Noob Question Thread: Ask Any Questions About Linux!

Cyclohexane@lemmy.mlmod to Linux@lemmy.ml – 314 points –

I thought I'll make this thread for all of you out there who have questions but are afraid to ask them. This is your chance!

I'll try my best to answer any questions here, but I hope others in the community will contribute too!

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Is there an Android emulator that you can actually game on? I've tried a number of them (Android x86, Genymotion, Waydroid), but none of them can install a multitude of games from the Google Play store. The one thing keeping me on Windows is Android emulation (I like having one or two idle games running at any given time).

Waydroid works, but there's three main things you need to get things going to replicate a typical Android device:

  • OpenGapps: For GApps/Play Store. You'll also need to register your device to get an Android ID.
  • Magisk: Mainly to pass SafetyNet / Play Integrity basic checks.
  • libndk / libhoudini: For ARM > x86 translation. libndk works better on AMD.
  • Widevine: (optional) L3 DRM for things that need it, eg Netflix

There are some automated scripts that can set this all up. I used this one in the past with some success.

Also, stay away from nVidia. From what I recall, it just doesn't work, or there are other issues like crashes. But if you're serious about Linux in general, then ditching nVidia is generally a good idea.

Finally, games that use anti-cheat can be a hit-or-miss (like Genshin Impact, which crashed when I last tried it). But that's something that you may face on any emulator, I mean, any decent anti-cheat system would detect the usage of emulators.

I see. I knew most of the emulators lacked ARM support, which seemed to be the biggest issue, but this helps. Sadly, I have a 3080 and no money to buy a new card, so I stuck with nVidia for the foreseeable future. I'll have to test this when I get time, though. Thanks.

You can try using scrcpy. It's sort of a remote desktop for Android. You can see your phone's screen on the PC and use mouse and keyboard with it.

An nvidia GPU unfortunetly doesn't work with Waydroid at all. You would have to use CPU rendering which won't play any games. You might be able to use your CPUs iGPU if it has one.

Most probably, no. I tried to run bluestacks on wine. Some game works, most of em don't