Hello all, I made the jump. Its been hard and I am here for some help
Hello all, I made the jump. Its been hard and I am here for some help
Hey! So I have always wanted to make the jump to linux and pc gaming and figured I would do them both together. I would not consider myself techy, just aout tech literate in that I am aware of how much I dont know.
I have linux mint, on a mid to late i5 w/16gb memory. I wanted initially to make a home server but I have jusy been poking around and ended up trying to play all the games I have in attic through emulators and the like.
So I got loads of emulators, I use Cartridge which is a Lutris fork. It just seemed cleaner and worked when I tried it out. In that I had been booting into PCSX2 and finally playing MK Deception again. After three evenings poking and gaming PCSX2 shuts down every time I try to boot a game.
I have uninstalled, reinstalled and changed from 1.7.xx to 2.2 to the nightly 2.3 (I think). I cannot get it to work.
I have so many questions but if I could get back to Konquest I would be so happy, and bother you all later.
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Emulators work pretty well on Linux. I mainly use them on steam deck with the bazzite distro, perhaps you might consider that over Linux mint? Don't get me wrong, mint is amazing for switching from windows but bazzite is full on gaming focused.
What advantage do you see in running Bazzite on your SD over SteamOS?
I run bazzite on a deck as well, and the main reason is because I can actually use it as a pc without as much hassle from SteamOS really wanting to be read only.
If I want to set up say, a dev environment, from git sources, and all the required libraries to compile things, bazzite comes with distrobox so it's not too hard set that up... whereas SteamOS will blow up all of that when it updates, even after you turn read only mode off.
...
That and the AUR sucks, lol.
I thought Bazzite was immutable as well? I know I've faught with SteamOS a few times to make something work only to get it wiped, so that makes sense, but I assumed the same would happen with Bazzite.
How do you find it? Do you miss SteamOS for anything or does it feel the same in gaming mode?
A simplified explanation is:
Bazzite itself is immutable, but then on top of that base layer, its a customized version of Fedora, via DistroBox, which itself mostly is mutable, and allows for you to set up other DistroBox instances pretty easily.
Bazzite's system updater utility updates both the underlying Bazzite core, and all of the DistroBox instances running on top of it.
99.9 % of the time there is no reason to mess with the immutable core bazzite stuff, but the distrobox containers built on top of it? You can do whatever you want.
Also if you do fuck up the Bazzite core, you can fairly easily roll it back and reset it without losing your existing files, without having to re-image the whole SteamDeck.
As far as the non desktop mode, actual SteamDeck mode experience? Seems the same in terms of game performance, but it is easier to add things like DeckyLoader and EmuDeck and what not, as that base Fedora instance comes with a bunch of utilities that help you install and set them up.
EDIT: I am almost certainly not 100% technically correct in some way here, but I think this is generally accurate.
I run a lot of "alternatively sourced" games and it has better compatibility with that. Pretty similar otherwise.
Could you expand on that? Not the alternative sourcing, but why the compatibility is better. Is it just something to do with Fedora vs Arch, or is there something else that makes Bazzite work better?
I source almost everything officially, but one I was trying to do was Mass Effect 2. I played 1 on the Deck and loved it, so I wanted to buy 2 and 3 only to find that they don't sell them anymore. You have to buy this huge trilogy remaster pack with remastered graphics and huge file sizes, which defeats the purpose of a battery powered 720p device.
I couldn't for the life of me get it unpacked and working, even if I copied the files from a Windows computer over. I assume that I'm just not good enough at Linux to figure it out but that it is possible. Would be helpful to know of a different distro would make that easier.