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
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?
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!
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.
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)
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.
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.
Good job on bazzite. I hope you torrented that game tho instead of giving even more money to that transphobic piece of shit.
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.
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.
Nvidia and Linux is possibly the most dysfunctional and hateful relationship in all of existence.
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.
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…
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.
Yes, you need closed source Nvidia drivers. That’s a pretty heavily discussed topic. Basically, it’s because Nvidia refuses to open source their drivers. They’ve started open sourcing some components, which is nice, for sure, but not enough to game on. I buy AMD video cards specifically because they work really well on Linux without any work at all.
I’m surprised you’re seeing issues on Hogwarts Legacy though. My wife and I have been playing it over the last few months on two different machines both with Bazzite and haven’t had any issues at all. We don’t use Nvidia cards, so it might be an issue with Nvidia’s drivers.
They’ve started open sourcing some components, which is nice, for sure, but not enough to game on.
I read this a lot but I’ve been using nvidia-open, on Arch so I’m not running a LTS distro or anything, for over a year with no breaking issues.
It’s especially annoying in threads where someone is having a technical issue and as soon as they say they have an nvidia card you’ll see a bunch of people decide that it’s a driver issue.
Their issue is that they’re using Valve’s Proton which is missing some commonly used but proprietary video codecs. Using GE-Proton will ensure that they have the correct software to play videos.
I use Valve’s Proton and don’t have this issue. That’s not it.
The parts of Nvidia’s drivers that they’ve released as open source are not enough to game on. You have to add additional code to actually be able to game, whether it’s community drivers or Nvidia’s drivers.
Same, AMD is where it’s at for now if you penguin.
Same. I’ve been avoiding NVIDIA for years now, and haven’t regretted it yet. However, some people say that NVIDIA divers are good now, but I have my doubts about it. Seeing posts like this one just reinforces my confirmation bias.
Jap, I have a laptop with an NV dGPU and it’s still a bit hit or miss. And the perf penalty VS Windows is quite steep whereas in the red corner it’s pretty margin of error in most cases.
Are you using FOSS divers or the proprietary ones? How about power management, suspend, wake up etc?
Proprietary blob.
edit: there’s good advice in the comments for this post.
I only hope that people who still think that Nvidia drivers on Linux are an old issue that’s been solved ages ago, see this post and this comment. It got slightly better, but the problem never went away. Yet, anyway.
The post where the user is missing proprietary multimedia codecs, unrelated to NVIDIA drivers or the comment by the person decrying the problems had by NVIDIA users despite not using NVIDIA cards?
Honestly I’ve had zero issues with nvidia on Wayland for about a year now, before that there were some issues, but it seems to be fine now! Maybe I’m just lucky.
I don’t have any real issue either. Have a rtx 4070 card. Or… Well… There was some issues playing darktide on anything but the lowest settings for some reason but other than that its been good.
Note that i mostly play smaller/indie games with very few exceptions.
I had the Darktide problem but I think disabling upscaling fixed the performance/stability issue.
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.
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.
Gotta love Finnish philosophy!
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.
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.
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 just installed bazzite on a spare box over the weekend, with a bunch of cobbled together old nonsense I had laying around, and gave to a family member.
… I have a feeling the 1050 I tossed in there is just old enough to not be a problem.
Though it seems the r9 270x in on of my PCs is *toast. So it looks like my quadro 2000 is going in that machine. Or, fuck it, the even more ancient 5770 I have.
I don’t play very recent games though.
Edit: I a whole word.
