Linux Gaming

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/39456265

For those of you like me who are fed up with Microsoft’s BS but invested too heavily in hardware that Linux distros have yet to support well, I finally figured out a way to get HDR games to run well on my Nvidia GPU. This will be a brief description of more or less what I did to get this working. I’m very much a Linux noob so I don’t fully understand the way everything here works but I’m happy to try to answer questions if you have any.

OS: Bazzite –Desktop Nvidia KDE edition (BDNK) Bazzite was developed as a capable alternative to SteamOS on handhelds like the Steam Deck and ROG Ally, so the website is full of references to HDR, however from my attempts to get this working my understanding is that it’s easier to get that working in Gaming mode which is unsupported on Nvidia GPUs. Nevertheless, this version of Bazzite, while only for desktops, comes with KDE Plasma v6 installed by default meaning it technically supports HDR and you will likely see a difference if you install this version and flip the HDR switch from the display settings. I had tried installing Ubuntu on my desktop before and since it didn’t support HDR all the colors on my monitor were almost obnoxiously saturated; I see the same effect in BDNK when I disable HDR.

Drivers: I didn’t fiddle with my drivers. BDNK comes with up-to-date Nvidia drivers bundled and installs them when you install the OS.

Software: SteamTinkerLaunch (installed using ProtonUp-Qt) SteamTinkerLaunch (STL) is a user interface for making it easy to configure your launch options for any given game in your Steam library. If you don’t know what a compatibility tool is, it’s functionally a layer of software between the game you want to play and the OS you’re using which can tell the game to do certain things that your OS is not configured to do. STL can be added to the list of compatibility tools you have to use in your installation of Steam, though it is not technically a compatibility tool itself. STL is used to configure other compatibility tools that Steam already has at its disposal, like Proton which is the primary compatibility tool SteamOS uses to make Windows games run on Linux.

Follow the instructions in the SteamTinkerLaunch GitHub ReadMe to install the tool and add it as a compatibility tool in your installation of Steam. Once you’ve done that, I recommend rebooting. I have yet to get STL working as the * default * compatibility tool, so for the time being I have been manually editing the properties of each game I have installed (Steam Game Library > right click on a game > click properties > go to the compatibility tab) to set the compatibility tool to STL. From here, whenever you launch the game in Steam, it should bring up STL’s menu before launching the game.

Within STL, the key settings to mark are as follows: Gamescope: Use gamescope and mark HDR as enabled for gamescope. I also recommend setting gamescope to fullscreen with your desired resolution, and then also locking your cursor to the gamescope window so that you don’t end up with weird double mouse cursors that aren’t aligned on the screen. Proton: since you told Steam to use STL instead of Proton as the compatibility tool, you need to tell STL to tell Steam to launch the game with Proton.

And that’s pretty much it. Or at least, that’s all that I did. From there, you should be able to configure HDR settings within each game’s menus.

TL;DR – install Bazzite Desktop Nvidia KDE, then install and configure SteamTinkerLaunch for your games.

What games will this work with? No idea. So far I have tested it with Cyberpunk 2077, DOOM Eternal, and Elden Ring and HDR is looking to me as good as it does in my Windows installation.

Will the Gnome version of Bazzite work for HDR on an Nvidia GPU, or for that matter any other OS as long as I’m using gamescope to run the game with HDR enabled? Good question! I don’t know, please give it a try if you’re curious and respond back with your results.

I have another question that you didn’t list here, what’s your answer? Probably “I don’t know” since what I wrote here is more or less what I know, but by all means ask away and I’ll try to answer it!

This game plays like a top-down Terraria and is a lot of fun to play co-op. Great to see it's already sold a million copies on steam.

I'm looking for discussion and suggestions about the best way to play games from GOG on linux.

My current method is that I've got GOG Galaxy installed with bottles, and then I use GOG Galaxy to install and launch the Windows games. That's working alright so far. One downside is that won't install Iinux versions like that, so for games that have a native linux version I have to decide if I want to install it separately, or just run the windows version with the others. So that isn't perfect. Another minor thing I don't like is that since I'm installing games via GOG Galaxy via Bottles via Flatpak... I end up having very little idea of where stuff is being saved. It's difficult to find save game files for example; and if there is some junk installed or left over from something, there's very little chance that I'm going to notice and delete it. It just feels very opaque. (I guess that's mostly just about my personal lack of knowledge though.)

Anyway, I'm mostly just wondering how others are choosing to handle their games from GOG.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/25475442

Dear fellow enthusiasts,

my wife and I finally got stable enough in our living situation, that we can buy some new hardware (ours is 7+ years, while hers is a laptop). So I went out into the wild wild web to catch up with 7years of hardware progress (I am technological affine, but not following the trends in any way) and wanted to run by my first iteration of a setup with the infinite wisdom of this community.

For the background: both of us only use Linux at home and at work and do not plan to change this. We do not play AAA games, the most demanding game we play as of late is probably Dota2, ARK and GTNH (a Minecraft mod pack, that eats your ram for breakfast). Hence we won't need cutting edge hardware, more like an upper end budget setup. Anyway, with my last PC I had tons of troubles with the mainboard, the GPU (nvidia) and other stuff, even though I thought I checked stuff in advance, so I wanted to have an outside opinion.

TL;DR: here my draft, with prices from an online store:

• Mainboard: ASRock B650M-H/M.2+ 97.90€
• CPU: AMD Ryzen 7™ 7700, 8 core, 3.800 MHz base, AM5, 32 MB L3 cache 227.90€
• GPU: XFX Radeon RX 6650 XT Speedster SWFT 210 Core Gaming, RDNA 2, GDDR6, 3x DisplayPort, 1x HDMI 2.1 249.90€
• RAM: ADATA DIMM 32 GB DDR5-4800 (2x 16 GB) Dual-Kit, 84.90€
• PSU: be quiet! System Power 10 650W 61.90€
• Storage: Crucial P3 Plus 1 TB, SSD PCIe 4.0 x4, NVMe, M.2 2280, Reading: 5.000 MB/s, Writing: 3.600 MB/s 69.99€
• CPU cooler: be quiet! Pure Rock 2 Black 39.89€
• case: generic 50.00€

sum: ~880.00€

we don't mind to pay a little bit more here and there, but I do not see any real benefit to it. Even storage should be fine for our purpose and can be easily expended (the MB has two M.2 slots, and even Sata3 should be fine for raw storage).

ah, and we would buy two of those... My first idea was to buy one PC with two GPUs with passthrough of GPU and USB input (sitting anyway close), but I got the impression, that is at this moment more something to tinker, then to run "in production".

Best wishes, me

PS: if this community is not correct, I apologize and would kindly ask for the better fit.

Hey all. I'm heading to Quakecon 2024 tomorrow and will be repping the penguin. I've got all my games set up and ready, but was now wondering, are there any extra steps I should take as far as network security goes?

I'm sure I'm not as vulnerable to random badness as the flock of Windows machines that will be on the network, but you never know. The only thing on my list so far is to disable sshd. I thought about installing Portmaster but it has always messed up my DNS in the past...

I'll probably run Wireshark just to see if I can capture anything interesting there. Do you all have any other suggestions for prepping my PC?

I'm on Kubuntu 24.04, rocking a build that was pretty darn high end in 2021 with an AMD 6800 XT, and of course, Wolfenstein: The New Order was already old news by then. Proton does miracles, but this game freezes my entire machine. The last time I saw something like this happen was with Monster Hunter World in 2018, on a much older version of Proton. I can reliably get the game to freeze my machine in the opening level of The New Order, even across multiple versions of Proton, even with the renderapi launch parameter that should switch it back to OpenGL. Of course, even if I report this to Steam support, they'll tell me that they only support Steam Deck and not bespoke Linux desktops, and the game works fine on my Steam Deck, but would they be interested in some logs and a bug reported against the GitHub project? This is assuming no one here has an easy fix, of course. But if not, how would I get the logs? I wouldn't know what I'm looking at in those logs, personally. I'm also not sure if they'll write out correctly. Because it freezes the entire machine, I end up having to hard shut down the computer by the power button, and once or twice during my experiments, it failed to mount my game SSD (a separate drive from where my OS is installed) at boot, and I had to set up the automatic mount in the partition manager again. So assuming that doesn't impact the ability to write out the logs, I can collect them with some instructions, if you kind strangers in the know wouldn't mind providing them, please. And if Valve is interested in looking at them.

Hello everybody! My brother plays Insurgency Sandstorm a lot and I wanted us to be able to play together, so I got it and after some messing about got it working on my system. One of the things I read in forum posts to do to get it to work on an Arch based system is to install glibc-eac-bin which has some patches to make certain games work (I hope I understood that correctly).

Today when I try to update my system I get the following message and it will not allow me to continue:

:: Starting full system upgrade...

resolving dependencies...

looking for conflicting packages...

:: glibc-2.40+r16+gaa533d58ff-1 and glibc-eac-bin-2.40-1 are in conflict. Remove glibc-eac-bin? [y/N]

I dont want to remove glibc, but i want the message to go away and to be able to proceed with my updates. Any suggestions on what I should do?

Thanks in advance

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/38676431

A while back I ended up getting tired of making hacks to get custom binaries to launch in Steam for Windows titles. Primarily for modding, I would find a way to simply launch custom EXE files through Steam to ensure the modding tools and the game were contained neatly in the same prefix. My first ventures with this were Skyrim and Fallout: New Vegas. With these titles, I overrode the gamebryo/creation engine launcher EXE with Mod Organizer 2 (renamed to be the launcher). While this worked, the solution doesn't work for other games without a secondary launcher that is targeted through Steam.

I eventually came to the conclusion that one can override launch targets entirely in Steam, and that tools like SteamTinkerLaunch could take advantage of this. However, STL certainly does a lot and honestly, that is way more than I really desired just to launch games with a custom EXE. Thus I made a shell script that essentially allows for the user to write in their own custom target and have it launch right through Steam.

The usage for this is simple. Just copy the 'shim' file into the game directory, override the Steam launch arguments to include "./shim %command%", and all is good. Furthermore, environment variables (such as DRI_PRIME=1), additional launch wrappers (gamemoderun), and game launch arguments (-novid for Source Engine titles) all work. If one needed a combination of all of this, it would look something like "DRI_PRIME=1 gamemoderun ./shim %command% -novid".

The way target editing currently works is on first launch the shim file grabs the default game target and writes it as the contents of 'target', another file in the game directory. From there, one can simply edit the target location in the file and shim will launch the custom executable.

So far, I have used this to get things like RaftModLoader and BeamMP working (mod loader for Raft and multiplayer for BeamNG.Drive respectively). I see no issue with this being able to also work for Bethesda titles and others that need custom executables. As I understand as well, the actual game install directories on a Steam Deck with SteamOS are mutable, and with a bit of tinkering through desktop mode should help get a seamless experience for launching modded Steam games for Deck users as well.

I hope someone finds as much use and utility that I have for getting a lot of modding tools for Windows games working without needing to mangle the prefix using protontricks in some cases or install the absolute multi-tool that is SteamTinkerLaunch.

About a week late to post this but someone could probably use this info.

This is a community made patch to fix serious issues playing Black Ops 3 online everything from stuttering in menus to RCEs, it's basically a requirement even if you're just playing zombies with friends.

The latest version no longer requires you to run an exe along side the game and is officially supported on Linux now.

The beautiful games I own are Snake Pass and Sonic Racing Transformed, both of which have sound issues (muffled audio) when played through a cheap soundbar via bluetooth, audio for all other games with this soundbar works perfectly.

I'm on EndeavourOS (Arch Linux) using repository Steam, KDE Plasma and Pipewire. I've tried all the different proton versions (experimental, 9, 8, 7, 3, etc) without success. Maybe I could solve it by removing pipewire but I don't think it's worth worsening the entire OS, since it's only about these two titles.

Q:

• The problem seems to not appear on other distros, like Debian (maybe due to different packages / pulseaudio?).
• Coincidentally it only happens with these two SumoDigital games, could proton be missing some component commonly used in these games?
• Since I can't find any relevant solutions online, I assume that the problem only exists with this type of Bluetooth audio device.

[edit] AtM I "solved" it by connecting the speaker via cable.

I have been using GNU for so long now and what always annoyed me, was the fact that the last proprietary components of my OSs were always some kernel firmware blobs that are packaged with the official Linux kernel. Now I'd like to know if anyone has already tried the Linux-libre kernel on a modern system.

Update wine to latest bleeding edge

Update dxvk to latest git

Update vkd3d-proton to latest git

Import upstream proton changes

Rebase staging

Add xinput patch for Dragon Age: Inquisition ( thanks cammoore1 )

Protonfixes:

Add protonfix and steamgameid envvar to trigger Dragon Age: Inquisition xinput patch (allows to work with EA version in umu)

Add protonfix for Flowers - Le Volume series (thanks R1kaB3rN)

Add protonfix for The Last Blade (thanks ranplayer)

Add protonfix for GOG Beyond Good and Evil (thanks ImLinguin)

Add protonfix for WRC4 (thanks ToRRen1812)

Hi All,

I get an infrequent error when playing balder gate 3 on Fedora Workstation 40. I run it in direct x11 as vulkan crashed all the time. Any ideas how to fix?

PS very new to Linux/GNU so let me know if you need any additional information.

CrowdStrike’s Falcon software uses a special driver that allows it to run at a lower level than most apps so it can detect threats across a Windows system. Microsoft tried to restrict third parties from accessing the kernel in Windows Vista in 2006 but was met with pushback from cybersecurity vendors and EU regulators. However, Apple was able to lock down its macOS operating system in 2020 so that developers could no longer get access to the kernel.

Now, it looks like Microsoft wants to reopen the conversations around restricting kernel-level access inside Windows.

Hey, I've just received and built my first custom key board using the Wooting 60HE module and Lekker L45 Switches.

I tried testing them out in Trackmania and I've run into an issue. The analog inputs aren't registered in the game. I'm running the game via Steam through Proton GE 9.7 and it just simply does not register the input.

I read somewhere as the keyboard emulates controller input you had to set the input device in the in-game controller settings to "xinput controller" but since there is no actual controller connected the only available devices are "xinput keyboard" and "xinput mouse".

I'm curious if anyone has had or solved this issue or if anyone could bring some tips on how to possibly solve this.

SOLVED: Apparently there's specific gamepad settings inside of Wootility under Settings > Gamepad. There you have to select what type of controller the software will emulate. I just took the recommended (Xbox Controller) and now it works as expected.

"Mind the gap."
Thanks in advance!

UPDATE:
Santiago Santiago has updated a video on how to install Fallout: London on Steam Deck.

YouTube

Piped

https://www.theverge.com/24204770/asus-rog-ally-x-review-handheld-gaming-pc

I'm a big fan of this FOSS game and very excited for it's future, the game being around 20 years old

So as we know Windows Platform Apps and WinUI3 apps do not work on Linux, I keep wondering if Microsoft were to launch a new API let’s say direct X 15 but limit it to Windows Store Apps, and provided a way for the apps to be installed from other stores like steam could they in time kill modern Linux gaming.

More information available on NVIDIA.com