T w e n t y S i d e d

In case you missed the very last line of last week’s post, I was able to get Star Wars: The Old Republic running on my Linux laptop. Despite knowing that the graphics architecture in the laptop is actually not fully supported in the kernel any longer, this still gave me a lot of hope moving forward. The first reason is because the driver implementation is not necessarily rigidly separated. That is, many of the driver-enabled features of a chip made using GCN 5 are going to be more similar to the subsequent architecture than the oldest versions of the older architecture. That is part of the reason I was able to do things with the laptop in gaming that I couldn’t do with my older GCN 1 cards. The second reason is the specific reason I was able to take the game from non-running to running; something I had seen reference to a few times but didn’t *fully* understand: I installed a custom “Proton” layer for use by Steam. I talked about what Proton is last week. There are community-supported custom versions that allow Proton to be more compatible with the average Linux installation on your home computer, rather than being designed specifically for SteamOS (and/or the Steam Deck.) The next morning I tried installing MANY games that are either favorites or just seemed interesting, and was able to get every single one to start up and play. Having conquered this last challenge, I started *seriously* looking for the one thing I needed to finish an up-to-date, fully-functioning computer: a video card.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Finished!”

Paige Francis He/him

Gonna be a bit “train-of-thought” today. OK. *More* train-of-thought than usual. At least as I start writing. I’m still on the Linux project. I have learned how to do many things, and even recently learned that I have been largely wasting my time getting games to run on my PC. The laptop is still doing great…it just gets better and better. I have completed converting all of my external drives to EXT4 from NTFS, with all but 2.5 TB of files transferred back to their customary locations. Part of that involved starting a PC build to accommodate the upgraded hardware that is the only way to solve the gaming problem. And as I write I am testing once more an install of Star Wars: The Old Republic on my laptop, as I have been unable to find a known, definitive reason to explain why it hasn’t worked yet. Other than it’s an old game with a clunky design, and my laptop is based on one of the *least* supported Ryzen integrated architectures.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Step By Step”

Paige Francis He/him

Over the past week, I uninstalled World of Warcraft from my laptop, as I had proven everything I needed to regarding running WoW on Linux. I then spent the entire rest of the week trying to get Star Wars: The Old Republic running without ever achieving final success. SWTOR seems to be one of those things that either works immediately without problems or with very minor launch instruction additions…or it doesn’t work at all. I have increasingly run into things that “just work fine” on Linux until I try them, when I discover that the truth is “just works fine” comes with a ****load of caveats and assumptions. And Linux community-sourced support can literally tell you ANYTHING you would ever want to know about every possible problem you might ever have; at the expense of not ever being able to address the literal question you asked in a way that frames a useful experience going forward. I liken it to asking “how do I make a souffle?” and everyone answering “well, first I need you to go learn French or you won’t actually understand what’s going on or the instructions I would give you” or, unfortunately, the standard “why would you want to do THAT?”. Also, every discussion of a support issue WILL DEVOLVE into two separate arguments between two people trying to “help” about whether either is making the correct assumptions before attempting to provide and answer. Regardless, I erased my Windows installation and installed Linux on my main computer, this computer, last night.

Oh, and World of Warcraft released the newest expansion and broke some major game mechanics for two days.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Interesting Times”

Paige Francis He/him