If you just install yay, doesn’t that allow you to use the AUR?
Same commands as pacman IIRC.
I used EndeavourOS for a while, which came with yay preinstalled
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I think it would work.
Also, I read somewhere that paru would be default installed in Cachy, maybe test it also.
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Thanks for your input, guys! I’ll look into the tools tonight.
Last night I downloaded and tried a few games and used Steam’s own FPS counter to estimate performance and psensor for checking temperatures. I also ran a full memtest (no errors).
The games I tested so far:
-
Foundation
with my current 300 people settlement it runs at 140 frames or so. Everything on ultra. On my old PC I run it on high and that settlement size is approximately where the frames drop below 60 when I have the whole settlement in view. -
Gothic 1 remake (Nyras Demo)
An UE5 game. On my old PC this runs at 40fps, with some stuttering, in medium. On my new PC I turned it all the way up to ultra settings and it is between 60 and 70. Sounds not too good until you realize that the demo is rather poorly optimized and even people with high end 5090 based systems only reach 90fps or so. -
Control
140-160 fps on ultra without raytracing, 60-70 eith raytracing. That’s about the same result (slightly better) compared to my old PC on medium to high settings.
Junction temp went up to 84°C (I am told that this is normal, the rest remained somewhere around 50°C while the game ran. The fans kicked in but the PC is still way more quiet than my old one. No coils making sounds, no loud fans.
So after those short initial tests I can say that definitely the driver works, the hardwar3 and OS do their job, and at least those few games run pretty well. The basics are there. I will be able to do some better testing tonight I hope.
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Everytime this thread pops up in topics I think to myself…"Now Why Would Anyone Want to Build a House Without Windows???.. 
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Haha, like in the old Linux saying:
“In a world without fences and walls, who needs Windows or Gates?”
(Since Bill isn’t in charge anymore, young people tend to not get the joke).
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The first part aged like milk as well 
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Yeah, now that you mention it… the 1990s really were the good old days ™, weren’t they? 
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Last night I didn’t have as much time as I would have liked, but I did install Total War Warhammer 3 and ran a few benchmarks.
All settings ultra, but resolution still just 1080p yielded an average of 150 fps in all tests. Temps looked OK.
I think at this point I can stop performance tests, I didn’t have a single crash or anomaly, the driver is performing fine.
At some point I will boot up the Win11 partition and install a few things there to compare results between Linux and Windows, but right now I lack the energy to do so, as the results in all games are fine so far.
I also went back to the Gothic 1 Remake demo since IIRC it is the only game I have that supports FSR. Tried it (quality mode).
I fail to spot any difference except that the game runs at 100fps instead of around 60.
I also went through all the games in my Steam library and threw them into the ProtonDB search to determine which won’t work well. Not that many actually.
The Crew 2 is one of them. I got it for one €, only my son plays it occasionally. I don’t really care.
EA WRC hurts. I like that game.
But at least Dirt Rally 1+2 are reported to run.
Even most of the VR games (like Moss 1+2) actually work apparently, but since my Rift S has no drivers for Linux that’s useless.
Oh, and I tried yay to install Stellarium, but failed. Lots of error messages.
Next up: test all my periphery and a few more games.
- Minecraft (I have it installed on half a dozen devices, but never on Linux)
- BeamNG drive
- PS3 controller + PS4 controller
- pedals, TM16000
- TM150 wheel
- TrackIR
- Saitek panels
- Saitek yoke
- Logitech G940 (but I don’t have much hope for the Force Feedback)
- MSFS2024
- DCS
I guess I have to learn how Lutris works, for the non-Steam games. So far I only used basic wine configurations and if they didn’t work I shrugged and let it be. Now I want to try and get more stuff running.
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Lutris is sooo much easier than setting up wine yourself, you were putting the cart before the horse!
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I raw-dogged wine because that’s the only thing I knew, back 20 years ago when I first tried it. 
Edit: in fact it was the only thing that existed.
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I see, I had read that as you were setting up games now with pure wine.
Unfortunately, that’s going to be a tough nut to crack, due to Natural Points unwillingness to support anything but Windows. I’ve not made any kind of progress in that regard, but I’ll be very curious to hear If you can find something.
Edit: Reading my own words I had to recheck and I found some reports of people having it running under Linux with linuxtrack, so maybe it’s possible.
I’ve got the downloader running with Lutris out of the box, but not the game. I kinda suspect it has to do with the new launcher that ED introduced, but haven’t had enough interest to check it out further.
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Yay! (Not really.)
After I failed to build Stellarium from source I caved in and installed the binary package from AUR via octopi.
Baby steps.
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I just got DCS running with the documentation from here
Edit, well the menu, haven’t started the sim yet.
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Seems to run quite well with DLSS, no headtracking as of yet though.
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Last night I decided to buy Star Wars: Jedi Survivor (on sale for 12€) and test that.
Seems to run fine on everyhing maxed out except raytracing, but I don’t get the Steam FPS overlay. Steam seems to think that the mandatory EA launcher thing is the main window and shows the FPS there, and then stops when the window closes.
I installed MangoHUD and tried to launch from Lutris with MangoHUD enabled but it didn’t work.
My PS4 controller was instantly recognized and worked just as well as in Windows.
I also installed Minecraft (Prism launcher) and at least in single player mode it ran fine, as expected.
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Last night (this thread is becoming my personal Linux gaming blog it seems ) I got some stuff done!
I installed X4:Foundations (apparently runs marvelously btw.) because it supports joysticks and head trackers and isn’t MSFS or DCS which to install and run is a separate journey that I cannot start just yet.
I installed antimicrox so I have a graphical tool to check joysticks, and as expected the TM16000 works just fine.
I will soon try other joysticks, but now I have at least one of them and one controller recognized and working.
I tried installing Blizzard’s Battle.Net (so I can play Starcraft 2 if I want to, on my old PC I played a bit of the SC1 remake mod “Mass Recall” lately).
Lutris failed to install it. But then I read that if you add the installer to Steam as a non-Steam game, Steam applies the same Proton environment to it like it does for Steam games (I didn’t know that, never added a game to Steam). So I tried that and indeed the installer ran. I haven’t logged into BattleNet yet but at least the installation worked. As soon as I find my login I can try installing SC2 via that launcher.
While I tinkered around with BattleNet I made a mistake though. I ran the installer in standard wine and it did do some stuff before it crashed. Now my system seems to think that I installed BattleNet via wine (menu entry and everything, but not working). I have no clue how to remove it. I don’t have a deinstaller or anything.
I’ll write about the more interesting activities of last night later.
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Now, the more interesting part is:
I tried to get head tracking to work.
Since X4 supports OpenTrack and I needed some starting point I tried to install that. It isn’t in the repository and octopi couldn’t find it in AUR either, so I had to build it from the git.
I ended up using paru for that. It checks out the git, fetches the dependencies, and builds.
Pretty neat. The only library I had to install manually was called… qt5-tools I think.
With OpenTrack installed I tested if it did anything in X4. First it didn’t, but then I figured out that I had the Linux version of X4 installed via Steam.
I switched to the windows version via Proton.
Not sure how to get around that step, maybe it is easy, but the game seems to run just as well on first glance, and it also finally displayed my old savegame, which it previously didn’t.
Then I used the UDP mode (127.0.0.1:4242) to establish the connection. Sadly it only worked the UDP way, and not like it usually is supposed to work with Steam.
OpenTrack worked but now I realized that OpenTrack does not track a head via Webcam automatically, which I thought it did.
Then I thought I could just put my TIR5 reflector hat on, but that didn’t work either. Point tracker apparently needs active IR points?
But I didn’t want to wait. So I looked whether I could use just the Webcam as an input. And indeed people recommended AItrack. I tried to compile it, but failed a few times using different tools. Even the recommended ones didn’t work, and neither do they for other people it seems.
I decided to get adventurous and installed the Windows version via wine. That thankfully worked out of the box and decently tracked my head using my webcam.
Initially I had a few problems connecting it to OpenTrack, until I realized that the UDP ports collided. AItrack uses the same protocol that OpenTrack uses to transmit to X4. I just changed to port and suddenly it worked.
I haven’t adjusted the curves or anything yet, but tracking 1:1 works pretty neatly.
I am not sure how the OpenTrack → MSFS/DCS connections work. Also that UDP port?
I will probably get to trying that next week, if I even get the simulations to work that is.
Today I might try other hardware. I already installed BeamNG drive and I hope that my TM150 wheel + pedals + shifter will just work.
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I adjusted the curves for Opentrack and tested it in X4. Not quite there but pretty good, almost as good as the TIR5 settings I last used in Windows. A bit trickier to setup, but manageable.
I also tried BattleNet and installing Starcraft 2 in there. Works fine and I can play, at maximum quality in 400fps.
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Meanwhile I connected my T150 wheel (no pedals or shifter yet, it was late already) and started BeamNG drive.
It was recognized just fine as there is a driver in the Kernel, but without FFB.
There is however a separate driver that somebody made which does support FFB (or at least parts of it). I will try and see how to install that soon.
The rest of the night I spent re-connecting all my network devices including my NAS (worked fine but I had to reorganize my man-cave. The new PC is bigger and the tiny room was a mess).
I also connected my printer and at least printed one test page, which also worked.
I will probably buy MSFS2024 tonight, so I don’t have to install the huge MSFS2020 on that PC, and at least download it so I can try my flightsim stuff on Saturday. We’ll see.
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You are giving me hope.
Flight sims (MSFS and DCS currently) in VR are the only thing I still boot into Windows 10 for.
DCS, evidently, is not that hard, just needs a few old dotnet framework DLLs. As for VR, it seems the situation has improved a lot since I last checked a few months ago. Some heroes have been hard at work, while Nvidia has been messing up:
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