Hi everyone!
I’m a Playstation gamer looking into moving to Linux gaming as the next Playstation might not be able to play physical games.
Here are my 2 computers:
MacBook Pro 2012 (upgraded) with Fedora 41
Surface Go 1 with Fedora 41
I bought Frostpunk on Steam after checking on Proton DB that it would normally run on the MacBook as I knew the Surface Go would probably be way too weak.
According to Proton DB it’s a Gold game.
In the end, no matter what version of Proton I use, it doesn’t launch on the MacBook. I have a black screen, some icy sounds and then it crashes at best..
I then thought, let’s give it a try on the Surface Go and it launched immediately without any tinkering using Proton experimental.
But, the game crashes when the firat cinematic starts, probably because it’s loading too many assets for the Surface.
If anyone has an idea about what to try too many get it working on the MacBook, I would be thankful.
In the meantime, I would want to know, how do you know if a game is gonna run on your machine?
It's is (usually) not so difficult, and this is no exception.
Look up the game's system requirements. Frostpunk's say this:
Looks plain as day to me. Your hardware doesn't meet the published requirements, or even come close.
Keep in mind that CPU-integrated GPUs like yours are not merely slower than the discrete GPUs listed as bare minimum; they sometimes also lack features that are present in the latter. Similarly, both of your CPUs are older/weaker than the minimum, and may lack some of the newer instructions that would be present in 3.2GHz+ models.
In cases like this, there's no reason to expect the game to run on your hardware. This is not because you're running Linux. It's because of target platform decisions made by the game's developers.
You might get lucky, or discover enough workarounds to get it running anyway with some effort, but it's unlikely to be a good experience. If I were going to try anyway, I would start by enabling as much logging as possible, and searching online for any error messages I found in the logs to see if I could find someone else who had encountered and solved them. Be aware that troubleshooting like this can take a long time even if you're an experienced software developer, and might not bear fruit.