So after using ubuntu on laptop for past few years or so, considering moving my main gaming machine to a linux distro. After watching the gta 5 on linux video, I was thinking if there was a distro preferred set up for Wine?
hi. The only distro I know is Mint (17.3 and starting on 18) which aesthetically pushes all my buttons ;)
I've got a few old games running well in Wine : Freelancer, both Dungeon Keepers, Prey
Some games seem to have problems, notably 'No-one Lives Forever" 1 & 2 which have rendering glitches. Battle-Isle Incubation works fine but crashes on exit; not a big problem.
Modern games seem to run perfectly without Wine (no problems with any Steam Linux game so far)
Hope this helps
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Ubuntu or one of its flavors is quite good for gaming. Steam works out of the box and wine + playonlinux are set up in no time.
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Well people are recommending ubuntu/mint but I recommend debian. Ubuntu is based from debian and mint is based from ubuntu.
There really isn't one that's better than the other.
But when it comes to gaming, you'll see the most community support from Ubuntu/Debian and Arch based distros.
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It doesn't matter. For sake of argument you could use BSD if you wanted to or skip it all and use ReactOS, the only OS you can expect all of the same quality of wine from. (kek /s)
I'll say manjaro. Its arch, easy to build packages and such. If you're new to linux you'll learn the cli really quickly. Wine is wine, it doesn't really matter as long as you have the libs installed that you will be needing.
Unless you're me and it just doesn't work.
Don't worry, you're not me, you're most likely good.
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@whyevenask well amongst my mates, I have a reputation of all of my technology being both in a state of working and not working. Depnds on the devices mood :p
But thanks for the option though
Linux Mint XFCE it seems. Works with most drivers out there atm, doesn't have odd display manager issues which will cause you headaches in wine or with drivers like AMDGPU-PRO (only works on compton).
XFCE also lets you modify it more compared to others, the only down side is it often takes more effort and elbow grease to get it working/looking how you want it, other display managers generally have all the pretty bells and whistles turned on or more accessible in gui menus then XFCE.
In saying that, bells and whistles will cause you issues with Wine/Drivers depending on your hardware setup. You could technically use any other rolling/recent distro but the driver updates almost always hit Ubuntu distros first thanks to SteamOS being based on that, and valve 'actively' working on their compatibility support of hardware. Example, SteamOS has AMDGPU-PRO 16.40 vs 16.30 that was standard release by AMD, probably no MAJOR difference except some compatibility work!
With XFCE, I'm guessing you would be editing the options within a terminal environment then?
I'm mostly okay with that so long as there is a somewhat okay guide to go with it :p
Yeah there is ok easy guides, plus you can use gconf (or dconf) whichever to do some customization.
Linux Mint 18 XFCE is coming out this month, but you can go ahead and use 17.3 as there will be a upgrade path planned.
I can't say it'd be better for you personally, but I prefer Mint (17.3+). I'm definitely no Linux expert. However, LM is the only distro I've been able to successfully run programs and games in Wine on. Plus, the distro itself is generally minimalist and clean. Just personal preference. I've seen some compatibility improvements since LM18 was released. I assume this has something to do with more updated files from Ubuntu being available, but I'm not sure. I hope my feedback provides somewhat useful
Xfce for life.
- Ubuntu Mate 16.04
- Mint 18
- Manjaro
There is a best distro for wine. It is any distro that keeps wine up to date, so arch, Fedora, Gentoo, etc (unsure in the Ubuntus)
Wine is constantly updated with new fixes and new features for games so having an old instance of wine can turn out to be a bit if a pain.
Just a matter of subscribing to the correct repositories. But anyone serious about Wine is going to use GamingOnLinux which you can also get off their website the latest build. It has options inside to install latest staging releases. Just keep in mind some releases are missing community added features like CSMT and get added later on.
There is also that virtual release for using wine/latest drivers and such that I can't remember the name of, seems more development focused as I could never wrap my head around howto use it.
I think you're missing the point of the gta 5 on linux video.
To achieve the situation that Wendell had, you do not use wine. You use KVM and PCI-E passthrough to essentially run windows and Linux at the same time, and use steam streaming to stream from the windows side to the Linux side.
My recommendation is either Manjaro, Arch or Antergos, because arch-based distros are crazy robust. Sometimes, you may have slightly more work to do, maintaining everything, but trust me, it's worth it.
To do what Wendell does you almost need 2 pcs in one, you need enough CPU cores & memory to dedicate towards windows, and also a extra videocard. To get the best performance you can't share those resources also, unfortunately. You can emulate CPU but it will be pretty bad performance compared to dedicated.
It will be amazing when the day comes that you can assign a videocard/cpu/ram to a KVM/VM on the fly without a reboot and still be able to re-add those resources back to Linux after your finished. Atm its all locked in on boot. I might do the KVM method in the future but its allot of work and I will need to keep my existing videocard to do it.
Might wait until AMD releases a 12 core Zen CPU, that would be ideal for such a setup. (hopefully decent price too)
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yeah, hopefully fingers crossed I'm thinking of upgrading to Zen and RX480 come the new year and then change to Linux.