Finished!
In case you missed the very last line of last week’s post, I was able to get Star Wars: The Old Republic running on my Linux laptop. Despite knowing that the graphics architecture in the laptop is actually not fully supported in the kernel any longer, this still gave me a lot of hope moving forward. The first reason is because the driver implementation is not necessarily rigidly separated. That is, many of the driver-enabled features of a chip made using GCN 5 are going to be more similar to the subsequent architecture than the oldest versions of the older architecture. That is part of the reason I was able to do things with the laptop in gaming that I couldn’t do with my older GCN 1 cards. The second reason is the specific reason I was able to take the game from non-running to running; something I had seen reference to a few times but didn’t *fully* understand: I installed a custom “Proton” layer for use by Steam. I talked about what Proton is last week. There are community-supported custom versions that allow Proton to be more compatible with the average Linux installation on your home computer, rather than being designed specifically for SteamOS (and/or the Steam Deck.) The next morning I tried installing MANY games that are either favorites or just seemed interesting, and was able to get every single one to start up and play. Having conquered this last challenge, I started *seriously* looking for the one thing I needed to finish an up-to-date, fully-functioning computer: a video card.
I previously identified the RDNA 2-architecture Radeon RX 6600/6600 XT as the best price/performance/longevity option. After shopping for a couple of days, I found a Sapphire RX 6650 XT on sale.
The 6650XT is two years old and is essentially just a refinement of the 6600 XT. On average it is about 10% faster than that card, and was largely considered a superfluous product when it was released. It intruded into the territory of newer-series cards and overlapped the price point. That certainly may have been true, but it’s not like this isn’t a regular thing AMD does. The real benefit, of course, comes two years later now that the price has been reduced to cheap-mid-tier and you can pick up a video card whose performance overlaps with current-gen cards (it’s capable of 60fps at 2K). I consider it a bargain. And the beauty of sticking with Radeon (which I have preferred using for quite a while) is that the AMD-provided open-source drivers are built into the Linux kernel.
The new computer is a Ryzen 5 5600X with 16GB of RAM. I have a 500GB M.2 NVMe system drive and a 4TB SATA 3.5″ mechanical hard drive installed. I also installed my Intel PCIe wireless card. The big USB 3.0 powered hub (works fine) and the three external hard drives I talked about last week were added after installing Manjaro to the 500GB NVMe. The internal 4TB drive is mounted as an INSTALL drive for certain programs, but mostly games. The three externals are all data drives. So how does it all work? Here are a bunch of too-big screenshots:
First up is the Input-Remapper program. You can also see shortcuts on the desktop. In the taskbar you can see Steam is running, as well as Discord. The Bitwarden password protector/manager app is loaded; and the grayish triangle is Proton VPN, currently not connected. *Someone* out there may be tempted to point out you don’t need some third party VPN on Linux, and they’re right. You can pop open the terminal and set up a VPN using tools already present. But I like having a GUI and I’ve used Proton Free for quite a while. I have to turn off the VPN for certain tasks every day and I’m used to how Proton works. Thunderbird Mail is open, but isn’t closed to the task manager. I kept having minor issues with BlueMail including lagging performance and random “double” deliveries of mail. I have tried Thunderbird repeatedly on Windows and for whatever reason never could get Unified folders to work, something very important to me. Well, they work just fine in my Linux installation. Literally just turned the feature on and there they were.
Battle.net running. More WoW at the end. Surprisingly, this has been the only install so far that I had trouble with. Once I learned the basics, I re-installed WoW numerous times over the last couple of weeks without trouble. On the new computer, the default Lutris World of Warcraft install procedure failed early on from an error generated by Wine. The few solutions I found addressing this error didn’t fix my problem. Doing the Battle.net install separately and then just installing WoW from Battle.net as you normally would worked fine. I am assuming for now there is a particular initial Wine configuration step that I did without being aware previously that I skipped this time when I thought I knew what I was doing. As a bonus, even with successful installations recently, launching WoW would generate an error that, regardless, did not prevent Battle.net or the game from running. That error is gone, now. The graphics quality slider starts out at 2; I have been raising it by 1 every time I log in since yesterday. I’m up to 7 now without noticing any change in performance. I do have the Razer Nostromo installed and mapped. It turns out the single biggest problem out of the many I have mentioned is the light weight. The Logitech G13 actually has a steel plate bottom. The Nostromo is fully all-plastic. Rubber foot-pads do nothing if there isn’t enough weight to make them effective.
Quick shot of Star Wars: The Old Republic running. This game has two idiosyncrasies that seem to be well-documented. You have to agree to the EULA every time you log in. I have read in multiple places this is a known problem with the Steam version. It also has to “process Vulkan shaders” every time it updates on launch, which so far has been almost every time I restart Steam. To be fair, unless you know there’s been an important update for your Linux installation, it appears you can “skip” the shader processing on startup. The evidence I have seen is that you will suffer decreased performance when you first log in as the shaders will then process as they are called. Which is fine for me. I take a hit repeatedly as I look around the fleet station, although this disappears rapidly after I move around a bit and glance around. I have no doubt this will happen again when I visit a new location. This “processing” on startup actually takes about 5 full minutes, maybe longer. Very annoying. But not something that will keep me from playing the game.
Title screen for Lifeless Planet, a fairly recent (ten-year old) moody story-driven, light-puzzle “walking simulator” game. The point is experiencing the story; there is very little “gaming” involved. It’s one of my favorites, and the sequel/successor was just released a few days ago. I wrote about this game on another blog a few years ago, but I’m pretty sure that article is gone. It was pretty short, anyway. Might be worth writing it up again. The game can actually be pretty tense and even frightening the first time through, much like Firewatch or Gone Home. Playing through a second time is about appreciating the atmosphere and the story, and looking for things you missed the first time; you’ll never really get the tense feeling back, unfortunately. I actually played through the first three sections on the laptop, although I’ve lost everything but the achievements since the re-install. Although, come to think of it, I don’t know why Steam wasn’t showing any achievements from the first time I played the game…unless the distinction is that this is the Premier Edition while my first playthough was on the non-Premier edition. {checks Steam} No, that’s not it. The Premier Edition replaces the non-Premier Edition. And after checking the internet, the Premier edition adds more music, some voice acting and findable story elements, improves textures, and updates the achievements, so…
Speaking of favorite:
I had to do a bit of fiddling to get Fallout 3 Game of the Year edition to work on the laptop, but it loaded straight up on the new computer. This was really just proving I could get it working. Fallout 3 is documented as working poorly in Linux, and I haven’t really spent any time playing it yet, even though you have to have started the game once to finish creating all necessary folders and files before you start modding. And modding is maybe going to be a challenge. Partly because I can’t remember off the top of my head which mods are on the “necessary” list in order to get full HD textures, bug-fixes, etc; and partly because most Fallout 3 mods are located on Nexus Mods, and the Nexus mod manager program is *not* Linux-friendly. Yet. In fact, the Nexus Mod Manager saga might actually be worth a post of it’s own. It is *quite* a story. Assuredly, most mods can be installed manually and don’t call anything from the system…but not all. Some only got packaged for the manager program. Bottom line, though; I’m not ready to jump into another play-through of Fallout 3.
While waiting for the video card to come in I also played some RollerCoaster Tycoon Deluxe. This was installed from GoG bound to the Lutris launcher; pics below. Just as with Steam, you will find several games actually have Linux builds already, or at least have install scripts already set up for installing the game *to* Linux with appropriate tools and settings. RollerCoaster Tycoon Deluxe is a good example; the GoG install had this up and running out of the box. Here’s Good Old Games in Lutris:
You can see from the shortcuts I also have Epic Game Store and the EA store/launcher connected. GoG does *not* require installing the GoG Galaxy launcher; in fact some sources say doing so is not recommended, although it’s possible. I believe the only reason to not install GoG Galaxy is because the integration is redundant, as Lutris serves the same purpose. Like Steam, Epic and EA will launch for managing those games.
Having not spent much time gaming the last few weeks, I’ve kind-of lost the thread of various projects. As I indicated, I’ll probably be spending a lot of time on some story-driven adventure/walking games. But one recent thing happened that has prompted a particular adventure in World of Warcraft. And this ties into the whole “death” thing, too. I comment in several sub-reddits, certainly Star Wars: The Old Republic and World of Warcraft. Someone brought up some problems they had with the (now former) leader of the Forsaken faction, Sylvanas Windrunner, the Banshee Queen. Sylvanas and the Forsaken had, in my opinion, one of the best stories in World of Warcraft…until the expansion Battle for Azeroth. BoA took Sylvanas in a different direction that many people feel was contradictory to how the character was built up and the lore that previously supported the character. Anywaaaayyy…this turned into a fairly large “discussion” between one guy who thought Sylvanas’ story went off the rails a long time before Battle for Azeroth (and to be fair I know many people share that opinion) and those of us defending the story elements he was criticizing. I stopped taking part when he changed the parameters of his claim.
BUT…
Despite spending so much time playing Draenei lately, I am a Forsaken player at heart. Whenever I hear “Dark Lady watch over you” I instinctively reply “Victory for Sylvanas!” So, yeah; I acknowledge some bias here. And I’m going to play through the Forsaken starting area with Cinderlynn, following the Cataclysm story and then moving on. As I’ve mentioned several times, the entire (original) world was redesigned for Cataclysm. Not only physically, but the starting areas were changed. Some of the starting area stories were *heavily* re-done, including the Forsaken story. Hell, they introduced a new character in the new starting area that I would be willing to bet they had no idea would turn out to be instrumental to the future of the faction.
So coming soon, maybe next week maybe not, I’ll be covering the rise of the Forsaken, truly a World of Warcraft story that has little more than a few foundations in the RTS games. Much as with the person I was talking with on Reddit, the Forsaken have been a controversial faction among World of Warcraft players. The Forsaken was once one of the most popular factions. These days they’re not in the top tier but seem to be among the most popular of the second tier (understanding there is a *huge* gap between the most popular 4 or 5 and the next tier.) You can find 15-year-old+ YouTube videos about “what your WoW race says about you” that almost universally allege all Forsaken players are edgy, death-obsessed goth kids (no adults…but of course most of those videos were made by teens, as well. But that’s for the future. Hopefully I will make my case.
See you next week!
https://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=57817