cross-posted from: https://discuss.online/post/34255100
Thought I’d create a distinct thread from the previous one asking about daily use, because I really do want to hear more on people’s pain points. Great to know people are generally sounding pretty positive in those posts who recently switched, but want to know your difficulties as well! This way old and new users can share their thoughts, hopefully to inspire a respectful discussion.
Not daily, but sim racing. Game and peripheral support is all over the place. Wheels/wheelbases generally need Windows to update firmware or adjust features.
Some games will detect wheel, pedals, handbrake, etc. no prob in Windows but not at all in Linux. Certain games need reg fixes in Windows that are more complicated to apply in Linux.
It’s a pain, and the best supported wheel is also one of the cheapest/poorest quality ones on the market (Logitech G29). If you have higher end DD gear or mix and match stuff, it can get complicated or unviable.
https://simracingonlinux.com/
Also https://github.com/JacKeTUs/universal-pidff
I use an OpenFFBoard wheel on Linux. It requires no drivers (works with hid-generic). I’ve not found a game that runs on Linux that doesn’t detect it that didn’t also have trouble on windows (looking at you ACR…)
AFAIK pretty much any moza wheel works with universal-pidff and a bunch of others. And oversteer’s github has a bunch of other links to drivers that make some other higher-end wheels work pretty well.
I’ve got a Moza R5 and it’s fine for most stuff (my old wheel was a Thrustmaster TMX Pro that didn’t work in Linux at all).
But it’s still got problems with the WRC games which sucks because they’re great and I rally more than race.
AC Rally seems to have started supporting it as of the latest update but I haven’t gotten around to testing it. It didn’t detect the wheel on 0.1 release.
In all it’s not totally bad, just frustrating at times.
Yeah, my t300rs worked on linux but that’s because there’s a kernel module for it. Which it looks like they have expanded since I last took a look, so that’s cool. But I ditched it for the DD ffboard a while back.
In terms of rally games not working, which ones are you having trouble with? I play all the big ones that people talk about and haven’t had any issues but I don’t have a moza wheel so I’m not sure what specific issues those have. Apart from EA WRC which doesn’t run anyway (and when it did I never thought it was that great of a game). ACR has input issues on windows too unfortunately.
The SROL discord can be pretty helpful since it was started by a couple of very active developers in that space including the dev responsible for universal-pidff. I think the situation is quite good and always improving, but still depends a little bit on what hardware you have. There are some less popular wheels that are completely unsupported still. It also doesn’t help that iracing and EA are actively hostile to the linux community.
Mainly it’s the Nacon WRC games. 7, 8, 9, 10, Generations, none of them work in Linux with Moza. The games just have poor wheel detection. Not much to be done for now, even lawstorant (Boxflat developer, the Moza software for Linux) apparently keeps a windows partition to play those.
A few other minor issues as well. AMS2 works, but I have to configure the wheel manually in-game every time I want to play it. And RallySimFans RBR works great, but updating it is a nightmare with Lutris, it’s literally easier to fully uninstall and reinstall when there’s an update.
Ah, yeah the Nacon WRC games are weird. I could never get them to work either but just with device detection in general, not only my wheel. Also people tend to say they weren’t amazing in terms of FFB feel and gameplay either so I stuck with the more popular titles. You’re totally right and I had completely forgotten that those games are just non-functional at the moment.
I don’t use lutris for anything, I run umu directly with proton-ge for RBR and a few other non-steam games and it’s been great. Upgrades are as easy as just launching explorer in the prefix and double clicking the RSF installer, and since 10-22 I think you don’t even need the dll overrides since they are included in recent proton-ge. My opinions of the game and RSF are not as amazing though so I admittedly don’t play it much. I used to a lot but found interacting with the community to be pretty taxing at best, and not good as a Linux player. All the wine/proton development work in the world can’t improve a community that is borderline hostile towards a subset of players.
JacKeTUs has a fork of proton-ge which helps with device detection stability which is the issue with AMS2. They are working on upstreaming that work I believe, but I’m unsure what the status is. From what I’ve heard soon devices constantly unbinding in many games will be fixed very soon across the board in wine. Assuming there are no holdups with that work that I’m unaware of. For now I do as you said and rebind my wheel axes every time. It does seem to remember buttons and other controllers though, just not the steering axis.
Interesting, thanks for the info. I didn’t know about the GE fork.
Re: Lutris and RBR, it’s just how it worked out. When I originally set it up, it wouldn’t work properly when I tried running the install via proton and I could only get it to launch with Lutris and WINE. Could be things have changed, last time I set it up was like 2023 or something. I just ran into the problem a few months back when trying to update.
For now I did set up a windows partition for some of this stuff (WRC 10, Gens, AC Rally, RBR, Moza firmware updates), but I just hate booting into it.