Four days ago, I woke up, as I usually expect to after going to sleep and I turned on my really fucking awesome Archlinux gaming rig, hit the desktop and decide, hmmmm… I haven’t updated in a while(a week), let’s pacman -Syyuu and get up to speed. Well, I got up to speed and my favorite game, the best game of all time, Team Fortress 2
##FAILED TO LOAD! 🚒 🔥
In the imminent crisis-state that I had found myself in, I did what any filthy scout-main Archlinux user would do, I googled the problem and put the word arch in quotation marks.
The first five results yielded ancient bullshit useful to someone five years ago, probably. The next ten, redditors complaining about old tat. Then I did what any old wine veteran would do. I shut steam down and started it in the terminal so I could monitor its raging bitch-fit in real time.
Team Fortress 2 failed to load because of lib32-libtcmalloc.so. Arch had updated it to a future version not yet even coded, and steam wasn’t having it. The answer was on protondb all along! So, some fella says
The native version of tcmalloc introduced a bug on TF2 that it randomly crashes the game. You need to install lib32-gperftools (name of the Arch AUR package, other distros should have similar names) and add LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib32/libtcmalloc.so %command% to your launch options to override the library.
et voila, I’m torturing 25/7 2fort.
Now, I know what you’re thinking, who in their right mind would suggest Archlinux for a beginner? See, that’s where I already caught you because this bug trickles all the way down to Garuda and Manjaro users too since they have the same libraries (and that fancy SteamOS that’s floating around).
So while I love Linux and software freedom, I find suffering Linux on someone might be more suited to a person that actually wants it, and not to work through it to get to what they actually wanted to do.
I wanted to play Team Fortress 2, and I was rather irate about the last thing on my steam account that shouldn’t work, not working all over me. This system has been a saint for six months, but when it’s a devil, boy, is it.
Anyway, KDE is better than gnome! Thanks for reading!
I’ve considered setting up a passthrough VM like this (and almost did), I’m just reluctant to I guess because of how much work it takes to configure and get going, and how little I actually use Windows anyways, so I just stick to dualbooting when I really need it. I definitely wish the process of setting up the passthrough VM was easier, but like you pointed out, it’d probably be a good learning experience.
And if you’re a multiplayer gamer, there’s no point because they can ban you if they detect a VM.
I haven’t been a multiplayer gamer in a while, and the only mp game I fire up from time to time doesn’t have this problem. So I admit I forget it can be a thorn in the side of some people.
I learned a lot about both Linux and virtual machines. I’d say it’s worth it if you think that knowledge would be useful to you. Proton and Wine-GE both do almost everything I could want but when something can’t or won’t work, it’s nice to just throw it into a environment you know it will work with. I think I keep all of five games on my windows vm, and I might need it for productivity software in the future.
There’s a few ways of doing GPU passthrough, as you probably know. I have an APU and discrete GPU, which allows me to use Windows like just another application on my Linux desktop by way of looking-glass and scream-ivshmem. It’s very convenient. I can imagine it would be less so if you’re looking at a single-GPU situation as I think you’d have to close your graphics session when you swap.