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
Linux gaming was always slightly buggy for me for a while. Then I tried Nobara, and since then everything has been more or less plug and play.
AC Odyssey was a bit more work to get going but that was because I had bought it through Ubisoft Connect. But even that just needed me to install it in Lutris which comes preinstalled and made the setup nice and easy.
Nobara is developed by the guy who makes ProtonGE, as a side note.
https://nobaraproject.org/
I switched from PopOs to Nobara, and it worked great but after a while my sound quit and I missed how switching workspaces worked in PopOs. I tried Mint and surprisingly I had a hell of time trying to get gaming working like it did, so I back to PopOs and I have zero complaints. Everything just works. I have a bunch of games that say no on the steam deck but they work great. I’ve been told the kernal is outdated but honestly, I don’t care, everything works. In my household we have 5 pc’s. My wifes is the only one left on Windows and she has more issues than me.
i tried nobara, i dont remember why but for one reason or another the install was kinda borked
When I switched I had to use Windows (gross) to make the boot disk. Turns out that was my mistake, Windows fucks with the drive just a tad and made the verification fail on the installer.
Using a live usb Linux stick I was able to download the ISO and write a new install disk. Worked flawlessly from there.