I'm starting to second-guess my switch to linux...

[InDarkestNight]

Honestly, I'm mostly looking to use this thing to play older games that don't work so well on modern systems, while still being able to make use of modern tech and software. I'd also like to NOT have to 'upgrade' if I don't want. Honestly, windows 98 and 95 are far closer to Ubuntu than they are to what Windows is today. Like I said, over time windows has become more like apple products, deviating further and further from what they were before. Granted, I don't have much direct experience with 95 and 98 (the first computer I ever 'owned' ran windows xp). I was involved in the Sims 2 modding community back before the sims 3, so I do know a thing or two about the system. I found windows 7 limiting, because it removed a lot of features I was used to AND ADDED NOTHING. Windows 10 was the same story but dialed up to 11. I never did like windows 10. Didn't like 7 even either, but it was 'sufficient'. Its not like I had another choice anyway. To me, the only thing that has improved over time is graphics. Being older, I'm not as superficial as I used to be. I don't care much about what games look like; I'm just interested in the gameplay itself. This is why I keep trying to turn Skyrim into a simulator; its the only reason you would play a modern game for! Because creating realism is the only thing modern graphics would be a practical necessity for. Though I have thought about maybe making a text-based fantasy simulator. Maybe that will replace Skyrim for me one day, but for now Skyrim and all the old mods I love will have to do.

[InDarkestNight]

Decided to run a little test. I've heard there's an issue in Linux where enemies don't move and/or don't attack the player! Use coc to send myself to Embershard mine. I was able to engage in combat fine. I could also mine ore, harvest plants, get sleep in a bed, do sneak attacks, use the favorites menu with hotkeys, use a staff I found to cast fury on some bandits, read a skill book, crafted some items, went through load doors multiple times, did a quest in riverwood, got a follower, traded items, used training, got some perks that boosted my damage, and saved and loaded my game. The only 'issue' I ran into was that the game lags briefly when opening the skill menu. That's obviously not a problem.

So far, it would seem I can use the game's mechanics fine. I still have much to test though; alchemy effects, enchants, the scripts tied to quests, shouts, dragons, maybe animals. So far so good though.

[InDarkestNight]

Well, I've been having a few minor hiccups. Often times the npcs lips get out of sync. When an npc has a quest arrow above their heads, it jitters every time they or me move. I also ran into a FLYING DEER, seriously. I found the old orc and maiq hanging out together, not sure if that's a glitch or just a rare occurrence. Farkas also didn't give his dialogue when I returned to Jorrvaskr, Vilkas wasn't there waiting for me either. Not sure what happened there.

Haven't had any freezes or crashes though, so that's a MAJOR improvement. I'm willing to tolerate these minor annoyances if means my computer doesn't keep freezing, or the game crashing (though steam did crash on me once when I tried to start the game).

So far so good. These minor annoyances are starting to bother me a bit though. Sadly, I have no way to check my fps, though something about the game just doesn't feel right. Guess I'll have no way of knowing until I finish this MASSIVE playthrough and install enboost. No idea what might happen when I start installing mods. For now I'm just making sure the unaltered base game works fine. Assuming I can play through everything without issue, things will be good in my book. Maybe I need a new processor, or install some effeciency mods (changing the graphics settings made no difference at all).

[zixi]

I've never had any game mechanics issues with Skyrim. I did have the sound issue briefly when AE was released until GloriousEggroll fixed it. It used to freeze sometimes (especially at first). In fact, at one stage I switched back to Skyrim rather than SkyrimSE  but this last year it has been very stable. Certainly wine and proton are heaps better than they were.

I'm glad that your feeling more positive about it all. Computers can be extremely frustrating when they misbehave. 

[InDarkestNight]

Well, I got my first freeze. Left Movarth's lair, walked back to Morthal, and I froze in place. I was hoping that I was past this bs. This is why I quit playing Skyrim for months; I just got sick of crashes, which kept escalating the longer my game went on. I could barely get past level 10 before my game became too f*#@ing unstable to play. This is a clean fresh install, not a single mod has ever been installed, completely new OS, and the issue persists. Wtf? What am I supposed to do about this? Why am I not allowed to f*#@ing play Skyrim in peace? People in the past accused me of LYING about my situation, insisting I must've done something to screw up my game. Here I have a complete fresh install that literally has never had one single modification, and it still happens. What the hell? Why can I never be free of this? Am I going to have the same damned problem trying this stupid LotD challenge again? I can hardly even finish the vanilla game before my game starts to become unstable! This is bullshit.

[zixi]

I cope with it by saving really frequently.  How did you get out of the situation? There are a number of ways of dealing with it and if you're happy with how you dealt with it then I won't suggest alternatives. But I do know when you get your first freeze on Linux it's: And what do I do now?  

I found Skyrim much more stable than SkyrimSE and at one point I stopped playing SE because of that but it's now very stable (well until the latest update it was...) 

Can you hold off playing it till things calm down and they sort out whatever they've done to SE? Maybe try the Morrowind you bought but never played? That might tell you just how stable your system is for other things...

As an aside, the last time I did Movarth's Lair - I did it before I'd been given the quest and I didn't get his boots! Afterwards, I got the quest and went back and killed him again and I still didn't get his boots...

[InDarkestNight]

I just reloaded and tried again. I was expecting to get the crash again, but it didn't happen. I then spent half an hour or so running between my new house (my inventory was completely filled with items I didn't want to discard and I had no place to put them, and I didn't feel like buying breezehome and transfering EVERYTHING from there again) and Morthal building it, and I didn't have an issue.

If this becomes more common as I level like it did before, I will be very unhappy. I applied probably half a dozen fixes when I played on Windows, but the only one that made ANY difference at all was NVAC. Of course, I started to suspect after a while that it was replacing my crashes with freezes, but its still the only thing I ever installed that made a noticeable difference. Crash fixes and Bug Fixes didn't seem to do anything. ENBoost seemed to only give me a way to check my fps.

What, does my computer just hate LE? Other people claim they've never had these problems. I got three crashes on the first day after I installed this game, and they've never went away. And that was on a completely different machine (I couldn't salvage any of the parts from it due to how old it was. I even had to buy another monitor because this thing didn't have a vga connector on it).

[zixi]

The problem with computers is that there are sooo many variables. I saw a situation once where a couple of machines, side by side, exactly the same hardware and software were attached to the same network in exactly the same way and one was fast and one was slow... I'm not sure that anyone really figured it out. I suspected gremlins... 

As for issues... hmmm that's a tricky one. One person might have issues but they don't pay heed to them. Someone else is driven to despair by them. I broke Oblivion today. It was nicely modded. I was enjoying the game and then this morning it refused to 'see' my saves... so I tried a few obvious things and then I'm not sure what came over me but I allowed Mod Organizer 2 to update... It was ever so happy. It updated and was pleased. Unfortunately it no longer actually worked... It's taken a couple of hours to solve and I still have to reinstall a couple of mods because the whole thing pinged all over the place and I was sweeping up Oblivion from  distant corners and from ceiling... I say this to show that it doesn't have it in for you in particular. It's just at the moment it really upsets you when it fails so you take more notice of it. I'm sure some people have issues but it doesn't really get to them. For some others the same situation is really upsetting. Have you seen what  people are saying about the SE update? Some are in tears. Others don't care at all... Same situation - just different responses. It's what makes people interesting. 

I hope it stabilises for you and you can get on to the game. You've had some interesting things to say about role playing - for example - so I suspect that for you the game experience is quite intense. It is for me when I'm in the game but if it pings all over the carpet then I become interested in that problem instead...

[InDarkestNight]

Had another freeze today, but the game recovered.

I'm getting really bored with my playthrough though. I'm not too keen on playing through every quest, or doing every dungeon. The only reason I'm doing this is because I've found I've missed out on a lot of vanilla content I had no idea was even there. I'm so used to mods, I've never bothered to fully explore the game. I'm thinking, do I really need to re-do all the major questlines? I've already done the companions, and can confirm it works fine. Its mainly side quests that I've never done. I've also never seen the inside of every structure, and I think there's dungeons I've never bothered to do either. Guess the companions can give me quests that point to everything, but surely that's going to get boring really fast.

Probably doesn't help that my build is super boring. I decided to go heavy armor, one-handed, and restoration. I chose this because I want to use the necromage exploit. On a side note, I'm wondering if I should do that? It is technically an exploit, and I'm not going to do the infamous fortify restoration exploit. If I'm not willing to do that, why then the necromage exploit? Guess I always saw it as 'fair' because its the only thing that makes playing a vanilla vampire worth it. Afterwards, I'm worried I may regret not making the most powerful buiild that DIDN'T use exploits. Fml. Why must playthroughs take so much time? I've started using fast travel again to try and speed things up, but that removes a lot of the magic of the game for some reason.

I've started trying to grind restoration just so I can move on from it and start making my build interesting. I'm too far in to turn back now; restoration only benefits me through the necromage perk, so I've already invested too much skill levels into it.

Don't know what I should do. Maybe I should just avoid the main quests, unless the benefit me, and instead focus on side quests. That will at least give me new content to experience. Fml playing without mods is so boring. My game looks terrible, its the same old quests over and over again, there's nothing to make my build interesting, its taking forever to do. It may be years before I can finally attempt this Legacy challenge assuming my computer can even handle it. Maybe part of it is due to saboating updates, I don't own any games anymore that I enjoy. The best I have is freaking freecell and sudoku! What kind of choices are those?

Why do companies destroy their own games with updates? They know that discourages sales right? They're tearing their products out of the hands of their f*#@ing customers. Who the HELL thinks mistreating your customers is a good business decision???? What if a furniture store came in and trashed everything you bought from them? What benefit would they serve? No one's going to buy from a company that does s#*! like that! I haven't bought a new games in years and I see no reason to change that. Why waste money on something that's going to be taken from me after a few years? Wtf? f*#@ bethesda again and again, and all worthless gaming companies. I really need to find something else to do SO I CAN BE FREE OF THIS BULLSHIT. But seriously, what else is there to do? Read books all day? Watch youtube? Stare at the f*#@ing walls? Learn to code? The latter may be the best thing for me IF STUPID UBUNTU WOULD RUN MY PYTHON PROGRAMS THROUGH SOMETHING ELSE THAN THE TEST-RUN FEATURE IN THE IDE. I hate modern tech, but you're required to sell your soul to the f*#@ing devil just so you can keep your f*#@ing job. If I had a choice in the mattter, I would never go online again, or use any electrical device BUT I'M FORCED TO AGAINST MY f*#@ING WILL. f*#@ modern tech and the modern world. Why can't anything go f*#@ing right? Why is this whole country going to f*#@ing hell? Why can't anything go right??????????

[InDarkestNight]

I'm tempted to give up on this playthrough. I decided to play on expert difficulty to make making myself as powerful as possible worth it. Problem is, I'm getting owned by everything, even though I'm used to playing on expert. I think my problem is I'm forestalling investing in perks until I can get the necromage exploit working. I can't handle bandits now, mages are nigh impossible too, giants and 'giant spiders' (which I had no idea could spawn above ground btw) one-shot me from full health, despite investing 50% into health as I usually do. I straight can't do s#*!. I'm also getting sick of dying and reloading over and over again.

Think I need to just give up on this. Like I said, I'm using an exploit anyway, so its not like I'm making the most powerful build that could be made using legitimate methods. Guess I need to give up playing, go back to adept, and see if I can get mod organizer and skse and wrye bash and everything else working on Ubuntu. I just found a new quest I've never done before too, and now I have to start it all over again just because I CAN'T HANDLE BANDITS. I don't see how I could get myself infected with vampirism anyway. I can't do the dawnguard quest, and I can't possible handle vampires. Guess this playthrough is an utter failure. Should've just stuck on adept, but that may not have helped much anyway. Guess now I'm starting that mage playthrough long before I was done with this one.

So yeah, how do I get mod organizer working on Ubuntu? How do I get skse and everything else I need to run on this OS? I haven't the faintest clue. Apparently you can add MO to steam and run it through its emulator that way, though it requires you to edit some of its file paths or something. I am so god damned sick of restarting playthroughs, either due to stability issues, or something going horribly wrong. Guess I need to stop with weird builds and play it safe. Too bad the LotD playthrough requires me to play  TWO-HANDED STEALTH BUILD. I was thinking of doing that, though I was planning on it being a nord and not using any magic at all. Guess that playthrough's dead now that I'm playing something so similar to it. Maybe I could finally do that idea I had years and years ago of playing a stealth archer with an ebony bow with soultrap and an inventory full of black soul gems. I have to do enchanting anyway for one of the displays in the museum anyway.

Edited December 19, 2023 by InDarkestNight