Another Linux gaming success story

[Grogan]

This one was kind of unexpected. I've been recommending that my nephew play the first Bioshock game, Bioshock Remastered (BioshockHD). I just said, play this on Windows, because I just wanted him to enjoy it without compromise or any annoyance to turn him off etc. It's one of the best games ever made (and they generally don't make games of that mostly linear style much anymore).

Finally, he wants to play it (I've actually showed him parts throughout the years) and it doesn't run on Windows 11. He tried everything (which I repeated yesterday), and it wouldn't run in any of the compatibility modes. The game would run, but just crashes on the first load screen right before it lets you in game proper.

He did try installing it in Linux (Manjaro) simply by double clicking the GoG installer and running it through system wine (prefix ~/.wine etc.). However, the behaviour of the GoG installer in wine when it loses focus led him to believe the installer didn't complete and he didn't try running it. I found it and did and wow, it did run right out of the box. Except... as soon as it got to the first underwater cut scene after the plane crash... blub blub for real. It slowed down rendering frames, to a slide show, to freezing then rendering a few more frames at a time, to a complete CPU deadlock. I should have acted while I could to avoid a hard boot but I thought it would start responding after some shader compiles etc. There was no DXVK, it was running through WineD3D with his system's wine-staging package. It's a DirectX 11 Unreal 3 game I think, the remaster, so that would certainly have trouble (it's fairly good graphics) and be highly CPU bound.

So, Lutris time, where it will symlink runtimes like DXVK into the wine prefixes for you (that would be a pain in the ass for him to manage with just system wine). I first tried it with his wine-staging (with lutris's dxvk runtimes), and while it worked and wasn't crashing, performance was off. So I had lutris install a runner*, wine-ge-8.26, and it worked beautifully, 100% perfect smooth performance with no vsync enabled.

Windows, you're fired. Did you know that Microsoft Office is almost dead to us too? Microsoft Publisher is the main reason there are 4 Microsoft Office Professional licenses in this family. That will be the last, because they are discontinuing Publisher. Guess who handles Publisher's .pub files now? That's right, LibreOffice (Draw) opens those now.



* (Note that Lutris is moving towards this UMU shit that runs your own steam protons in a container, so they haven't been putting out any new wine runners. Not keen on using that so I use my own system wine-tkg. We'll fix that next week)

[Zema Bus]

That's good to hear!

On some tech podcasts I still hear people saying how they can't use Linux for gaming so they're sticking to Windows, and others say the same thing about desktop usage. That makes me wonder if they've even tried gaming on Linux in the last 7 years, or Linux in general in the last 20 years.

[Grogan]

If he would have had that on Steam, it would have been a right out of the box situation, that game. Maybe having to disable ESYNC and FSYNC in the launch options, I haven't tried it with them enabled in a long time, but it used to barf on getting threaded like that, causing texture resolution to be delayed or in some cases not fully resolve, with blurry surfaces.

Those tech podcast guys aren't likely to be keen on Linux unless they have some experience with it (and they'll tend to vehemently defend what they know lol). A lot of it is just parroting, but I'm sure on the whole it is still easier to play Windows games on Windows. On Linux though, you are more likely to find a way to get a game working, that doesn't work correctly on Windows anymore. Some of that old shit I have in Lutris wouldn't have a chance on modern Windows.