Man, I wish. The problem nowadays is that denuvo is actually effective - many titles that are rather popular but have denuvo DRM haven’t been cracked for years at this point, so the only practical choice is to wait for years until those game companies stop their contract subscriptions and DRM gets removed.
RIP. Even though she got a lot of shit from the youtube community, at least she was a bit better than what youtube currently has.
Same as you, I was somewhat already leaning towards Linux but seeing Windows 10 EOL announced around 3 years ago and seeing what new “features” are going to be implemented to Windows 11, I decided to hop ship.
The main reason for switch was privacy concerns, got redpilled by Mental Outlaw while he was still making regular Linux videos.
Directx 11 in this case, played bg3 on Linux and that was the only option that worked, and it did work quite well.
As for when to use one or the other, just check protondb. People usually leave what they played on, they even leave some useful launch commands or solutions to issues that could possibly arise, so it’s always worth a look.
My very first distro was Manjaro actually - I tried it twice but there would always be some graphics related issue I would encounter that I couldn’t troubleshoot as a beginner (even though I’d spend a week looking for a solution on forums), and I’d move back to Windows. Finally getting the courage to try out Arch which was considered the “big scary meme distro” was what made me stay with Linux.
The biggest thing for me was that I actually knew what was installed on my system and what the function most of the major programs served (things like xorg, multilib graphics drivers, pipewire/pulseaudio, desktop environments/window managers), so whenever I encountered an issue or wanted to customize something, I would sort of know where to start looking.
Of course, all this depends on the person - not all power users are the same. For me, arch worked best but someone else might gravitate towards fedora, debian or whatever else and their way of doing things.
Arch isn’t a bad choice for a new Linux user who was a power user on Windows. You get to actually know what’s installed on your system which can really help during the inevitable troubleshooting, though it’s definitely a trial by fire when it comes to manual install and setting up the environment.
Recommending Gentoo to a new user though is a war crime.
99% of distro hoppers quit before finding the perfect distro
Damn, I had a malicious version installed on my Arch machine. I’ve since done a system update which removes the backdoor, but looking more into it, it does seem that only fedora and debian(?) are affected/targeted but better safe than sorry.
It’s not the biggest issue I managed to fix, but it was definitely the hardest to figure out a fix for:
Whenever I would boot up any game on my Linux machine I would have microstutters ever so often, and it was frequent and lengthy enough to be very annoying, and thus started my 2 month long quest to figure out what was going wrong.
To cut a long story short, the compositor I was using had suddenly decided to do a breaking update and change the names of the backends they were using.
There’s pretty much only two ways you can go about it in my experience:
Fail forwards and try cobbling something together, constantly using search engines to fix errors or finding libraries or getting help with those libraries. One thing you’d have to figure out is an order of operations - what do you code and in what order, which might be tough for someone new but I’d say it’s well worth it.
Find some tutorial to a project and try following it (those that have step by step guide on what you should do without letting you copy paste code), then using the knowledge you gain to do the way #1 above to hopefully have an easier time figuring out the order of operations, plan out your program and what you’re gonna be coding.
Don’t think you can avoid getting hands-on and coding something up by yourself. General coding tutorials can only get you so far and are often harmful if abused too much (aka being stuck in tutorial hell).
Wonder if that’s the “alienation of labor” thing Marx was talking about
Yeah I used it as well, but I was missing a couple of dependencies and realized that I have to move the loadorder files around in order for mods to be loaded. Was pretty annoying but it worked in the end.
Kitty for both X and Wayland - I like the customization (as in I already have the config file that I have backed up and can just plop it in), it works perfectly on any VM (used it on sway, hyprland, i3, awesomewm), though honestly I don’t see much of a difference between the terminal emulators. There’s literally no wrong choice or meaningful difference in my experience at least, but admittedly I just use a terminal emulator to run commands, neovim and system file editing.
me, trying to setup Skyrim mods to play Skyrim CO-OP with friends and constantly failing to setup a mod manager:
I know this is quite unprompted, but did you install correct video drivers? You gotta install proprietary nvidia drivers and its 32-bit libraries instead of nouveau
It’ll probably be fine, although I’d personally pick some rolling-release distro for better performance.
In any case, besides the release model I’m pretty sure a distribution you use doesn’t matter that much. Usually every somewhat popular distro has the same few packages you need for games to work (32-bit libs, wine, steam, whatever).
Gentoo - too long compile time, especially on my dated CPU. I prefer my system to update quickly.
Linux Mint - don’t like apt, some packages I installed refused to work properly (like Lutris), and the color scheme which is admittedly customizable but I prefer rolling with defaults except when using WM.
Void Linux - after installing it I realized how much I actually missed systemd, couldn’t be arsed to symlink services manually. And yes, I realize that’s the whole point.
NixOS - realized how much there is to learn with the flakes and separating home configurations and whatever, and just gave up
Manjaro - I tried it twice at the beginning of my Linux journey, and both times the nvidia driver shat itself and gave me different problems that I couldn’t fix.
Maybe I’ve been spoiled by Arch though, as most of my problems probably boil down to “not the same packages”, “not pacman”, “need to learn new skills that weren’t in Arch” and so on. Though admittedly, I did try to explore with an open mind to find a new “cool” distro, but I’d always go back.
I haven’t used Ubuntu, but I had a similar setup to yours in the past, and on Archlinux I couldn’t run any game until I installed 32 bit nvidia drivers (on arch the package was named lib32-nvidia-utils), and that’s my first instinct - maybe you don’t have 32 bit drivers installed?
Now, as I haven’t used Ubuntu much I’m just going off of online reference so there commands might not be 100% correct, but try doing this:
sudo dpkg --add-architecture i386 to add 32-bit app support
sudo apt install -y libvulkan1 libvulkan1:i386 to install the vulkan drivers, including the 32 bit one. I’m not sure if this will have the same effect as lib32-nvidia-utils package on Arch though or if it does the same thing, but hopefully it works.
As for League, it does work on Linux quite well, but the installation is a little bit unusual. The gameplay though is literally the same as on Windows, no performance loss there at least in my experience.
I’m going to do a hard disagree here - they don’t have to support Linux, just add compatibility in terms of anti-cheat for Linux. Proton is likely good enough to run the game itself but the anti-cheat sees Linux and just craps itself.
They don’t even have to provide support - League of Legends runs on Linux if you install the game using community scripts and custom proton, and while the client runs poorly nobody spams the Riot Games support about how the “Linux version” client doesn’t work the well because people understand that it’s a community effort. Riot themselves have only made a statement saying how they’ll try not to break the game for Linux users, and that’s pretty much it.
League of Legends is a massively popular game as well, yet Riot barely has to do anything to maintain it on Linux, let community fix issues that come up, let community provide support as it’s their tools.
And while I do understand that porting an anti-cheat to be more friendly to another operating system isn’t an easy task (such as for Rust, where they tried to make the anti-cheat compatible with Linux but it introduced other issues so it got shelved), I think you’re vastly overstating the amount of areas a company has to cover for a game to be playable on Linux.
Welcome to the club - after starting to use window managers around 3 years ago at this point, I haven’t gone back. Whenever I’m forced to use Windows or a regular DE, I start instinctively abusing virtual desktops feature lol