Look long story short, what i expected to be a short install ended up being a 5 hour manhunt for an issue that resulted in needing a closed source instead of open source nvidia driver. Shes all switched to linux, and if her trial goes well and i don’t end up tearing my hair out doing tech support. I may switch over as well, probably a different distro though.
One thing i will say though, even though the state of gaming has drastically improved since my first foray into linux, the “fine details” of gaming have not. Fuck me the first time i looked into the modding scene on linux and how much busywork that took, that just killed a little bit of my soul. Even trying to get her game open, we first had a xbox game controller bluetooth not connecting issue, my bandaid was to do a wired connection, and sitting here just now i hear a laugh and look back and see this in her game. What i can only imagine is some sort of video player error, but the game works. Its rough, but it works.
It’ll be interesting to see how this goes, thats for sure
Weirdly enough linuxmint with lutris + steam works fine for me. I followed this guide in order to figure out lutris configurations. Don’t download protonupqt though, just download through lutris.
I plan on making a post of my own personal experiences in the coming weeks. However, I will issue caution to others who may believe themselves to be higher on the tech savvy ladder: forget most of what you do with Windows and accept that Linux, no matter the distro or DE, is not going to be 100% like your previous Windows experiences. Tech peeps typically have a high level of OS/system customization. These don’t usually translate well to a non-Windows OS. On other “managed” operating systems, you might try things, but not be able to really do damage. If you try to force it with Linux, you will fuck yourself.
I’m really concerned about my MiL and wife as they both have machines with NVidia cards. My wife and her mother play Sims 3, as well. Her mom’s game, specifically, is extremely mod-heavy and she is religious about updating her mods when patches drop (she’s retired so has a shit ton of time to do that monthly, I guess). I’ve talked to her about getting off Windows, but I’m nervous to get her on any version of Linux because 1) I don’t play Sims 3 nor do mods for it, 2) I’m a tech-baby with Linux troubleshooting, unlike Windows, and 3) I’m just a registry editor 💔, so I’m concerned I won’t be able to support her potential sticking points with it and Sims 3 and it’ll further entrench her against Windows and change, in general.
Good luck on your journey, regardless. The people in this community are pretty great (including the Arch and Vi users, I guess)! Totally wasn’t held at gun point while saying that last bit. Nope, not at all!
However, I will issue caution to others who may believe themselves to be higher on the tech savvy ladder: forget most of what you do with Windows and accept that Linux, no matter the distro or DE, is not going to be 100% like your previous Windows experiences. Tech peeps typically have a high level of OS/system customization. These don’t usually translate well to a non-Windows OS. On other “managed” operating systems, you might try things, but not be able to really do damage. If you try to force it with Linux, you will fuck yourself.
This, right here, if you’re a tech savvy windows user considering migrating, read the above until you’ve internalized it. Don’t trust me? Go watch Linus from LTT use Linux and break everything in a matter of hours because he literally answered “Yes, I know what I’m doing” when he had no idea.
It’s my experience that tech savvy windows users know enough to be a danger to themselves, and worse, have the confidence to shoot themselves in the foot.
Yeah, i have an example of this. I spent since time today building a local copy of handbrake have it run in a distrobox of arch to get AMD hardware acceleration as an option. The flatpak version refused to do this. It wasn’t too bad, but still wild i did this.
As part of “Steam Play”, videos are re-encoded and downloaded to allow playback via proton in certain cases. On subsequent runs of the game, the video will likely work fine.
Oh it’s the transphobic billionaire’s game. Nice 👍
Good job on bazzite. I hope you torrented that game tho instead of giving even more money to that transphobic piece of shit.
It’s a weird cycle of “it’s not an OS used by gamers so we don’t have to support it” and “nobody supports it so I don’t wanna use it.”
And the part that sucks is that writing drivers for linux was probably trivial to these companies compared to windows but they just didn’t wanna because it’s unpopular.
My suspicion for Nvidia not opening their drivers is that they have something shifty going on, maybe benchmark “optimizations” or some other trickery.
That, and they’re plain evil.
I think it was a Finnish philosopher who once said it best: Fuck you, Nvidia.
Gotta love Finnish philosophy!
It’s much simpler than that actually. Nvidia makes a lot of money in feature licensing, particularly GRID/vgpu. If they fully open-sourced the driver they would have no method of enforcing license restrictions.
What i can only imagine is some sort of video player error
My guess is, your system is missing a video codec, probably a gstreamer plugin like libav (I don’t know what its called on Bazzite, something like gst-plugin-libav or gst-libav …).
If you would start the game from console or find the steam log file you should see a error message. (I’m not at home now and rarely use steam, so I can’t look it up now).
close, but it would actually be missing the codec in proton. bazzite actually comes with a very comprehensive ffmpeg build and all its dependencies.
steam just can’t include those proprietary libs in proton. luckily, protonge exists for this exact reason.
There was no mention of this, but if you’re dual booting (which I don’t recommend to anyone anymore) that might be causing the Bluetooth issue. Windows doesn’t properly “let go” of some Hardware when you “shut down” with default settings. This is because the default settings are to hibernate instead of properly shutting down. Linux boots up and the hardware doesn’t load correctly.
I hate to be that guy, but this is just the Linux BT stack being… Not great. Don’t get me wrong, I love Linux, but Bluetooth is one area I still see issues with every other update. Headphones using wrong audio codec, devices dropping out, incorrect ordering of trust login actions, etc.
Interesting. Do I have to double shutdown?
If I remember correctly, I think the solutions are to disable Fast Boot and Hibernation in Windows, then shut down?
Which, this solves a lot of Windows issues even if you don’t use Linux.
The xbox controller thing is because you gotta update the driver of the xbox controller on windows, then it works. (Source: had to do it)
Not necessarily, could be a Bluetooth driver issue.
I don’t think so, it worked out of the gate for me, but that would be the second thing to look at if it fails obviously.
Fair enough, I only said that cause it was the case for me aha.
Super weird that you upgraded your fiance’s computer to Linux, but not your own? What’s the driving factor here that led to using your partner as a lab rat?
She asked me to?
Ah, that adds a lot of context. Sorry, the post just sounded like this was a “you” initiative.
Nah lol she really doesn’t like the big AI push that windows is doing and suggested Linux, NGL I was surprised and a little proud
Maybe Tiny 11 was the answer?
needing a closed source instead of open source nvidia driver.
Yes, you need Nvidia closed source drivers, especially if you want to play games. Although you had no way of knowing this if you hadn’t interacted with the community before, this is well known and part of the reason most of us who’ve been here a while use and recommend AMD.
Shes all switched to linux, and if her trial goes well and i don’t end up tearing my hair out doing tech support. I may switch over as well, probably a different distro though.
That’s an interesting approach, I usually experiment on stuff myself before making others switch, makes me more comfortable on the stuff and more confident that I’ll be able to solve their issues.
the modding scene on linux and how much busywork that took, that just killed a little bit of my soul.
Care to expand on that, I’m not too used to modding games, but from the times I tried it, it’s my understanding that 99% of the times it’s just putting stuff into the right folder. If not how is it different from Windows?
Even trying to get her game open, we first had a xbox game controller bluetooth not connecting issue
The game wouldn’t open if the controller was connected via Bluetooth? That’s weird, or did you mean that you had issues with making the game run and after that the Xbox controller wouldn’t connect?. For the Xbox controller thing I will assume you’re 100% sure it has a Bluetooth chip (not all of them do), I’m not sure how it’s in Bazzite but in other distros you need to install
xpadneoto get them working via Bluetooth, they also need to be in a updated firmware (but I never had to do this step), you can read about it here even though you’re not using Arch, their wiki is extremely helpful.see this in her game. What i can only imagine is some sort of video player error, but the game works. Its rough, but it works.
You’re almost correct, for legal reasons Steam can’t include transcoding for certain proprietary video formats that games love to use. There’s an alternative version to proton called Proton-GE (or GloriousEggroll because that’s the name of the maintainer), it includes those codecs plus some other extra fixes, as a general rule it’s always better to use it. To use it you either download it from the release page and extract it in
~/.steam/steam/compatibilitytools.dand restart steam, or using ProtonUp if it’s available for you which will make things easier on the long run.Good luck and welcome!
Yeah, having your partner switch first is hella weird. I switched first, then my partner switched soon after. Same distro as well, which means that usually we can communicate with how updates went (I of course update first) and I’m more prepared to help her with issues.
The biggest issue she’s had was with her drawing tablet… That was solved by using the CORRECT PEN for the tablet she was trying to use lol, instead of a pen for a different tablet.
the modding scene on linux and how much busywork that took, that just killed a little bit of my soul.
Care to expand on that, I’m not too used to modding games, but from the times I tried it, it’s my understanding that 99% of the times it’s just putting stuff into the right folder. If not how is it different from Windows?
Alright so modding is actually harder on linux and stupid. You should use a mod manager and not manually install your mods so you can uninstall them easier, resolve conflicts easier, manage them, etc. But the mod managers don’t all work on linux natively. So you end up trying to get steam tinker launch working (to use vortex or mo2, but the creator hates modding and will let you know) or using other random things on github (like jackify). I spent way too much time trying to get this stuff to launch and that is before you start actually modding. I ended up doing some distro hopping to get the mod managers to work and ended up on CachyOs.
I’m currently using r2modman for Lethal Company modding, but it does lots of other games as well and it’s been working pretty well, so you might want to check that out.
That’s the only one I know that runs on linux well, but it is not popular in most of the games I mod. I would not be able to make huge Skyrim modlists on it. I could string some valheim mods on it, but that’s about it so far. I stayed on windows for so long because I needed not just the games to run, but the mods I spend a lot of time on tinkering as well. I even tried other things like pushing a payload to a Nintendo switch recently and ended up just going back to my windows install where it detected RCM right away (but the linux tools I tried didn’t).
Shes all switched to linux, and if her trial goes well and i don’t end up tearing my hair out doing tech support. I may switch over as well, probably a different distro though.
That’s an interesting approach, I usually experiment on stuff myself before making others switch, makes me more comfortable on the stuff and more confident that I’ll be able to solve their issues.Yeah, that was the standout for me too. You’re on winblows and might switch later, but are going to support her, way to treat the gf as a lab rat…
To fix the missing videos, use Proton-GE. Easiest method: Download it with Proton-up QT (bundled with Bazzite) then chose Proton-GE from the game’s Steam compatibility settings.
It’s because they use proprietary codecs that Valve can’t freely distribute.
Nvidia and Linux is possibly the most dysfunctional and hateful relationship in all of existence.
JKR is very windows
closed source instead of open source nvidia driver.
This is where the problem really began. though afaik, you can get a version of the bazzite distro with the closed source nvidia drivers already installed, so did you select a different one? Nvidia gave me nothing but issues when I was trying to migrate to Linux though. Ever since I switched to AMD, it’s been smooth sailing.
My partner and I are running Kubuntu, both with Nvidia cards, and haven’t had any issues that aren’t solved by using the ubuntu-drivers tool.
Shes the only one in the house with nvidia, which tbf, has been just perfect for her needs up to this point. I’m just worried what might happen when i finally get her a new motherboard (long story short, it was my old one, i was splicing a 500ft ethernet cable, and didn’t realize 250 ft away the other end was still plugged in)
Shes the only one in the house with nvidia, which tbf, has been just perfect for her needs up to this point.
If you spend any amount of time at all in various Linux meme or Linux newcomer communities you’ll quickly see that this is one of the issues plaguing people switching over.
That’s not a dig at you but to make you realise how big and well known the issue is. The reason it persists is because nvidia refuses to play nice with Linux or an open source environment, presumably for monopolistic licensing issues.
The issue is large enough that there’s even a fairly famous video of the creator of Linux specifically giving a very vocal ‘fuck you nvidia’ middle finge specifically for their efforts at hindering cooperation with Linux at all.
