Linux Distro Makes a Difference

[Simon of Aragon]

At home, I am running a dual boot of Kubuntu 12.04 and 14.04. I made the upgrade on my laptop here at work about 6 months ago. I decided to migrate my machine at home. I never burn my bridges behind me, as I left my working distro alone and installed to another partition.

The first issue I have with "trusty" there appears to be (at present) no method to install my Radeon HD proprietary drivers (fglrx). I tried; sudo apt-get install fglrx and came up empty. So I am stuck running the open source Radeon driver known as Gallium 0.4 on AMD Cedar under Mesa. I tried the deb file from AMD and got unmet dependencies issues.

This weekend I ran a variety of games to test the 3D differences between 12.04 an 14.04. They are clear as night and day. 12.04 out performs 14.04 on all the tests. At present if you are into any kind of 3D accelerated gaming, I would recommend sticking with Ubuntu 12.04.

I ran my (non-WINE) Steam Linux versions Portal 1 and Portal 2, also tested Borderlands 2. These games run under 14.04 but all the videos ran like they were skipping frames and the game play lagged. Portal 2 kept crashing at the most inopportune moments. I had to readjust (lower) the settings for them to play in 14.04. When I switched to 12.04 and logged into Steam from there, all the games ran as expected.

Next I ran some older 3D games in both distributions under the WINE 1.7.44 overlay. This gave me strange results; Kubuntu 12.04 would reject some 2D games or have graphic issues with games where acceleration should not be an issue. Meanwhile playing games on 12.04 such as; Prince of Persia: Sands of Time and Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory worked great. Kubuntu 14.04 exhibited the ability to handle the 2D gaming (Original Starcraft) but failed on most of the 3D games; Morrowind, Psychonauts, GTA 3 and San Andreas.

Until I can install my drivers into 14.04, my opinion is use 14.04 for work and internet surfing, however 3D games will operate much better on Precise 12.04 with the proprietary drivers. This is just something you might want to consider when thinking that your games don't perform well because of WINE.

It might be your OS distribution is the culprit.