I have been daily driving Linux for over two years now and I have switched distros many times. So, when my friend bought a new laptop, I convinced him to install Linux Mint on it. I asked him if he wanted to dual boot, he said no because it would fill up all his storage. We installed Linux Mint. The other day, he wanted to play FIFA 17 on his computer. After 5 whole hours of troubleshooting we were able to get FIFA running smoothly with some issues. Next, he wanted to play Roblox. I guided him through the process of installing Waydroid and libhoudini, only to discover that Roblox would run at 10 FPS. With Minecraft, it wasn’t any better. It took us 1 hour to get it working (not skill issue, he wanted to play cracked through Prism Launcher). Now, he wants to go back to Windows 10. I have already told him about dual boot, but he has only 256GB of storage and he wants to play a lot of games. What should I do? Install Windows to his laptop, install some other Linux distro, or try to convince him more about dual boot? Thanks in advance and sorry for the essay.
Unfortunately you chose the wrong distro - Linux Mint isn’t good for gaming - it uses an outdated kernel/drivers/other packages, which means you’ll be missing out on all the performance improvements found in the latest kernel/packages found in more up-to-date distros. Gaming on Linux is a very fast moving target, the landscape is changing at a rapid pace thanks to the development efforts of Valve and the community. So for gaming, you’d generally want to be on the latest kernel+mesa+wine stack.
Also, as you’ve experienced, on Mint you’d have to manually install things like Waydroid and other gaming software, which can be a PITA for newbies.
So instead, I’d highly recommend a gaming-oriented distro such as Nobara or Bazzite. Personally, I’m a big fan of Bazzite - it has everything you’d need for gaming out-of-the-box, and you can even get a console/Steam Deck-like experience, if you install the
-deckvariant. Also, because it’s an immutable distro with atomic updates, it has a very low chance of breaking, and in the rare ocassion that an update has some issues - you can just select the previous image from the boot menu. So this would be pretty ideal for someone who’s new to Linux, likes to game, and just wants stuff to work.In saying that, getting games to run in Linux can be tricky sometimes, depending on the game. The general rule of thumb is: try running the game using Proton-GE, and if that fails, check Proton DB for any fixes/tweaks needed for that game - with this, you would never again have to spend hours on troubleshooting, unless you’re playing some niche game that no one has tested before.
In the case that mint is the problem perhaps a different distro that is still stable and has a large user base would be good as it makes it easier to get support. I think that’s also why those distros aren’t recommended to newbies. I started with Ubuntu which worked fine. I think I could’ve started with most gnome/KDE distros though if they were similarly stable (preferably more). I think having the settings available in a gui was important for my first time.
The problem is not that games don’t run smoothly. The problem is that games don’t run at all or require major effort to run without issues. Will installing that distro fix the complicated installation of Prism Launcher cracked? I don’t think so. But I agree with you for the fact that I chose the wrong distro. I wanted something easy for beginners.
Bazzite also solves this, sometimes.
But you cant change if Roblox etc actively block Linux compatibility
Why did they even do that?
Linux doesn’t have good anti cheat, barely has any players, and is a constant source of noise on tech support forums (because most games aren’t made to work, they just kind of happen to).
You can’t do the same kind of anti cheat on Linux without risking losing a court case about you not sharing your kernel driver source code. Wine is built around swapping out DLLs (which is exactly what most cheats do) and code signing is practically non-existent. There’s no way to determine if someone isn’t messing with your game on Linux, so the moment someone develops a cheat on Linux you can choose between allowing cheats or disallowing Linux. Someone could invest in Linux specific anti cheat for the sliver of market segment it makes up, but it’s just not worth it.
Unfortunately, solving anti cheat server side just isn’t feasible anymore. It used to be, but these days it’s not an option if you intend to keep the game fun and want to make money as a publisher. Single player games and local co-op are a different story, but in my experience those tend to work most of the time.
There’s no way to completely avoid cheaters and I really don’t get why there’s so many windows games that want Kernelmode access. You could still read the memory and emulate inputs based on that or draw something on the screen. It’s probably just causing the cheaters who want to download something and win to get more viruses (which most probably deserve assuming the viruses aren’t too bad), while the game company gets closer to being indistinguishable from a virus itself.
Reading memory is, if the anti chest mechanism is working, not possible without detection. That’s what the kernel mode driver is for, among other things (like detecting spoofed hardware sending fake inputs, hypervisor detection, etc.).
There’s always the analog hole (just point a camera at a screen, together with a keyboard hooked up to an arduino) but software cheats can be prevented quite effectively. There’s a reason cheaters pay three or four figures for a cheat in their “favorite” game, it’s not just good ol’ Cheat Engine trainers anymore.
“SeCuRiTy”
A major cause for that is the distro - when it comes to gaming, the distro makes a huge difference. The second major cause is the flavor of Wine you chose (Proton-GE is the best, not sure what you used). The third major cause is checking whether or not the games are even compatible in the first place (via ProtonDB, Reddit etc) - you should do this BEFORE you recommend Linux to a gamer.
In saying all that, I’ve no idea about pirated stuff though, you’re on your own on that one - Valve and the Wine developers obviously don’t test against pirated copies, and you won’t get much support from the community either.
Seriously you’re recommending Reddit to a Lemmy user?
I really wish people stopped recommending mint for any purpose other than reviving a 20 Yr old laptop into a chromebook.
Mint is perfectly fine for commodity programming and basic office work, too. It’s not that great for gaming but it’s a good distro for boring stuff, even on modern hardware.
Unless your hardware demands it a distro with a modern de would be much better for those imo
@Lojcs @d3Xt3r I only use linux mint because the laptop is 6 years old but, it was a stop gap computer with 2GB ram and a 64GB emmc. The latest windows 10 brings it to it’s knees.
Thanks I’m going to give this a try.