Putting the 'role' back in role-playing games since 2002.
Donate to Codex
Good Old Games
  • Welcome to rpgcodex.net, a site dedicated to discussing computer based role-playing games in a free and open fashion. We're less strict than other forums, but please refer to the rules.

    "This message is awaiting moderator approval": All new users must pass through our moderation queue before they will be able to post normally. Until your account has "passed" your posts will only be visible to yourself (and moderators) until they are approved. Give us a week to get around to approving / deleting / ignoring your mundane opinion on crap before hassling us about it. Once you have passed the moderation period (think of it as a test), you will be able to post normally, just like all the other retards.

Linux RPG list

Are you willing to give Linux a chance?

  • I am already on Linux

  • Didn't know so much incline was available on Linux, might consider it

  • There is a game that i really really have to play and is unavailable, else i might consider it

  • I am a Windowsfag, i love viruses, malware, NSA spying on me, DRM, and all that


Results are only viewable after voting.

Nano

Arcane
Patron
Joined
Mar 6, 2016
Messages
4,817
Grab the Codex by the pussy Strap Yourselves In Enjoy the Revolution! Another revolution around the sun that is.
Actually on windows you have to remember which launcher has the game, launch the launcher, wait for updates, then launch the game.
I don't use any launchers on Windows. That's much less viable on Linux.

And also, what you mean by "unintuitive" is that it's not what you expect. Because what you expect is windows.
EXEs are way more convenient than whatever it is Linux does.
 

Nano

Arcane
Patron
Joined
Mar 6, 2016
Messages
4,817
Grab the Codex by the pussy Strap Yourselves In Enjoy the Revolution! Another revolution around the sun that is.
Linux uses executables the same way windows does. They just don't have .exe extensions.
It's generally assumed by Linux developers for some reason that all users want to use package managers or launchers. It's hard to even get a chance to use executables.

Also, executables on Linux suck. I remember always having to go into file properties having to change up settings just so I could open an executable file with a double-click.
 

Bah

Arcane
Joined
Oct 6, 2006
Messages
2,946
Location
Northwest American Republic
Also, executables on Linux suck. I remember always having to go into file properties having to change up settings just so I could open an executable file with a double-click.

If the execute bit was not set for the executable, that's a problem with the way you acquired the game or the developer, and not a linux problem. In windows you create an executable by adding the .exe extension. In linux you create an executable by setting the execute bit (chmod +x filename). It seems that you just are very unfamiliar with linux, and these issues you are describing are not linux problems, but problems caused by the developer or distributor of the game.
 

Nano

Arcane
Patron
Joined
Mar 6, 2016
Messages
4,817
Grab the Codex by the pussy Strap Yourselves In Enjoy the Revolution! Another revolution around the sun that is.
Thanks but no thanks. Windows is just as easy to get for free as Linux is, and with Windows I don't have to pay for it with my time either.
 

Absinthe

Arcane
Joined
Jan 6, 2012
Messages
4,062
Unfortunately, the downsides to using Linux instead of Windows are many:

[...]

2 - the usual: lack of popular Windows software. So you can find open source alternatives to many things, LibreOffice is surprisingly good, even if it still has issues with some files created with MS Office, but these are rather rare, at least in my workplace. However, if you need Office or Adobe Photoshop
LibreOffice is pretty much the recommended Office substitute. There's no good Photoshop substitute, though.

or some actually good audio editing/mixing/mastering software, you will have trouble.
I recommend REAPER for that.

4 - battery life. No matter what I do and how fluid the whole system runs, battery life is still worse than on Windows. The difference is not huge, but it's significant enough to notice.
Depending on what you do, you can get much better Linux battery life performance than Windows. It requires lightweight window managers, drivers (especially graphics card drivers), a lot of fucking with sysctl settings, and this shit sounds fine. Going the extra mile is to recompile your kernel while disabling all kinds of cruft you never use and so on. So... it's possible to get really good battery life, but it can be a pain in the ass to squeeze out large battery life.

Lazymode Linux power management is to install this shit: https://linrunner.de/en/tlp/docs/tlp-linux-advanced-power-management.html Not perfect but it's a marked improvement over the default, and much more convenient than manually tweaking everything for power savings.

The difference is I don't expect Linux gamers to stop being tards (they won't) while Linux gamers that report bugs to me expect me to drop everything and learn how Linux operates so I can fix it (otherwise they wouldn't bother reporting it in the first place and understand their place in the industry, like Mac gamers do).
This is a shit complaint. Even if you're not really going to take major steps on Linux compatibility, it's still helpful to have Linux bugs catalogued properly. If your bugtracker doesn't have a Linux category/tag/whatever for you to tell Linux bugs apart from your regular shit, that's on you.

Implementing global-hotkey support (i.e. without the application being focused) required me to make a lookup table for PC keyboard keys in order to translate between Qt (portable) and platform-specific keys (Xlib). There's also a bunch of platform-specific caveats as on any other platform.
...And this took you "several years?"

Linux lusers like to "request" stuff but in the end won't bother sending code. And "please" or "thank you" don't pay the bills, especially for an open-source project.
Admittedly it'd be much better if all Linux users were programmers, but most aren't. If you want that kind of reporting, consider targeting the distros with more technically competent communities, like Slackware, Void Linux, or Gentoo and making an explicit point out of how any requests with code submissions will be looked upon more favorably. If you're targeting Ubuntu or Linux Mint you can pretty much bet your ass you will be flooded with people who can't do fuck-all besides report, request, and whine.

Sure, but in some cases even AMD cards don't work right with particular games.

[...]

Yeah, and sometimes being fucked over like particular AMD R2xx model arbitrarily not getting supported by AMDGPU.
Like I said, you can't stop at having the right brand. You need to check whether your specific model is supported well. No denying it's a nuisance, but the state of graphics card support is improving, and it helps to make sure you have stuff that is well supported as opposed to "functional, but slow." Most of this shit can honestly be blamed more on graphics card manufacturers for releasing shitty Linux drivers.

I don't mind fucking around with settings if I can at least arrive at a working configuration to begin with. The matter is bad performance regardless of the amount of time spent on that.
It's also a measure of fucking with the drivers. Sometimes the proprietary drivers are better. Sometimes they're not. Sometimes the latest version is not the best version for your card (this one happens on Windows too, mind).

No, it's the matter of switching to D3D11 and dropping D3D9 entirely.
That didn't help, but PoE's graphics engine is infamous for being a cobbled-together, finicky mess. Mind, PoE support is still Gold-rated by WineHQ's appdb and protondb.

Be very careful here.
Nothing to be careful about. Unity is not good for squeezing out performance or for a bug-free experience. Unity's strong suits are being popular, cheap, and convenient. It's the Fast Food option of game engines.
 
Last edited:

Deuce Traveler

2012 Newfag
Patron
Joined
May 11, 2012
Messages
2,920
Location
Stuttgart, Germany
Grab the Codex by the pussy Divinity: Original Sin Torment: Tides of Numenera Shadorwun: Hong Kong Pathfinder: Kingmaker Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag. Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture
The difference is I don't expect Linux gamers to stop being tards (they won't) while Linux gamers that report bugs to me expect me to drop everything and learn how Linux operates so I can fix it (otherwise they wouldn't bother reporting it in the first place and understand their place in the industry, like Mac gamers do).

I don't understand your beef with us Linux users. If you don't want to deal with us, then just don't make a game compatible with Linux and move on. The majority of RPGs out there aren't compatible with Linux, but we have entire communities to help us figure out how to get the ones to play to run, or we just purchase old used Windows rigs and use them solely for gaming.
 

Silly Germans

Guest
I always wonder how does one become a Linux user ?
The only reason i use Linux is work. If not for that i probably would have never encountered Linux.
I like it now and miss the command line tools when using Windows but i see little benefit if
all that you do is gaming.
 

Bad Sector

Arcane
Patron
Joined
Mar 25, 2012
Messages
2,334
Insert Title Here RPG Wokedex Codex Year of the Donut Codex+ Now Streaming! Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
I like it now and miss the command line tools when using Windows

Check out msys2, it provides bash, pacman (from Arch), a terminal emulator and a repository of many command-line tools you'd normally find on Linux (e.g. awk, grep, python, make, wget, imagemagick, clang, gcc, etc) as native Windows executables (Windows 10 also has an option to install WSL2 which allows running Linux binaries, but the integration with the rest of Windows is wonky - msys2 using native executables means you can mix and match with any other console windows application).

Even though i do not use Linux myself as primary OS, i use msys2, bash, awk and a bunch of other tools you'd normally associate with Linux/Unix all the time on Windows.
 

Mexi

Dumbfuck!
Dumbfuck
Joined
Jan 6, 2015
Messages
6,811
I always wonder how does one become a Linux user ?
The only reason i use Linux is work. If not for that i probably would have never encountered Linux.
I like it now and miss the command line tools when using Windows but i see little benefit if
all that you do is gaming.
Some butthurt faggot, Linux user rating my post brought me back. Agreed with what you said. It's a great device for work since it's very simple to run and create scripts through bash, etc. By simple I mean that you don't have to worry about compatibility issues or messing up anything like you do on Windows.

I might even be teaching a class on it since a lot of the PI's grad students where I'm at don't know how to use the supercomputer. Other than that, I don't know why anyone would be a faggot that uses it as their main OS.
 

Mexi

Dumbfuck!
Dumbfuck
Joined
Jan 6, 2015
Messages
6,811
Every single bug that has been reported on something I've made always has to do with some bullshit that affects Linux and can only be fixed by either the user themselves or by a developer that gives enough of a fuck about Linux (0% of people that respect themselves and their time).

I'd love to bring back the ovens for Linux users.
:lol: I like this guy.
 

soulburner

Cipher
Joined
Sep 21, 2013
Messages
839
I like to install Linux on old computers which lack the performance to properly run Windows 10. Additionally, I do this only when the user is not going to do any serious work outside the web browser.

The biggest issues with Linux for me are:
- the fonts suck. Sure, the Ubuntu, Liberation and a few other font faces look nice in the UI, but try browsing the web for a while longer. You will see kerning issues, the browser ignoring your selected font filtering setting and using wrong Windows font substitutes. No, installing Windows fonts is not the solution, because of the kerning and filtering issues. The fonts that look good - they look good, possibly even better than on Windows, but most of them have those two issues.

- gimped file browsers. I understand the philosophy of Linux programs is "don't do anything you're not designed to do", but not being able to see image thumbnails of RAW images is laughable. I think only Dolphin can do this out of the box, while others need extensions which either don't work, because they are no longer developed or are so slow it's pointless anyway. Another thing is file copy dialogs - Linux being kind of an OS for geeks, having a file copy window less informative than on Windows is a joke. Gnome just shows a small chart in the window corner. Clicking it will show a simple progress bar, without any info about filenames or source/destination. KDE puts the copy dialog in the notification center. The only way to get a pretty progress bar with verbose information is to use Midnight Commander in the terminal. It's a pretty nice piece of software, but I keep encountering a bug when... the file operation dialog will not come up, the process will continue in the background while MC itself looks like its hung. "Linuxers" told me I'm simply using it wrong.

- GUI inconsistencies. You think Windows 10 looks inconsistent? Try a Linux distro. I understand the mess stems from different window managers or whatever they're called, with KDE and Gnome being totally different from each other, but that's not what I mean. I mean many programs with a GUI look off, messy and unintuitive. It's most likely because the programmer designed it - and programmers generally cannot into user experiences.

- there are things you can easily click through in Windows that are not available in the UI on any Linux. You have to modify config files, which is not a bad thing in itself, but google a thing you want to set up and you will receive several, completely different instructions. You're using Ubuntu 19, but found a solution for Ubuntu 18? No go. Use something Arch based? If it's not on Arch wiki, information for Ubuntu or Fedora will not apply.

- no native support for NTFS. Sure, each distro supports it, but it's implemented through FUSE and is slow. Maybe on high end machines it's not as noticeable, but on low end laptops it will hurt if you often copy files to/from NTFS drives (because dual boot, for example). Additionally, when volumes are mounted in the default way, ntfs-3g will generate hidden metadata files that are compatible with Linux's implementation of file security and shit. These files are created in random physical locations, are tiny and unmovable by Windows defrag software. After a longer period of using an NTFS volume in Linux, thousands of such tiny files will be generated and will cause extreme file fragmentation that cannot be fixed in any other way than a format. There is a way to mount the volumes in a "safer" way, but you need to be aware of it first. Of course, it's not entirely the fault of Linux - NTFS is guarded by Microsoft. ExFat support was recently implemented within the kernel but with all the "Microsoft loves Linux" thing going on, I don't see NTFS being opened anytime soon

- games are always slower. Wine, DXVK, etc but also native. The gap between Linux and Windows became much smaller in recent years, but it's still happening. On a powerful machine, you may not care whether a game runs at 300 or 270 fps, because you will g/free/v-sync it to 60, 144 or whatever your display supports, but if you're using a lower end machine, you may not like the fact that a game that barely keeps 60fps on Windows will run at 40 on Linux


So why would anyone install Linux on a home PC, not related to work?

- it's generally faster than Windows. Use something lightweight, like xfce and you will find that your ancient laptop still works and even lets you browse websites and shit
- the I/O is faster, perhaps unless you're using NTFS often. I noticed the disk cache tries to keep more data in memory than Windows and that significantly speeds up access to often used files. Cold Firefox start is faster, too ;)
- you want to feel free from any kind of spyware, telemetry and other shit. Because Linux is open source, someone will sooner or later find code that is nefarious in any way, so it usually doesn't happen, at least not without consent
- you want to learn new things or are just tired of Windows and you got nothing better to do with your life
 

Twiglard

Poland Stronk
Patron
Staff Member
Joined
Aug 6, 2014
Messages
7,509
Location
Poland
Strap Yourselves In Codex Year of the Donut
Check out msys2, it provides bash, pacman (from Arch), a terminal emulator and a repository of many command-line tools you'd normally find on Linux (e.g. awk, grep, python, make, wget, imagemagick, clang, gcc, etc) as native Windows executables

It's also goddamn slow, breaks windows ACLs, has terminal issues (e.g. mintty freezing, improper terminal sequences on windows 10 console), and can't really be used with dev tools -- the native msys2 cmake executable can't really be invoked with native tools, etc. It always finds a way to break pathnames or pass switches improperly.

Most of the time, only cross-compiled mingw-w64 tools can be safely invoked from outside the msys2 environment on my end. It's not nearly as bad as cygwin with its pointless incompatibilities but still.

Regarding Windows ACLs -- I've had newly created files with broken permissions (e.g. no rights for my user or group unlike the parent directory). The umask concept doesn't make sense on Windows with its own ACL system. msys2 will fuck up file ownership, disable ACL inheritance, forget to include permission for the owner SID all the time. In the span of months developing on Windows having to reapply permissions for directory tries was an almost daily occurence.

You have to modify config files, which is not a bad thing in itself, but google a thing you want to set up and you will receive several, completely different instructions. You're using Ubuntu 19, but found a solution for Ubuntu 18? No go. Use something Arch based? If it's not on Arch wiki, information for Ubuntu or Fedora will not apply.

Bullshit. I use the Arch wiki when setting up Debian a lot.

the I/O is faster, perhaps unless you're using NTFS often. I noticed the disk cache tries to keep more data in memory than Windows and that significantly speeds up access to often used files. Cold Firefox start is faster, too

It's NTFS that's shit compared to ext4 or XFS. Using ReFS on Windows was only half as bad as full-on NTFS. But not all programs work with it.

Dual-booting works for me but only if keeping Windows as a full-on "Wintendo" without dev tools. Once I start moving some workloads onto Windows it turns into an msys2-infested hell again.
 

Bad Sector

Arcane
Patron
Joined
Mar 25, 2012
Messages
2,334
Insert Title Here RPG Wokedex Codex Year of the Donut Codex+ Now Streaming! Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
It's also goddamn slow, breaks windows ACLs, has terminal issues (e.g. mintty freezing, improper terminal sequences on windows 10 console), and can't really be used with dev tools -- the native msys2 cmake executable can't really be invoked with native tools, etc. It always finds a way to break pathnames or pass switches improperly.

Honestly i never had any issues with msys2 nor developing with it. It might be that we do different things so you hit bugs i didn't (e.g. i do not use cmake, i write makefiles by hand or write python scripts that generate makefiles), but i've done almost as much stuff under msys2 as i've done on Linux, including C/C++ development, writing scripts for building game assets, working with svn and git repositories, etc and i use msys ever since its original "msys1" form that was part of the original MinGW distribution more than a decade ago. The only thing i've encountered was performance, but that is mainly due to Windows (i get similar performance outside msys2) than msys2 and in practice i do not care that much for what i'm using it.

Of course i do not doubt that you had problems, but it just doesn't match my experience, so chances are it wont match everyone's experience either.
 

soulburner

Cipher
Joined
Sep 21, 2013
Messages
839
You have to modify config files, which is not a bad thing in itself, but google a thing you want to set up and you will receive several, completely different instructions. You're using Ubuntu 19, but found a solution for Ubuntu 18? No go. Use something Arch based? If it's not on Arch wiki, information for Ubuntu or Fedora will not apply.

Bullshit. I use the Arch wiki when setting up Debian a lot.
I might have exagerated the problem, but I sometimes do find tips on how to modify some things that seem not to apply to the distro I'm currently using - Arch wiki might suggest editing a specific file which does not exist on Ubuntu in that location, but does in another and is named slightly differently (or vice versa - an Ubuntu resource might suggest something that's not the same in Arch). It doesn't seem a big issue right now, when I know things, but when starting with Linux and being a n00b, it caused some headaches.

the I/O is faster, perhaps unless you're using NTFS often. I noticed the disk cache tries to keep more data in memory than Windows and that significantly speeds up access to often used files. Cold Firefox start is faster, too

It's NTFS that's shit compared to ext4 or XFS. Using ReFS on Windows was only half as bad as full-on NTFS. But not all programs work with it.
I'm not sure it's NTFS itself, because there are no benchmarks of NTFS versus ext4, for example, because such an environment with native support for both doesn't exist. I might do some research about ReFS, though, my only knowledge about it is that it exists ;)
 

Twiglard

Poland Stronk
Patron
Staff Member
Joined
Aug 6, 2014
Messages
7,509
Location
Poland
Strap Yourselves In Codex Year of the Donut
i use msys ever since its original "msys1" form that was part of the original MinGW distribution more than a decade ago

The "MINGW32 msys" project was different. It was a thin portability layer around Windows. Cygwin makes everything slow.

only thing i've encountered was performance, but that is mainly due to Windows

Try running a few GNU autotools configure scripts, especially the old crufty ones that check for pointless 20-year-old things. Using fork(2)/execve(2) combo takes forever. They made it slow due to some irrelevant edge cases -- Windows actually has a hidden syscall that works like Linux's clone(2). Just something to think about.

FWIW,
Code:
% uname
Linux
% while :; do date || break; done | head -n 2000 | sort | uniq -c
     13 Fri 29 Nov 11:41:43 CET 2019
    531 Fri 29 Nov 11:41:44 CET 2019
    509 Fri 29 Nov 11:41:45 CET 2019
    411 Fri 29 Nov 11:41:46 CET 2019
    409 Fri 29 Nov 11:41:47 CET 2019
    127 Fri 29 Nov 11:41:48 CET 2019
 

Twiglard

Poland Stronk
Patron
Staff Member
Joined
Aug 6, 2014
Messages
7,509
Location
Poland
Strap Yourselves In Codex Year of the Donut
Gentoo is my favorite rpg

I'd love Arch if partial upgrades were supported. Now I merely use it.

You rolled a 1...
"Compilation requires a dependency of a specific version that is only hosted on a sourceforge link that no longer works."

Reminds me of the Slackware days. Getting a tarball, fails to build, so extracting dependencies into subdirectories and going up till it builds. Normally it took 3-4 directory levels for building something pretty essential.

Who cares if you could have achieved 240fps on Windows, but only 177fps on Linux, if what you need isn't even half that much?

Maybe my mistake was buying a 4K screen. And not paying more than ~250 EUR for a GPU. I can't imagine spending more than what is basically Potato minimum wage on a GPU. An arbitrary standard but still.

At least with 4K I can sit over a meter from the display, not squint my eyes, and have about 150% screen real estate.

games are always slower. Wine, DXVK, etc but also native

Native not necessarily. It's largely bad ports. In KSP I get about ~15 FPS unless in deep space, in 4K. See also the awful Witcher 2 port. There are some interesting Linux-Windows benchmarks on Moronix with new titles having at least the same amount of FPS.

It's worse with browsers since they interact with X11 more, and are overall more platform-dependent.
 

thesheeep

Arcane
Patron
Joined
Mar 16, 2007
Messages
10,098
Location
Tampere, Finland
Codex 2012 Strap Yourselves In Codex Year of the Donut Codex+ Now Streaming! Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Torment: Tides of Numenera Codex USB, 2014 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 BattleTech Bubbles In Memoria A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag. Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
Maybe my mistake was buying a 4K screen. And not paying more than ~250 EUR for a GPU.
That definitely sounds like a mistake.
At least assuming GPUs cost about the same in Potato land as everywhere else. For 4K gaming I don't think anything less than the latest GPUs will do. And those cannot be bought for 250€, at least where I'm from ;)

Except if you want to turn all the details down just to have a very high res, but I don't quite see what would be the point.
 

Jasede

Arcane
Patron
Joined
Jan 4, 2005
Messages
24,793
Insert Title Here RPG Wokedex Codex Year of the Donut I'm very into cock and ball torture
For a 4K display you would truly want a 2080 or something like that. I have a 1080 but decided not to get a 4K display myself because IMO, I would rather have 120 FPS on ultra in HD than 60 FPS on medium details in 4K.
Depends on what you want, I suppose.
 

As an Amazon Associate, rpgcodex.net earns from qualifying purchases.
Back
Top Bottom