Linux gaming

[Lemika]

I've never really been overfond of Windows, and I've become progressively less fond of the latest couple of iterations of both it and OSX to the point that I would prefer to avoid using either in the future if they both continue down the same developmental track they seem to be on, so I have lately been returning to my old goal of managing to make a Linux gaming computer. In the past, the thing that always held me back was that not enough games would run on it (and more specifically, not the ones that I wanted to), but it looks like it's more common now for games to come out with a Linux version -- at least, for Ubuntu -- and also that most things can be run with Wine these days. I've heard that Steam works reasonably well for some Linux distributions as well, which should help.

I'm planning on putting together an experimental PC soon in order to test my theory that the time may be right, but I'm wondering whether anybody here uses a Linux machine as a gaming computer, and what issues you may have run into if you do. Or advice you might have, games you have or haven't much luck running, all that sort of thing.

[NaOH]

I can't say I play a lot of video games these days. But I do use Linux, and I do play the occasional game of Lix or join in on lan parties at my house for different games.

Generally, things have gotten pretty good. I last used Linux (KDE) around 2010 for a while, but it felt very clunky so I went back to windows. Now I'm using Mint, and it is charming. I find it much easier to understand what the computer is really doing in the background and therefore fix problems when they arise. On Windows, things were randomly hidden from me and some things were way too hard to do.

Things that work for me, though I'm hardly an expert. (Some of these may be obvious to you or unnecessary depending on your previous Linux experience. I've been using Mint for the past year, which is the majority of my experience. So some of these lessons I learned the hard way.):

- If you're new to Linux, figure out right away how to kill programs that are causing problems. Usually problems don't happen, but I was frustrated when I instinctively tried ctrl+alt+delete and it didn't work. This is especially useful when using wine, because programs under wine cause lots of problems for me when they don't work.

- I use an Xbox controller sometimes, I've surprisingly never had any problems with it on Linux. I did have to install the right driver, though.

- Wine is generally 50/50. Usually I've found that when it works, it works well, but for some games it just won't work at all. (Actually, sometimes things work better in Wine, which is surprising. A game who's binary I'd compiled some years ago ended up corrupted, I was never able to play it until I tried running it in wine, and somehow that fixed it.) I recommend using PlayOnLinux, which is a friendly program that manages versions of wine to figure out which one best to use. (Sometimes updates to wine break compatibility with games that previously worked well, so PlayOnLinux looks up what version is known to work in a database and downloads that one, IIRC.)

- Install at least two versions of Steam, one native Linux and one under wine (probably PlayOnLinux); use the native one for running games that run natively on linux, use the other one for running games that require wine. I recently spent hours trying to get Borderlands 2 to work on wine, only to find out that it runs natively on Linux.

- For native linux non-steam games, you may have to build from source a lot. On the bright side, you get to have access to the latest development version! On the other hand, building from source is a real pain and the latest development version is usually super buggy. But on the other other hand, it's much easier to build things from source on linux than on windows. Scanning through the README.txt file for what libraries to download and for the magical command to type into the console will work 75% of the time. (I usually give up the other 25% of the time.)

- If things are working okay, do not update your graphics card driver. Just to reiterate: if it ain't broke, don't fix it. I regret every time I ever updated my graphics card.

(Just back up your documents and get comfortable reinstalling linux. I've had to do that a few times. It's been 8 months since my last reinstall, so I think I've figured things out a little better.)

[Prob Lem]

- If things are working okay, do not update your graphics card driver. Just to reiterate: if it ain't broke, don't fix it. I regret every time I ever updated my graphics card.

Though I use Linux, I don't do the PC gaming thing, but I just wanted to emphasise how important NaOH's advice here is. Messing with your graphics card drivers unnecessarily is a recipe for trouble. I learned that the hard way quite early on (I've been using Linux for getting on for a decade, now), and knowing that has served me well.

Obviously, if there's some overriding security reason for it (i.e., an exploit's come about and you NEED to update it, trouble be damned), always make sure you have current backups first. But, we all know that part anyway, right?

[Lemika]

Thanks for the advice! Yeah, I'm already fairly careful about updating drivers, but I'll certainly take that into account. I have used Linux before, but that was Slackware quite a few versions ago, so I expect that Ubuntu/Mint/any other distro I might consider for gaming will have some differences. I wasn't a particularly advanced user at that time, although I knew at least the basics.

I never use a controller -- grew up using only keyboard and mouse, and controllers feel clumsy and awkard to me -- so that won't be a problem.

PlayOnLinux sounds quite useful. I'll certainly keep that in mind. Any advice about wrangling Steam is always appreciated, since that's something I've a few concerns about, having had large troubles with Steam in the past (albeit on Windows and when Steam was relatively new). I figure there's no way reinstalling Linux can be as much of a pain as reinstalling Windows 95 from floppies, so I'm cool with that. Good to know, though.

I've heard that Nvidia cards have tended to work better with Linux than AMD cards in the past, but I'm having trouble figuring out whether or not that's still true. Do you know? I've been using AMD processors and video cards for the last few years, and would rather continue that if it's reasonable to do so (partly 'cause they're less expensive, I admit, and partly because my last two computers have been the most stable I've yet managed), but I'm not against switching back to Intel and Nvidia if that's the way to go.

[namida]

From what I've heard (and do take this with a grain of salt, since it comes from my stepdad who's one of those thinks-he-knows-more-than-he-does types), AMD is actually better than NVidia for Linux these days. CPU-wise I don't have any idea.

[Lemika]

Presumably that at least implies that there are no major issues with AMD and Linux these days, so that's cool. People will always debate back and forth about which one is ultimately better, or works better with various things.

I expect, really, that either Intel or AMD would work just fine for CPUs; it's mostly that I (at least thus far) have found that Intel/Nvidia and AMD/AMD work better than the other way around, and I tend to build my PCs around their gaming capablity. After all, the rest of the things I do will work on just about any machine.

The distros I'm mainly considering right now are Ubuntu (or one of its flavours) and Manjaro. It seems that Ubuntu, and particularly Mint, probably have more native support for the kind of gaming I do, but Manjaro looks like it might be overall more versatile and easier to work in-depth with. The knowledge that Windows is apparently going with an updates-only model after Windows 10 has led me to decide that I am probably going to go forward with this when I rebuild my computer next (currently I'm still on Windows 7 and quite dislike Windows 8, and from what I've seen Windows 10 isn't going to improve the things I don't like about 8), some time in the fall. I'm hoping to build a test computer in between, but if I end up not having time, I may skip that step.