Gaming on Linux: Finding Solutions, Together!

[shadenight123]

So, after spending two hours tinkering and fixing and attempting the impossible rendered possible, I have finally succeeded. And then I thought "Let us see if it can help others."
What am I talking about?
Gaming on Linux.
With an Nvidia Card (3070).

So, here is where I'll be (but you can do it too!) detailing/helping others who might be in the same situation, depending on the games in question, and meanwhile report my successes and failures.

For starters, my Linux_Os is Nobara 39 Official, KDE 'X11' desktop (Wayland refuses cooperation, it is unfortunate, Nobara is A Fedora Spin by GE, (glorious Eggroll) the one in charge of the Proton Steam thingie), and my desktop holds an Intel processor as well as a Nvidia card (as preambled before).

My main crux on moving to Linux after Windows has always been gaming. Anything else, I didn't really *care* that much to lose/alter, but gaming? Hey, you know the saying, 'work hard, play harder, Shade shadier' -or something of the sorts.

So, in this thread I'm going to showcase some games that either worked out of the box, needed some tinkering, or required some interesting side-solutions.

I'll start with the premise:

Nobara comes with Lutris and Steam Preinstalled and some useful extra additions to make the gaming experience easier. However, I have found that sometimes, Bottles is all you need.

Hence, download and install Bottles.

From Bottles, hit the 'Install Programs' once you're done choosing and picking the Runners you want (and the DLL components), and install the Epic Games, Gog Galaxy, EA launcher or whatever other installers you need (Not Steam, Steam works by itself).

Now, from the respective installers, install the games you wish to play.

IF the game launches, and plays, then congratulations, that's it.

IF it doesn't, come here and ask. (Someone, if not me, will attempt fixing the issue, and once the issue is fixed, I'm going to threadmark the solution).

Of course, you might have other methods of playing games on Linux. You might have different Distros, with different problems. That's okay. However, I'm going to showcase here what problems *I've* had and how I've fixed them. And meanwhile, you can explain your own problems too, and we'll see if we can fix them!

Hence, let this Gaming_On_Linux helping session begins!

I'll start with the first one:

Sleeping Dogs, Definitive Edition, GOG version.

Issue: Game does not start. White screen. Attempts at fixing it by following the ProtonDB of 'DisplaySettings.xml' creation have failed.
Solution:
The White screen happens because DXVK refuses to acknowledge the beauty of fullscreen Sleeping Dogs, or viceversa. However, while for some the DisplaySettings.xml trick works, for others it does not. In my case, it didn't. Now, I could attempt a 'blind navigation' of menus in search of the correct button to press, but one throwaway line gave me pause.
It mentioned moving between desktops to actually *see* the game's menu.
Hence, I tried that, and it solved the issue. First, create a second desktop if you don't have one.
Bottles should have the following settings, but you can keep your own and see if it works all the same:

Launch the game. It will white-screen. Press ESC to skip the 'not visible' intro. Push enter and you should hear the telltale sound of a button being pushed. Now, WINDOW+TAB to change desktop. And then Window+TAB again to return to the first one. You should now see the game. Head into the display settings after setting the starting stuff and set the Display to Windowed rather than fullscreen. Next time you launch the game, you won't have to do the WINDOW+TAB thing.

Notice: There are some who say to use GAMESCOPE or Virtual Desktops. If it works for you, you can absolutely use that. As it didn't work for me, this was the workaround I found.

Anyway, I hope this thread will, with time, become helpful to others who have grown tired of getting 6GBs of RAM sucked in at idle by Windows' latest bloatwares that come preinstalled, or who just want to be able to properly mess up their kernels with no Gods nor Bill Gates to stand in the way of absolute control and destruction.
And remember, if all fails, just reinstall from a Live-Usb!

 

[Alan975]

...I understand that this is a real thing, but what you just wrote might just be the most incomprehensible piece of techno-babble that I have ever laid my eyes on.
Looking forward to how this goes? Might look into side-loading or whatever its called to squeeze a few more frames out of my 70ti

 

[A Small Bird]

Just chiming in with my three experiences on a Debian install (latest stable, so... is that 14 or 11?)

Using Proton 8(? Most recent non-experimental) compatibility suite:

Quasimorph works out of the box after enabling Proton 8 through Steam.

Rain World: Downpour works out of the box as well, but I note that some workshop mods do not function and appear to fail to load. For example, the Pearlcat mod appears in the Remix and Mod options, but neither the character nor campaign are selectable. However, the built-in 'Jolly CoOp Mod' options are there last I checked. Will do further testing to troubleshoot.

Lethal Company boots and loads into a game via Proton, but I get some shader(?) issues that make my screen unusable. Chiefly some weird zooming and artifacting effects. I am playing on ancient hardware, however, and I would expect if it was an issue with Linux then the game wouldn't work at all.

More troubleshooting to follow, and hardware specs if I can remember.

 

[Rgal]

Had trouble configuring Copy Kitty (demo version, but the main game would probably be the same) to work properly with Proton. The background was flashing, and the main story mode crashed on trying to start it, although the tutorial and the endless mode worked fine.

Than I turned on the in-game option to restrict FPS to 60 and now everything works perfectly. Apparently XNA has trouble with 75Hz refresh rate, which is what my monitor uses by default.

 

[SCO]

Ah yes, Wayland fucking ruining desktop Linux gaming by fucking with wine resolution code.

It's been a problem for years. I would just use x11, if I didn't want to get dragged into a rabbit hole I explain next.

Specifically weird things happen when a game tries to change resolution from the desktop resolution. In wine and x11, this mostly works because x11 has the capability to change the desktop resolution in true exclusive Fullscreen. It's not perfect, because some games will choose the first supported resolution and they can't handle it, but it works 98% of the time since that's a problem that would also happen in windows so games that were tested at the time, only support some limited list of resolutions... and that's part of the problem.

In Wayland, not only exclusive Fullscreen is a no-op (To prevent games\fullscreen apps blocking access to alt-tab or ctrl-f4, which sometimes causes other trouble), but desktop resolution change too. The game may try it and fail and recover saying it didn't work, may try it and crash, may try it and zoom in your image to just a part of the menu screen.

This happened, and coincidentally is not fixed, because Wayland designers got a bug in their bonnet about malicious or crashing apps changing resolution then not restoring it on exit. Instead of doing something saner, like restoring it themselves, they pissed on the users and made it fail with 'the promise of a shader extension to zoom in\out when necessary in the future' (which never happened edit: outside of valve's gamescope).

I made a lot of personal scripts changing resolution to 800x640 or whatever the game had as maximum resolution then restoring the desktop resolution after the game terminates, or changing random games cfgs to the current desktop resolution if the game was more flexible (coincidentally, the most compatible way to query the current desktop resolution of a monitor in gnome, that worked on both x11 and Wayland was some dodgy xml file I used a even dodgier cmd line xml parser for. Very evolutionary guys, forcing me to use a program that hasn't been updated since 2008 and adding dependency checks to wine scripts - xmlstarlet btw).

More modern games tend to be more well behaved, they tend to adapt to any rectangular resolution and start the first time after a install with the desktop resolution, instead of a random 'well supported at the time' one, and since Wayland tells them the desktop resolution is the ONLY one, modern games, that actually query the supported resolutions and aren't badly coded to assume, mostly don't have this problem and don't let the user change resolution in game to screw themselves over.

But there is always some badly coded shit, anywhere, anywhen.

 

[Rgal]

Ah yes, Wayland fucking ruining desktop Linux gaming by fucking with wine resolution code.

It's been a problem for years. I just use x11.

Specifically weird things happen when a game tries to change resolution from the desktop resolution. In wine and x11, this mostly works because x11 has the capability to change the desktop resolution in true exclusive Fullscreen.

In Wayland, not only exclusive Fullscreen is a no-op (To prevent games\fullscreen apps blocking access to alt-tab or ctrl-f4, which sometimes causes other trouble), but desktop resolution change too. The game may try it and fail and recover saying it didn't work, may try it and crash, may try it and zoom in your image to just a part of the menu screen.

This happened, and coincidentally is not fixed, because Wayland designers got a bug in their bonnet about malicious or crashing apps changing resolution then not restoring it on exit. Instead of doing something saner, like restoring it themselves, they pissed on the users and made it fail with 'the promise of a shader extension to zoom in when necessary' (which never happened).

I made a lot of personal scripts changing resolution to 800x640 or whatever the game had as maximum resolution, or changing random games cfgs to the current desktop resolution if the game was more flexible.

More modern games tend to be more well behaved, they tend to start the first time after a install with the desktop resolution, instead of a random 'well supported at the time' one, and since Wayland tells them the desktop resolution is the ONLY one, modern games, that actually query the supported resolutions and aren't badly coded to assume, mostly don't have this problem.

Click to shrink...

Funny you should mention that. Me, I've never had resolution problems with Wayland (mostly because the only device I've managed to coerce to use Wayland is my potato of a laptop, but still). With X11, though, there'd been a pletora of resolution problems — although, again, not because it was X11, but still, the point is that "just use X11" doesn't really work.

One problem I still have is that connecting a VGA monitor to a non-VGA videocard with a DVI adapter doesn't seem to transmit monitor's EDID (that's basically a binary blob inside the monitor that tells your videocard what resolutions the monitor supports and prefers). Eventually, I managed to make a DVI monitor work and everything was great (after I made sure I2C kernel modules were installed and modprobe'd, because that's apparently not guaranteed)… until the monitor died. The replacement monitor is, again, a VGA — and unfortunately, I did not manage to find this exact model's EDID in the database (GitHub - linuxhw/EDID: EDID repository for LCD monitors), so I used one that felt close enough and fiddled with monitor buttons until the entire screen was visible. Before that, I tried removing GPU driver's restriction on available resolutions and manually setting one that works, which was simple enough with mesa, pointlessly complex with proprietary NVIDIA blob and either way resulted in some games attempting to set an unusable resolution on launch (I think I had this problem with Stellaris and Surviving Mars, specifically, which have native linux versions to begin with).

In conclusion, if you have a choice, make sure the interfaces of your GPU and monitor match. Also, you might save yourself some pain if you stick to AMD GPUs, because at least the kernel part of the driver is opensource and is officially maintained in-tree, which conveniently also means Wayland should work fine.

---

And because I don't want to make a double post for this one unrelated thing I just remembered, I'll say it here: Steam launches some Proton games in a container, which might result in no sound if you are a pulsaudio disliker like myself. Thus, if you want to play rhythm games like, say, Muse Dash, you'll have to either bite the bullet and install pulseaudio, or configure pipewire and pipewire-pulse, which is like pulseaudio, but better.

 

[SCO]

About the rez, that was some years ago before gamescope was a thing. I think it's supposed to solve this, but I mostly never used it since I preferred my more hackish hands on methods I was already using before and hated compiling it to support the closed source Nvidia driver (there was a problem like that on my computer), and now really can't because I don't have a PC.

This really should be part of wine (Preferably) or wayland itself instead of a valve or playonlinux thing.

 

[Feng Lengshun]

Notice: There are some who say to use GAMESCOPE or Virtual Desktops. If it works for you, you can absolutely use that. As it didn't work for me, this was the workaround I found.

Click to shrink...

Gamescope has been really unstable in recent months for me.

Also, note that Bottles does their own thing, it's not quite vanilla Wine setup. I'd recommend using Conty or Distrobox to get different versions of Wine, as sometimes I've found that they work better there for some reason. Always try multiple versions of Wine.

Personally, usually Heroic Games Launcher or Lutris are good enough for me, Bottles and Conty-Wine is just there for quick launch of games that I don't want to add to library.

A few short tips for me:

1.) if you're thinking of reinstalling, want a prefix to sync with the game, or otherwise just want a more silo-ed wine prefix, you can define a wineprefix with `WINEPREFIX=$PWD./_winepfx` to make a fresh prefix on the folder your terminal's in (which should usually be in the game's folder if you're launching a game from terminal).

2.) if you want to play RPG Maker MV games, like Fear and Hunger or DemonsRoots, you want the v.0.72.0 built for NWJS to make it run better (haven't found a version newer than that that works for MV - RPGM MZ works just fine with newer versions). Note - it does not always work for all games (sometimes it doesn't start, sometimes it thinks it has 0 capacity or the save folder is read-only), but when it works, it's MUCH better performance. You DO need FHS though, so if you're on NixOS, you can always use Conty to run it. Along with the corresponding ffmpeg build from here, I've aliased `nw72` to `nw72='$XDG_BIN_HOME/conty.sh env LD_PRELOAD=$XDG_DOCUMENTS_DIR/Private/Linux/bin/nwjs-v0.72.0-linux-x64/libffmpeg.so $XDG_DOCUMENTS_DIR/Documents/Private/Linux/bin/nwjs-v0.72.0-linux-x64/nw'` allowing me to just run a game (assuming I'm in the game's folder) with `nw72 .`

3.) try running a game with Lutris, Heroic, Bottles, and other runners of Wine. Also, turn gamescope on and off - sometimes a game wouldn't run in gamescope until you run it with gamescope turned off, othertimes it won't run with gamescope at all.

4.) if all else fail, if the game is light enough, you can always use virt-manager or gnome boxes to run the game on a Windows VM.

5.) if you're playing Hoyo games (and PGR), you can use An Anime Team's launcher to play them.

6.) use gameconqueror if you need a CheatEngine replacement. Also available through Nix.

7.) use Flatpak where you can, and instead of your native package manager (apt, dnf, pacman), consider using Fleek to get apps via Nix, and Distrobox to get apps without littering your host system.

 

[shadenight123]

So, refreshing this as I began playing Horizon Zero Dawn and ended up with the 'it crashes every X minutes' thing. What fixed it for me was, as I was playing it through Bottles (GOG version), one of the following things which I did in order: Install the mfc40 depency, set compatibility to windows 8, got the latest runners and dxvks, and also in the Video Settings WITHIN the game, set the game to FULLSCREEN with ADAPTIVE FPS ON.
Hasn't crashed after 30 minutes. Could be that it now crashes every hour rather than every 10 minutes, but I'll take my victories.

 

[yeastmobile]

If yinz want to play OSRS on your linux install and you have a jagex account, just look for the Bolt Launcher. I have linux mint so I can just download a flatpak of it off the software manager. No issues, dead simple install, and runelite already has a native linux client you can download so no issues. Continue your training friends.