my time using linux

subject to change

original date. Jun 06/05/2024
January 01/04/2025 10:50PM

Threes a lot. And I have trouble remembering things. This article will probably be reposed a few times.

So. For a month or two, I don't remember. I used linux as my main OS on my PC for awhile and tried gaming on it. And BOY let me tell you. I had a hell of a time getting some games to work. Some didn't. Some ran just fine. And VR didn't really look at all.

Before I begin. Let me just start with my specs. And my setup

specs

and now the os I chose

extra software

I LOVE qpwgraph

drivers

lib32-nvidia-utils 550.67-1
nvidia 550.67-6
nvidia-lts 1:550.67-5
nvidia-settings 550.67-1
nvidia-utils 550.67-1
opencl-nvidia 550.67-1
cuda

the story

I decided to do arch linux as I found it cool installing it yourself and learning it. And I had already been using basically the same setup in a virtual box virtual machine for awhile and had gotten used to using it. I didn't decide to use it right off the bad. I had the opportunity to get a nice nvme drive for half off or cheaper and decided to try linux. I don't like the way windows is going with its super privacy invasive updates. Like recall.

tech fwiend :)

I also have a friend to help with a lot of my linux issues that also used arch. buuut they used kde. And they don't know how to manually configure stuff very well. Though they did help a lot. I'll refer to him as Caleb in this post.

dpi

I did my installation and that went well. But then I ran into my first issue. My taskbar took up 150f my vertical space and everything was scaled up to big. Caleb suggested, and at the same time I googled, got 'change your dpi'. So I did that with xrandr. I set up a auto script with dwm's autostart so it happens after dwm starts. To set my dpi with xrandr. Instead of being in .xinitrc

dpi and underscan

Then another issue. When I reboot. It still scaled weirdly. The bar would be waaay to small but my dpi was correct. So when I booted in. I'd have to startx, witch starts dwm. Stop it, Then start dwm again. And it was fine. Then I discovered another issue. yay. I was using a dual monitor setup, and when I moved my mouse all the way to the right of the screen, then further. Everything would shift left off the screen. And if I move left, then further it reset. This shift was determined by nvidia-settings underscan setting. As my second monitor had to have this else it went off the screen.

the fix

I fixed this by instead of setting my dpi in xrandr. I did it in nvidias config settings. This fixed the underscan issue, and me having to restart dwm after logging in.

picom lag

I use picom on the main repo. And randomly. I would get a lot of desktop lag. Typically after it being on for awhile. But I just don't run it as much. Especially while in a game. Not a big deal.

VR

I also tried running VR with ALVR. The same software I use on windows for VR. I have a quest 2 from 2020. I had to turn down the settings quite a bit. I had A LOT of lag when I first tried getting it to work. I downloaded some more drivers. Tried different settings, unplugged my second monitor, nothing worked. And I think it was steam. I would get the periodic freezes for about less than a quarter of a second. Around 90ms ish, that happened at least 6 times a second. It was enough to make me nauseous. But it only happened when I moved in real life. Or if I used OVR advanced settings to move my play space around. So I do think it was steam, And not the VR streamer. It could be do to the drivers. Or just linux not liking my PC. But it was steam.

It is a consistent lag.
Distance objects look like their blurring and Re correcting. Distorting the world making it looked warped occasionally.

I also had general lag that would happen in game without me moving, but that was less noticeable than the above mentioned. But was worse than running on windows.
Through tweaks I was able to mitigate this quite a bit but never stopped it. I did try kde with wayland, no change.
I have not tried other drivers and may try them to see if they do any better.

I did try getting help about this in the ALVR discord. And a little bit in the Arch linux discord to no avail. Google search has been really bad for me so a lot of the things I did try didn't work. Aside from using a different distro

audio

I got, on and off, audio breakage that sounded like a robot dying.. Sort of. It happened more often the more things there were in qpwgraph. I later mostly fixed this on my same setup on my laptop by changes the bit rate among other pipewire related settings

vseeface

vseeface is a vtubing software that I use. It works well on windows. Linux, it works fine but I had to do some weird stuff to get it to work. As the linux section on their website suggest, you have to download the tracking software separately. But its super simple. The issue I had is wine. You have to run vseeface through wine. When I started it normally. If I switched desktops, or clicked on a window on a different screen, then clicked back. The entire thing would be UN clickable. It wouldn't freeze. I had to run wine with virtual mode where it has a small virtual environment. I forget what its called. But its akin to a VM. And this worked for awhile, a few weeks?

Then, wine updated and it stopped working. Id load up the software, select my model. And my console would be spammed with 01c0:err:d3d:wined3d_debug_callback 0000711D07C6D220: "GL_INVALID_OPERATION error generated. Texture is immutable.".. So Frustrating.

vseeface fix

I managed to fix this by adding vseeface as a steam game and running it through steams proton instead of just wine

OBS discord cam & streaming

I used vesktop on linux as discord wouldn't let me screen share. And one thing I like to do is screen share my desktop and what I'm doing through obs virtual cam. And a lot of people said and showed that it looked like ass. For some reason camera on vesktop looks like potato. Screen sharing looks better but still looked bad. On windows it looks perfectly fine. On my preview on linux is looks perfectly fine. For some reason it gets really compressed or something on vesktop. I have not tried on normal discord.

steam updates

when I did run games on linux I had a few games. One of them was warframe. And every god damn day most of my games would update whereas on windows it didn't. And for warframe this was a 6GB update that took anywhere from 10 to 20 minutes.... every god damn day. This is really annoying when you just wanna hop on and play a game like warframe.

games

changed

so the final nail in the coffin for me was games. So I first before anything, I Download steam. Then changed. A top down 2d game make in game maker about escaping a facility without becoming a feral Anthro furry. Its fun for me and I like replaying it. In 2 levels of this game it dropped to 3 fps in some areas where in windows there is NO LAG. And in this game there is a slight, probably intentional, input delay. So frames MATTER. I was able to mitigate this using proton-ge. but seldom so.

sky children of the light

sky children of the light is a simple game about freeing spirits, collecting candles to unlock emotes, and making friends. Randomly, seemingly for no reason. I would get quarter to half a second frame freezes that happened fully random, but consistent. I thought it could be temps? No GPU temps are 30-40C admendment turns out my gpu temps were reading wrong either due to the gpu hanging. or it was reading right and proping it up makes it read wrong. yes it is screwed into the case. iz chill. I felt it and its been hotter. Drivers? Probably. Cable? Could be. Not a issue on windows. This lag was far worse in java edition mine craft with optifine. And also embeddium.

But the lag was my second monitor. My monitors have different refresh rates (59.99 and 59.94) and linux doesn't like that. Or xorg doesn't like it.

The GPU has 1 hdmi and 2 dpi ports. For my second monitor, I used a dpi to hdmi cable. Its apart of the cable not an adapter and its one way. All I did was plug that cable into my primary monitor and use the hdmi to hdmi cable on my secondary and weirdly, that mostly fixed it. I was able to play sky and mine craft mostly fine. In terms of fps. Mine craft actually seemed to do better in this regard.

but it wasn't finished.

I still on and off got small lag but not nearly as bad. One thing someone suggested was to add
```
_GLSYNCDISPLAYDEVICE=DP-1
_GLGSYNC_ALLOWED=0
_GLSYNCTOVBLANK=0

KWINX11REFRESHRATE=59940
KWINX11NOSYNCTOVBLANK=1
```
to environment variables. I did this and disabled force full composit in nvidia-settings and it seemd to help. Regardless of force full composit being on or off.

And that mostly fixed it.

asseto corsa

I did get asseto corsa working with content manager by using resources provided on protondb. But boy was it a bit much. Not to bad though.

doom eternal

I tried doom from steam and it ran mostly fine. It did have lag that made the game annoying to play that I couldn't quit tweak out. I wasn't that invested in getting that to work at the time.

space engineers

the final game. That made me switch back to windows, was space engineers. I tried downloading the game. Choosing proton GE. And playing it. And it ran fine. I loaded into the game. And after a minute. Crash to desktop no warning. I joined a server instead of my modded solo game. Crash after few minutes. Tweaked settings. Deleted my settings. Joined the official keen server and did the fixes listed in pinned messages in their linux channel, because they didn't show it on proton db. Nothing. I looked through SE's normal and graphics logs. Nothing. Just some missing texture warnings but said textures loaded fine in game. I even turned PROTON_LOG=1 in args for the game to get assembly output for it and... A warning about a missing lib. gst-dirty or something like that. I installed it. Still crash. I tried all of this over 3 days. And then I gave up. I went back to windows (only to not play the game lol) because I was fed up with all of this.

mint

on 06/20/2024 I just tried mint linux. Giving linux gaming another go.
nvidia 535 drivers

VR

and VR lag is the same. Despite the 4338 nvidia or nvidia related drivers it installed. And cuda. I still get the lag from VR mentioned above. But the lag is a lot less, and shorter. But its still there. Making the world warped

changed

change on level 2 actually ran fine.

space engineers

space engineers was running fine on this but I had a nice spicy low 15ish fps. And it crashed once saying my gpu has failed. Make sure it has not over heated... Or something like that
but it still. It crashes without warning. It may be mods. But its a few mods I like to use.

conclusion

linux is great for a lot of things and gaming has come a long way. But gaming is too tedious for me to use, or just plain doesn't work. And I suggested to my friends to try it but I also listed off the issues I had and they cant be bother to deal with this either. I still use it on my re purposed debian server, and my same setup Arch linux laptop, and a Arch linux virtual machine for c programming, and RSync. GOD I love rsync. And I love the environment and community a lot better. Its a lot more helpful than windows help mostly being "have you tried reinstalling your whole OS?" but gaming I too tedious for me to use. And VR is a big deal breaker for me. I'll stick with windows 10, at least for now.

Amendment

01/04/2025

About a month ago someone suggested i use wivrn with envision as well as this site https://lvra.gitlab.io/docs/fossvr/envision/ which has a lot of information on other vr related stuff too. Turns out it was entirely steamvr's fault or steamvr and nvidia's fault with asynchronous re projection. I can pretty much play any game now, and i can run vr just fine. I'm pretty much fully on linux :>

Check out my config files if you want to here https://github.com/iceyrazor/iceys-linux-stuffs

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