This is really a dealbreaker for me, much more than the TPM and recent processor stuff. There must be some workaround :(
Edit: Thanks @yourusername, I had missed the part where it's only for the home edition. I'm glad there is still a way.
Edit: Thanks @yourusername, I had missed the part where it's only for the home edition. I'm glad there is still a way.
Of course there may be one or two titles that tie you to Windows, or perhaps multiplayer specific gaming related software, but if you are flexible in that regard gaming on Linux is just… good.
I know the wine guys have been doing great work trying to get anticheats working in wine/proton. Hopefully that progresses well. Getting anticheat to work in wine would really be the best.
Basically you bind the graphics card to the vfio driver by writing the PCI ID to /sys/bus/pci/drivers/vfio-pci/new_id and then you can use it in qemu with -device vfio-pci,host=01:00.0.
If you have sane IOMMU groups and have an extra GPU for the host it should work with just those two steps. You still have to decide about how you handle input and output, but that's very user specific. Virtual input over the qemu GUI works well enough, there's also an evdev thing that lets you switch by pressing both Ctrl keys, or pass an entire USB controller. For audio I recommend scream[1] for the lowest latency (I get 2ms VM->PA->Speaker with MuQSS scheduler) with full 7.1 audio and if you don't want a dedicated monitor or switch monitor inputs there is Looking Glass[2] which captures frames and shuffles them to the host over shared memory. It also handles input via spice.
It's still a bit of work, but for me that's mostly on the Windows side rather than the passthrough stuff itself.
[1]: https://github.com/duncanthrax/scream [2]: https://github.com/gnif/LookingGlass
Something like Looking Glass looks cool. I definitely disliked having to switch monitor inputs back and forth every time, though that was just more of an annoyance than anything else, of course.
I ran Manjaro for about half a year recently, including using it for gaming. Very few games actually worked out of the box for me, including games with so called "native" Linux support.
I ran into multiple games with "official" Linux support that were simply broken or became broken by an update. Some of those that weren't broken had significant performance issues (that Windows on the same machine didn't have).
Is it possible to game on Linux? Yes. But at the very least it requires fiddling. As much as I love Linux, gaming is just a lot easier on Windows.
Playing games on Windows often requires fiddling as well. Either having to lock the mouse to one monitor, fiddling with V-sync and FPS limits (often only possible through graphics card drivers, launch arguments or text config files), disabling Windows malware scanning, fiddling with Windows compatibility settings for older games, ...
Admittedly I now dual-boot to Windows to play videogames, but that's not because of faults in native Linux games, just the reduced selection.
Plenty of people on protondb reported zero issues with the same games on their Manjaro/Arch boxes.
> Playing games on Windows often requires fiddling as well. Either having to lock the mouse to one monitor, fiddling with V-sync and FPS limits (often only possible through graphics card drivers, launch arguments or text config files), disabling Windows malware scanning, fiddling with Windows compatibility settings for older games
Maybe it's the type of games I play, but this is extremely rare in my experience. I don't remember the last time I had to fiddle with anything outside the game's own settings despite having a multi-monitor setup.
There used to be a way to run Proton outside of Steam but i think it is now discouraged.
1. Download gog install files into the same directory
2. Add the install executable as a non-steam game, and enable proton compatibility before starting it up.
3. Run the installer and complete the installation. Gog installers typically give the option to run the game from the installer, but that will only work once.
4. Find the path of the installed game, and the working directory of that executable by searching in ~/.steam
5. Edit the entry created from 2. with this exec path and working dir, and look up possible args from protondb.com
It's how I run my GOG games on Pop OS.
TBH i do not think things are completely unsolvable, it is just that i wish Proton, etc wasn't tied to Steam.
And there are still multiple issues: For instance with X11 you can select a specific window. I have not found a way to do this in with a wayland compositor yet.
I still get screen tearing.
I am running on a laptop, but I typically keep it plugged in as often as possible to save the battery so I haven't noticed if it's good or bad.
It's still a good trade IMO.
Spend the time to get acquainted, soon you will see you can do almost everything you need on linux (and more) that you can on Windows/macOS, but with less mental overhead (after you are used to linux, it really is simpler).
Also saving files in Debian is a bit of a pain. I think it keeps searching instead of actually typing the file name when you save a new word doc from libre office or another application.
Plus other services, like Netflix and Hulu, may not work out of the box. You’ll have to find a workaround but I think their official stance is still “Linux is not a supported platform”.
Don’t get me wrong Linux is great and it’s in a wonderful spot compared to 10 years ago. But it still does not have the polish or UX that users from windows and Mac expect in an operating system.
(I'm all ears on how to solve that file picker problem though, that is mildly annoying).
Use the for long time available patch for GTK file chooser, use an XDG portal to open KDE file chooser instead of the GTK one, or use a Qt-based (KDE or Deepin) rather a GTK-based environment. And for any interested programmers, a maintainer recently has outlined some steps[0] to introduce that functionality in a way that probably GNOME devs will accept.
[0]: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/233#note_1106706
Next time I'm on a graphical linux system I'll muck around with XDG to get PCManFM or whatever as default. Thanks.
Obviously this varies from person to person but I have verified already a more than a decade ago that it worked very well with ordinary users as long as they didn't need MS Office or anything like it.
And true: Netflix doesn't work but for that I use my phone/tablet that I cast to my TV.
You may say: not everyone has a PC and a phone but as far as I can see the overwhelming majority who has a PC also seems to have a smartphone.
Like, yes, most things have a learning curve. I have yet to encounter any evidence that Windows having a particularly easy one for anything is more than propaganda
I've got rid of my Netflix account; between Sky, Youtube and Freesat, there's more stuff to watch than I have time in the day.
You only have a directory file tree, that is often not in the right directory, where the application was launched from. No really way to directly jump to a directory via a path, that you copied from a open Explorer, which you might have open next to it, because you started the .exe from there. So you have to click your way through.
That one: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/windows/d...
Nevertheless, my days of advocating for others to use it are over (I even used to frequent comp.linux.advocacy!). People that are used to Windows will have a very hard time moving away of it. No matter how easy the migration path, there will always be something painful. The path of least resistance will always be running Windows. And in addition even the most polished Linux versions have issues. I've run them all. They are nice, but once you get into an obscure singular case, the console dance start. Wifi, sound, bluethoot, video, media-keyboard or mouse, fingerprint reader. There's always something.
We People who have been using linux for years are already used to it: google for a couple of minutes, open the terminal and copy/paste a bunch of commands. Sometimes it works, other times we compromise by not using that feature that doesn't work.
For people used to Windows this is very painful.
So yeah, I can imagine how people coming from windows might be frustrated with that.
* Plug in monitor 1
* Plug in monitor 2
Windows 10 was also not subject to this requirement, yet you're harassed when you try to keep your local login.
Imagine McDonald's applying such dark UI patterns: maybe forget part of your order, put your change on the table under a napkin so you don't notice it, only offer you the free ice cream the 3rd time you ask, etc. People would be up in arms!
But Microsoft?! Well, they are the darling of the tech world now so it must only be a prank no?
No evil to see here, sir!
Google and Apple do it too and no one has complained. Why suddenly the up and arms when Microsoft does it? That doesn't sound like a darling of the tech world to me.
People complain about Google and Apple too.
Though, not even Apple applied such dark patterns to force you to create an account with them. There's still time though!