasing and see if the settings are
there.

~~~
sirn
> Vega & Navi AMD cards cannot don't do pcie FLR or full reset properly so
> you'll have to do full machine reboot per VM restart if you're using one of
> those for Windows)

To add: for Navi 10 (RX 5700/RX 5700 XT) there's currently a patch available
at Level1Techs[1] which force the card to enter and exit Bus Active, Chip Off
(BACO) which essentially resetting the card.

I have been using this patch with my VFIO setup ever since the author made it
available and has been working quite reliably for me with my RX 5700 XT
reference card. v1 patch sometimes stuck in weird state after BACO but usually
it could be fixed by sleep the machine and wake it up. I have not experience
any issues with v2 patch so far.

[1]: [https://forum.level1techs.com/t/navi-reset-kernel-
patch/1475...](https://forum.level1techs.com/t/navi-reset-kernel-patch/147547)

~~~
ptomato
Ahh, fantastic; good to hear that that got somewhere

------
liamwestray
I am now getting significantly better graphics quality (Lighting specifically)
and between 20% slower and 20% faster frame rates under
Linux/Steam/Proton/DXVK on Manjaro. Significantly improved over Ubuntu
performance.

Completely shocked.

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spondyl
Has anyone had any luck with SteamVR and the HTC Vive? I tried Proton a few
times, was hugely impressed but the one pain point remaining is that I can
never seem to get the headset to work properly

I play a fair bit of Beat Saber so it kinda forced me back on Windows 10 :(

~~~
krastanov
Do different headsets work very differently in terms of software requirements?
I have the Valve Index and it works fine under Ubuntu (both for native and for
Wine/Proton games).

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rvz
> Traditionally, the open-source OS has been far behind Windows when it comes
> to gaming, but is that still the case in 2019?

From a hardcore Ubuntu gamer's perspective, you defeat your own argument by
using "open-source" and "NVIDIA" in the same sentence. Historically, they have
never gotten along and have caused eternal pitstops for gamers using a Linux
distro like Ubuntu, Pop!_OS for tweaking their systems for using the latest
NVIDIA GPUs.

While the news here is welcoming for general PC gamers, the moment Windows
gamers try to move to a Linux distro (Ubuntu) with NVIDIA as their GPU, things
get chaotic if the GPU is too new. If I was to go for a Linux-based gaming
machine these days, the CPU must be AMD Ryzen and the external GPU must be
Radeon.

Also "Linux" is a OS kernel rather than a full OS. Ubuntu or Pop!_OS with AMD
is "the" viable OS for PC gamers migrating from Windows. The moment you
involve NVIDIA, then it becomes "almost" and if it involves VR gaming then it
becomes "nearly there, but not quite".

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newnewpdro
What I don't get is why Valve hasn't ported Steam to ARM yet.

The Raspberry Pi is plenty used for gaming, but for lack of first-class
support by the likes of Steam it's been mostly used with emulators for
retrogaming.

My games on Steam are just a toolchain setup and rebuild away from supporting
the Raspberry Pi, but there's no point in adding support when there's no Steam
client available for the platform. I would love to sell to Raspberry Pi users
via Steam, but Steam is just getting in the way here.

I feel like their Linux/SteamOS support would be better represented if they
supported the non-x86 platforms better. It's one of the areas Linux shines,
and they're completely missing the boat by neglecting it.

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hurricanetc
I could live with all the limitations of Linux and Proton but I can’t live
without the anti cheat. It is the single biggest roadblock for gaming on Linux
right now.

------
nxnews
I wish proton would also let me use photoshop, and illustrator so I can
completely ditch windows

~~~
jedieaston
IDK if you need it for production (in which case this may not suit you
completely), but Wine can install CC 2018 at the moment:
[https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iI...](https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iId=36206).

Should just be double-click the installer and run, hypothetically. 2019 works
if it is cracked (although that is obviously not suitable for real-world use).

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me551ah
While this works for occasional casual gaming, it's way more performant to use
Looking Glass and GPU passthrough using KVM. Windows licenses are cheap(if you
don't want to use the evaluation) and all games just work.

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RedComet
I don't want games to work on Linux, I want Windows 7 back.

~~~
vardump
Then just install Windows 7 and play games on it, this is something that
already works.

Games on Linux are nothing away from you...

~~~
RedComet
Wrong, it doesn't work anymore. Nearly out of official supprt. Major privacy
violations. Can't pick your updates anymore.

But your second comment is just a non sequitur.

------
exikyut
I'm curious about the statements saying the NVIDIA drivers being "more
stable". Is this true? I recently heard that the amdgpu driver is better than
where Intel is currently at - although the discussion/context at the time was
prioritizing hackability and tinkerability.

~~~
Mathnerd314
The AMDGPU driver is open-source and generally seem the best integrated with
the rest of Linux; performance is comparable to Windows. The nVidia closed-
source drivers also give performance comparable to Windows but have issues
like graphics corruption with KDE on suspend
([https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=364766](https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=364766),
supposedly KDE's misuse of OpenGL). The open-source Nouveau drivers for nVidia
are not really usable: the team has to reverse engineer everything and nVidia
doesn't really support their efforts so it's rolling a stone up a hill.

Intel graphics are open source but they're mostly used on laptops, so I don't
think the drivers support much beyond basic functions. I guess light games
would probably work well with them though.

~~~
ahartmetz
The Intel drivers on Linux are fine, they are very reliable and don't lack
important functionality. The problem with Intel graphics for gaming is
underpowered hardware.

~~~
Mathnerd314
I was looking at
[https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Intel_Graphics](https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Intel_Graphics).
There are quite a lot of workarounds listed which have the effect of disabling
certain hardware optimizations. I'm sure the drivers work well for most
people, since even the Nvidia drivers are quite usable, but they do seem to
have some bugs.

------
fulafel
Tldr: Wine

------
Thaxll
"Viable" except none of the recent games work properly, if you're a real gamer
Linux is absolutely not an option.

That's not even talking about the performance on some games that is way slower
than on Windows.

Age of empire 2 && Terraria don't qualify for "Linux is now a viable OS for PC
gamers"

~~~
newnewpdro
What does "real gamer" even mean?

~~~
bitxbitxbitcoin
I think "real gamer" in this context means a gamer that is interested in
buying new titles, not just playing old titles. That is, "real gamer" means
that you're a viable target for the gaming industry to make money off of.

