On Windows, the go-to emulators are Bluestacks and NoxPlayer (both closed source), especially when gaming is concerned. Unfortunately they are not available on Linux, and the Nox devs’ dismissive attitude towards Linux also makes it unlikely they’ll ever make a Linux port:
So apart from trying to run these two using Wine, what emulators are out there on Linux that yield a sufficiently decent performance to make Android games playable?
EDIT: looks like Waydroid is a winner, see the comments.
Last time I tried Waydroid the kernel modules required by the Android subsystem caused several kernel panics and made my system unbootable. These modules were removed from the main Linux kernel years ago, but are the core of many Android calls.
As usual I’ll just blame closed source the Nvidia drivers for somehow interfering with them, but I’d like to warn people here that installing Waydroid and loading these kernel modules can break your system. As always before messing with the kernel, make sure you have a fallback boot method and know how to undo your changes before they can become a problem!
Waydroid will either work spectacularly well or it will break shit in exciting unforseen ways. It’s really impressive how well the hardware acceleration works!
It’s worth noting that the
bindermodule you’re referring to is already included in the Linux Zen kernel, which is usually very stable and trusted by Linux gamers. It may be possible however thatbinderdoes funny things with the Nvidia driver. On my AMD system I have no proprietary drivers and everything works out of the box withlinux-zen.Yeah, somehow Nvidia fucking it up wouldn’t surprise me. Most of my kernel issues have somehow come back to Nvidia.
Lots of gamers will have Nvidia cards, though, so if it is, it’s good to know this beforehand.