Linux is now a viable OS for PC gamers, thanks to Steam's Proton initiative | Hacker News Reader

Linux is now a viable OS for PC gamers, thanks to Steam's Proton initiative

windowscentral.com

99 pointsreddotX45 comments

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).

> 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_...

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

From what I have been reading over the last year nvidia is supposedly going to start opening up some hardware documentation for linux open source drivers. https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NVIDIA-O...

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.

> Pop!_OS

It’s actually even worse: Pop!_OS.

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

Open-source software never disappoints with bad naming... :(

Ubuntu Mate also has nVidia support

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.

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/ - 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.

> 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...

Ahh, fantastic; good to hear that that got somewhere

Thanks that was one of my top choices. I'm also looking at custom building a case. I'm debating if trimming 2L is worth the effort to build my own case.

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.

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 :(

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).

It works for me, but it seems to have performance issues

> 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".

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.

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.

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

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....

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).

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.

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

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

Games on Linux are nothing away from you...

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.

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.

I recently updated my computer from i5 4690 / GTX 970, to Ryzen 3700x / 5700xt, because I’m sick of how bad Nvidia Drivers are. 3 times I’ve had my linux install completely destroyed by updating Nvidia Drivers. Everyone says amd is better for linux support so I figured I’m going all amd and if I summon up the courage to move back to linux at home I hopefully won’t end up with a dead install.

NVIDIA drivers are not as bad as they used to be, but it's a proprietary driver so you're dependent on NVIDIA, who doesn't care that much about Linux gamers (probably 0.1% of their bottom line).

I have a NVIDIA card I bought because I did not know better (and I used to run Windows). I'm lucky that it works fine on Ubuntu 18.04 (I can play games like the 2016 Doom fine) but if I had a choice I'd pick an AMD GPU.

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, 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.

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.

I was looking at 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.

Tldr: Wine

"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"

"Viable" is not the same thing as "optimal".

I would describe "viable" as "without unacceptable concessions or compromises".

If a game you consider essential does not work, that's not acceptable.

would you say the Xbox is not a viable gaming system because you can’t play God of War on it?

It’s 100% reasonable to say that it’s not the right choice for you (and I’m not dumping my Windows box any time soon either, unfortunately), but Linux went from having a very limited catalogue of mostly indies and open source low budget projects to its current state where you have a considerable selection of big ticket games available to you.

If you can only have one gaming device, and consider GoW to be essential, then yeah, Xbox wouldn't be viable for you.

And I agree that Linux has made fantastic, amazing strides, but it's still a subset of Windows gaming. I would not be surprised if the vast majority of people who consider themselves to be hardcore PC gamers would see Linux as non-viable as their sole OS, even after being fully informed.

Ok let me rephrase it, 99.9% of the AAA games from the last 3 years don't work. For the one that work

- it's buggy

- online doesn't work

- lower FPS

- need custom setup / with custom scripts

Numerous benchmarks show AAA games running at higher framerates in Linux under DX12 and especially DX9 than in windows.

These advancements have happened within the past year. I'm genuinely curious as to whether you've tried it yourself or are relying on experiences that predates Proton being a first class citizen in Steam.

The world changed.

I installed PoP!_OS on my laptop with a gtx 1050. It booted first try, I installed Steam and was able to run every single game that I like in my library without issues, including some with weird launchers (Warframe...).

I play a ton of video games and have wanted this for so long. It is an option. I am backing up everything off my Windows desktop via Syncthing as I'm typing this for a seamless switch to Linux.

What does "real gamer" even mean?

Somebody who plays the games GP thinks are good, obviously.

Someone who plays/develops games for a living. Most of the rest are casual gamers. Then there are game-addicts, who play most of their wake hours playing video-games.

No?

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com