Date: 2023-11-17 22:38
This is the story of the difficulty I had trying to play The Sims 3 on Linux, as well as other general struggles doing similar things.
I use Linux. I'm very open about it (which is to say I don't shut up about how superior I am over Windows elitists who refuse to try new things), and I enjoy it as a hobby as well as something that makes my life easier. Making the switch was painful in itself (it deserves its own blog post, if I'll be honest) and I had to make a lot of compromises and changes to what I do, but it was all worth it in the end. My PC runs significantly better, my workflow is significantly more efficient, and I use tooling I never used before and effortlessly deal with what used to be massive headaches. The biggest issue I have had, however, is gaming.
For the most part, gaming is perfectly fine on Linux. For 99.9% of people, gaming is quite effortless; you just install Proton and use that for all your Steam games. A lot of games also have native support, including all Valve ones, and devices like the Steam Deck and projects like Proton, Wine and Lutris have made huge strides. Just a few years ago, the answer to the question, "What games can I play on Linux?" was either open-source games or Minecraft, which runs on Java so it doesn't really count. However, the past few years of progress is proof that Linux is genuinely superior, and I am right and you are wrong.
Unfortunately, none of that applies for my situation, because of my unique hardware configuration.
My computer is quite outdated; I run a third-generation Intel i3 CPU with no graphics card, and the small form factor of my PC makes it impossible to upgrade to a reasonable degree. Because I use "Ivy Bridge" hardware, a lot of things just don't work properly. Vulkan (a graphics API for rendering to the screen used by a lot of games) barely works and I haven't for the life of me gotten Proton working on anything other than AdVenture Communist, which crashed on the loading screen. All other games I tested just open and crash before anything loads. Lovely.
I have tried everything to get *something* working under Proton. I tried installing Proton the official way. I tried using Proton GE by following the install instructions. I tried an unofficial AUR package maintained by the Garuda Linux team. I tried ProtonUp, a tool for getting Proton working. All have failed. I can get the Apache web server running. I can port-forward (in theory, I haven't had a reason to yet). I've even installed Arch Linux with little to no difficulty, apart from the install guide being trash and GRUB not working. WHY CAN'T I GET PROTON WORKING?
Note on the heading: I am being sarcastic. I don't mean that.
Moving on past that, let's talk about the game that has been the most difficult to get running. If you remember my first blog post, you'll know that I like The Sims 3. When I had Windows, I managed to get a free copy of The Sims 3 with my Xbox Game Pass (3 months for a pound was hard to skip, even for someone broke like me). I loved it. Sure, the EA app was broken and some things were tedious to deal with, but once I got into the game I had a blast. When I moved to Linux however, my Xbox Game Pass subscription was long gone, and I ended up playing something else. That is, until very recently.
Getting a copy was hard enough. I looked everywhere for a copy, looking in the sketchiest parts of the Internet so that I didn't have to pay £24 for a game from 2009. However, most either did not work or had all of the expansion packs, which took up too much space. Ah, the joys of being poor. I eventually found a copy courtesy of Razor1911, the oldest warez group ever, and installed it. I didn't realise, but this was about to be the least of my issues.
The game, annoyingly enough, defaulted to a pretty low resolution, which I upped to a crisp 1920 by 1080. I began making my Sim, which went smoothly until something happened.
The game just crashed. And it kept crashing. I tried again and again until I literally memorised how to make my Sim down to the character traits, and finally managed to get it working. I picked a nice, furnished home in the middle of the city, leaving me with just $25. Enough to get a job and have a nice but very quiet life. Just what an elderly Sim wanted from the town; a job as a policeman and a nice, stable community to participate in.
Living the life of my Sim was really enjoyable until I realised a major issue. The game kept crashing. It would crash at random. Sometimes it took 2 minutes. Sometimes it took 30. However, it eventually crashed, and it would keep doing it until I got frustrated and stopped playing and became scared to touch the game in fear of the second issue.
Saving the game was also incredibly tricky: a couple times it crashed while I was saving, which reminds me of the video-game Uplink in a weird way. Not because the game had issues saving. The crash while saving would permanently corrupt my save, and there was nothing I could do but start again. Sometimes, it would refuse to save, giving me an "Error code 13". I love those. When this happened, I would exit the game and hope I'd saved recently. Of course, I became paranoid about saving. I would do it when my Sim woke up. When he entered the carpool for work. When he arrived at work. Halfway through work. When he got home. Constantly. I was paranoid.
Because I consider myself a bit of a hacker (got plenty of those stories), I already had a sneaking suspicion that a resource leak was the issue. When I looked it up online, my hunch was right. Thanks to some combination of bad game code and Wine issues, the game has a memory leak that causes it to crash after a while.
The part that adds insult to injury? The game is certified PLATINUM on Wine AppDB, the database that record-keeps what works on Wine and what doesn't.
This is absolutely unacceptable. Why does it get Platinum when a literal memory leak causes it to crash every five minutes?
I don't want to stir up drama or anything like that, or put the certifier of the game under fire, I'm not petty. The experience varies from person to person. But I don't think you can give TS3 a Platinum if the same page warns you twice about the memory leak issue.
Grievances aside, I don't want this post to be a criticism of the Linux, Wine, Proton, or gaming communities. Far from it. I have massive respect for the talent that puts in all the work needed to make games for Windows run with near-native performance.
However, I do have a very valid point: most of the development testing for these games is done for systems with fairly powerful hardware. I understand that, to a large extent, you need this hardware to play games, but people without it get left behind. Not everyone has the money to buy a powerful or even mid-range computer, and often have to make-do with whatever they have. This is especially an issue in developing nations, or even countries like Brazil, where the average wage is low, and buying games is considered out of reach for almost all Brazilians and gaming PC's are status symbols.
My experiences gaming on Linux using one of the toughest environments you can get (a ten-year-old computer that can't record 720p video without having a stroke) are important to take note of, as the free software community should be, and is for the most part, about accessibility and breathing life into older hardware. I'm not saying that that's the be-all-end-all of Linux, but it's a core part of the culture, and I love it. Switching from Windows to Linux was like installing a new engine into an old car. It's more efficient and it does things differently in the way that excites me. Sure, my kernel breaking is never fun, but I enjoy a challenge every now and again.
The only proper way to end this conclusion, as it's way too long, is to say that I don't want to be negative. As much as some issues really piss me off, I am grateful for the experience I have gained after I stopped using Windows. With all of that being said, have a nice day, for it's time for me to shut up about The Sims 3.