No Stupid Questions

Arch linux user here. Gaming totally works. Sometimes even better than Windows when playing native games. Even Proton works good most of the time. Sometimes I play Brawlhalla with Proton Experimental and it runs better and less laggy in Linux than Windows despite Windows having a native build. Check ProtonDB to find out how well games work on Linux. Linux gamers review games there.

Thanks to Valve, the Steam Deck is getting Linux popular and basically makes devs build their games for Linux as well.

I've been gaming on EndeavourOS for over a year now and have had the opposite experience. All my games work great in Steam with Proton. Granted I don't play modern AAA shooters or League of Legends which goes out of their way to use bad anticheat that doesn't support Linux. Only one time I had a game not start right away and all I had to do was install .Net for it or something which was also very easy.

Using workarounds to attempt to get foreign software running on an operating system for which is was never built is always going to be fraught with problems.

If the game isn't distributed compiled for your platform, then you are a second class citizen and no amount of API wrappers, translation layers, VMs or whatever will ever address the core issue.

Running a game in Proton (Wine) is not playing on Linux. It is your linux environment contorting itself and doing miraculous back flips in the hope of convincingly coaxing the Windows binary game into thinking that it is running on an actual Windows host.

Soft solution: Purchase games that are properly developed and released targeting your platform natively.

Hard solution: Graduate from playing games and move on with your life. (btw mine improved a lot after putting gaming behind me for good. + I can now use whatever computer hardware and software I damn well please)

You can actually get the terminal output from your game by setting the launch options to %command% 2>&1 > /tmp/log.txt Which will write the terminal output of the game to the file /tmp/log.txt

Tbh I can recommend nobara linux. For gaming especially it's often nice to have access to recent drivers / proton versions. But maybe that's not even relevant in your case.

That setup is cursed and I wouldn't recommend it for Linux gaming personally

It is not. It has gotten better but it still has ways to go. Unless you want to game while huffing copium, after spending a good chunk of your gaming time troubleshooting.

The thing with trying different distros drives me a bit nuts. If you’re getting consistently bad results across so many different ones, then you can see how distros don’t matter all that much after all. What really matters is your hw config combined with software config. Stop trying different distros expecting that some of them will maybe do something differently, stick to one and try to figure out the problem or ask for help. Only resort to other distro if you know that it will make something easier (eg provide more up to date packages).

You said what’s your hw configuration, but not much about how you handle NVIDIA drivers. By default, your GPU will run on open drivers built in Linux kernel called Nouveau, combined with OpenGL (and for your GPU that’s it for now) implemented in Mesa. This is enough for basic things to work, such as the desktop, video playback, office applications, but not necessarily games. For that you need the proprietary NVIDIA drivers. Check manual of your currently used distro for how to get those drivers in place. For your GPU even the newest drivers are available (560), so it’s good if your distro offers that. For drivers older than 555 series, use X11 session instead of Wayland.

What kind of gaming?

Single player or some older multiplayer games without anti-cheat programs running?

Probably ready for a lot of those.

Triple-A major games with anti-cheat?

Not so much.

I moved my Steam library over…or at least the games I could actually play. There’s a lot of games that just won’t work despite the Linux crowd constantly saying gaming is great on Linux. VR? Not a chance.

Linux gaming was always slightly buggy for me for a while. Then I tried Nobara, and since then everything has been more or less plug and play.

AC Odyssey was a bit more work to get going but that was because I had bought it through Ubisoft Connect. But even that just needed me to install it in Lutris which comes preinstalled and made the setup nice and easy.

Nobara is developed by the guy who makes ProtonGE, as a side note.

https://nobaraproject.org/

As with most things in life, it's probably a combination of factors. But please don't beat yourself up over it.

There's a lot of good advice already in this thread; no reason to repeat it. One thing you might look at the Proton Github issues list. Occasionally, when a game otherwise has a gold rating but I have problems with it, I can find some interesting corner-case details here. Here's a link that you could use to find Anno 1404 issue, as an example: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3Aopen+%22anno+1404%22

The other thing I would suggest is that you be more verbose when describing problems. You did a great job sharing the high-level issue and your system's details, but what do you mean by "didn't work"? Does it fail to launch? Does it launch but not do X? Those details can go a long way towards troubleshooting (though I do understand that your post was meant to not be game-specific).

Oh, and stay away from Cracks. Unless you're VERY sure about what you're doing, it's just inviting trouble.

Why didnt you just to fucking try removed the wacky ram and adding one by one to see if it changes anything? Its like 30 minutes max

The common denominator in your issues would be your PC. If games are working according to protonDB and you're unable to get them to work on multiple distros that suggests its your PC.

There are two candidates in your specs - your RAM and your Graphics card.

As others have said, asymmetric RAM is unusual and it certainly was warned against in the past as it caused system issues. While OSs may be much better at managing RAM now, that doesn't mean all scenarios can tolerate it. Given what Proton is doing is complex (running Wine, which is essentially a windows layer) I would not be surprised if the memory configuration is just a step too far - you have windows software using a windows compatibility layer for memory asking a linuxn system for memory access.

An obvious way to test this is to remove the 16gb stick from your machine and see what happens.

The other side is your graphics card - are you using the latest nvidia drivers?

"Synchronous 26" and "Synchronous 320" sounds super weird. Are you combining RAM with different clock frequencies / timings? that can and often will cause problems like instabilities and crashes. i would take out the one you added and try the games again.

Is it ready for primetime supporting everybody's random hardware and everyone's software without crashes, stutters and slow downs or be free of the requirement for weird configuration tweaks?

Probably not.

Can it work perfectly well with a lot of hardware and a lot of situations for a lot of games Yes.

Is it ready for primetime on a steam deck? Yes.

Last OS change I threw bookworm on a random laptop asked it to install steam, enabled proton for my games and everything just worked. But that doesn't mean it will work for everyone and for every game.

Mixing ram is one of those no-nos that a lot of us do anyway. Ideally everything just slows down to the slowest piece of RAM and everything runs fine. And you wouldn't think that the board would care if you have 16s in one side and eights and the other. But if you're having problems with your stability that's absolutely the first place to look. Even if all the RAM is perfectly matched, from a stability standpoint it's better to run two sticks than four. I'd pull it back to 16 and see if it stops crashing. If it stops doing that so all your RAM and get two 16gb sticks.