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Comment by gpm | Hacker News Reader

Yesterday I played civ6 with 4 people on 3 operating systems.

The Mac user couldn't fullscreen the game and had weird rendering artifacts.

One of the windows users had the game take 10x as long to load as it should have (commparing to mac/Linux/windows on vaguely similar hardware)

The other windows user kept dropping. Note that we were all sitting at the same kitchen table, with reasonably good wifi.

Linux worked flawlessly.

I'm sure there was some luck involved, but Linux gaming has truly come a long way from being the most finicky platform.

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Last year I played Final Fantasy XV coop with my friend. This game is a part of Nvidia's The Way It's Meant to Played, there's even Nvidia logo on the start screen. I had a lot of crashes on my GTX 960. Almost no problem on Radeon (although multiplayer is quite bugged-ridden there).

Sometimes official support tells nothing about runtime quality.

And yet, I still have trouble running normal software that was built for Linux, on Linux.

Every set of updates might cause a problem that I've never seen on Windows or a Mac. I had an Ubuntu machine that only lasted 2 weeks before it wouldn't boot one day after an update. Never figured that one out - it was an experiment to see how much easier Manjaro was to setup and add software to than Ubuntu. (The answer: it's much, much easier.)

I run Manjaro too. Having up to date versions of software is nice instead of having to wait until ppa's are updated.

Also there is a community version that includes just i3 the tiling window manager out of the box.

What distro are you using for Linux? Civ 6 is literally the only reason I keep my Windows partition and I can't get civ 6 to work with Proton.

Arch.

I just checked and it turns out it's running natively not via proton.

Not sure if any of this will be news to you, but for generally debugging:

If you run `steam` from a command line, and then launch civ 6 (or any game) from steam, it will print any errors to the terminal. Chances are it's some sort of missing dependency.

I was told by someone else that I might need to set launch options to `LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/libfreetype.so.6 %command%`, for whatever reason I didn't need to, but you might try that.

I don't play civ6, but I've managed to play quite a few Windows games on Linux with Proton, Lutris and before that with Wine.

The two most important factors for a game to run well are 1) the version of Wine/Proton you're using and 2) the version of your GPU driver you're using.

Rolling release distros like Arch are great for gaming, since you always have the last version of Wine and of your GPU driver. It's a real pain in comparison on fixed release distros like Ubuntu, especially if like me you stick with LTS releases.

By using Proton within Steam Play you at least don't have to worry much about the version of Proton; just make sure you've not forced an old release and Steam will chose the right one for you. Same when using Wine within Lutris. Your only remaining duty is to make sure you're running up-to-date GPU drivers.

You guys are the best, I had gone through all the debugging steps awhile ago including what you put there (which was required for me). But the culprit to it not working was having some mods enabled that disabled the menu when running on Linux. Thanks for getting me to take another crack at getting it running!

Civ 6 has a native port to Linux. Why do you need Windows?

I was unaware, I just assumed that it was running on proton since I was having issues with it. But the culprit to it not working was having some mods enabled that disabled the menu when running on Linux. Thanks for getting me to take another crack at getting it running!

FYI Civ 5 also has a native port.

Civ 4 runs on wine, but the Beyond the Sword expo needs workarounds to work (some few winetricks commands). Does not run out of the box.

Civ 4 Colonization works out of the box but occassionally it will hang.

I have not tried Civ 3 or previous civs.

FreeCiv/FreeCol can be fun too if you don't mind the graphics. Especially the online play. The diplomacy is different.

The Civ V port works well except for the fact that it has no anti-aliasing option.

Civ 2 works flawlessly with wine.

I can't connect to local network games hosted by OSX in linux.

Doesn't Civ 6 have native Linux support? Steam says it does.

It apparently does, I just assumed that it was running on proton since I was having issues with it. But the culprit to it not working was having some mods enabled that disabled the menu when running on Linux. Thanks for getting me to take another crack at getting it running!

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