Ill keep it as short as possible, apologies if i keep rambling(ill put my specs at the bottom)

Over the last yew years, i have used quite a lot of distros, from mint (currently my main again), to manjaro to solus to endeavouros and more i cant remember, one thing they all (minus solus) had in commong (for me) was the fact that pc gaming…was horrible on them.

Many hours where spend getting different games to work, or rather trying to get them to work at all, most of them had failed, steam, lutris, default wine, no matter what has been used)

As an example:

Anno 1404 history edition (best anno, fite me), i bought it on steam, tried launching it, didnt work, tried several proton versions, didnt work, lutris, didnt work, i downloaded a crack to see, didnt work either, using a different file format, nothing.

Sometimes i was able to make it work, once and than never again, solus was the only one where anno 1404 worked out of the box, i managed to make it work in endeavouros once by installing two packages i could never find again. (most recently, i bought space marine 2, didnt work and keeps crashing no matter what i do9

But this was the best case scenario, games really work.

Is it just my hardware?

Am i using linux just wrongly for years?

Is it my fault?

Am i missing something?

My specs:

prebuilt desktop: Acer Nitro N50-620

memory 64KiB BIOS

memory 32GiB System Memory

memory 16GiB DIMM DDR4 Synchronous 26

memory 8GiB DIMM DDR4 Synchronous 320

memory 8GiB DIMM DDR4 Synchronous 320

processor 11th Gen Intel® Core™ i5-

bridge Intel Corporation

display TU116 [GeForce GTX 1660 SUPER]

storage Micron_2210_MTFDHBA1T0QFD

bus Tiger Lake-H USB 3.2 Gen 2x1 x

network Tiger Lake PCH CNVi WiFi

bus Tiger Lake-H Serial IO I2C Con

  • AnIndefiniteArticle@sh.itjust.works
    61·
    3 months ago

    Each nvidia card works better or worse with different version releases of nvidia drivers. Older cards usually need smaller version numbers. Since you are running mint, all versions you need to test should be in the default repos. Try different drivers and see if you can find the right one for your card.

    apt-cache search nvidia

    should give you a list of options, which you can install with apt-get install.

    • Mandy@sh.itjust.worksOPEnglish
      31·
      2 months ago

      ngl, id rather stick with what is recommended before i go through hundreds of slightly differently named drivers

      • AnIndefiniteArticle@sh.itjust.works
        2·
        2 months ago

        There’s usually only like 5 tracks. “What’s recommended” is nouveau, which works but not for gaming. It’s recommended because it’s open source and can do most things that the proprietary nvidia drivers can do. Nvidia is really bad at maintaining their drivers, and different drivers work better for different cards.

        Nvidia sucks. Switch to AMD and never have a problem again. Or spend an hour testing each of the proprietary options maintained in the debian repos, and most likely find that at least one of them works. Until an update to the drivers or kernel comes along, and breaks it again, so you have to play around with driver versions and kernel versions to find a combo that works. That’s less likely to happen if you stick with a debian-based distro vs a bleeding-edge distro like arch.

        And buy AMD for your next machine to send a message to nvidia that their driver support sucks!

        • Mandy@sh.itjust.worksOP
          3·
          2 months ago

          idk man, mints driver manager do be saying nvidia is recommended

          but besides that, i tried asking for an equivalent card on lemmy once, ill leave it at: im not inclined to try again

          henceforth, if amd, prebuilt only

          and regarding driver and kernel version, the moment i have to fiddle with either to get something working to the extent you are describing, im burning my pc

          • AnIndefiniteArticle@sh.itjust.works
            3·
            2 months ago

            Please try versions 535 and 470.

            See if either fixes your issues.

            You need to reboot after switching. It’ll take you 30 mins max, even if neither works and you have to switch back.

              • AnIndefiniteArticle@sh.itjust.works
                1·
                2 months ago

                What motivated you to switch branches? Did it solve another issue? Why were you not on the latest branch yesterday, ie, why did you roll back originally? Does one driver work better for some games, and another driver works better for others?

                Nvidia drivers are jank. I honestly haven’t touched them since 2017. I remember having to reboot and switch drivers to switch games I was playing with friends and finding the whole experience annoying as hell. I realized that Linus Torvalds was right, fuck nvidia, AMD is the way to go. Have not had to touch anything with my drivers since switching. All of my interactions with nvidia since have confirmed that they are not a company deserving of my patronage.