I'm willing to give Linux Gaming a try

B00nie said:
It was designed to work perfectly but running games that were originally intended for another platform is no easy task. How many linux native games does Windows run?
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Lol.

The hero worship is real, try to keep it on topic.

You've lost a convert. I wanted to run Linux- any distro- as a daily driver. Most of what I need is there! But we're not talking about a game- no, we're talking about a platform whose singular purpose is to run games on Linux. It isn't the game! That works great! It's the Linux software that outright borks sound on different, nearly unrelated Linux distros, with a ubiquitous Realtek DAC. Without error, in the background, somewhere that isn't widely understood.

That is the state of Linux gaming.
 
IdiotInCharge said:
Checked all that. Go Linux!

Partition wiped. Three days of troubleshooting is enough. I'll see if I can replicate it on something that is not a daily driver later.
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And here I found my last two weeks of troubleshooting quite interesting. It's been quite enlightening behind the scenes tying to make shit work again.

Here's the TL;DR version:

1. Was running Solus Plasma. Had FFXI running via WINE under Solus Plasma perfectly for months.
2. Found out Ikey was gone. Don't like direction core Solus devs are headed. Nothing against them just don't feel like their vision is nearly as far reaching as Ikey's was.
3. Went distro hopping.
4. Ubuntu MATE - got FFXI working with WINE 3.18 (3.19 was released the next day) but performance was garbage and Ubuntu MATE performance itself wasn't that great. Don't know why. Didn't care.
5. Jumped to my old favorite, Arch Linux using Budgie desktop. Couldn't get FFXI working. POL.exe flat out didn't work.
6. Jumped to back to Solus Plasma. Got FFXI working partially. Turns out WINE 3.19 has a regression in it that breaks POL.exe. Patch has been submitted but not yet accepted. Funny thing though the error with POL.exe was different on Solus Plasma than Arch Budgie.
7. Jumped to Arch with Plasma. WINE 3.19. Same error now on Arch Plasma and Solus Plasma. So definitely something different between Mutter and KWin when dealing with WINE. This explained why MATE was functional with WINE 3.18 as it uses Marco.
8. Jumped to KDE Neon. Loaded up WINEHQ PPA. Installed wine-staging 3.10 (oldest available for 18.04). No dice. Loaded wine-staging 3.11. FFXI now fully functional.

I'm really not a huge fan of Ubuntu based distros so I just spent the last 2 days slowly building another Precision 5510 with Arch Plasma (this one has a 4K screen and man Plasma's scaling works beautifully). Thanks to archive.archlinux.org I was able to install WINE 3.11. It now looks like FFXI will run under Arch no problem as POL.exe is running perfectly. In fact it actually looks like it'll run better under Arch than it does KDE Neon. It's been most interesting figuring all this out. It's also been very interesting finding out just how much I need to do to the WINE Bottle for FFXI to make it function. In the end very little now compared to when I was first doing this a few months ago.
 
I'd be willing to try Arch on a non-daily-driver; my reservations with Arch, from not having used it yet, are that it seems to be 'self-bricking' due to the update cycle. This is why I was trying Manjaro, and I can't say that I really understand the underlying differences between the two other than the information blurbs that include a different repository.
 
Arch rarely "fucks" itself these days.

Having said that. If your not a Linux head already go with Manjaro,. They hold most major bits back 1-3 weeks until they are sure there will be zero issues.

Updates causing issues isn't something I have ever run into with Manjaro. They also have a great kernel selection setup... where you can run more then one Kernel. Nice to keep a LTS kernel running at all times, while you enjoy the latest kernel at all times for things like Steam play. I keep 4.14, but rarely boot into it. Just switched to 4.19 the other day.

As for people giving up after a few days, how very power user of you. Its hard to trouble shoot for someone through a forum. I haven't had major sound issues in ages... the advantage of taking the time to figure out why something isn't working is worthwhile for the knowledge you will gain. I don't honestly know why people have so many issues with such basic things. I have installed 100s of Linux desktops on hardware new and old and can count the major issues I have run into on one hand.
 
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ChadD said:
Arch rarely "fucks" itself these days.

Having said that. If your not a Linux head already go with Manjaro,. They hold most major bits back 1-3 weeks until they are sure there will be zero issues.

Updates causing issues isn't something I have ever run into with Manjaro. They also have a great kernel selection setup... where you can run more then one Kernel. Nice to keep a LTS kernel running at all times, while you enjoy the latest kernel at all times for things like Steam play. I keep 4.14, but rarely boot into it. Just switched to 4.19 the other day.

As for people giving up after a few days, how very power user of you. Its hard to trouble shoot for someone through a forum. I haven't had major sound issues in ages... the advantage of taking the time to figure out why something isn't working is worthwhile for the knowledge you will gain. I don't honestly know why people have so many issues with such basic things. I have installed 100s of Linux desktops on hardware new and old and can count the major issues I have run into on one hand.
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Eh. Each situation is different. When is the last time you installed a recent game on Linux? You may out may not run into some of the same issues.... A lot of variables involved
I agree. It's worth troubleshooting if you have the time. I don't think it's the lack of wanting to troubleshoot for anyone that's posted. But, rather the want to just play the game they installed and have a little fun.
 
FNtastic said:
Eh. Each situation is different. When is the last time you installed a recent game on Linux? You may out may not run into some of the same issues.... A lot of variables involved
I agree. It's worth troubleshooting if you have the time. I don't think it's the lack of wanting to troubleshoot for anyone that's posted. But, rather the want to just play the game they installed and have a little fun.
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I really haven't had any issues. But I guess it depends what sort of games you like to play.

Frankly most games I actually play when I have time have native Linux versions. Dota Kerbel... and I still prefer the older versions of Civ all of which run no issues. The only game I play without a native Linux version is Star Trek Online. A couple years ago when they moved to DX11 only and killed their DX9 path there was a period where I was unable to play it under Linux. When DXVK launched, I first gave it ago when it was 2 or 3 months old and STO booted and ran first go. I won't claim the performance was stellar... but everything rendered perfectly, and its not a super popular game that was getting a lot of DXVK or Wine Attention. With the most current version of Steamplay proton beta, it runs almost on par with windows. The latest patch for sure fixed a bit of lag in the mouse input that game suffered. (it was an issue I was able to solve in a round about I wouldn't expect most people to be able to figure out) It is now however fixed in proton itself.

I think when it comes to Linux... and running windows only games. People need to adjust their expectations. lol DXVK is a year old. The official mask off this is really a Valve project was only a couple months back. Patience. Every beta update things get smoother and more games are moved to the runs well side of the spreadsheet.

I am not accusing anyone specifically in this thread of claiming to be "giving Linux a shot" looking for things to QQ about. But it does seem that way sometimes when people claim to be running into major show stopping issues with things like basic sound support. As its not something I have really run into. The few people I have talked to over the last few years with legit sound issues... are either running non standard setups like 3-4 sound devices on one machine. Or they have bought into some crazy internet talk and tried to manually replace Pulseaudio bits or something cause someone told them Pulse sucked. ;) Pulse has its issues... as does windows sound system, but for everyday average users / gamers ect pulse and windows sound system are just fine. The only OS with a very good out of the box complete sound system solution is MacOS. You don't have to deal with things like Jack, or ASIO as you do in windows. Apple has done a good job of creating a system that is all things at once. I'm not a huge Apple fan... but I'll give them that one their Audio support is by far the best there is.

Anyway as most Linux gamers will tell people if they listen. If you play 5+ hours a day of windows AAA games... don't go and delete your win part just yet. If you play 5 hours a week, and spend a lot of time doing things that matter... give it an honest go cause ya Steamplay is starting to get cooking. If like a lot of us you mostly shun the (for the most part) crap AAA titles... and prefer indie games like Kerbel space program, well you may find Linux more then handles everything you like to play. My steam list isn't massive... think I have 30-40 games or so... I think only 5 or 6 of my games don't have native Linux bins its just a product of the type of games I like Borderlands is the only shooter I have really spent any time playing since doom days, and the newer titles have Native bins.. and I was able to play Borderlands 1 under wine, I assume it would install with steamplay if I tried, perhaps I will this weekend. Other then that I play some rocket league and some dota.

We all know who we really are as gamers. If you really are the gamer that buys every 80 dollar AAA title on day one and play the heck out of it for a week before you never touch it again. I guess Linux might not be for you yet. If you skip AAA games till they are on sale for 20 bucks or less... Linux MAY potentially keep you happy. If your like me and only rarely go in for games of the make your hardware sweet variety, Linux will cover you 100%.
 
FNtastic said:
Eh. Each situation is different. When is the last time you installed a recent game on Linux? You may out may not run into some of the same issues.... A lot of variables involved
I agree. It's worth troubleshooting if you have the time. I don't think it's the lack of wanting to troubleshoot for anyone that's posted. But, rather the want to just play the game they installed and have a little fun.
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I've had numerous gaming issues under Windows that I've had to diagnose to the point of absolute frustration, Windows is not immune to such issues by any means.

The issue here is a distinct lack of familiarity with the OS where issues are encountered, the issue is not a result of Linux not being ready for the desktop. If a Windows user was having the exact same issues under macOS the result may very well have been identical assuming little experience with macOS in direct comparison to gaming under Windows.

I personally find gaming under Linux to be fantastic and encounter no more issues than I did under Windows. Such issues are few and far between, just like they were under Windows.

A little perspective goes a very long way. ;)
 
Well I have 4 SSD's with 4 different OS's. My linux SSD is set up to use Steam. That way I don't have to deal with this or that. When I'm done with Linux I'm online with Win 10 or whatever it may be.
 
Mazzspeed said:
I've had numerous gaming issues under Windows that I've had to diagnose to the point of absolute frustration, Windows is not immune to such issues by any means.

The issue here is a distinct lack of familiarity with the OS where issues are encountered, the issue is not a result of Linux not being ready for the desktop. If a Windows user was having the exact same issues under macOS the result may very well have been identical assuming little experience with macOS in direct comparison to gaming under Windows.

I personally find gaming under Linux to be fantastic and encounter no more issues than I did under Windows. Such issues are few and far between, just like they were under Windows.

A little perspective goes a very long way. ;)
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Well, sure. I explained this in an earlier post as well. I agree.
 
IdiotInCharge said:
I'd be willing to try Arch on a non-daily-driver; my reservations with Arch, from not having used it yet, are that it seems to be 'self-bricking' due to the update cycle. This is why I was trying Manjaro, and I can't say that I really understand the underlying differences between the two other than the information blurbs that include a different repository.
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I used Arch for a very long time before moving to Solus. Never had it brick anything.

Oh and FFXI fully functional on Arch now. Will be rebuilding this 5510 over the weekend with Arch. The other one has a 4K screen (my god what a bitch to install Arch on that) but half the RAM and only a 512GB SSD. This one has 2 SSDs a 256GB and a 1TB. So I'll just have to settle for 1080p. ;)
 
Mazzspeed said:
I've had numerous gaming issues under Windows that I've had to diagnose to the point of absolute frustration, Windows is not immune to such issues by any means.
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I have too- but very few since the release of 7, and essentially none on 10 related to the OS- and none that irrevocably killed sound system wide. Fixable problems are learning experiences, and that's why I'm here!

Seemingly unfixable problems only compound frustration, which is why I'm stepping away for a bit. Probably not a decade, but maybe a few weeks before I bang my head against the problem again.

My main frustration was that I'd resolved to putting Linux on my laptop and using it for as much non-gaming stuff as possible- which mostly means browsing the web and remoting into other systems- with the one gaming exception being League of Legends, which does not have a convenient Steam listing. Close enough to have it at my fingertips, but alas not close enough.
 
IdiotInCharge said:
I have too- but very few since the release of 7, and essentially none on 10 related to the OS- and none that irrevocably killed sound system wide. Fixable problems are learning experiences, and that's why I'm here!

Seemingly unfixable problems only compound frustration, which is why I'm stepping away for a bit. Probably not a decade, but maybe a few weeks before I bang my head against the problem again.

My main frustration was that I'd resolved to putting Linux on my laptop and using it for as much non-gaming stuff as possible- which mostly means browsing the web and remoting into other systems- with the one gaming exception being League of Legends, which does not have a convenient Steam listing. Close enough to have it at my fingertips, but alas not close enough.
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The important thing to remember here is that you mucked up audio fiddling with Lutris, this is hardly an issue of Linux itself. I'd love to help, but I've never mucked up audio as a result of fiddling with Lutris and I don't run Manjaro. I've run Arch based distro's in the past and stupid issues always resulted in me turning back to Ubuntu based distro's for my daily driver, I don't recommend it as a distro for a newcomer to Linux on a daily machine.

The one time I did have audio issues under Ubuntu I had to add my user to the audio group and everything worked fine. Remember, by default Linux is more secure than Windows.
 
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Mazzspeed said:
The important thing to remember here is that you mucked up audio fiddling with Lutris, this is hardly an issue of Linux itself. I'd love to help, but I've never mucked up audio as a result of fiddling with Lutris and I don't run Manjaro. I've run Arch based distro's in the past and stupid issues always resulted in me turning back to Ubuntu based distro's for my daily driver, I don't recommend it as a distro for a newcomer to Linux on a daily machine.
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Did it in two Ubuntu-based distros too. If it was just Manjaro, whatever. It wasn't. And that makes it more baffling.

Mazzspeed said:
The one time I did have audio issues under Ubuntu I had to add my user to the audio group and everything worked fine. Remember, by default Linux is more secure than Windows.
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The challenge is that sound was working on install. I found no reference that could explain the path of sound through Linux with Alsa and PulseAudio, the dependencies etc.; especially one that could explain having the audio playing by every software indication and still having no sound out of the speakers. And this is the laptop speakers- I tried headphones too, since that is a separate audio path, with the same results.

--------------
I do want to thank y'all for trying. While I've been using Linux for server duty since Counter-Strike was in beta, I've never been comfortable with it as a daily driver; now, we have migrated some of our work stuff over, and intend to migrate more, and I feel that prod to raise my basic awareness.

I figured putting it in a limited daily-driver situation would be perfect for that. Maybe it will be, but not today :).
 
Mazzspeed said:
Remember, by default Linux is more secure than Windows.
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Linux adopts a different posture- this is perhaps complicated by attempts to alter that posture minimally for desktop users. This is probably why nearly all training material I've looked at starts at the console, despite having advanced GUIs available: approaching Linux from the perspective of a desktop user is a very frustrating experience as you don't really account for how the system is set up. Windows and Mac OS X really do a better job here of bridging that gap.

As for security itself; the OS is only part of the picture. I'd argue that Windows is just as secure, but at the same time presents a larger target. Microsoft has done quite a bit with Windows 7 through 10, with a lot of pain (drivers!), to make Windows secure for a broader set of computing environments. In this I feel that they have succeeded in ways that neither Linux nor Mac OS X really have.

Security through obscurity can be effective, but it's not really security- you need defense in depth for real security on top of active auditing to a standard, and with that the process is what provides actual security more than any of the individual components.
 
IdiotInCharge said:
Could be related, except this seems to happen upon install and persists uniformly whether Lutris is launched or not.
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Well whatever sound card you're running in that laptop obviously doesn't have drivers supported by Linux if it doesn't work on fresh install under any distro. Probably made by Realtek.

If you mean it happens upon install of Lutrus, I'd be doing whatever is outlined in that guide as obviously some dependency is being overwritten along the way. Unlike Windows, Linux does not install the same dependencies over and over again for each application.
 
Mazzspeed said:
Well whatever sound card you're running in that laptop obviously doesn't have drivers supported by Linux if it doesn't work on fresh install under any distro. Probably made by Realtek.
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Nearly all soundcards are Realtek- and it works until I install WINE/Lutris. Meaning that the WINE/Lutris install is the prime suspect.
 
IdiotInCharge said:
Nearly all soundcards are Realtek- and it works until I install WINE/Lutris. Meaning that the WINE/Lutris install is the prime suspect.
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So the installation of Wine is overwriting a dependency. I'd be trying that link I provided.

If you were running Ubuntu I'd say a simple 'sudo apt -get install -f' may rectify your issue, but you're running an Arch based distro and it's been years since I ran Arch so I don't know the equivalent command.
 
You have a dependency issue that I don't know how to resolve as you're running an Arch based distro. The interesting thing is that you said you encountered the exact same issue under Ubuntu, plenty of us here run Lutrus/Wine under Ubuntu based distro's without issue? Certainly not sound issues and certainly not sound issues that bring down audio system wide.

I've run Creative audio as well as Intel HD audio and I have never encountered this issue. Most Intel based laptops actually run Intel HD audio BTW.
 
IdiotInCharge said:
...and I'd already done that. Really. I didn't give up easily.
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Any chance of trying the same process on different hardware? That might help determine if it's a software thing such as a procedure or wine config, vs something particular about the particular Realtek LMNOP-stroke4 version 2 that's on your board. Quickly scrolling back through, I didn't see what computer or motherboard you were/are using for this... The Asus ultrabook, or did you get another machine up?
 
Mazzspeed said:
Most Intel based laptops actually run Intel HD audio BTW.
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Fair to say that it's 'both'. I realize that the Realtek stuff is the DAC stage and many times the amp stage, and that the Realtek part interfaces with Intel's HD Audio, formerly Azalia.
 
IdiotInCharge said:
Fair to say that it's 'both'. I realize that the Realtek stuff is the DAC stage and many times the amp stage, and that the Realtek part interfaces with Intel's HD Audio, formerly Azalia.
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Was this an issue under an Ubuntu based distro or is it only an issue under Manjaro?
 
Frobozz said:
Any chance of trying the same process on different hardware? That might help determine if it's a software thing such as a procedure or wine config, vs something particular about the particular Realtek LMNOP-stroke4 version 2 that's on your board. Quickly scrolling back through, I didn't see what computer or motherboard you were/are using for this... The Asus ultrabook, or did you get another machine up?
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That's the next step. I work 12's, so next week, probably- current system is an 8550U-based ultrabook. My 'Linux workstation' is an ASRock Z270 ITX with a 7600K and GTX970- and I'll likely be putting my old 27" G-Sync monitor on it too. That system I used Shadow of Mordor to confirm that it's a go for gaming, with a Ubuntu Budgie install.

(that's also likely to be a Realtek setup, but I hadn't tried to get WINE/Lutris running on it)
 
If you open terminal and enter 'alsamixer' without quotes, what card and chip is listed?

EDIT: Under Alsamixer, is Master, PCM and Line Out turned all the way up?
 
IdiotInCharge said:
Nearly all soundcards are Realtek- and it works until I install WINE/Lutris. Meaning that the WINE/Lutris install is the prime suspect.
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Nearly all cheap bargain-bin motherboards have Realtek, yes. I haven't yet run to any hardware where I couldn't get the sound working though.
 
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Mazzspeed said:
If you open terminal and enter 'alsamixer' without quotes, what card and chip is listed?

EDIT: Under Alsamixer, is Master, PCM and Line Out turned all the way up?
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I did mess with Alsamixer quite a bit. Very basic troubleshooting here; and to be clear, there aren't a lot of settings available for this audio device. It's a stereo DAC. I believe that it has the ability to output PCM, but I'm not sure if that is through the analog jack with an adapter to RCA or if that means HDMI only, I haven't tried either.

I'm really just talking about that analog jack, because the sound works out of the laptop's speakers and with headphones plugged into the jack, and then when sound breaks it doesn't.


In the meantime, I've been VM'ing quite a bit- Fedora, OpenSUSE, and KDE Neon.

I'll say that the biggest thing I've seen between distros is the window manager- I think Gnome is the slicker UI, but KDE is more natural to use as a Windows user. Package managers differ but that largely only matters for learning their console routines, and of course there's differences in terms of what's installed and what's available in the repositories.

So know I'll be balancing between Fedora, Manjaro, and OpenSUSE for an updated system for my Linux workstation, and if I can get that working favorably I may try again on the laptop.
 
IdiotInCharge said:
So know I'll be balancing between Fedora, Manjaro, and OpenSUSE for an updated system for my Linux workstation, and if I can get that working favorably I may try again on the laptop.
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If you're having problems, I quite honestly wouldn't be recommending any of those distro's to a relative newcomer to the Linux desktop. I'd personally be recommending an Ubuntu based distribution.

I just don't understand how you've had this issue under a number of distro's and yet no one else has encountered it. There has to be a step performed either deliberately or inadvertently in an attempt to get something running better that's being missed here.
 
Mazzspeed said:
If you're having problems, I quite honestly wouldn't be recommending any of those distro's to a relative newcomer to the Linux desktop. I'd personally be recommending an Ubuntu based distribution.
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I had the issue with two Ubuntu-based distributions.

Mazzspeed said:
I just don't understand how you've had this issue under a number of distro's and yet no one else has encountered it. There has to be a step performed either deliberately or inadvertently in an attempt to get something running better that's being missed here.
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I don't understand how it's possible for it happen and how impossible it seems to troubleshoot. The first I can deal with; the second is where I take a step back. Days of Googling and trying different things in complete frustration due to every resource coming up dry.
 
IdiotInCharge said:
I don't understand how it's possible for it happen and how impossible it seems to troubleshoot. The first I can deal with; the second is where I take a step back. Days of Googling and trying different things in complete frustration due to every resource coming up dry.
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Because it's by no means a widespread issue, that's what's so odd here and that's why you're struggling to find answers. The other thing is that running an Arch distro you're going to be lacking the support you get under an Ubuntu distro, no matter what anyone likes to claim and all personal preferences aside - The Arch user base tend to work out problems quickly and keep the fix to themselves, they're 'tinkerers' by nature and they aren't overly friendly (with the exception of ChadD!)

Are you certain that all you do is install Lutris and Wine as a simple default install, no tinkering whatsoever, no 'power saving utilities' or 'performance boosting utilities' of any kind and like that all sound simply vanishes? For example, can you install a straightforward Ubuntu 18.04 distro and have sound with nothing else installed, install Lutris and Wine and all of a sudden have absolutely no sound 'with absolutely nothing else installed'?

I don't mean to go over and over the same thing, but it's just so difficult to get the straight facts when diagnosing such problems sometimes.
 
IdiotInCharge said:
I don't understand how it's possible for it happen and how impossible it seems to troubleshoot. The first I can deal with; the second is where I take a step back. Days of Googling and trying different things in complete frustration due to every resource coming up dry.
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Seeing how you can reproduce the error on demand, have you attempted to watch your log files while causing the issue? (tail -f /var/log/messages and such) Seems like the type of thing where you'd see something in the background crash, complain, or otherwise emit something more to search on to narrow in the problem?

If I wanted to try to reproduce it, you're just launching League of Legends under wine and/or lutris, right?
 
heatlesssun said:
Difficult to isolate issues typically aren't widespread.
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Not too sure just what point you're trying to make here.

Frobozz said:
If I wanted to try to reproduce it, you're just launching League of Legends under wine and/or lutris, right?
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I thought he IdiotInCharge was simply installing Lutris/Wine and the issue could be recreated under every distro? Without installing any games at all? o_O
 
heatlesssun said:
Difficult to isolate issues typically aren't widespread.
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This is true I have a client/friend who has been trying to use some Line6 audio gear with a windows 10 machine. Stupid thing is constantly freezing audio sound system for no seeming reason. After a few weeks he gave up and plugged it all into his mac. lol

I agree though ya this sound issue is odd. Sounds like his card is perfectly supported by the kernel... its some strange interaction with something he is running.
 
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