Hacker News Reader

Comment by wink | Hacker News Reader

I've been using Linux for work for years (software developer) but my main machine at home is still running Windows 7 because for me, the state of gaming is still kind of horrible on Linux.

Am I the only one who just gave up because of video and sound driver issues? That's for 3d, of course - as stated above, everything in a window manager usually works just fine.

That said, this is awesome news, maybe I'll come around to try dualboot again (after many, many years) because it could be easier to get my Radeon working under Linux than some of the other chips (especially on laptops) in the past.

View on HN

It depends. I'm playing Enemy Unknown without a hitch with an older Nvidia card. The beta of Sunless Sea (arguably not a demanding game, but Unity seems to have a bad rep on Linux) runs well on Intel graphics. Gaming on Linux has improved by leaps and bounds, to the point where I gave up on dualbooting Windows a few years ago (though I'm not a avid gamer).

PS: don't know why you get downvoted. I wish it was possible to flag unwarranted downvotes...

Nowadays native games usually don't have issues and for the other ones wine often works, even with a somewhat unusual tiling window manager (Xmonad).

Performance is still not as good as on Windows though. For example I can't play Dota 2 because of low fps on linux but on windows it is playable.

You're not alone. Things are getting better, though. Drivers are definitely still an issue, but I think because of Steam's movement in the Linux market a lot of progress is going to be made... of course, maybe all this SteamOS stuff is just a hedge against Windows (to dissuade a move to a 100% app-store model on desktop).

Laptops and wireless are still definitely a big issue. I think desktops have a much better chance of working. Whether they work as well as Windows or not is a different question.

I dunno, this morning I was able to get minecraft, sims 3 (via wine) and steam (playing xcom) on an Arch/BridgeLinux liveUSB playing without issues in about 45 minutes. Kernel 3.12.x means the 3d was slower than I'd want (AMD free drivers are waaay faster in the new kernels), but I didn't want to do a full pacman -Syu on the liveUSB. Performance was decent, and had I installed to hard drive, would've been competitive with windows even without the catalyst drivers installed (which is a yaourt install away).

> Am I the only one who just gave up because of video and sound driver issues?

No issues here. I guess you may be running AMD hardware hence the video drivers issues, but I haven't had sound issues in games for years.

Nvidia. Installed System Shock 2 (through Steam) on my Linux machine at work. Ran it, cool, left the game and resolution was stuck at a really weird one (on 1 of 2 monitors) and I had to fix a problem.

Same game on Windows, likely no problem to fix.

Issues for sure still happen with Linux gaming. Many games are fine though, of course.

To be fair, dual screen setups and games have a history of trouble (even on Windows)

I have a dual screen desktop running Arch and I play games a lot, on the radeonSI Gallium driver and Intel driver.

The funny thing with multi-screen gaming on Linux is that the "default" target SDL picks is not your primary monitor, it is the monitor on the left. It doesn't matter what input order its in, or anything else, I can reconfigure my screens however I want but "full screen" always means leftmost panel.

That's more likely an issue with the game, the desktop, or some other component than the video driver.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com