Ladies and * of the simracing Fediverse, my name is BlinkerFluid and I don’t even own a wheel yet… it’s out for delivery. G29, btw. Yes, YouTube.
I, am a nerd and I like operating systems that are light, utilitarian, pretty, quick and easy to use. The last part may be subjective, but I like Linux. It gives me the ownership feeling of actually owning my PC, and I don’t want to give that up to race simulators.
This will all be done on Garuda Linux, KDE variant, for those following along at home.
I will catalogue my journey for historical use, for the Linux driver of the future who came here from his SearX search on his self-hosted AMD 6600 AIO he got on ebay for $200.
So where are we at, Mr. Fluid?
I own a lot of racing games and I happen to know quite a few run on Linux, like BeamNG! I also know some… kinda… work or not so well, work on Linux, like Assetto Corsa, despite spending an hour throwing protontricks commands at it from blog posts to install lots of missing Windows libraries, and the content manager. That works, at least.
Yeah so far, AC has loaded, then failed to load the exact same car and track setup, then hang, then crash. BeamNG has been a saint, and runs well, so it will likely be my first choice for testing my wheel, despite being like, my 5th choice for a racing experience, it’s closer to my 1st-2st choice for a solo driving experience.
Huzzah, PCSX2!
Then there’s Gran Turismo 4 and PCSX2. First off, I know I can run it as I’ve ran about half the game on an Xbox controller and my PC doesn’t suck… that much. This hits all of my marks, personally even if it isn’t that modern as this is my gaming generation, and also my generation of cars.
but a massive grey area is the wheel. I’ve seen general how-to’s for Windows users but I’m not sure if the same information applies for me and I can’t know until I have the wheel.
Dirt… 3?!
Yeah, I’m 35 and I’ve been gaming forever so I own Dirt 3 on steam despite it not actually being on steam anymore. I’m pretty sure I can get the wheel running with this, although I wonder at what level.
I have a few others but I’m not sure what the utility of a racing wheel with arcade racers would be, but I’m at least going to see what chaos unfolds, and I’m also interested in cruising around GTA 5 with a wheel despite it not really being a sim. The experience would be tight.
I will keep you updated! Stay tuned!
AC works fine with a very small amount of effort for me. I found https://gist.github.com/tim-gromeyer/2fbce4609f7d6d330e81504bcea70546 to be helpful.
Dirt3 is going to be difficult. There was a lul in game development for steam based games around this time. Ferral was trying to make native ports (dirt rally) and also trying to make working proton ports but it was very early on in that effort. It resulted in a lot of games which “worked” when they were released with a bunch of hacks to get them working, followed by zero maintenance releases causing all those hacks to fail when Linux and supporting libraries were updated. No one was interested in fixing dependencies so some of these ports are unplayable now.
If you are interested in the dirt series and rally racing Dirt Rally 2.0 is worth the money in my opinion and works very well on linux.
My experience with arcade style games such as Forza Horizon 4 is that they don’t handle input devices very well. Even in windows I believe you need software which emulates a G29 or something to get real sim racing hardware like separate wheel+pedal+handbrake usb devices working. I’ve had issues in carx drift that were similar but those were solvable.
My biggest trouble has been pedal support as my pedals are a standalone usb device with only 3 axes. protopedal and xboxdrv both can help workaround these.
Wheel support is hit or miss and you should be very careful what you buy right now. Have a look at the oversteer readme. There is a list of known drivers for various wheels. The logitec wheels, with the exception of their new DD wheel, are all in-tree and well supported without extra work. Other things like certain Fanatec and Thrustmaster models have their own community based reverse engineered drivers provided as loadable modules. And some things like higher end hardware, simucube, moza, etc. have zero support and FFB will not work.
My last piece of advice is: use gamescope. Especially if you are on wayland. It makes everything a million times easier and more stable.
Feel free to ask questions, most days I feel like playing with games to get them running on Linux is my actual hobby, and not playing the games… =]
Good luck trying to set up a wheel with GTA. I got some interpreter to get my wheel to show up as an Xbox controller… Massive dead zone in the middle, couldn’t fix it with the software I used (windows). If you do figure it out, let me know what you did/what software you used
I believe AC and RF2 also both work on Linux. I haven’t tried.
AC does not work for you? Would love to be able to give some advice, unfortunately for me it worked fine without any config, just starting it with default proton :(
Not on Linux, no. I set up a dual boot with Windows 10 last night just so I could enjoy my $300 purchase while I tinker with the Linux side of things.
So far… I’ve enjoyed controlling some BeamNG but some combination of either Oversteer or my settings kept nerfing the hell out of my force feedback. I don’t believe I have FF on Linux at the moment. I’ve only experienced it on my Windows side.
Assetto runs!!!..but. big but. A lot of cars don’t load in. They just hang on the loading menu and I have to kill the program to get back to desktop. What’s odd is that it can sometimes not even matter what car. It might load one once then not again, or not at all then load all the sudden. No matter how long I wait, it sits and I don’t even have mods installed. If there was some consistency to the problem, I might be able to troubleshoot but the same car that works one load-in will be the same car that doesn’t load the next. I don’t get it.
AC, ACC and Dirt3 run perfectly fine for me and cover everything I really need in sim racing. That said my G29 runs like a dream, first time config was super easy and plug and play. Have fun!
Check iracing. But to warn you it’s expensive.
Other than that try assetto corsa competizone
