Hey all!
So I’ve been wanting to get into Linux gaming for a while thanks to inspiration from this community, but I’ve struggled to get it working, and after a final try today I’m starting to lose hope. I haven’t gotten a single game working, most of them using Steam and Proton, but I also tried League of Legends through Lutris. I don’t know what to try next, other than maybe installing a different Linux operating system and trying again. Anyone with some advice on what I can do, or where I can turn for help? I’ve searched online as best I can but didn’t find anything that seemed relevant.
Some details of what I’ve tried if anyone is curious: on Steam I tried Trine 4 and Jusant today, previously also Baldur’s Gate 3 a few months ago. The games simply don’t launch, though for BG3 and LoL at least the launcher starts. Usually no error message, but Trine did for once tell me “GPU error detected” today. I’ve tried both Proton Experimental and whatever the newest version is at the time, today Proton GE-Proton8-14. Some system details:
Distro: Ubuntu 22.04.3 LTS RAM: 16GB CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 1600 six-core GPU: Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070 GPU Driver: Nvidia 545.29.06 (proprietary)
That’s odd, I installed Nobara as my OS and almost any game is just install and click play and it plays flawlessly. Using both steam to install and Heroic Launcher (which you could try) that has the capabilities to get the games you have on GOG, Epic and Amazon Prime*. Don’t forget that in steam you need to enable Linux/Proton in settings.
Otherwise ProtonDB is a great resource to see what games run on Linux, how well they run and how each person ran the game.
https://www.protondb.com/
Edit: I do believe getting a dedicated gaming distro does help as it has a lot of necessary tweaks pre-configured. For that I’d recommend, Nobara, Garuda or PopOS!
ProtonDB is great, I did look at it which is why I expected to be able to run those games! Even people on protonDB that had to tinker to get it working seemed to at least be able to start the games, so I couldn’t find anyone with problems matching my case. Thanks for the tip though! If I don’t manage to figure it out with all help in this thread I might try one of the gaming distros :)