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Comment by imbusy111 | Hacker News Reader

From my experience, it's still not a 100% replacement. For example, there are no drivers for a pretty common steering wheel (Logitech G923). There is a driver for an older version of the wheel that kind of works, but no TRUEFORCE support. And even then, you have to mess with some low level details to make it work, send magic values to the hardware on plugging it in.

I also noticed that games from Steam end up taking up substantially more disk space to the point where I can have only a few games installed on Linux.

And even the games without any special hardware dongles don't work so well as you imply.

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> For example, there are no drivers for a pretty common steering wheel (Logitech G923).

This is a nice, specific detail. Most of these comments are very vague.

> There is a driver for an older version of the wheel that kind of works

Do you mean an out of tree driver?

Would you test this and post back? The 6.3 kernel they mentioned 3 months ago is very old and likely a forked kernel.

https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/vb0b37/g29g92...

I am new to steering wheels-not sure if this is the exact version because they mention xbox)? Try a distro with a very recent kernel (6.11; like Nobara for a gaming focused distro).

> I also noticed that games from Steam end up taking up substantially more disk space to the point where I can have only a few games installed on Linux.

Shouldn't be substantially more disk space. Would you provide stats?

Proton makes a Windows environment for each game as it installs those 3rd party libraries in the environment and that is used for disk calculations, while on Windows those libraries may be installed directly to the OS. Each 3rd party library and the shader cache is stored separately. This is my guess-I do not work on Proton.

> And even the games without any special hardware dongles don't work so well as you imply.

Anticheat and a few obscure Windows libraries are an issue. River City Girls needs some media foundation library or it does not show cutscenes. Valve is working on them.

Anticheat is not some minor detail, lots of popular competitive games require it.

Specifically, these ones:

https://areweanticheatyet.com

I wish anticheat/multiplayer was universally an option on install. I don't play multiplayer games online, and often I'd like to be able to cheat in single-player, because I'm time-constrained and would like to cut out some part of the game I find less fun. Anticheat only makes my experience worse.

I think the point OP was trying to make is that there's still a large amount of programs and devices that don't work on wine. Probably for at least as many people that "everything just works" for, the opposite is true in my experience.

A question about the shader cache. what is it?

My steam system is somewhat questionable. it is netbooted, everything is nfs. This... well, it sort of sucks, I would not recommend it. But I love having the "one good drive" my NAS and then using that for everything, I am patient So I am sticking with it. But the "rebuilding shader cache". what is it doing? why does it take so long? why does it do it every time a launch a game? why am I offered a choice to skip it? why do I not notice any difference if I skip it?

I have a 10G connection to my nas but things are still much slower than I think they should be. I think it is related to poor interaction between nfs and a lot of small files. Otherwise, linux and proton are working great for games. When running games on windows I used iscsi for my games, and that worked well, I should probably do that on linux but I like having a filesystem on the far side instead of an opaque block device so I thought I would try nfs.

There are some weird artifacts in the system, I have to start steam twice, The first time it fails to connect to the webhelper, once everything is cached, it starts faster and thus works the second time, the shader cache takes forever and a day to rebuild, I can manually empty it which helps the next rebuild, I suspect many small files, having to check and replace them one by one, but I don't know, nfs tuning is somewhat of a dark art. Steam does not get along with my favorite tiling window manger(spectrwm) so I thought I would try that other openbsd floating window manager(CWM), steam is happier, but still has a few artifacts with menus, I suspect the CWM zero sized borders are the cause.

Overall, The experience is much worse than on windows, but that is because I made it that way, and so I am much happier than when I am on windows.

> But the "rebuilding shader cache". what is it doing? why does it take so long? why does it do it every time a launch a game?

Does that happen for every game, or just specific ones?

Asking because this is a behaviour I saw for a short time (week or two?) a few years ago, but these days it'll just do the "rebuilding shader cache" thing once for a game. Mostly after upgrading the Nvidia driver to a new release.

> I have a 10G connection to my nas but things are still much slower than I think they should be. I think it is related to poor interaction between nfs and a lot of small files.

That sounds more like your NAS is using hard drives (slow, especially in an array) rather than ssd's. Is that the case?

> There are some weird artifacts in the system, I have to start steam twice, The first time it fails to connect to the webhelper, once everything is cached, it starts faster and thus works the second time ...

Yeah, that really does sound like your storage isn't set up optimally, so is timing out as Steam loads into cache on your NAS. :(

Out of curiosity, what kind of NAS is it? :)

With regard to the shaders, I actually started steam instead of going off memory, it is any windows game, so proton is involved, and the message is "processing vulkan shaders", This take a long time to finish(5 minutes for simple game "CW4", Long enough I always skip for larger game "satifactory") I just checked and opposed to my memory it does appear to cache them correctly, that is, only run the process one time. I cleared the cache at one point as nothing was progressing(too many skips, corrupted cache?), I just deleted everything under "steamapps/shadercache" and this appeared to help.

You are probably correct about the nas, it is full of wd reds, that is, the very slow supposedly reliable drives. I was prioritizing cheap bulk space when I built it, hoping the infamous zfs cache would save me. On your not quite advise I will probably add a ssd pool and see how that affects the whole system.

The nas is a 5 year old home built clone of a IX systems truenas box. 32gb memory.

Thank you very much for your kind words on the subject. It is more than I deserve for my screwball system.

No worries at all. I've used TrueNAS before, and you should be fine with adding an ssd pool. That'll work well with a 10GbE connection. :)

There's one thing you might want to try first though, which is to create an iSCSI volume from your hard disk pool and try running your Steam library from that instead of NFS.

iSCSI is a "single user at a time" access thing (unlike NFS), but the caching acts differently to nfs so you might get a better result. Or not. ;)

Am suggesting that as it could be useful to try prior to spending money on ssds. :)

The actual mounting of your TrueNAS iSCSI volume from a Linux box just needs the installation of "open-iscsi" (on Debian anyway).

You run the appropriate iscsiadm command to log in to the iSCSI portal, then mount it:

  # iscsiadm --mode node --targetname "iqn.2005-10.org.freenas.ctl:myshare1" --portal myserver --login
  # mount -o noatime /dev/disk/by-label/NAME_OF_THE_SHARE_IN_TRUENAS /Games

Unmounting the iSCSI share afterwards is the standard umount command, then you log out of the iSCSI portal:

  # umount /Games
  # iscsiadm --mode node --targetname "iqn.2005-10.org.freenas.ctl:myshare1" --portal myserver --logout

Anyway, hope that helps. :)

Heh, and now I just noticed your earlier message had this:

  When running games on windows I used iscsi for my games, and that worked well ...

Ahhh well. If you want to try iSCSI for the Linux side of things too, then the above might help. :)

Using an ssd pool on the nas will be your best bet though. With a 10GbE connection it'll feel like a natively attached ssd, which sounds like it'd be a massive improvement for you. :D

I still don't get why wheels even need drivers at this point. It's 2024 and even with a legit version of Windows, there are all kinds of problems with all different wheels and all different games. We have a couple of axes and a bunch of buttons and some feedback. Steering wheels have been around for at least 30 years.

And if you DO have a driver, why does the fucking game have to have a list of supported steering wheels? Shouldn't that be abstracted away from the game? Isn't that the whole point of all those gaming and device APIs that Microsoft has built?

The experience with racing games isn't great on Windows, it's going to be worse on Linux where manufacturers put exactly zero investment into making it work and the crossover between sim racers and Linux developers is very small.

> From my experience, it's still not a 100% replacement

if it were a perfect replacemente, there would be no Windows.

for some it's good enough to endure the rough spots.

if you want to replace Windows and give yourself a gray area, and you can afford it, get a computer with 2 gpus and use a VM with VFIO and looking glass and you can contain its naughtiness away while enojoying it at native speed for gaming or whatever you want at 4k@120hz in a window or fullscreen inside Linux.

It's possible to do this with one GPU. The downside is that you have to shut down the VM in order to get back to your Linux desktop.

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