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Comment by lifetimerubyist | Hacker News Reader

I replaced Windows with Linux about 6 months ago. Then I ran into a game I really wanted to play but it didn’t run well with Proton (not kernel anti-cheat, just bad performance) after all the tweaks so I just reserved to dual booting with Windows 10.

After not using Windows for so long, I came to realize that Windows is just as much a mess as Linux just in different ways. You get used to the quirks so you don’t notice them after a while but they are definitely there.

Most of my games work just fine or even better on Linux. Some of my older games don’t even work on Windows that work perfectly under Wine/Proton which is truely miraculous. The Wine team and Valve have made some incredible contributions to the preservation of games on PC, it can’t be understated.

So I daily drive Linux and play those handful of games on Windows, and I’ll probably stay this way for now and try the proton situation again in a few years.

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I saw a gal say that a Windows VM worked solid for gaming, after passing through a GPU.

EDIT: I hunted for the link, to deliver it to you! https://astrid.tech/2022/09/22/0/nixos-gpu-vfio/

thank you!

> Then I ran into a game I really wanted to play but it didn’t run well with Proton

Out of curiosity, which game?

I promise I am not asking as a gotcha. Just genuinely curious.

I don't play many new games on PC (normally I play recent games on consoles). What I play on PC is older/niche games.

I have a couple of oddballs that I could not make work on Proton. Others had weird issues that got fixed over time.

Sometimes there is a fix, such as fiddling with different Proton versions, etc. Lutris makes this somewhat straightforward.

The game is called HROT it’s an indie “boomer shooter”. The game was first locked to 30fps which is horrible for an FPS. Then I got that figured out, but FPS was all over the place and it felt basically unplayable to me even though I was often getting 100+ FPS. Frame pacing was absolutey FUBAR’d no matter which version of Proton or Wine, so even though frames were high it still felt terrible to play. So I just decided to create a Windows dual-boot just for the odd game. Now I can get a locked framerate to my monitor refresh and the game feels great to play.

It’s basically “Soviet Quake”. Very moody atmosphere with just weird random details in the game. Amazing level design.

On the flip side. The original Max Payne does not play on Windows but it works perfectly on Linux for me.

I wonder if this might be some odd library issue that could be fixed in the WINE prefix.

I knew a guy that wanted to play a Japanese version of a JRPG on Linux and he figured out he needed some weird libraries there to properly render the font, which was causing the game to not start.

Anyway, for older games and emulators, playing on Linux has been a magnificent experience for the most part.

Part of it was the game just didn’t play nice with Wayland, and since I use Gnome I don’t have an X11 session available. I could’ve tried on a different DE but didn’t want to install a bunch of extra bloat; yet I installed a whole other Os…sigh

shrugs

Maybe I’ll try switching to KDE and see if it works better under X11 there.

Out of incessant curiosity and borderline obsession - I installed KDE, then I enabled the experimental Wayland support for Proton and tried the game again.

It runs great now. The Wayland support didn't seem to do anything when I was using Gnome but it's a noticeable difference on KDE. As long as I disable vsync which locks the framerate at 30fps for some reason. But overall the game is very playable on Linux now.

Guess I'm switching to KDE.

This is actually great to know!

This makes me wonder if this would be a preferable setup for Proton.

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