Spurred by the move to non-proprietary software I swapped out my Windows 11 for Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, and now 3 out of the 4 games I regularly play don’t work well enough to play. I haven’t checked games I only play occasionally, but I expect issues there too…
- Path of Exile via Steam - Works perfectly, in fact maybe slightly better than Windows
- Overwatch 2 via Lutris - Runs but with significant stuttering making it difficult to play
- Diablo 4 via Lutris - Cannot run due to “Graphics Initialization failed” error
- Melvor Idle via Steam - Runs but with minor stuttering and randomly breaks requiring complete re-install
I’ve Googled, and tried the most common solutions to these problems (like configuring Lutris to use VKD3D v2.8, running the script that Lutris provides with Overwatch, and add D4 to Steam and run from there) but no real positive changes.
For the most part, the rest of Ubuntu has been fine, but I don’t want to be locked out of doing things I want to do on my own machine… Would appreciate any tips before I get too impatient and go back to Windows!
Thanks in advance.
Are you by chance using a laptop with 2 graphics cards? That’s a fairly common issue because in that situation you sometimes have to indicate with environment variables that certain programs should use the dedicated GPU rather than the integrated GPU which is generally a lot weaker.
Out of curiosity, have you tried Bottles yet? This is what I use, and it works just fine for Diablo 4. I know that Lutris and Bottles both use Wine under the hood (although Bottles has some customization on top as far as I understand?) but perhaps the defaults is what makes the difference.
If you still have D4 downloaded, when you install the Blizzard launcher into Bottles you should be able to copy (or move) the files from where Lutris is storing them over to the new directory, and then Blizzard’s launcher has a “Find installed games” option somewhere that will then make it recognized as downloaded.
Since you’re on Ubuntu which doesn’t have Flatpak support by default, you’d need to setup Flatpak for Ubuntu and then you’ll be able to install Bottles from Flathub if that is something you were interested in. On the upside, it supposedly has really good compatibility for regular Windows (non-game) applications as well, though I’ve yet to try that part out.
Okay, this helped a lot. Got D4 working (noticeably lower graphic quality, but completely smooth fps and very playable), and also massively reduced the stuttering for OW2.
For any future readers, I definitely recommend Bottles over Lutris or standard Wine for Battle.net and related games.
Thank you very much for the suggestion!
