The Game

Sometimes I get phases when I dive deeply into something. It might be programming, growing chili, etc. This time it was gaming.

I found accidentally Satisfactory and it hit my sweet spot of building and tech trees. That kind of dragged me into itself and before I knew it I was spending most of my time with it. During a month I played the current early access (8 tiers) thorough, even getting the “Employee of the Planet” cup.

At the same time I finished it, I dropped the interests. There’s nothing to do. Thus tried to get back to my old projects like the kernel I have been blogging about earlier. But no, it didn’t work yet.

However I started investigating again how I could improve my gaming experience. I installed proprietary NvIdia drivers instead of nouveau. Then I decided to try if I can run Windows games in my Linux installation. Earlier I tried some wine tricks, and PlayOnLinux magic. But Steam has actually improved a lot, and it’s Proton has made a lot progress.

Thus I installed Proton Experimental to get the cutting edge stuff, and tried some games. I was surprised how well and smoothly everything worked. I even tried some CPU and GPU heavy 3D games, and everything just worked. Of course it was slow, and lost lot of FPS and performance compared to Windows. But it was playable.

Takeaways:

• Gaming in Linux is pretty good
• There’s lot of native games in Linux
• Windows emulation layers works pretty well
• Top games suffers most from the emulation, but are mostly still playable

However, let’s see what I’ll come up next.