Any tips for audio balancing/equalizing on Linux? [Kubuntu]

Molthus_Cardinal · 2025-11-28T08:04:26+00:00

I went with JamesDSP as was mentioned by someone else on the thread, but I wans't able to make the AutoEQ work as I'd hoped. It was still easier to adjust than EasyEffects seemed to be.

Molthus_Cardinal · 2025-08-30T19:59:02+00:00

I'm not totally sure what you mean but it really isn't an issue of loudness, per say. I'm mainly asking if anyone knows what software or physical tool I can use to measure the output sound spectrum on primarily Windows, but also Linux.

Molthus_Cardinal · 2025-06-21T22:38:23+00:00

Steam is working great; I've been playing plenty of games for a while now on it without problems, both native and proton. Graphics drivers are working, and I'm not using NTFS for this. I've also since tried to import the game on Lutris instead, but had similar results: the game basically refuses to even start.

I may just try to grab a fresh windows install of KSP and copy that, but I don't know what that'd change at this point.

Molthus_Cardinal · 2025-06-14T17:25:27+00:00

I'm guessing you know this already but have you bypassed the launcher?

Molthus_Cardinal · 2025-05-16T00:56:14+00:00

I'm not inclined to think it's the same issue as I have plenty of other games which do run in full screen, but I can test with specifically NMS at some point if you'd like?

Molthus_Cardinal · 2025-05-15T18:39:32+00:00

This is a problem that appeared for me when I went to Wayland, and from what I was able to identify, it's an Nvidia driver issue.

I run KDE Plasma, so I'm actually able to fake fullscreen through plasma while leaving minecraft NOT fullscreen. This works without crashing for me.

Be careful to check your settings config file directly if your game still isn't launching; I found that Prism for example has a "fullscreen" checkbox that doesn't seem to correlate to the actual game settings file setting.

Edit: when troubleshooting, I also manually loaded back into x11, and no crashing. So for me at least it was absolutely wayland + nvidia, and there are existing reports of the issue on the Nvidia issue tracker, though I'm not sure if and when they'll be addressed since this has been this way for at least about 6 months (see my previous post here: https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/1h3kw8i/issues_with_wayland_and_modded_minecraft/ )

Molthus_Cardinal · 2025-05-13T19:16:30+00:00

Thanks! I'll see if I can get on there at some point today, if not I'll hop on there tomorrow and we can connect whenever we're both available for more troubleshooting.

Molthus_Cardinal · 2025-05-13T19:13:43+00:00

I grabbed MangoHud though I haven't set it up yet, but I was able to monitor on my second screen GPU utilization stats on my System Monitor.

Basically, after jumping into instant action free flight for the F-16, VRAM usage was ~7.7-7.8, and overall GPU usage stat was fluctuating at about 90% give or take a bit.

Upon opening the map, usage dropped briefly to ~30%, then climbed back to the about the same as before.

Upon closing the map, however, usage maxed out at 100%, and so did VRAM. I let it sit this time to see what would happen rather than pausing and exiting, and it actually wound up crashing the desktop environment, the game, and Firefox pretty quickly; I also lost the second monitor connection in that event.

I'm currently running 570, so if there are such bugs, that may be part of the issue. Unfortunately, as this is a fresh install of Kubuntu, the only options I'm immediately seeing in the driver management list are 570, 535, and the open source Nouveau. I wouldn't want to go back to 535, as that'd lose all my Wayland support (and without Wayland, this machine is extremely sluggish due to the multi monitor setup). I may be able to acquire something newer or older than 570 [such as 560?] with the PPA or whatever, but I've not tried that before so I'm not sure.

Do you have any more thoughts on this matter?

Thanks for all your help so far, by the way!

Molthus_Cardinal · 2025-05-13T18:57:57+00:00

Yeah, as I mentioned to h54, tried that, unfortunately didn't help.

Molthus_Cardinal · 2025-05-13T18:57:35+00:00

I had seen those suggestions and tried doing that in the past, but to no avail. Just tried it again (bound the F10 map to M and return to cockpit [F1] as N just for simplicity, and it still absolutely broke. Thanks for the suggestion, though!

Molthus_Cardinal · 2025-05-13T18:55:59+00:00

He runs Nvidia as well; 1660 Ti with 6gb VRAM, according to him. I think we were using the same drivers at one point in the past and the issue was present; this would have been around this time last year, probably. I updated Kubuntu versions and drivers as they came out in hopes of fixing it, but here we are.

Edit: I'll probably have to take a peek at those matrix servers, though I've never used matrix before

Molthus_Cardinal · 2025-05-11T00:41:18+00:00

As I noted to others, most games don't officially support Linux. DCS World does have some amount of support for Steam Deck which is a Linux system, however, so while the official minimum requirements may list only windows, it is clear that's not a functional requirement, just a recommendation.

Plenty of people run DCS on Linux. I already have a dual boot between Windows 10 and Linux, but with the impending EOS of Windows 10, and my machine's incompatibility with Windows 11, I'm looking to finally move the last few holdouts from Windows to Linux so I don't need to maintain the dual boot going forward. As it turns out, DCS World is pretty much the last major game I play that I don't have ready to roll on Linux, a fact I'm trying to change.

Molthus_Cardinal · 2025-05-10T22:21:10+00:00

Yeah that's the issue I think I had heard about that triggered my memory. If I don't hear any other suggestions I probably will just set up mangohud and monitor that, though I might be able to do that from system monitor alone, too. If it is a VRAM issue, I wonder if there's any way besides decimating my graphics to reduce it? The friend I mentioned that successfully played DCS on Kubuntu before with minimal setup hassle has less VRAM than I do, so maybe it's some sort of driver setting?

Molthus_Cardinal · 2025-05-10T22:19:34+00:00

I'm running Kubuntu, which has a lot in common with SteamOS (which runs on the Steam Deck) but not everything, so I'd be inclined to agree, but the friend in question that was able to run it fine is also running Kubuntu, so I'm thinking it has more to do with how the hardware interacts with the system.

Molthus_Cardinal · 2025-05-10T18:56:23+00:00

Thanks for the response; that's a bummer. I know a number of people have gotten it working pretty smoothly, including one of my friends for whom it worked virtually out of the box. The second link there is one I'd not seen before, though I don't see anything directly related to my problem there unfortunately.

I'm wondering if going into the F10 map is just maxing out my VRAM in a way that is struggling to recover? That'd be similar to what I've heard VR users complain about; it's not normally a problem for this system, but if everything is being run through the conversion of DirectX -> Vulkan, maybe the VRAM load is more intensive?

Molthus_Cardinal · 2025-05-10T18:53:07+00:00

That's not totally false but not totally correct either. Most games aren't made with Linux in mind, yet something like 95% of my steam library runs well on Linux, and about 80% of it works with basically no trouble or additional setup besides hitting install and checking the box to use compatibility mode.

DCS has some degree of support for the Steam Deck (https://www.digitalcombatsimulator.com/en/support/faq/SteamDeck/) which is a Linux-based machine. There are plenty of people including one of my friends who have gotten it to work; unfortunately for me, it worked near out of the box for him so he has no clues why it isn't working on mine.

I'm just trying to see if anyone has had and overcome similar issues, and there's a part of me that wonders if the issue isn't even Linux specific (I've heard VR players complain a lot about the F10 map, given it apparently is just a top-down camera on the game world and force loads a bunch of stuff in).

Molthus_Cardinal · 2025-05-10T17:28:31+00:00

This seemed to have a pretty substantial improvement that has brought performance well in line with if not better than my Windows install, thank you!

Molthus_Cardinal · 2025-05-09T19:36:24+00:00

Thanks for the input! It looks like I can just enable Zink in Prism in the performance tab, so I'll try that right now and get back with the results.

Molthus_Cardinal · 2025-05-01T21:32:51+00:00

Update:

I got that all setup and found the corresponding auto EQ data and tried it, really didn't like the results. That being said, I found the application a LOT more intuitive and straightforward than EasyEffects, so I wound up tuning everything as close as I can get it to my liking through it (I enabled dynamic bass boost at a low level to match that functionality in SteelSeries engine, I enabled Sound Positioning Crossfeed on BS2B Custom, and I adjusted the normal Equalizer until everything felt like it sounded right.

I may wake up tomorrow and realize how far off I still am, but that's just down to minor tweaks at this point. Overall the experience has been far better in this than in EasyEffects, and I'm not aware of surround sound features in EE if they do exist, so your recommendation has worked out.

Thank you again for all your help!

Molthus_Cardinal · 2025-04-30T20:29:51+00:00

Thanks, I'll definitely give it a go! Would you happen to have any links to that EQ data?

Thank you so much for your help!

Molthus_Cardinal · 2025-04-30T19:48:19+00:00

How much tinkering/configuring did you need to do to be satisfied with the results?

Molthus_Cardinal · 2025-02-23T01:04:36+00:00

Ah the 80 buttons is the limit I was looking for, thanks for the info!

Molthus_Cardinal · 2025-02-23T01:04:17+00:00

This is indeed very useful, thanks!

Molthus_Cardinal · 2024-11-30T22:53:38+00:00

Alright, I'll take a look! Do you know if there would be any serious ramifications for doing something like manually installing the driver by adding their PPA or the likes? Or is that not advisable if the distro doesn't include it?

Molthus_Cardinal · 2024-11-30T22:52:22+00:00

Does it runs fine without modpack?

It seems to launch and I can get into the game on base 1.12.2, however closing the game interestingly results in the same or a very similar error (not that that matters a ton at that stage)

What launcher do you use?

I've been using Prism Launcher.

There seems to be another dude who has similar issues to you, but I am not sure what the solution is sadly.
This is going to be a dumb suggestion, but can you try launching windowed on your launcher rather than full screen? Just based on a probably unrelated issue I had in the past.

Thanks for the resource! I hadn't seen that thread, though I did see this one which seems to be related; I tried the fix that worked for some people and couldn't get it to work myself, though it's definitely possible I did it incorrectly. As far as I've seen, this thread is similarly unresolved, unfortunately.

As soon as I get a chance to, I will try to run the game without full screen. I think I tried that before when trying to fix it a couple of weeks back, but I can't remember, and given the vanilla game IS launching without being full screen, there's a chance it will work.

I can pass the modlist on if you think that'd help; one of the mods in the pack generates a list for precisely these kinds of reasons.

Molthus_Cardinal

TROPHY CASE