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Dear Big Tech, Stop Shoving AI Into Operating Systems (www.howtogeek.com)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 8 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I made a new computer in November, and while I didn't try Mint (I don't think) I installed 3 or 4 different versions if Linux. In them, I installed steam and Nvidia drivers, but most of my game library said they weren't playable. If I didn't have kids I could have spent more time and gotten it working, but is Mint different? Would they have been playable on it?

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  • [–] 14 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    It's probably because you need to go to Steam settings and enable Proton for all games. I don't understand why this is still not turned on by default...

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  • [–] 8 points 1 year ago

    This. Also be sure to go to the compatibility section and select 'Enable Steam Play for all other titles.' Otherwise you're borked.

    Just for completeness, I like Bazzite for gaming over Linux Mint, but Linux Mint should still work fine.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    You have to change your steam settings to attempt to use proton. Once you do this, steam will allow the games to play. Practically everything will work once you do this.

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  • [–] 9 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    ...shiiiiiiit, I had so much fucking trouble getting games to work (most steam games just wouldn't even launch) and never discovered this. This is why linux is still unsuitable for the non-technical consumer; I'm a former unix sysadmin, I've hand-edited SysV runlevels and bootstrapped gcc and shit, but I've been out of it so long that a lot of shit has changed and I don't even know where to look for solutions other than just googling 'reddit XYZ doesn't work' and hoping I find solutions that are even relevant to the distro I'm running.

    Quick question, I've seen split opinions on this - I have an SSD that just has my games installed (mostly steam games) under windows, is it reasonable to try to mount that under linux and try to run games that way, or should I just reinstall them onto the linux drive?

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago* (1 child)

    I had quite a lot of the same frustration because, although I was never a sysadmin (more like a senior dev who has done a lot of software systems development and design for software systems where the back and middle tier are running on Linux servers, which involved amongst other things managing development servers), I was used to the Linux structure of a decade and more ago (i.e. runtime levels and the old style commands for things like network info) and the whole SystemD stuff and this whole raft of new fashionable command line info and admin tools that replaced the old (and perfectly fine) ones was quite frustrating to get to grips with.

    That said, I've persevered and have by now been using Linux on my gaming rig for 8 months with very few problems and a pretty high success rate at running games (most of which require no tweaking) not just Steam games but also GOG games using Lutris as launcher.

    That said, I only figured out the "magical" Steam config settings to get most games to run on Linux when I was desperately googling how to do it.

    Oh, and by the way, Pop!OS is a branch of Ubuntu, so at least when it comes to command line tools and locations of files in the filesystem, most help for Ubuntu out there also works with Pop!OS.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Yeah, that's my main issue is just all the stuff I'm familiar with has changed. And that's not a problem for the OS, it's been 15+ years since I've messed with it so that stuff should've changed. It's more frustration with how much of a pain it is to relearn it all, especially as I'm older and have other stuff I would rather be spending my time with than poking around 40 pages into a man page to try to make basic shit work.

    Re:games - if you happen to have a link to that magical steam config that would be immensely helpful, cause I'm gonna try again at some point, and the more resources I can sock away toward making that less painful the more likely I am to stick with it, and being able to play games is my #1 requirement to do that.

    Oh, and by the way, Pop!OS is a branch of Ubuntu, so at least when it comes to command line tools and locations of files in the filesystem, most help for Ubuntu out there also works with Pop!OS.

    You would think so, but they use different packages (they swap pulseaudio with pipewire or vice versa, etc) and put things in different locations, so I was often frustrated by solutions tailored to Ubuntu that required editing files that just didn't exist in PopOS.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (1 child)

    Well, the "magical" Steam config was that stuff others pointed out that you need to in Steam actually under Settings -> Compatibility enable use of Steam Play with Proton for all titles since that's not enabled by default.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago* (1 child)

    Ive tried this and proton seems to overwrite the games data everytime i launch the game breaking it and forcing a reinstall. I found that the best way is to simply have a drive formated to ext4 or ntfs mount it in both linix and windows and have seperate folders for linux games and windows games. Kinda jank but it works

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Ugh, that sounds like a pain. My current drive set up is:

    1. Old 128gb SATA SSD boot drive, just windows.
    2. Old 512GB SATA SSD that has some incidental stuff on it.
    3. Recent-ish old 1TB NVMe SSD that used to have all my games on it but is now blank.
    4. New 2TB NVMe SSD that now has all my games on it.

    #3 is blank so I was just going to install linux there, but also I have ~1.8TB worth of games installed from windows onto #4 that I'd rather not have to try to also install onto #3 and keep them separate. Installing dupes on #4 is equally bad, so of the two I think I'll go wtih just installing games for linux on #3. Thanks for the advice.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Be careful dual booting off a single partitioned drive ive heard windows likes to fuck with linux installs boot files overwriting them on win updates. Might just be best to put linux and its games on #3

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago

    I don't have room on #1 or #2 to install linux, so it has to go on 3/4, and I'd much rather it be on its own drive, I can just create a second partition for the games if single-partition is a problem.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago

    By default many games will use steam runtime for linux compatability which just doesnt work. Gotta go to steam settings>compatability> and switch to the later versions of proton (proton is just a translation layer that converts some code of the game to linux compatible code) sadly many games with anticheat are not playable. Check the sites protondb or areweanticheatyet for info if your game is compatible

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