Manjaro

Okami Plays Nicely With Proton… Kinda

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When Proton was brand new I remember Okami being among one of the first titles I tried to run, but never to any success. I’m happy to say that has changed, at least with Proton 5.0 hard at work. The only problem I’ve found with it is a random crash that can occur at anytime during any particular cutscene, and given that you have to manually save at certain locations this can be a little annoying if you’ve covered a lot of ground and barely made it to a save point before crashing. Still, it’s much further along than it was when Proton was in its infancy.

Now that I know how well it performs on my desktop I’ll have to install it on the laptop to see how Proton handles the game on an NVidia GPU… because science!

Resident Evil 2 Plays Peachy Under Linux

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I played RE2 a little bit under Linux last night, and surprisingly it runs almost as if it was natively released for the platform. I turned up everything I could, making sure to utilize as much of the GPU as possible, and it didn’t crash once. I always like seeing newer titles with few flaws working under Proton/Linux.

I’ve been experimenting with OBS recordings, as it appears that unlike the Windows version of OBS I’m able to record games that use the Vulkan API. I tested it earlier with DOOM, and while it did record it did also overload the encoder. I didn’t have time to test Resident Evil 2 and other games running through Vulkan, but now that I have a fully loaded OBS to record with under Linux I’ll have to do some more science.

Goodbye Mint, Hello Manjaro

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With the new PC build in place I felt it was a good excuse to upgrade my Linux install, though I couldn’t decide between upgrading to a newer version of Mint or venturing out to try another distro. I contemplated trying Solus OS, but found it to be a little too heavy for my liking. I’ve heard Fedora is getting better on the gaming front, but that distro still leaves a sour taste in my mouth… CentOS for gaming is also too much of a pain to setup for gaming (but it is excellent for running this website!), so I finally settled on the latest version of Manjaro Linux.

This was surprisingly easy to setup. Usually when I setup Linux there are at least two different repositories that I have to install in order to get some of my favorite programs (or having to compile them from source myself). But right out of the box this came installed with the latest open source mesa drivers, Vulkan, controller drivers, and Steam is even preinstalled! I still recommend updating your software/drivers after any OS installation.

I couldn’t find OBS on the package manager, but it was easy to grab via snapd. This version of OBS comes with all kinds of plugins already pre-installed, most of which are handy for livestreaming, and my personal favorite; the VAAPI plugin for recording with AMD GPU’s. Now I record my gameplay directly from the GPU just as I can under Windows. I’ve known about this plugin for quite awhile, but never got around to compiling it for OBS under Mint or CentOS. I did some test recordings with Sonic Mania and Crash Bandicoot using Proton, and the quality is on par with my Windows install. This will make it easier for me to do comparison recordings between Win 10 and Manjaro.

I’m happy to finally see Linux get this kind of attention! This has definitely come a long way since the days of having to gather up like 12 different repos and getting stuck in dependency hell in order to get half of these things to work properly. Now 97% of the stuff I use everyday runs outside of Windows… stunning.