
Since I have been looking at Linux tutorials on Youtube it suggested Linux Bottles. So I installed it and it wasn’t a great experience.
Yes, it installed perfectly fine. However, using it didn’t get me any results. I followed the tutorial and installed Steam in Bottles just like the video said. It was point-and-click and very easy. The problem is that Steam in Bottles never started and so I couldn’t evaluate if it works or not.
One of the neat things about Bottles however is that there is a ton of things to configure/settings you can explore. I tried a few settings but it didn’t seem to help. If I can’t get Steam to start in Bottles, then trying to get a game running in the Steam environment inside Bottles doesn’t seem more likely. I am not giving up, but it is not a straightforward process.
The video said that there are pros/cons of using Bottles versus other virtualization technologies. So far all I have experienced are the cons of it not working. The pro is that it was easy to set up and had lots of customization options. Further research is needed.
I understand that I am trying to get something to work that wasn’t designed to work in this way. An unsupported environment is always going to be a challenge. At some point you have to ask yourself, how much is that environment worth to me to go through all of this? I am not so crazy about games that I would run Windows, and I have bought other Windows gaming machines that were terrible for the games that I wanted to play. I tend to like Strategic games and City simulation games and those haven’t worked well on any computer that I have had. Cities Skyline worked the best on the Mac, but it was still a struggle. At 100k+ citizens my top-of-the-line mac struggled with it. It was the reason that I stopped playing it. It became unreliable and slow to respond and that isn’t fun.
So when my Mac wasn’t working for me anymore, I thought let us buy a top-of-the-line PC gaming laptop and see how it goes. It wasn’t better in Cities Skyline at those levels of population. The game called Control played very well on this computer, but it took some time to configure. That wasn’t fun or intuitive. One of the reasons that I liked playing the PlayStation in the past is that I didn’t have the complexity of all the IT stuff I do. I could just play it and it worked. I wrote earlier that playing Red Dead Redemption 2 on the PS5 was probably the most graphically beautiful game I have ever played. It was so compelling, but Playstation/Sony had their issues that affected me and it wasn’t perfect either. I crashed RDR2 on the PS5 and when I told my friend about it, he was like “I played this for 10 years and never crashed it.” So perhaps I have a gift for finding the bugs in programs.
One of the things that was compelling about game systems was that even though they had lower video quality in the past, they were more reliable. That is one of the reasons that I played the Playstation for so long. However, Sony is not an ethical company and I wrote earlier about the Sony Store problems I had. I will never buy/support Sony again and so that means that no more Playstations for me. I had an Xbox in the past and I wasn’t impressed. Video games need more competition.
Am I saying that Linux Bottles won’t work for you? Not at all. You may not have a crazy NVIDIA system and it will work great. My friend has AMD and said he never had a problem with it. That will be my next computer and hopefully, Linux gaming will work better for me.