I was a long time Windows user, starting with XP. I only tried Linux a few years ago, and while I loved it, at the time I had to dual boot for a couple specific Windows only things (VR and flight/racing sim hardware).
A couple months ago though, I got sick of it. I figured if I really wanted to do those things, I could boot up a VM, or just force myself to be patient and wait for a proper Linux solution. So, I wiped all my drives and installed Arch. Around this time, I also got an AMD RX 7600XT, so that was a nice performance boost, plus it waranted a switch to Wayland.
Let me tell you, I have been so pleasantly surprised by basically everything I’ve tried. Cyberpunk 2077 through Heroic Launcher, for example, with 15 odd mods. Runs at a solid 80fps at 1440p on high settings, the only graphical issue I noticed was flickering volumetric clouds. This game ate my old card (the venerable GTX 1080) alive even on Windows.
Just last night, I found my joystick, an old VKB Gladiator + Kosmosima grip, plugged it in and it worked perfectly.
What has really, really impressed me though is VR. I have a Quest 2 that I used to use via Steam link to play my PC wirelessly. Obviously that isn’t an option on Linux (yet) but that’s where ALVR comes in. Sideload the client on the quest, run the streamer on the desktop, start SteamVR, and bam, it works. The first game I tried was Elite Dangerous, one of my all time favourite games and easily my favourite VR epxerience. Now, I won’t go ahead and claim it’s perfect, hence the 99% in the title. After fiddling with the settings and making sure I had hardware encoding/decoding set up right, I had very good clarity, up to 120hz refresh rate, but occasional blockiness and artifacting, especially in heavier graphical scenes, like during docking. However, out in open space, it felt just like the ED I know and love.
At this point, I’m just going to look at fiddling with some settings and hopefully smoothing out the stream, but the fact that I can play my favourite games, with my favourite hardware, with great performance and in VR, and the amount of setup is really comparable to what it is on Windows is just kind of wrinkling my brain. Plus, only a couple months ago, this wasn’t the case. Support for things that were once doomed to be dual boot material for the foreseeable future is coming along rapidly. This is a great time to be a Linux gamer.
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Yeah, a lot of expectations people have around Linux are about a decade old. I think Linux has really improved a lot in the area of gaming over the last few years even.
And as long as Linux keeps being worth supporting I think we’ll see more and more games targeted toward linux.
And as long as Linux keeps being worth supporting I think we’ll see more and more games targeted toward linux.
Valve has cemented this now, their efforts are what has made gaming on Linux viable for anyone.
Gaming on linux is a decades old ongoing effort, there’s plenty of praise to go around, vulkan and winehq, dxvk…
Don’t forget Tuxracer
Only game I know for sure I could install on a toaster and would run at 300fps.
Unless it was one of those netbook desktop things, holy hell those were bad. I managed to get AntiX running pretty well on one, and tuxracer lagged a LOT. Was pretty useful as a cheap thin client though.
I agree. The steam deck has been a godsend for Linux gaming.
Glad ALVR worked for you on Wayland. It never did for me but it’s been a while. All Linux needs next is support from Adobe and AutoCAD and it’ll be 100% for most people
Photoshop too, unfortunately
Dumbass, its not for Linux to support Adobe and AutoCad. Its for those companies to port their programs.
I switched from Windows to Linux during the whole Vista debacle back in 2008. For basically ten years I was out of the PC gaming scene. I fucking love Proton and what its done for Linux as a gaming platform. Now I play (almost) everything on Linux, no sweat. The only things I ever need my Windows partition for anymore are things with those shitty anticheat platforms that just assume you’re a cheater if you use Linux. Cause, you know, Linux scary.
those shitty anticheat platforms that just assume you’re a cheater if you use Linux. Cause, you know, Linux scary.
To be fair, the people at the cutting edge of modern computing are statistically very likely to be Linux users. Therefore it’s not entirely unreasonable to have some prejudice against Linux users.
But as a sweeping measure these anti-cheat measures are absolutely unacceptable. The only other explanation is that they just don’t want to bother with the market share still being low compared to Windows.
Personally, if a game requires anti-cheat, it’s probably not a game I’d enjoy playing. Not a big fan of competitive gameplay. But for those that are, this needs to stop. Especially with all the new bullshit Microsoft has been pulling in Windows lately.
To be fair, the people at the cutting edge of modern computing are statistically very likely to be Linux users. Therefore it’s not entirely unreasonable to have some prejudice against Linux users.
Can we drop this “linux is hackerman territory for cheats” stereotype?
Most people cheat on windows. Not cause they are technical or knowledgable… but because they have a credit card
cause they buy cheats designed for windows.
The overwhelming majority of people out there cheating are cheating using tools they bought and use on windows.
So if anything, its Windows that should be treated as the pariah dog of hackers. Cause its where the credit swiping script kiddies are.
People buy cheats ?! Is that how this works ? So there are cheat developers making a living off this ?
Yes. Thats why cheaters are so rampant in certain games.
its not because each cheater is a elite linux hackerman, using unique and custom cheats personally created by them.
Its because they are dumb idiots with mommies credit card buying a product that some asshole has made and put up for sale to ruin everyones fun.
@KrokanteBamischijf @hperrin But it needs to stop in a way that keeps those competitive games fun…
- Trusted Computing-based solutions
- Don’t tell the game anything-based solutions…
- ??Trusted-Computing requires a more locked down system than any distro provides, and also (effectively) everyone going along with some MS-controlled standards for TPMs and so forth.
Ignorant-Games approaches perform terribly.
What else ya got?
@A_Random_Idiot That’s basically a form of @sugar_in_your_tea 's suggestion about making cheating more expensive: “We’ll find your cheat program later, and retroactively find that you were cheating and ban you. Well after the match ended and everyone else’s game was ruined”
You are going to always be reactive to cheating.
If you are pro-active, you’ll just make it easier for cheaters to iterate and experiment and find ways around the pro-active… and what happens then? You’re back to reactive. Not to mention, pro-active anti-cheat tends to be rife with false positives, resulting in very public ban waves against innocent people.
It cant be helped, No amount of giving your butthole over to big daddy game company and their rootkits will make a game cheat-free. all they can hope for is to catch the cheaters, drop the hammer on them in bulk, so they struggle and panic to try and find out how it was detected so you can increase their cycle time before they have a new working one out.
@A_Random_Idiot That’s … not entirely wrong, but doing more to raise the barriers higher keeps the game fun longer before the cheaters ruin it.
(Again, … limiting discussion to competitive PvP-style games)
But if youre banning people based on operating system, of what’s now the only viable consumer operating system, youre basically sacrificing 100% of ‘keep the game fun longer’ for those players.
So if that’s the philosophy, it would be wildly counterproductive to even put that on the table.
A few options in my personal order of priority:
- allow private servers - you can still have competitive play, just with people you trust to not cheat
- anti-cheat on the server only - would require human moderation as well (users could submit reports, which could be compared to server logs)
- increase cost for cheating - maybe have players ante up, and lose their ante if they’re caught cheating (e.g. pay for game licenses and have the license revoked); to be fair, this would require independent review
I haven’t tried ALVR in over a year, but last time I tried it it had some major issues, good to see someone report that it’s working well for them, I look forward to trying it again when I can
the fact that I can play my favourite games, with my favourite hardware … is just kind of wrinkling my brain.
You’re finally streets ahead
I love this reference
And if you have to ask, you’re streets behind.
I just wish someone could have a walkthrough guide on how to get the games (and launchers) to work for me like they do for you. Every time something jams up and I have to reinstall until I shrug and put windows back on.
Windows XP and 7 got a special place on my heart, but once i get a PC, I’m moving to Linux Mint
Honestly I’d still use XP if more programs supported it. As i said to another user here, it was Windows at its peak. It created the basic layout and feature set that modern Windows still uses, but lacks all the bloat and ads.
Can’t recommend XP knowing it’s vulnerable
Fair enough. Not really speaking to its tech specs, mainly just how nice it was to use compared to modern windows
I can understand, but still, it’s not wprth it using windows XP unless you’re using a VM for playing retro games offline
Just FYI, bazzite is amazing. It’s made for gaming, and it. Just. Works.
I am in a similar situation, I use quest 2 a lot to drive in assetto corsa. I have a Thrustmaster TS 300 PC, I don’t think there are any Linux drivers for that base.
Oversteer should be what you need. Just take note that you need an extra driver module for the T300RS.
Edit, if you meant the TS-PC you may be out of luck. It looks like support for the TS-PC has an open request in the T300RS driver but it isn’t implemented yet.
Ah! Thanks, I will check it out. TS-PC is indeed what I meant. Maybe this is a good reason to upgrade my sim setup to more open source friendly brand.
I’m in the same boat. I’m actually on the verge of going full open source and building my own direct drive with OpenFFBoard.
Nice! Is there a kit you’re buying or are you sourcing parts from Aliexpress or similar? If you’re interested there is a guy doing open source pedal sets and shifter which I’m thinking of building as next project. https://www.youtube.com/@LeboisRacing
I was considering sourcing my own parts as I haven’t come across a full kit that seemed to have everything I wanted.
Also thats super cool, although I’m currently pretty happy with the rest of my setup atm. May look into the shifter at some point tho
Hey OP, could you give a brief rundown on what settings you’re using for ALVR? I was gifted a Quest 2 and would love to get it running on Linux. I got the ALVR app sideloaded on the Quest, but the performance seems to be atrocious. I also haven’t been able to get the audio routed to the headset properly, not sure if that’s something you got working either - if so I’d love to know the secret sauce for that one too!
I left most things default. When I first set it up I played with all the settings and made everything worse lol.
I can tell you that I set the resolution to the highest setting, the refresh rate to 120hz and the bitrate to the quality settings. Everything else, I left default. I found that this resulted in the best clarity while not really making the artifacting/lag any worse. I’m still playing with it though.
If you have the option in SteamVR’s game specific settings to enable “Legacy motion smoothing”, apparently that improves things noticably. For some reason motion smoothing is completely unavailable to me though so I can’t personally attest.
I’ve heard audio was an issue, but in my case (Arch plus KDE6), it was as simple as picking my audio output in the system tray dropdown. I could stream it to my headset or send it out of my headphones I have plugged in.
Edit: I’m gonna link this becaust I found it while looking into why motion smoothing was unavailable. Apparently disabling async reprojection via a config file can give a noticable performance boost. I’ve yet to try it but I’ll add another edit when I’m back at my rig long enough to test it out.
Interesting, I’ll give it another go and try out your recommendations - thank you!!
No worries, good luck with it
i only switched over quite recently (a few years ago)
i swear there has been significant improvements in wifi, bluetooth, gpu support, gaming over the last 10 years that made me think it was now good enough
also there was areas where linux was outdoing windows for quite some time; system wide audio equalizer, customization generally, home services and self hosting, development tools
Linux audio is really under appreciated. I’m one of the nutjobs that still uses a PCI sound card and I’ve never had to install a third party driver. I can manually adjust the output and EQ for every port, disable or enable them on the fly, etc. The only thing I’m missing is hardware EAX support for older games but I’ve kind of accepted that’s just a dragon I’ll always be chasing.
What EQ do you use? I’ve been using Easy Effects for a while, but have been plagued by crackling and stereo sound only playing on one ear lately.
Many hardware manufacturers unfortunately require windows for firmware updates. Fwupd isn’t nearly used enough unfortunately
Most (all?) motherboard vendors have a separate download you can put on a USB to load directly. Other hardware may have something similar.
dont buy them? Or are you their bitch?
