Hiya, i've just installed Zorin Core on a new old PC for my son. It's probably mid-spec - at least to my mind. It has a 9th Gen Intel i5 with a low-end version of an Nvidia 1050 - i.e. it doesn't require additional power. It's in an HP compact PC of some kind.
Anyway, i used the "newer Nvidia drivers" (or something) choice from the boot menu of the installer. We installed Steam and he's starting to download stuff to see how it goes.
What system/configuration tweaks would people recommend to improve performance of games?
There's a few things you can do, but personally I prefer to go the route of, try getting things running by default WITHOUT doing anything, then possibly changing things in the future. Reason being is that sometimes changes can actually cause more harm than good.
Some people install gamemode , which is an os wide program that essentially, when it recognizes a game, should limit / tone down some background tasks and a couple other things to prioritize the game process and get it more resources. Personally for me I haven't noticed much of a difference, but it's made a difference for some.
Running steam using proton-ge is usually going to net you better performance / compatibility versus valves versions of proton (although sometimes the opposite is true) . At least having a version installed would be helpful in my eyes. I use protonup-qt to manage them easier.
You could upgrade the kernel or mesa drivers in order to MAYBE get some performance, buuuuuut. As far as I'm concerned, I've only seen extremely minimal change. Basically if your stuff works by default, I'd wager that's more or less going to be the same on the newer drivers as well. The other 2 before this would likely benefit greater.
Depending on the games, there are some fixed you'll have to make. For example, in Hogwarts Legacy you'd have to increase max_map_count, otherwise the game would crash usually at the loading screen after a few teleports. But those are the fixes you're just going to figure out as games are attempted to be played really.
Also I like heroic launcher for epic and gog games, or lutris. Just throwing that out there.
None, games run like windows. Just configure them in game.
A few days ago i had to switch to proton 7.0.6. The game Iron Harvest runs very great on that. Everything above proton 7 will stutter the game. Even proton-ge
not sure how steam work ( i don't play games) , do one download a game and play local, or can one play online too ?
what i wanna suggest really is if you play online , upload and download speed should be enough. People usually dont worry bout upload speed, but it helps a lot with online gaming
Please consider getting games through GOG.com. Their games are DRM-free and they do offer a fair amount of support for Linux. WINE is an alternative, too. I would use WINE instead of Steam if I were in your shoes. Just saying. Anyway, good luck.
You can also use the "Run On Linux" setting on Steam ...... to find out if you game will run on proton go to this website (below) and type your game name in the search bar ...... try to always pick the "gold" choice and then read the various posting by other people as to what will work and what won't ...... make sure the spec's they list for their set up matches most of yours for better performance ..... most of the time just the "Proton (experimental) will work ..... other times you will need a different version like 9.1 .... 8.7 etc .....
Here is the link .....
Also read up on using Proton on Steam here .....
159754499
Jump right in the water is fine and good luck .....
Adding to this: the Epic Games Store gives 1 or 2 games for free every week that you own forever after claiming them within the same week. You don't get to choose what the free games are, so most will probably be unappealing for some people, but with games being given for free every week, chances are you will get something you will like from time to time
That's a very good suggestion. But if a game is available on steam but not on gog, it could also be DRM-free. The fastest way I know for checking (before buying the game) is searching up "[name-of-the-game] pcgamingwiki". Here is an example:
It will list the stores it's available on and say if it's DRM-free on those or not. In the case of Portal, the phisical CD version has DRM, but the one from steam doesn't.
If the game is available on multiple stores and the DRM situation on each is different, it will also detail them. For example, Spiderman remastered is only DRM-free on the Epic Games Store:
A big advantage of DRM-free games is that you don't need the steam launcher, nor the epic games launcher, nor any launcher at all to run the game after it's installed, so that alone will save up a few system resources that will help the game run slightly better (wine/proton will still be necessary if a game was only made for windows).
Why is that ? Steam uses proton and has everything setup. While if you use wine you have to configure everything by your self. Does not make any sense to me.
It depends on the game. Only game I remember trying with wine instead of proton was Undertale Yellow, and I didn't have to configure anything. Just double click, wine sets up itself in the home directory automatically, and the game starts up and works fine.
If the game only uses simple 2D graphics or is old, wine should be fine. Even some 3D newer ones could work, as a big part of proton's patches eventually get upstreamed to wine.
Though, if something doesn't work with wine (or is complicated to make it work), using proton doesn't necessarily mean using steam, as the heroic games launcher can run games using proton. Or you could also add non-steam games to your steam library by telling it where the executable of the game is and use steam's proton at worst case scenario that nothing else worked
One very big tip: Don't jump on the newest drivers for optimizations. Let them sit for a while, find out how they're going for other users. A fresh Zorin install with modern Nvidia drivers right now will get you 550. 555 also seems pretty stable. 560 works for some people and is a nightmare for others—some things that work on 555 for me just don't even launch with 560, and I'm not alone there.
Using Bottles is also an option for non-Steam games for which you have an installer. It has a couple of advantages, like containerizing your WINE config on a per-bottle basis, so if you need to screw with WINE settings, you only work on one bottle without adjusting anything else, and easy cleanup (delete the whole bottle if you don't want to keep anything in it). I've had more luck with it than with other methods, but it's also more work to set up, so if you don't have a reason to avoid Steam (easiest choice if your games are Steam games in the first place) or Heroic, I'd stick with those unless they don't meet your needs somehow. I've had weirdly bad luck with Lutris, which is why I started using Bottles in the first place, but it's well liked by the community, so I'm pretty clearly an outlier there.
What about mesa/vulkan updates and such? Will they be taken care of by Steam? Or will Zorin's slow release cycle mean long waits for updates to those? Or none of the above!
If there's a patch to the major driver version you're using—for example, 550 recently got an update despite not being the latest—that tends to come in relatively quickly. Actually updating to an all new version of the drivers doesn't happen very quickly though, partly because Nvidia driver updates have been known to cause problems in Linux, especially for Wayland users. To be honest, I'm not sure Zorin will ever switch you to a new major version on its own.
If you want to change driver versions, you can do that by running Software and Updates, going to the Additional Drivers tab, and changin the driver version you're using from that list. If you don't see the version you want, you can follow Aravisian's steps here:
That requires terminal use, but is the most reliable way to update to a major version Zorin has yet to deploy. I strongly recommend against trying to install Nvidia's drivers downloaded directly from Geforce.com. That way lies frustration and possible system breakage.
Or use my tutorial to install the driver manually so you can run the latest driver on your machine. The first time you need alot of commands, but you can copy and past them. First time requires alot of commands, but updates after that only require a few.
For advanced users you can copy all the commands in the saved file where the commands get saved and you only have to press key up and hit enter
