There are about 30 different ways to do any single thing and whatever way you choose is guaranteed to provoke 17 neckbeards into writing essays on why you’re wrong and, while they’re at it, you also picked the wrong distro.
On the other hand:
the clocks just tell time
your user directory isn’t stored in a data center 1500 miles away
the update process understands the concept of consent, and;
you can create a local user account during install without … whatever this is.
I’m old, and can’t be fucked learning a whole new system. I just want to browse the internet and play my games. The biggest barrier is getting my simracing gear and modded Assetto Corsa working on it.
Yeah, I completely understand. I bounced off Linux desktop several times and I’m a sysadmin.
It’s only the last few years where there have been rapid and significant improvements to get gaming so it “just works*” and both of the popular desktop environments, KDE (Windows-like) and gnome (Mac-like) have had a heavy focus on fixing all of the little fiddly annoyances that turned people off.
It’s not perfect and it can be annoying, but its dramatically better than it was 5 years ago while Windows keeps moving in the opposite direction.
I’m not trying to sell you on it really, Linus doesn’t pay me commissions. Windows isn’t THAT bad and learning a new OS is a big ask.
I’ve just been impressed by the state of things and enjoy yapping about it.
There are about 30 different ways to do any single thing and whatever way you choose is guaranteed to provoke 17 neckbeards into writing essays on why you’re wrong and, while they’re at it, you also picked the wrong distro.
My favorite one is
“Oh linux is easy these days, you don’t have to even open the terminal”
“Haha noob why did you install the flatpak version, never do that, always install everything as .debs through terminal”
You can just click on debs in your file manager, no different from an exe in that aspect… but sure, i guess you could run an exe via cmd if you really wanted to
Haha oh yes, it’s just whenever I search for some solutions it feels like I end up finding at least one reply with the instructions to use terminal only for installing
As someone who isn’t scared of the terminal, I don’t get the fear really. What’s the difference from opening a store app or web browser and searching for an application and asking your package manager to search for an application? Either way, you just type the name and it gives you results. I guess the package manager you at least know it’s from a mostly trusted source (usually, unless you do something to allow exceptions), while a web search isn’t always.
Why you find terminal instructions online is because it works for every system though. It doesn’t matter what distro you have, or what packages; they all have a terminal and the same base. This isn’t true for package manager instructions though, because there are several, and different distros provide different ones.
The big one I see across most distros is: Pipewire needs better default minimum quants.
I see so many complaints about crackling audio and it’s almost always that pipewire defaults to using a tiny buffer for lower latency and system load (like gaming) can cause the buffers to empty resulting in crackling.
If this happens, you can fix it temporarily (it’ll last until you reboot):
pw-metadata -n settings 0 clock force-quantum 256
Increase the 256 to 512 or higher until the crackling goes away (it doesn’t need to be a power of two, any integer will work). It’ll take effect immediately you don’t need to restart pipewire.
OK, so tell me how to get Assetto Corsa Content Manager, Custom Shaders Patch and all the other mods I have installed, Quest 2 VR and Moza Pit House working in Linux, because that’s the thing keeping me from switching. Would WINE work well enough for that?
The answer is generally: Proton/Steam. There was a patch to WINE or Proton recently that made it much easier to use mods that require custom DLLs.
The core weird trick is understanding that there’s a directory for your game (once installed/setup in Proton) that’s essentially the C: drive. As far as your game is concerned, it’s running on Windows where it is the only non-system software installed.
So, any mods that are just scripts/plugins where you copy them into a folder then launch the game (anything without DLL, basically), you install the same way… But you use the directory, that contains the “C drive” for that specific game.
It sound complicated but once you do it once or twice it’ll feel familiar. You just now have a unique “C drive” directory for each game.
You can install/run multiple applications in the same bottle (basically what WINE calls the fake-c-drive-using windows environment). For example, when I play PoE2, I use a third party program to make trading easier. I just run that program inside the same bottle as the game and they think they’re both running on the same computer.
For basic things like installing and playing games on Steam it’s all handled automatically. You click the install button and then click the play button. Installing workshop mods is also exactly like in Windows. Steam just knows how to use WINE/Proton.
That approach doesn’t work for any game, tho. For example, I can’t get mods working for World of Tanks. If I move the mid files in the directory where they normally would be under Windows, WoT crashes when I start it.
For the method that you’re using, you could enable proton logging and that would let you see the traceback of the crash. It may give you a bit more information about what it was trying to do when it crashed.
Essentially, if you can install the game with Steam it works out of the box. According to Protondb (https://www.protondb.com/app/244210) the game has a Gold rating which means it works without any major flaws.
As far as mods, I’d need to know which other mods you use to see if there are any specific instructions/issues.
List of force feedback steering wheels, the driver needed to use them and a rating of how well they work with Linux. It looks like all Moza products have a Platinum rating so they work flawlessly.
https://github.com/JacKeTUs/linux-steering-wheels
Thanks. I will say, though, that still seems pretty lengthy and complicated to get working. ;) But I guess I only have to do it once.
Most of the other mods are simply cars and tracks, which I guess are just drag and drop like in Windows. The only other one that might be an issue is the 2Real traffic/pedestrian mods.
I will say, though, that still seems pretty lengthy and complicated to get working. ;) But I guess I only have to do it once.
Yeah it is. Though, if you’re doing sim racing and also modding a game it isn’t an inherently a plug and play situation even in Windows. :P
Most of the games I play are just ‘buy, click install on Steam, press play’.
The only other one that might be an issue is the 2Real traffic/pedestrian mods.
It looks like you can run the install.bat file in the wine prefix via protontricks and then copy the csp traffic tool, car pack and traffic/pedestrian.json files in the appropriate folders.
You may have to click the ‘Try to Fix’ button in the taskbar in Practice mode to auto-install the traffic mods, but this seems like something that you have to do on Windows too.
Yeah it is. Though, if you’re doing sim racing and also modding a game it isn’t an inherently a plug and play situation even in Windows. :P
True, but I’m at least familiar with it.
Most of the games I play are just ‘buy, click install on Steam, press play’.
All my games are installed on a non-OS drive. Will I have to re-download them, or will Steam automatically detect them once I point it to the directory?
There are certain Linux distributions that come with all basics pre-installed and are designed to be convenient. All ubuntu derivatives, Mint, Pop_OS, Zorin etc. I know it because I use one and it’s just as convenient as Windows.
You can be sure these distributions will cause you no trouble because they are made by companies that put them in their computers or design them to be on pre-builts and therefore cannot be allowed to be difficult to use. For example, System76 developed Pop_OS to be used in their PCs. SteamOS is developed by Valve for the handheld console. These aren’t indie projects some hobbyists made.
For your programs, we now have flatpaks/snaps that make a program work even if it’s not developed specifically for your distribution. Valve developed Proton for its console, and it “translates” almost all games to Linux, including some games with anti-cheat. I have a library of 500+ games and they are all compatible. You can install any program with a click of a button, it’s just as easy as running an .exe file.
This was somewhat true 15 to 10 years ago. It wasn’t true for a while. There is however endless amount of discussions about the way to make it just the way you like it and because a lot of that is subjective, those will get heated. However if you want it to just work, that is pretty easy to arrange.
My wife is a linguist and an English teacher, about as far from being a tech person as you can get. She’s running Arch daily since 2020, and the only help she needed from me was to set it up and to teach how to install and update apps. The amount of tech support that was required of me almost daily when she was running Windows can’t even be compared.
I’m still plugging along with Windows 10. :) It’s mostly just laziness about having to go through and reinstall everything on a clean install that’s causing the most resistance to change, and the thought of learning an operating system I’m not familiar with just adds to the inertia.
What even are the significant differences with different distros? I’ve seen Bazzite recommended as the best one for gaming. Mint comes pretty strongly recommended as well.
Yeah, I get that. But you’ll have to do that anyway and when the time comes, getting Linux will be there for you.
Regarding distros, it really doesn’t matter at the beginning, hoping from distro to distro if you need it later is dead easy, most of the time it’s as easy as running one command to install all the apps, and copying your /home/ dir, it will transfer wast majority of all your settings, if not all. Some apps are stubborn but those are outliers.
So the choice of a distro basically comes to a single thing you care about. Like, for example, some are “rolling release”, which means they try to have all the libs and apps and other shit up to date, some are “stable”, which means they don’t update that often. Both have their ups and downs, personally I find rolling releases easier to deal with.
The biggest difference for a novice is what desktop environment is the default one, and that’s basically a matter of preference (but actually KDE is the best of them, and that’s my objective opinion).
I’d switch if every discussion about Linux didn’t devolve into lengthy discussions about the complicated ways you need get anything working on it.
e: ^^^ don’t downvote them -_-;;
Fair.
There are about 30 different ways to do any single thing and whatever way you choose is guaranteed to provoke 17 neckbeards into writing essays on why you’re wrong and, while they’re at it, you also picked the wrong distro.
On the other hand:
I’m old, and can’t be fucked learning a whole new system. I just want to browse the internet and play my games. The biggest barrier is getting my simracing gear and modded Assetto Corsa working on it.
Yeah, I completely understand. I bounced off Linux desktop several times and I’m a sysadmin.
It’s only the last few years where there have been rapid and significant improvements to get gaming so it “just works*” and both of the popular desktop environments, KDE (Windows-like) and gnome (Mac-like) have had a heavy focus on fixing all of the little fiddly annoyances that turned people off.
It’s not perfect and it can be annoying, but its dramatically better than it was 5 years ago while Windows keeps moving in the opposite direction.
I’m not trying to sell you on it really, Linus doesn’t pay me commissions. Windows isn’t THAT bad and learning a new OS is a big ask.
I’ve just been impressed by the state of things and enjoy yapping about it.
Obligatory “Gnome is NOT Mac-like” comment.
The Windows people think Gnome is Mac-like. Hah, no it’s not! Gnome is its own weird thing.
KDE can actually get a lot closer to Mac than Gnome can, if you add a top menu bar, rearrange some stuff, and move the titlebar buttons around.
(We came from Mac land originally, and that’s how we have our KDE set up. Mostly.)
– Frost
My favorite one is
“Oh linux is easy these days, you don’t have to even open the terminal”
“Haha noob why did you install the flatpak version, never do that, always install everything as .debs through terminal”
You can just click on debs in your file manager, no different from an exe in that aspect… but sure, i guess you could run an exe via cmd if you really wanted to
Haha oh yes, it’s just whenever I search for some solutions it feels like I end up finding at least one reply with the instructions to use terminal only for installing
As someone who isn’t scared of the terminal, I don’t get the fear really. What’s the difference from opening a store app or web browser and searching for an application and asking your package manager to search for an application? Either way, you just type the name and it gives you results. I guess the package manager you at least know it’s from a mostly trusted source (usually, unless you do something to allow exceptions), while a web search isn’t always.
Why you find terminal instructions online is because it works for every system though. It doesn’t matter what distro you have, or what packages; they all have a terminal and the same base. This isn’t true for package manager instructions though, because there are several, and different distros provide different ones.
For most popular distros most stuff works out of the gate. It’s been a long time since I’ve had to wrestle with anything vexing.
The big one I see across most distros is: Pipewire needs better default minimum quants.
I see so many complaints about crackling audio and it’s almost always that pipewire defaults to using a tiny buffer for lower latency and system load (like gaming) can cause the buffers to empty resulting in crackling.
If this happens, you can fix it temporarily (it’ll last until you reboot):
Increase the 256 to 512 or higher until the crackling goes away (it doesn’t need to be a power of two, any integer will work). It’ll take effect immediately you don’t need to restart pipewire.
That depends on the distro, just choose one that’s beginner-friendly or “works out of the box”
LMDE, Zorin, etc.
Linux Mint is also great for new users.
That’s LMDE, except LMDE uses Debian for upstream instead of Ubuntu. It’s the same developers though.
OK, so tell me how to get Assetto Corsa Content Manager, Custom Shaders Patch and all the other mods I have installed, Quest 2 VR and Moza Pit House working in Linux, because that’s the thing keeping me from switching. Would WINE work well enough for that?
I’ll legit look into this tomorrow. e: Done - https://lemmy.world/post/46306690/23526313
The answer is generally: Proton/Steam. There was a patch to WINE or Proton recently that made it much easier to use mods that require custom DLLs.
The core weird trick is understanding that there’s a directory for your game (once installed/setup in Proton) that’s essentially the C: drive. As far as your game is concerned, it’s running on Windows where it is the only non-system software installed.
So, any mods that are just scripts/plugins where you copy them into a folder then launch the game (anything without DLL, basically), you install the same way… But you use the directory, that contains the “C drive” for that specific game.
It sound complicated but once you do it once or twice it’ll feel familiar. You just now have a unique “C drive” directory for each game.
You can install/run multiple applications in the same bottle (basically what WINE calls the fake-c-drive-using windows environment). For example, when I play PoE2, I use a third party program to make trading easier. I just run that program inside the same bottle as the game and they think they’re both running on the same computer.
For basic things like installing and playing games on Steam it’s all handled automatically. You click the install button and then click the play button. Installing workshop mods is also exactly like in Windows. Steam just knows how to use WINE/Proton.
That approach doesn’t work for any game, tho. For example, I can’t get mods working for World of Tanks. If I move the mid files in the directory where they normally would be under Windows, WoT crashes when I start it.
For WOT/WOWS you should be ablt to run Aslains modpack installer inside of the wine prefix with protontricks: https://github.com/Matoking/protontricks
For the method that you’re using, you could enable proton logging and that would let you see the traceback of the crash. It may give you a bit more information about what it was trying to do when it crashed.
Ok, my coffee fueled morning research:
Essentially, if you can install the game with Steam it works out of the box. According to Protondb (https://www.protondb.com/app/244210) the game has a Gold rating which means it works without any major flaws.
There’s a guide to get Assetto Corsa setup: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2828364666
If you don’t want to fuss with all of this manually, someone has created a script to do most of the work here: https://github.com/sihawido/assettocorsa-linux-setup
As far as mods, I’d need to know which other mods you use to see if there are any specific instructions/issues.
List of force feedback steering wheels, the driver needed to use them and a rating of how well they work with Linux. It looks like all Moza products have a Platinum rating so they work flawlessly. https://github.com/JacKeTUs/linux-steering-wheels
Moza Pit House doesn’t work, but someone has created a flatpak native Linux version: https://flathub.org/en/apps/io.github.lawstorant.boxflat
Here’s a compilation of links for software to get various pieces of simracing gear working: https://github.com/LukasLichten/awesome-linux-simracing
Steam VR via Quest 2 using ALVR: https://pawamoy.github.io/posts/steam-linux-alvr-quest2/
Legend! I’m saving this post for when I do finally get the motivation to switch.
The main mods I’m concerned about are Custom Shaders Patch and Pure, but I believe the devs are working on Linux versions of those as well.
If you do and run into any trouble, feel free to DM me. :)
Thanks. I will say, though, that still seems pretty lengthy and complicated to get working. ;) But I guess I only have to do it once.
Most of the other mods are simply cars and tracks, which I guess are just drag and drop like in Windows. The only other one that might be an issue is the 2Real traffic/pedestrian mods.
Yeah it is. Though, if you’re doing sim racing and also modding a game it isn’t an inherently a plug and play situation even in Windows. :P
Most of the games I play are just ‘buy, click install on Steam, press play’.
It looks like you can run the install.bat file in the wine prefix via protontricks and then copy the csp traffic tool, car pack and traffic/pedestrian.json files in the appropriate folders.
You may have to click the ‘Try to Fix’ button in the taskbar in Practice mode to auto-install the traffic mods, but this seems like something that you have to do on Windows too.
True, but I’m at least familiar with it.
All my games are installed on a non-OS drive. Will I have to re-download them, or will Steam automatically detect them once I point it to the directory?
There are certain Linux distributions that come with all basics pre-installed and are designed to be convenient. All ubuntu derivatives, Mint, Pop_OS, Zorin etc. I know it because I use one and it’s just as convenient as Windows.
You can be sure these distributions will cause you no trouble because they are made by companies that put them in their computers or design them to be on pre-builts and therefore cannot be allowed to be difficult to use. For example, System76 developed Pop_OS to be used in their PCs. SteamOS is developed by Valve for the handheld console. These aren’t indie projects some hobbyists made.
For your programs, we now have flatpaks/snaps that make a program work even if it’s not developed specifically for your distribution. Valve developed Proton for its console, and it “translates” almost all games to Linux, including some games with anti-cheat. I have a library of 500+ games and they are all compatible. You can install any program with a click of a button, it’s just as easy as running an .exe file.
Not true. Standard Debian install on Thinkpad takes 15 Minutes. I don’t need more words.
How long can a discussion be about pressing a button to install a thing from the package manager, then launch said thing?
This was somewhat true 15 to 10 years ago. It wasn’t true for a while. There is however endless amount of discussions about the way to make it just the way you like it and because a lot of that is subjective, those will get heated. However if you want it to just work, that is pretty easy to arrange.
My wife is a linguist and an English teacher, about as far from being a tech person as you can get. She’s running Arch daily since 2020, and the only help she needed from me was to set it up and to teach how to install and update apps. The amount of tech support that was required of me almost daily when she was running Windows can’t even be compared.
Like… what exactly lol?
Most discussions about Linux here devolve into distro sledging lol.
Even the joke stuff like Nvidia is from a bygone era.
My personal recommendation is Fedora, but any competent distro is miles more user friendly than current windows 11.
I’m still plugging along with Windows 10. :) It’s mostly just laziness about having to go through and reinstall everything on a clean install that’s causing the most resistance to change, and the thought of learning an operating system I’m not familiar with just adds to the inertia.
What even are the significant differences with different distros? I’ve seen Bazzite recommended as the best one for gaming. Mint comes pretty strongly recommended as well.
Yeah, I get that. But you’ll have to do that anyway and when the time comes, getting Linux will be there for you.
Regarding distros, it really doesn’t matter at the beginning, hoping from distro to distro if you need it later is dead easy, most of the time it’s as easy as running one command to install all the apps, and copying your /home/ dir, it will transfer wast majority of all your settings, if not all. Some apps are stubborn but those are outliers.
So the choice of a distro basically comes to a single thing you care about. Like, for example, some are “rolling release”, which means they try to have all the libs and apps and other shit up to date, some are “stable”, which means they don’t update that often. Both have their ups and downs, personally I find rolling releases easier to deal with.
The biggest difference for a novice is what desktop environment is the default one, and that’s basically a matter of preference (but actually KDE is the best of them, and that’s my objective opinion).