Well, it unfortunately happened. As of typing this post, I am now back on Windows 11. But I'm back to Windows not because I wanted to be. I rage-quit out of Linux for an entirely different reason, but we'll get into that later.
I wanna talk some positive things that I accomplished in Linux before I inevitably decided to go back to Windows, because all was seemingly going really well for me on Linux. Believe me when I say this - I had no intentions to just go on & drop Linux like I did, I had full intentions to keep going.
I wanna talk some positive things that I accomplished in Linux before I inevitably decided to go back to Windows, because all was seemingly going really well for me on Linux. Believe me when I say this - I had no intentions to just go on & drop Linux like I did, I had full intentions to keep going.
Honkai: Star Rail
In my previous post, I mentioned that I was pretty bummed that I could no longer play Honkai: Star Rail while on Linux, due to the anti-cheat HoYoverse implemented into the game, as well as it being a Windows-only game.
Fortunately for me though, there is a group of dedicated individuals who managed to figure out a relatively painless process of getting the game to work on Linux. They asked not to link any repositories or mention them by name, so all I will say is that one quick Google search and you'll find all the resources you'd need for this.
But yeah, here's one of the final few screenshots I took while I was still under Linux!
Fortunately for me though, there is a group of dedicated individuals who managed to figure out a relatively painless process of getting the game to work on Linux. They asked not to link any repositories or mention them by name, so all I will say is that one quick Google search and you'll find all the resources you'd need for this.
But yeah, here's one of the final few screenshots I took while I was still under Linux!
The experience wasn't flawless though. Namely, whenever I would encounter an area with a lot of particles, the framerate would tank. Not unplayable for the type of game that HSR is, but very noticeable.
But there was a bigger issue. Take a look at the image below.
But there was a bigger issue. Take a look at the image below.
Do you notice anything? I'm sure those who are keen-eyed have already, but I'll post a picture of the same area taken from my phone below. UID is censored just in case HoYoverse, you know, doesn't like this...
The difference is much more obvious, right? That's right, pieces of geometry would literally fail to load. There were even instances where entire areas wouldn't load, although this only affected Penacony, funnily enough. Herta's Space Station, Jarilo VI and the Luofu were all unaffected.
I did ask around in, you know, a specific place about this & got told to change the DXVK version in the launcher. I downgraded from 2.3.1-1 to 2.2, rebooted, and...fixed!
Once that was done, I did notice a few minor errors still, like certain effects looking corrupted or the CG cutscenes showing artifacting but it was very ignorable & then proceeded to...dump 20 hours into the game in 2 days. I really like Honkai: Star Rail. The Penacony arc is insane, but unfortunately I'm still not...done with it. Even after 28 hours.
I did ask around in, you know, a specific place about this & got told to change the DXVK version in the launcher. I downgraded from 2.3.1-1 to 2.2, rebooted, and...fixed!
Once that was done, I did notice a few minor errors still, like certain effects looking corrupted or the CG cutscenes showing artifacting but it was very ignorable & then proceeded to...dump 20 hours into the game in 2 days. I really like Honkai: Star Rail. The Penacony arc is insane, but unfortunately I'm still not...done with it. Even after 28 hours.
Halluci-Sabbat of Koishi
Halluci-Sabbat of Koishi is a Touhou Project fan game I took interest in back in November 2022 but never actually got around to playing. The whole reason I got the game back then was just because I was looking for more Touhou content to consume, and despite my favorite Touhou Project character being Satori Komeiji, I thought a game focusing on Koishi instead would be neat to try.
So I thought - what better way of experiencing the game to begin with than to try playing it on Linux?
Unfortunately for me, the game does not work OOTB. No matter what Proton version you use, even if it's the notoriously better Glorious Eggroll Proton, it won't work. So that's where my negative report on ProtonDB came in for the game.
But I didn't give up. I kept prodding. The reason? When I posted about this game not working on Linux, I actually received a response from the developer. After explaining a few things about Linux in...painfully brief & potentially inaccurate detail...I got to work trying to see if there were other methods of trying to get the game going on Linux.
I then installed protontricks & using its GUI, I spit-balled guesses as to what dependencies the game needed to actually run. I think I installed everything related to Visual C++, .NET & DXVK for the game. I'm not really sure, I just kinda installed everything that would "make sense", you know? Eyeballed the whole thing.
And eventually - voila!
So I thought - what better way of experiencing the game to begin with than to try playing it on Linux?
Unfortunately for me, the game does not work OOTB. No matter what Proton version you use, even if it's the notoriously better Glorious Eggroll Proton, it won't work. So that's where my negative report on ProtonDB came in for the game.
But I didn't give up. I kept prodding. The reason? When I posted about this game not working on Linux, I actually received a response from the developer. After explaining a few things about Linux in...painfully brief & potentially inaccurate detail...I got to work trying to see if there were other methods of trying to get the game going on Linux.
I then installed protontricks & using its GUI, I spit-balled guesses as to what dependencies the game needed to actually run. I think I installed everything related to Visual C++, .NET & DXVK for the game. I'm not really sure, I just kinda installed everything that would "make sense", you know? Eyeballed the whole thing.
And eventually - voila!
I got the game to run! It wasn't without any problems, however.
One thing that I intended to figure out was why the game stuttered every single time I did any type of action, including but not limited to - selecting menu options, moving in-game, attacking, talking to NPCs...seriously, this made it pretty much unplayable. Oh, and the initial loading screen when you first boot the game took around 5-10 minutes each boot to load.
The developer suggested that it could be because I potentially installed the game on my HDD (which I did), but even after moving the game to my nVME SSD, it still exhibited the same issues it did before. Nothing changed. I'm convinced that the issue was either:
I was planning on setting aside Sunday, July 7th, to figuring this ordeal out but as you'll soon come to find out, that would never end up happening...
One thing that I intended to figure out was why the game stuttered every single time I did any type of action, including but not limited to - selecting menu options, moving in-game, attacking, talking to NPCs...seriously, this made it pretty much unplayable. Oh, and the initial loading screen when you first boot the game took around 5-10 minutes each boot to load.
The developer suggested that it could be because I potentially installed the game on my HDD (which I did), but even after moving the game to my nVME SSD, it still exhibited the same issues it did before. Nothing changed. I'm convinced that the issue was either:
- GPU caching
- Lack of additional dependencies
I was planning on setting aside Sunday, July 7th, to figuring this ordeal out but as you'll soon come to find out, that would never end up happening...
Involuntarily parting ways with Linux
On the night of July 5th, well July 6th at that point, I was ready to clock out for the night. I had a trip on July 6th with family & saw that my Fedora install had a whole bunch of updates. It has been a while since I last updated my system, so my thought process was "I'll install these updates, reboot to make sure everything still works & go to bed". That was a mistake.
When I first rebooted my PC & logged in, I noticed something unusual. Only 1 of my 3 monitors was displaying. The cursor appeared on the other 2 monitors, sure, but I couldn't drag any windows into them. I could still technically interact with the windows that opened on the other monitors but I just couldn't see them, like there was just a black overlay over the whole thing that I couldn't get rid of. I thought it was a temporary bug at first. After all, I mentioned in the past that I did have issues with my monitor failing to initialize & a reboot would usually fix that. So I rebooted but...this time the problem remained.
Thus, at 1AM, I began searching around to see if anyone has encountered this. Keep in mind, my desktop GUI was KDE Plasma X11. More on that later. I kept encountering posts from like 2014, 2009, 2017, etc. - varying time periods mentioning the exact issue but to my utter dismay - most people's solutions to the problem were either:
Updating the GPU drivers felt suicidal but I've kept it on the backburner for then. As a "last resort" sort of thing as a hail-marry.
And option 3 - I've tried to get it to work for an hour straight. Installing different GUIs wasn't the issue - I managed to get both Cinnamon, XFCE & GNOME installed with relative ease. The issue was that the problem I had with the monitors wasn't resolved by it. No matter which desktop GUI I used, the other two monitors remained blank, with the cursor being the only thing that worked.
The only thing that actually got all 3 monitors to boot up & show an image was KDE Plasma on Wayland. BUT, you already know my woes with Wayland if you've read my previous blog post. And this time, the experience was much worse, since it lagged very bad. I could barely even log out of it.
So my final option, aside from going nuclear & trying to update my GPU drivers on a still unsupported distro for them, was to try to roll back whatever it is that Fedora updated then.
When I first rebooted my PC & logged in, I noticed something unusual. Only 1 of my 3 monitors was displaying. The cursor appeared on the other 2 monitors, sure, but I couldn't drag any windows into them. I could still technically interact with the windows that opened on the other monitors but I just couldn't see them, like there was just a black overlay over the whole thing that I couldn't get rid of. I thought it was a temporary bug at first. After all, I mentioned in the past that I did have issues with my monitor failing to initialize & a reboot would usually fix that. So I rebooted but...this time the problem remained.
Thus, at 1AM, I began searching around to see if anyone has encountered this. Keep in mind, my desktop GUI was KDE Plasma X11. More on that later. I kept encountering posts from like 2014, 2009, 2017, etc. - varying time periods mentioning the exact issue but to my utter dismay - most people's solutions to the problem were either:
- Use 1 monitor & wait for a fix for the GUI
- Update the GPU drivers
- Use a different desktop GUI
- Rollback updates
Updating the GPU drivers felt suicidal but I've kept it on the backburner for then. As a "last resort" sort of thing as a hail-marry.
And option 3 - I've tried to get it to work for an hour straight. Installing different GUIs wasn't the issue - I managed to get both Cinnamon, XFCE & GNOME installed with relative ease. The issue was that the problem I had with the monitors wasn't resolved by it. No matter which desktop GUI I used, the other two monitors remained blank, with the cursor being the only thing that worked.
The only thing that actually got all 3 monitors to boot up & show an image was KDE Plasma on Wayland. BUT, you already know my woes with Wayland if you've read my previous blog post. And this time, the experience was much worse, since it lagged very bad. I could barely even log out of it.
So my final option, aside from going nuclear & trying to update my GPU drivers on a still unsupported distro for them, was to try to roll back whatever it is that Fedora updated then.
Here is an image of the issue I was dealing with, so you'd understand the predicament I was in. The one in the middle is my 144hz monitor, the other two are the 60hz monitors that I have.
You can see in system settings that the other two monitors are indeed enabled & recognized by Fedora. And, as mentioned, the only thing I could actually see on them was my mouse cursor.
So I began trying to roll back Fedora updates. I genuinely thought the issue was with KDE Plasma X11, since Wayland worked "fine", so I asked for help on Mastodon about this. Predictably, at the hour I posted, no one was online to come to my aid this time. Except for an Aussie guy named GNU/Matt who tried to help point me in the right direction (shoutout to you by the way, thanks for taking the time to try & help).
Unfortunately, no matter how much I tried rolling back the updates, be it OS or KDE Plasma updates, nothing ever fixed my issues.
You can see in system settings that the other two monitors are indeed enabled & recognized by Fedora. And, as mentioned, the only thing I could actually see on them was my mouse cursor.
So I began trying to roll back Fedora updates. I genuinely thought the issue was with KDE Plasma X11, since Wayland worked "fine", so I asked for help on Mastodon about this. Predictably, at the hour I posted, no one was online to come to my aid this time. Except for an Aussie guy named GNU/Matt who tried to help point me in the right direction (shoutout to you by the way, thanks for taking the time to try & help).
Unfortunately, no matter how much I tried rolling back the updates, be it OS or KDE Plasma updates, nothing ever fixed my issues.
Here's an image of my terminal screaming at me regarding a file conflict that I couldn't get around. I even tried manually changing or moving these files out of the directory using the root account, but even after the files were literally GONE from the directory it's screaming at me about, it still didn't let me downgrade even KDE Plasma X11.
It was then when I pulled out the hail-marry. Updating the GPU drivers from 550.90.07 to the latest version that Nvidia has released. The GPU driver update went successfully. It asked for a reboot, gave it the go-ahead and...my Fedora installation was bricked. Kaput. All I could use upon reboot was just the Linux Terminal. Nothing else.
After losing 3 hours of sleep to this & knowing I have to be up by 9 AM that day to go on the family trip, I just decided - enough is enough. That is where my Linux journey ends...for now.
It was then when I pulled out the hail-marry. Updating the GPU drivers from 550.90.07 to the latest version that Nvidia has released. The GPU driver update went successfully. It asked for a reboot, gave it the go-ahead and...my Fedora installation was bricked. Kaput. All I could use upon reboot was just the Linux Terminal. Nothing else.
After losing 3 hours of sleep to this & knowing I have to be up by 9 AM that day to go on the family trip, I just decided - enough is enough. That is where my Linux journey ends...for now.
Am I done forever?
Well, no. I fully intend to go back to Linux in the future, but I guess right now - my hardware is not cut out for it quite yet.
A lot of you will say that I could've just distro-hopped. Go to Linux Mint like I initially planned. Try a different OS entirely like openSUSE. Maybe install Arch. But understand my perspective that after losing 3 hours of sleep that night, and oversleeping & missing the family trip as well, I was very burned. I did not want to deal with this headache anymore.
The thing is, the villain of this story isn't Linux, or Fedora, KDE, what have you. In the 2.5 weeks that I full-timed Linux as my main OS, I genuinely had fun with it. I got to learn so many cool new things & get a different perspective of using my computer. Truthfully, it was very fun & I love how supportive the Linux sphere, no matter where I turn to, was.
The real villain of this story is Nvidia.
I've mentioned in the first post that Linux & Nvidia do not mix. And Nvidia is the one that I blame my issues with Linux that I've had. The clipboard? Wayland issue because of Nvidia's horrible support of Wayland. Firefox being broken? Nvidia, because of the Wayland support. Games starting with garbled graphics or flicker like crazy when in use? You've guessed it - Nvidia.
Nvidia is a company that, henceforth, I've decided I'm boycotting for any future hardware purchases. My next graphics card will 100% be an AMD graphics card. The reason? AMD has open-sourced their drivers for their graphics cards, leading to the Linux community basically being given free reigns to fix any Linux-related issues on their own. And that's awesome!
Nvidia, however, doesn't. They insist on keeping their drivers closed-source & releasing their own versions of Linux drivers with zero guarantee that they'll work with existing elements in your install. And for this, you often have to wait weeks, even months until you get a stable Nvidia driver update. And even then, you will STILL be several driver versions behind.
Mark my words with this - when I eventually replace my RTX 3060 with an AMD graphics card, I will be back on Linux. I'm not giving up because of my experience. It's just that, for my sanity, and for the sake of being able to sleep at night, for now I've turned back to Windows. Not for long though, I definitely hope.
And don't worry...
A lot of you will say that I could've just distro-hopped. Go to Linux Mint like I initially planned. Try a different OS entirely like openSUSE. Maybe install Arch. But understand my perspective that after losing 3 hours of sleep that night, and oversleeping & missing the family trip as well, I was very burned. I did not want to deal with this headache anymore.
The thing is, the villain of this story isn't Linux, or Fedora, KDE, what have you. In the 2.5 weeks that I full-timed Linux as my main OS, I genuinely had fun with it. I got to learn so many cool new things & get a different perspective of using my computer. Truthfully, it was very fun & I love how supportive the Linux sphere, no matter where I turn to, was.
The real villain of this story is Nvidia.
I've mentioned in the first post that Linux & Nvidia do not mix. And Nvidia is the one that I blame my issues with Linux that I've had. The clipboard? Wayland issue because of Nvidia's horrible support of Wayland. Firefox being broken? Nvidia, because of the Wayland support. Games starting with garbled graphics or flicker like crazy when in use? You've guessed it - Nvidia.
Nvidia is a company that, henceforth, I've decided I'm boycotting for any future hardware purchases. My next graphics card will 100% be an AMD graphics card. The reason? AMD has open-sourced their drivers for their graphics cards, leading to the Linux community basically being given free reigns to fix any Linux-related issues on their own. And that's awesome!
Nvidia, however, doesn't. They insist on keeping their drivers closed-source & releasing their own versions of Linux drivers with zero guarantee that they'll work with existing elements in your install. And for this, you often have to wait weeks, even months until you get a stable Nvidia driver update. And even then, you will STILL be several driver versions behind.
Mark my words with this - when I eventually replace my RTX 3060 with an AMD graphics card, I will be back on Linux. I'm not giving up because of my experience. It's just that, for my sanity, and for the sake of being able to sleep at night, for now I've turned back to Windows. Not for long though, I definitely hope.
And don't worry...
My Intel NUC that I have will continue to run good ol' reliable Linux Mint. So it's not like I'm completely out of the game quite yet.
Like I said, I'll be back.
Like I said, I'll be back.
Closing thoughts
Just once again I would love to thank everyone who I've interacted with the Linux sphere in the last ~3 weeks. The amount of support & willingness to help a complete newbie at this sort of stuff has been nothing short of heartwarming, and an impressive display of camaraderie amongst yourselves.
It's this reason why I'm saying that I will be back on Linux some day. That's a promise!
Special thank you goes to shavit & Ravener for dedicating so much of their time towards helping me make my Linux experience the best it can be.
In the meantime, you can find me probably trailblazing the galaxy in Honkai: Star Rail on Windows. Not happy to be back on it so soon after leaving, but let's just hope that it's not for that much longer.
And hey, keep me in touch with things going on in the Linux sphere, alright? I'd love to hear more often from you guys about nerdy stuff regarding Linux. Just...don't hate on the Windows users though...take aim at Microsoft rather than the people who use Windows. Thanks!
- huu
It's this reason why I'm saying that I will be back on Linux some day. That's a promise!
Special thank you goes to shavit & Ravener for dedicating so much of their time towards helping me make my Linux experience the best it can be.
In the meantime, you can find me probably trailblazing the galaxy in Honkai: Star Rail on Windows. Not happy to be back on it so soon after leaving, but let's just hope that it's not for that much longer.
And hey, keep me in touch with things going on in the Linux sphere, alright? I'd love to hear more often from you guys about nerdy stuff regarding Linux. Just...don't hate on the Windows users though...take aim at Microsoft rather than the people who use Windows. Thanks!
- huu
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