I have been daily driving Linux for over two years now and I have switched distros many times. So, when my friend bought a new laptop, I convinced him to install Linux Mint on it. I asked him if he wanted to dual boot, he said no because it would fill up all his storage. We installed Linux Mint. The other day, he wanted to play FIFA 17 on his computer. After 5 whole hours of troubleshooting we were able to get FIFA running smoothly with some issues. Next, he wanted to play Roblox. I guided him through the process of installing Waydroid and libhoudini, only to discover that Roblox would run at 10 FPS. With Minecraft, it wasn’t any better. It took us 1 hour to get it working (not skill issue, he wanted to play cracked through Prism Launcher). Now, he wants to go back to Windows 10. I have already told him about dual boot, but he has only 256GB of storage and he wants to play a lot of games. What should I do? Install Windows to his laptop, install some other Linux distro, or try to convince him more about dual boot? Thanks in advance and sorry for the essay.
UPDATE: Of course I will help him install Windows on his computer if he wants so, I don’t want to force him to use Linux after all. I just wanted him to give it a try, and maybe daily drive it, if he can.
EDIT: Because for some reason it was misunderstood, let me clarify it here. Roblox ran with poor performance on Waydroid, not Minecraft. I just said that the installation of Prism Launcher cracked was difficult. After that, Minecraft ran smoothly without any problems.
Unfortunately you chose the wrong distro for your friend - Linux Mint isn’t good for gaming - it uses an outdated kernel/drivers/other packages, which means you’ll be missing out on all the performance improvements (and fixes) found in more up-to-date distros. Gaming on Linux is a very fast moving target, the landscape is changing at a rapid pace thanks to the development efforts of Valve and the community. So for gaming, you’d generally want to be on the latest kernel+mesa+wine stack.
Also, as you’ve experienced, on Mint you’d have to manually install things like Waydroid and other gaming software, which can be a PITA for newbies.
So instead, I’d highly recommend a gaming-oriented distro such as Nobara or Bazzite. Personally, I’m a big fan of Bazzite - it has everything you’d need for gaming out-of-the-box, and you can even get a console/Steam Deck-like experience, if you install the
-deckvariant. Also, because it’s an immutable distro with atomic updates, it has a very low chance of breaking, and in the rare ocassion that an update has some issues - you can just select the previous image from the boot menu. So this would be pretty ideal for someone who’s new to Linux, likes to game, and just wants stuff to work.In saying that, getting games to run in Linux can be tricky sometimes, depending on the game. The general rule of thumb is: try running the game using Proton-GE, and if that fails, check Proton DB for any fixes/tweaks needed for that game - with this, you would never again have to spend hours on troubleshooting, unless you’re playing some niche game that no one has tested before.
I really wish people stopped recommending mint for any purpose other than reviving a 20 Yr old laptop into a chromebook.
The problem is not that games don’t run smoothly. The problem is that games don’t run at all or require major effort to run without issues. Will installing that distro fix the complicated installation of Prism Launcher cracked? I don’t think so. But I agree with you for the fact that I chose the wrong distro. I wanted something easy for beginners.
The problem is that games don’t run at all or require major effort to run without issues.
A major cause for that is the distro - when it comes to gaming, the distro makes a huge difference as I outlined previously. The second major cause is the flavor of Wine you chose (Proton-GE is the best, not sure what you used). The third major cause is checking whether or not the games are even compatible in the first place (via ProtonDB, Reddit etc) - you should do this BEFORE you recommend Linux to a gamer.
In saying all that, I’ve no idea about pirated stuff though, you’re on your own on that one - Valve and the Wine developers obviously don’t test against pirated copies, and you won’t get much support from the community either.
Bazzite also solves this, sometimes.
But you cant change if Roblox etc actively block Linux compatibility
Why did they even do that?
“SeCuRiTy”
Thanks I’m going to give this a try.
I have been using Linux for years, but I don’t insist anyone to use it, because when they encounter a problem, they blame you.
Let them drown in their filth.
My friend doesn’t blame me. He blames Linux, which also isn’t nice. Of course, it isn’t Linux’s fault that the Roblox developers patched their game so it cannot be ran with wine, but in his eyes, and the eyes of the non tech-savvy people, if it runs on Windows and not on Linux, Linux is doing something wrong.
Its our fault for making him use Linux. Why does it matter what OS people use? Chill my man.
Your friend plays only the games that are a pain to make work on Linux, or straight up don’t work. What else does he want to play, fortnite? Maybe some destiny? Lol Let them be. Windows is for them, Linux isn’t, and that’s ok.
Ooh ooh! Genshin for good measure! That one even absolutely REFUSES to play in a VM or emulator!
I’ve been playing genshin on Linux for almost a year now. Hint, Heroic games launcher ;)
If that works I’m de installing Windows
It may seem petty, but I actually really like Genshin (and Honkai: Star Rail for that matter), and I had Windows already there, anyway
EDIT AreWeAntiCheatYet confirms Genshin should work:
Though they confirm Honkai: Star Rail is broken:
Honkai won’t work, only genshin.
Guys, search for “an anime team” on github. You don’t even need to configure Heroic/Lutris/Bottles.
Do you guys really believe that the Linux community will not find a way to play with waifus?
Oh I know about that some launcher thingy. It’s available for both, but very iffy. It worked for honkai for a while then just quit out of nowhere. And it never worked for genshin
I played Genshin with it for about 6 months before I quit and it worked pretty well, the downside is that when the game is updated the launcher has to be updated too and that takes some time. I never missed the dailies though.
And Genshin’s launcher needs to be told to install under C:\Program Files instead of that Z: drive, it’s installing!
Too bad about Star Rail, though.
I guess the 60 GiB monolith of a Windows installation has exactly one function, now.
The honkai one stopped working for good for me and the genshin one just refuses to work from the start.
Okay, happily Genshin is working fine for me! Honkai SR doesn’t, indeed.
Guys, search for “an anime team” on github. You don’t even need to configure Heroic/Lutris/Bottles.
Do you guys really believe that the Linux community will not find a way to play with waifus?
You skipped a few steps. Before you install Linux for your friend, you should first ask him what he uses the PC for, and if he plays games, what games does he play.
He obviously wants to use only proprietary Windows Software.
There is little reason to force him to use Linux. Of course Linux may have less overall tracking, annoying behaviors, better performance etc.
Win10 will be EOL veeery soon. Win11 is really bad on old hardware.
I second uBlue Bazzite and ProtonDB, check what you run first.
Respect that you even came that far lol.
Maybe you should have considered the stuff he wanted to do before convincing him to use linux. I could have told you he’d have problems with that stuff. If he said he mainly plays steam games then sure, but not literally the most finicky, cumbersome games to get going in existence. Also out of curiosity because I haven’t even thought about Roblox in like 8 years. I thought that was a browser game?
I had checked and saw that FIFA 17 ran on Linux, so I told him that, and was not prepared for the troubleshooting nightmare that followed.
Well you get an a for effort. But if your friend wants to play windows games it’s better for them to just have windows on the machine. I give it to you and your friend for going all out on a new laptop and putting Linux on it right away.
A more convenient way for a new user to experience Linux is to do a live usb for them. That way they can boot into Linux easily but boot into windows just by removing the usb drive.
I’m really sad to see this “If he wants to play Windows games, let him use Windows” being repeated a hundred times in these comments. Mostly because it’s an echo chamber, but also because Windows games have been better and better under Proton so 80-90% of Windows games on Steam run without a problem on Linux.
I understand your frustration but if you were in this guys shoes and this was your friend calling you all day to do troubleshooting, what would you do? Spend hours of your time helping him become a Linux addict or tell them just to put his computer back to windows and be done with it?
I’m a huge Linux fan but even my main pc and laptop are windows. I use WSL (amazing btw) on the laptop with a kali install. And I’ll use powershell (also really good) on the pc for any ssh needs for my Linux servers.
Do your friend a favor and install Windows back on his laptop for him.
Let him go back to Windows. You already planted the idea of using Linux in his head. Next time he gets tired of windows for any reason, he knows there is an alternative and he’ll consider switching to Linux on his own.
You have a nice friendship :) That’s more important than Linux.
Of course! :)
Sounds like he doesn’t want to spend his time tinkering, but playing.
Can’t blame him.
If he wants Windows, why are you questioning what he wants to do with his computer? He’s had enough of playing fuck-fuck with Linux. (Mind, I work with Linux all day, every day, it’s the cat’s meow for dedicated services like Proxmox, TrueNAS, containers, etc).
Go get Win10 LTSC. It gets updates 2x/year, has very minimal bloat.
Then get O&O Shutup to reduce bloat even more.
And you can permanently license it using Microsoft’s own scripts.
Roblox not runnimg is more like a feature. /s
Why were you trying to install the Android version of Roblox instead of using Vinegar?
Roblox removed wine support for linux so its either emulating the android version or running a vm with gpu passthru
When did they do that? There was a short time where Wine wasn’t supported recently but that was fixed.
Around the end of febraury i believe tho there was a temporary fix by forcing roblox player to use a old version tho it would come up with the update roblox error since it was too old
I just looked up Vinegar again and yes, it says that it’s been unsupported since the 22nd of February. That’s such a shame, it worked perfectly fine and there was actually one game that I liked to play. Makes me a little mad but I guess I just won’t play anything on Roblox anymore.
With only 256GB it might be even hard for him to use windows, to be honest.
Don’t tell him to dual boot. He wants Windows don’t shove Linux down throat. Honestly he probably shouldn’t of been using to begin with. I’m not sure why you would pressure him so hard.
