Ill keep it as short as possible, apologies if i keep rambling(ill put my specs at the bottom)
Over the last yew years, i have used quite a lot of distros, from mint (currently my main again), to manjaro to solus to endeavouros and more i cant remember, one thing they all (minus solus) had in commong (for me) was the fact that pc gaming…was horrible on them.
Many hours where spend getting different games to work, or rather trying to get them to work at all, most of them had failed, steam, lutris, default wine, no matter what has been used)
As an example:
Anno 1404 history edition (best anno, fite me), i bought it on steam, tried launching it, didnt work, tried several proton versions, didnt work, lutris, didnt work, i downloaded a crack to see, didnt work either, using a different file format, nothing.
Sometimes i was able to make it work, once and than never again, solus was the only one where anno 1404 worked out of the box, i managed to make it work in endeavouros once by installing two packages i could never find again. (most recently, i bought space marine 2, didnt work and keeps crashing no matter what i do9
But this was the best case scenario, games really work.
Is it just my hardware?
Am i using linux just wrongly for years?
Is it my fault?
Am i missing something?
My specs:
prebuilt desktop: Acer Nitro N50-620
memory 64KiB BIOS
memory 32GiB System Memory
memory 16GiB DIMM DDR4 Synchronous 26
memory 8GiB DIMM DDR4 Synchronous 320
memory 8GiB DIMM DDR4 Synchronous 320
processor 11th Gen Intel® Core™ i5-
bridge Intel Corporation
display TU116 [GeForce GTX 1660 SUPER]
storage Micron_2210_MTFDHBA1T0QFD
bus Tiger Lake-H USB 3.2 Gen 2x1 x
network Tiger Lake PCH CNVi WiFi
bus Tiger Lake-H Serial IO I2C Con
First of all, what the hell is going on with your RAM configuration?
Your first stop should have been the protondb page for your game. Given that most other people report it as running out of the box, then the issue lies somewhere else.
Which proton versions have you tried? Since you have an Nvidia card, what is the driver revision? What desktop environment, and version of it are you using?
I hate to say it, but reinstalling your entire OS multiple times, without doing any troubleshooting, has been a waste of your time
whats going on with my ram configuration?
i tried using protondb several times, but it rarely if ever has worked with me, the tweaks people suggest i mean.
all between 9 to 5 on many games, sometimes proton ge too but i never noticed a difference when trying to use that one
whats a driver revision?
DE: cinnamon 6.2.9
i have done so much troubleshooting over these years that reinstalling or installing another distro became easier and quicker to do
Usually people have only same size RAM, but other configurations can work too. (I have 20GB of RAM running fine, for example.)
do you think that may somehow be the cause of so many problems? or part of it?
Each nvidia card works better or worse with different version releases of nvidia drivers. Older cards usually need smaller version numbers. Since you are running mint, all versions you need to test should be in the default repos. Try different drivers and see if you can find the right one for your card.
apt-cache search nvidia
should give you a list of options, which you can install with apt-get install.
ngl, id rather stick with what is recommended before i go through hundreds of slightly differently named drivers
I never seen that weirdest ram configuration ever. Its probably cursed. I never had any game that did not play at all, either i had to change some minor settings but it worked good. ( I am on Linux Mint Cinamon too )
I would guess the memory just freaks out some games that use more than 8gb ?
protondb is showing you if it is compatible with linux. If it isnt working on yours BUT it shows Gold or platinum on protondb its a YOU issue.
protondb is showing if it works at all yes, btu it also has a bunch of epople and possible tweaks showing it
neither protondb own ratings nor these tweaks did much to make any of the games i tried work (i dont recall any of them being native to linux)
my rig is a pretty common stock build (minus the increased ram)
so if it isnt a hardware issue, and i dont tinker with system files, or any funky stuff like that
why would it be a “me” issues?
Because if its gold then it says A LOT of people have no issues ( small issues ). Many people recommend to use GEProton.
The ram is not common, it is not recommended and could lead to crashes or incompatibilities.
- The sizes
- The different clock speeds
Best try to use 1 stick ( 16 GiB )
if a bit more ram (and no other hardware changes) actually causes so much issues with gaming, is it really a me problem?
that just sound like a rather trivial change
if you say that its truly that funky, i can remove the extra ram and make it a simple and ncie 16gb
I’ve been gaming on Linux for years. I do habitually avoid games that would be borked ootb by things like anti cheat. But typically I have very minor issues.
Do you check out protondb.com at all?
The Anno games are notoriously hard to run on Linux. Protip: always check Protondb for Linux compatibility.
Also, if you find yourself missing Anno on Linux, check out Tropico or any number of city builders by Hooded Horse. There are lots of great resource production chain city builders out there that don’t force you to use Uplay
The thing with trying different distros drives me a bit nuts. If you’re getting consistently bad results across so many different ones, then you can see how distros don’t matter all that much after all. What really matters is your hw config combined with software config. Stop trying different distros expecting that some of them will maybe do something differently, stick to one and try to figure out the problem or ask for help. Only resort to other distro if you know that it will make something easier (eg provide more up to date packages).
You said what’s your hw configuration, but not much about how you handle NVIDIA drivers. By default, your GPU will run on open drivers built in Linux kernel called Nouveau, combined with OpenGL (and for your GPU that’s it for now) implemented in Mesa. This is enough for basic things to work, such as the desktop, video playback, office applications, but not necessarily games. For that you need the proprietary NVIDIA drivers. Check manual of your currently used distro for how to get those drivers in place. For your GPU even the newest drivers are available (560), so it’s good if your distro offers that. For drivers older than 555 series, use X11 session instead of Wayland.
