Gaming on Ubuntu Desktop

Hopefully this will allow Ubuntu to receive up-to-date drivers on the kernel, official support for gaming peripherals (i.e. macro mapping) with OEMs.

1 Like

The community is at it, but official support with full featured drivers based on documentation is a lot better and faster.
Hopefully we will get a good person and a lot of communication with the community.

Hi all,

I have a few updates from Ubuntu Budgie team. We have been working hard improving gaming experience for our users.
Our community project gained some visibility, @LInuxForEveryone wrote an awesome article on Forbes about our work. Others have pitched in with suggestions and feedback.
Since there is a lot going on there, I have been editing first post of the thread to recap all major work, tasks, and updates, with links to specific posts for those that want more details.

You can find the link to our discourse thread here: https://discourse.ubuntubudgie.org/t/community-project-ubuntu-budgie-gaming/5225
I would be very grateful if some of you could have a look and leave a comment. I know it is not Ubuntu proper, but our “Ubuntu Budgie Welcome” is a Snap, and all the code is on github. I hope our work can be also used by other Flavors or Ubuntu proper.

6 Likes

Hello Ubuntu Gamers!

More news from Ubuntu Budgie team: I wrote a couple of posts published today. First one is about our work on Budgie Gaming application, and second post is dedicated to OpenRazer and Polychromatic.
Luke Horwell and Luca Weiss certainly deserve some love for all the great work they are doing to support Razer devices on Linux. :star_struck:

Ubuntu Budgie post on our Budgie Gaming application:
https://ubuntubudgie.org/2022/03/a-deep-dive-in-our-new-budgie-gaming-application/

Front Page Linux post on OpenRazer and Polychromatic:
https://frontpagelinux.com/tutorials/control-your-razer-devices-on-linux-with-openrazer-polychromatic/

It has been a long evening for me, writing all that and another post dedicated on Unattended Upgrades. Will head to social media and various channels tomorrow to spread the word.

Constructive criticism is always welcome! Code contributions and ideas even more so :sweat_smile: :heart:

7 Likes

Very cool! Will check it out :slight_smile:

1 Like

I’m assuming it’ll install the PPAs of each respective client? I know for a fact that CoreCtrl & OpenRGB aren’t available in Ubuntu’s repo.

@YamiYukiSenpai

Our thought process was to use applications in this order:

  1. From Ubuntu repositories if possible (including universe and multiverse).
  2. From Snap if up to date and working fine.
  3. From PPA if up to date and working fine. Users are notified if 3rd party repository is about to be added to system, and they can cancel or continue.

If you want to know more, our discussion regarding PPAs and Snaps for each application can be found here: https://discourse.ubuntubudgie.org/t/community-project-ubuntu-budgie-gaming/5225/22 .

We are keeping track of PPAs and how those are maintained, and as more packages get into Ubuntu Repositories, we will be happy to transition. Regarding CoreCtrl, it also provides “Mesa almost stable”, so I reached out to Ernst Sjöstrand, maintainer of the PPA to thank him for his work and let him know he is helping us all with his repository.

In our future plans, we want to work on a “PPA maintenance tool” so that less tech savvy users get some help maintaining their PPAs especially after release-upgrades. We are busy with 22.04 release now but hopefully we can dedicate some time to it soon enough.
I shared my initial idea and thoughts on a discourse post: https://discourse.ubuntubudgie.org/t/ubuntu-budgie-automated-ppa-maintenance-tool/5722

2 Likes

Well… it seems I was forced to come here for help. As a project I use to make gaming work on my Ubuntu has been side tracked from Ubuntu’s side, not intentionally obviously.

https://github.com/M-Bab/linux-kernel-amdgpu-binaries/issues/23#issuecomment-1078073699

This has been the only kernel that has provided stability for my and for few other computers I maintain, and like the comment says, Ubuntu has dropped something somewhere, and we can’t get Ubuntu specific kernels now.

And yes, by stability I mean gaming on Ubuntu without this kernel, on my Ryzen and my friends intel machines with AMD gpu’s would be constant crashing.

So I wish this project could do something where the stuff was dropped. Having a stable GPU has been essential for gaming on Ubuntu and AMD has always needed the latest stuff to be actually working. Ironically NVIDIA has never been a issue on my Ubuntu install (after finding the perfect ppa)

Without this kernel project from M-Bab i would have probably dropped Ubuntu long time ago.

The state of the Wine packages are a bit questionable. Stable is at version 6 and wine-development as well. Upstream stable is at version 7.

Maybe more resources can be shifted to that.

2 Likes

Imho, the wine ppa is a must.
I tend towards some kind of official gaming repo, to keep the drivers and tools updated and packaged there there but not endanger the upstream stability of the underlying base Ubuntu.

1 Like

As an FPS gamer, I think GNOME settings should expose the “Flat” acceleration profile under the mouse settings. In a game like Apex Legends the default profile makes aiming feel too sensitive and unwieldy. Flat IMO makes it feel more like what I’m used to when using Windows.

2 Likes

Once upon a time, Ubuntu/Mint gaming wasn’t up to par, but the latest kernels and Mesa have eliminated that. My Linux machines have beaten my Windows machines in response and overall performance since the advances.

5 Likes

PSA Unreal Engine have released pre-built binaries for Unreal Engine 5 for Ubuntu 22.04, you can download the engine here (if you have signed up for an Epic Account), and it makes it very simple to get up and running with the editor now. :slight_smile:

2 Likes

Where are we with Gaming on Ubuntu? We mentioned missing apps and parts of the main distro that need to be bleeding edge for a good user experience.
I’d say an official and curated repository on top of the main one might be the way to go here in addition to work with hardware partners on upstream hardware enablement.

1 Like

Ah, the ol’ gaming on Linux thing. Maybe it’s about time we started considering the possibility of admitting one day that Linux just doesn’t work for gaming. Maybe it just isn’t the right tool for this job, maybe it was designed for something else…

Check the various gaming related talks on the Ubuntu Summit 2023

It works better than ever, we just need a bit more help from Canonical to make it viable by default without too much intervention and knowledge from the user.

IIRC, this is why Canonical decided on Snaps instead of Flatpak – it’s all about security.

Any plans on boosting the default vm.max_map_count?

https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/issues/6510#issuecomment-1422699309

One thing that I think would really help gaming on Ubuntu at this point would be to carry the Mutter-VRR patch in 24.04+ to add variable refresh rate support in Gnome/Wayland.
There is obviously an upstream MR to add support, but it’s over 3 years old at this point and is currently locked. There is also a proposed roadmap to add experimental support in Gnome 46 which was promising, but there doesn’t appear to have been any activity in a month and am really dubious at this point that it will make it before feature freeze.

Meanwhile “Mutter-VRR” with the patch been available on Arch (AUR) and Nobara/Fedora (Copr) for a few releases now and reportedly works great. Someone could potentially provide a PPA for Ubuntu of course, but it would be amazing if it was available by default (i.e. installable and/or behind a hidden gsettings flag).

I understand that it takes a resources and commitment to support a downstream patch, but it would really show that Ubuntu is serious about gaming and would hopefully push upstream to finally accept the MR (additional testing/interest). It would really be great to not go through another LTS cycle without VRR support.

Food for thought…thanks!

3 Likes

We have until February 29th for feature freeze, so there’s still a little time.