Linux Port – Feedback, Known Issues, and FAQ

^ that.

I would recommend Linux Mint myself, pretty much all should work now, each distro should have capable drivers now, perhaps Debian might be an issue with them older packages for stability etc.

Note: one can check the game out from a live USB session (running the Linux distro from the USB, without installing it) to test on, long has the game is on another drive etc, and the distro has a graphical DE/Window manager to open the game with (done it recently with Linux Mint), though this was with an AMD GPU where the GPU drivers are in the kernel compared to NVIDIA.

Just find one you like and works for you, no right or wrong way to go, one good thing about linux, options! (probably tooo many to be honest lol)

 

Well. The ZorinOS I'm thinking of installing is Ubuntu-based, I don't know if it's good in terms of compatibility with the game.

 

Well, I've never used Zorin personally, as I use Linux Mint
But as the dude above said, you can install BeamNG on whatever OS you have currently, boot into the Zorin USB WITHOUT INSTALLING IT, go to whatever disk manager there is in Zorin, make sure the drive with BeamNG on it is mounted, and go to your file manager to go to that drive and open BeamNG.
If it works perfectly, that's great! At that point, you should be safe to install Zorin, but make sure to test any other software you might use before wiping your drive and switching to Zorin

 

Since beamng officially supports ubuntu, going for a ubuntu based distro is a safe choice. I have never heard of zorinos, but it's probably fine. If you're on very new hardware, linux mint might be a bit too stable for your purposes. I'm currently on kde neon, which is not a stable distro, but i had a good experience so far, and beam runs well

 

I think the whole supporting Ubuntu thing is just with the tech version. You're able to see that Car_Killer was able to officially (he's on the dev team) support fellow community members who had issues. Support probably just refers to commercial support for BeamNG.tech

 

True^

Ubuntu also just seems to be the go-to support since 99% of new Linux users will use that first (I sure did back when it first came out, back in 2004!), not to mention Canonical's strong corporate/enterprise backing also compared to other distros so has a bigger footprint etc.

 

Yeah, i meant that it's a safe bet because it means the game is probably tested mainly on ubuntu so there is less chances that something breaks if you use a distro based on it

 

Bug:
Sometimes when I launch the game (I never know when), it automatically goes into fullscreen, and I can't switch back to windowed at all. Can't use Alt+Enter or the display settings.
The reasons I play in windowed are:
1: Performance sucks in fullscreen and I get flickering on reflections
2: Fullscreen is generally unstable and ALWAYS leads to my entire laptop locking up, so I'd have to force reboot with the power button

 

I would discourage you from using ZorinOS simply for it being massively out of date (Using Gnome 43.9 - Current Version is 48)
Basically ZorinOS ist just a gnome skin which falls apart quickly if you are unlucky and with paywalls for features that are available for free everywhere else.

In the end, BeamNG.drive works on every major Linux distro I have tried so far so that should not be a factor.

 

Does Gnome make more of a difference than updated Mesa drivers and etc.?

 

That was just an example to list one out-of-date component that came to mind.

 

Hello,
Still no luck for me with even launching 0.35, 0.34 is/was working fine.

A window briefly appears, but then it crashes with a memory-related error. Usually "free(): invalid pointer" or "munmap_chunk(): invalid pointer".
Tried to cleanly reinstall Beam, but that changed nothing.
I've seen other people who had some luck using the desktop file or environment variables, but those didn't help either.

Two different systems with similar setups, same problem:
Arch Linux
Kernel 6.14.2-arch1-1
X11
LXDE
NVIDIA driver 570.133.07

System 1:
AMD Ryzen 9 5900X
NVIDIA RTX 3080Ti

System 2:
AMD Ryzen 7 7840HS (iGPU disabled)
NVIDIA RTX 4060 Laptop GPU

The logs I attached from both systems are from the console, the log Beam itself writes is cut off mid line.

 

You should add shader cache support to help with stuttering

 

I've been having a strange issue assigning keybindings on the Linux native version of BeamNG. I'll try to describe it here:
Whenever I attempt to bind certain keys, the native version will apply the first letter of the name of the key instead of the actual key. For instance, when I attempted to bind the Up Arrow, the detected keypress event was the U key. And when I tried to bind Space key, the detected keypress was the S key. Page Up and Page Down both register as the P key, Delete registers as D, Insert as I, and so on. This only occurs on the native version, not the Proton version.

My OS is Debian Testing (trixie / 13) with Linux kernel version 6.12.21-amd64. My hardware specs are,
CPU: Ryzen 9 5900X
GPU: Radeon RX 6700XT running AMDGPU driver for Xorg

I would be happy to provide further troubleshooting information if I need to.

 

Yep was just experiencing this exact same issue, was remapping the steering keyboard keymaps and this was the results,

Pressing left arrow = L key
Pressing right arrow = R key

 

I'm getting some black flickering sometimes on Wayland (Arch with KDE, 6700XT vulkan-radeon), but the image is mostly stable.
Xbox 360 controller input is great, just have a snag with joysticks. The Y axis on both joysticks is inverted, which means I have to manually invert all up-down stick controls...

 

I have also been having the same issue with the arrow keys registering as letters. Ubuntu 24.04 LTS. Although, manually editing keyboard.diff under inputmaps to add the broken keys appears to work fine.

 

I'm on pop os (yes, unsupported, so I don't expect the issue to be resolved), and I have a moza r9. I can get force feedback to work easy, and I even got BoxFlat and can configure it there. In BeamNG native and proton, it accepts all inputs, but not get force feedback from it. I have it enabled, and did the "full (slow return)" setting too. I've played with a bunch of settings, and even turned the centring spring force in BoxFlat to 0 (I don't know how to just turn it off though), there's no change.

I also have fanatec pedals directly plugged in, and they don't want to work normally. Something to do with "SDL" not recognising things without buttons, so I ran "SDL_HINT_JOYSTICK_DEVICE=0x0eb7:0x183b %command%" in steam with proton and they worked, but I don't know how to use that in native (my preferred option).

I've also noticed that things in the native version are getting better, like I can now open folders in game. Much appreciated love your wok

edit- after 8 hours of different faffings about, I got it to work with https://github.com/JacKeTUs/universal-pidff though it also wasn't fully straight forward because I had to "interpret" their super vague instructions that have loads of assumed knowledge. I currently don't even need BoxFlat open (I also tried "oversteer", but it wouldn't recognise anything).
for me on popos (based on ubuntu);
1-
sudo apt update
sudo apt install git dkms build-essential linux-headers-$(uname -r)
2-
git clone https://github.com/JacKeTUs/universal-pidff
3-
sudo mv universal-pidff /usr/src/universal-pidff-1.0
4-
sudo dkms install /usr/src/universal-pidff
5-
sudo update-initramfs -u
6- restarted my pc. Do I know what any of this does? no. Does it work now? yes. Should I get anti virus? probably.

 

@fillman86

Glad you got it working. The good news is that this driver should be integrated with linux kernel version 6.15 and according to the reddit post below it should also be in 6.12.24, 6.13.12 and 6.14.3.

Reddit post by the person who made Boxflat, btw.

https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gami...a_moza_racing_cammus_asetek_etc_now_natively/