Linux, Anyone?

[fallenmystic]

From my experience, modding Skyrim on Linux has become much less painful nowadays. However, creating mods on Linux still involves considerable pain points.

 

VSCode + Papyrus compiler mostly works except for a few non-core functionalities. There's an unresolved issue with the Nvidia driver that can cause frequent crashes with Creation Kit on Wayland, so you may want to switch to X11 until it gets fixed.

 

The most critical issue I've found so far is that the diagram ActiveX control used by Creation Kit doesn't work on WINE/Proton somehow, so you can't use dialogue and scene views.

 

I haven't tried creating a mod for FO4, but I believe it wouldn't be too different from how things are with Skyrim since their modding environments are almost identical.

[vaultbait]

11 hours ago, Slaves of Tamriel said:

There's an unresolved issue with the Nvidia driver that can cause frequent crashes with Creation Kit on Wayland, so you may want to switch to X11 until it gets fixed.

 

That's good news for me, probably. I went with all AMD GPU systems for modern Linux gaming because Proton supposedly has better support/performance on them (owing to the Steam Deck being AMD-based), but also I'm just using an X11 tiling window manager (ratpoison) so no Wayland compositing concerns anyway.

 

11 hours ago, Slaves of Tamriel said:

The most critical issue I've found so far is that the diagram ActiveX control used by Creation Kit doesn't work on WINE/Proton somehow, so you can't use dialogue and scene views.

 

Ugh, good to know. I suppose I can still fire up Win11 with KVM and use the CK there as needed. And for now I have my old native Win11 modding rig running headless that I can VNC into anyway, if worse comes to worse.

 

Thanks for the details!

[PMluf]

Hello!

 

I'm running Arch Linux on an AMD system, quite old (X370 chipset, first when Ryzen came out back in 2017) but with the CPU upgraded to Zen 2 (partly because of Windows 11, but also because it's faster on Linux as well; fun fact: this combination, X370 chipset + Ryzen 7 3800XT is still able to run Windows 7). I used to have an AMD Radeon RX Vega 64 graphics card in it but replaced it with an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 Ti a while back, mainly for RayTracing on Windows. While this was a Windows-only machine for quite some time, about >1 yr ago I decided to give Arch Linux a try and I have to say that I'm very happy with this decision. The Steam client runs and looks just like it does on Windows, and game installation with it is very very easy. (Also, I symlink the binaries from the game directories on NTFS Windows drives to my Linux $HOME/.steam folder, so I don't have games installed twice. But this may already introduce problems, so I wouldn't recommend it to everybody...) It's also very easy to get GOG, Epic, and Amazon games installed using the Heroic Games Launcher. On both clients, Steam and Heroic, it's usually a one-click process. Normally the first run takes more time because it's installing all the dependencies, like some redistributable libraries such as Visual C/C++ Redistributables (VCRedist) and DirectX, but after a game has been started once it will start much quicker. Don't get me wrong: on Windows every game I played usually still starts a bit faster, but once the game runs I don't see any difference on Linux compared to running it all natively on Windows. The reverse is true: I'm having less issues with legacy games than I have on Windows (10, 11), because on Linux you get a simulated Windows environment for each game (Wine/Proton), and this can be set specifically for each game. So, games for Windows XP or Windows 7 run very well on Linux, as do—often to my surprise—very modern games and current releases.

 

There's also Lutris, yet another game client on Linux.

 

Now, I don't recommend Arch Linux for gamers because the installation process is quite a hassle. I do recommend it for everyone who wants a cutting-edge Linux system and is into Linux though... A variant of Arch that is easier to install would be Manjaro Linux, at least so I've read. But that's hearsay, I've never tried Manjaro.

 

I also haven't tried it, but I've read that Nobara Linux is specifically for games. It even has some kernel patches that optimize it for speed and specifically for gaming. Nobara is based on Fedora Linux.

 

TL;DR I'm gaming on Linux and it is my experience that when it runs, gaming is very very easy, at least for games from Steam, GOG, Epic and Amazon. Some other games are also supported, but this depends on the specific Linux distribution you're using. For games like Minecraft there's usually a launcher available from the specific package management software in use. At this point I'd like to recommend Flatpak as a distribution-independent package solution for additional stuff, like a Minecraft Launcher (if your distribution doesn't have one, or it may also be the case that the Flatpak version is better).

 

As a sidenote: Nvidia does have excellent drivers for Linux. But those drivers are a) closed source, and thus b) lack behind on new innovations, like Wayland instead of the now ancient X Window System. I once had a situation where after booting Linux I'd only have text mode available. It turned out that an Nvidia graphics driver update messed up Wayland support. I found this out by chance when I was investigating the issue and tried X.org instead of Wayland, and everything worked (?!?). The next Nvidia update fixed the issue and I went back to Wayland. Those things happen, but similar issues can also happen with AMD graphics cards. You can find reports about a very very slow Radeon RX 7900 XTX on Linux after an update, which could be fixed by either a kernel update (which is, depending on the Linux distribution you're using, not as trivial as it might seem) or some specific kernel command-line options for the AMDGPU driver. Again TL;DR using a Linux distribution that is specifically for gaming will be one step ahead of such issues. (E.g. Nobara Linux: https://nobaraproject.org/)

 

The best of luck to all Modders, creators and users!

Edited January 7, 2025 by PMluf

[vaultbait]

52 minutes ago, PMluf said:

Nvidia does have excellent drivers for Linux. But those drivers are a) closed source, and thus b) lack behind on new innovations, like Wayland instead of the now ancient X Window System. I once had a situation where after booting Linux I'd only have text mode available. It turned out that an Nvidia graphics driver update messed up Wayland support. I found this out by chance when I was investigating the issue and tried X.org instead of Wayland, and everything worked (?!?). The next Nvidia update fixed the issue and I went back to Wayland. Those things happen, but similar issues can also happen with AMD graphics cards. You can find reports about a very very slow Radeon RX 7900 XTX on Linux after an update, which could be fixed by either a kernel update (which is, depending on the Linux distribution you're using, not as trivial as it might seem) or some specific kernel command-line options for the AMDGPU driver. Again TL;DR using a Linux distribution that is specifically for gaming will be one step ahead of such issues.

 

What prompted me to go with AMD video controllers for my newer Linux gaming systems is that the Steam Deck uses AMD, so Valve's work on Proton and their recent contributions to the Linux kernel are mainly focused on improving performance and stability on AMD-based rather than NVIDIA-based systems.

[PMluf]

14 hours ago, vaultbait said:

 

What prompted me to go with AMD video controllers for my newer Linux gaming systems is that the Steam Deck uses AMD, so Valve's work on Proton and their recent contributions to the Linux kernel are mainly focused on improving performance and stability on AMD-based rather than NVIDIA-based systems.

Yes, my next graphics card will be from AMD as well. I'm currently planning to get an AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT as soon as it becomes available, most likely from ASUS as I like their cooler designs. I was playing with the idea to get a Radeon RX 7900 XT or XTX this year, but again, RayTracing was the one thing that stopped me. The reason for this is that I'm not happy with my Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 Ti: it has not enough graphics RAM. And it cost about as much a few years back as the Radeon RX 7900 XTX costs now. So, I figured, why not go to the top (or one notch below), but again go with AMD this time. The reason why I prefer AMD is the same as you describe: with their open source approach it is possible for other parties to contribute, like Valve does. The amdgpu driver (and Mesa and so on) gets better and better, something that Nvidia developers have to do on their own. Open source is always better than closed source, both in the short-term and in the long-run. Why? Because you get patches much quicker, and you get extended support after the manufacturer lost interest...

[Uthan The Perverse]

Do any of you guys know how to get the Creation Kit (both FO4 and Skyrim) to run on Linux with MO2?

 

It crashes for me almost immediately after loading and in case of Skyrim the render window just shows black.

[value_undefined]

On 8/14/2023 at 6:52 AM, shrtjsrtj said:

1. AMD gets a lot of praise for their open source drivers, but I haven't used them so can't really comment. Meanwhile Nvidia which is what I've used exclusively used for 15 years has been as you say, a pain in the ass with its closed source drivers. Everything is always someone else's fault for not reading their documentation properly while they do very little to work with the greater community, and they're still shipping closed source user space drivers. My next card will be AMD.

AMD is definitely the way to go. I ran a 6600XT a while back, and today run a 4080. Using the proprietary drivers on Linux required a few extra steps (dependent on the distro you’re using) and I still run into the occasional quirk. Currently I’m dealing with an annoying thing where a GNOME extension isn’t able to show my GPU utilization for some reason.
 

In contrast AMD is just a set and forget. The AMD driver will just get automatically installed, you won’t need to worry about downloading any specific version. It will get picked up by every other software package without any issues. It’s about as “set it and forget it” as any other driver in Linux. 
 

Unless you REALLY need CUDA for a project AMD is a better option under Linux.