I’ve been working on converting my gaming PC to Linux for a few weeks, but everything is running, but it all is just a little jankier than I would like.
I have an 8th gen Intel i7 and an Rtx 2070, running Arch linux.
Sometimes I boot up and my mouse doesn’t work and I have to restart. Sometimes I launch games and they just don’t launch right.
It feels like I’m doing a lot of work for no benefit. In fact, Elden ring runs way worse on my Linux partition than my Windows partition.
I’ve tried GE proton, gamemode, steam compatibility, everything… I’m sorry but I’m going to have to stick with Windows for gaming.
I switched to Linux Mint a few weeks ago and I’m not having any problems with games. Everything in my Steam library plays fine.
Arch for gaming, what the hell
Arch is great for gaming, but it’s not for beginners
Works quite well for me. But I would agree it’s not the best to start with if having little desktop Linux experience.
Valve thought it was appropriate when they made the steam deck.
Valve pre installs a lot of programs and tools to make it work that stock arch expects the user to already know about or to read the wiki
Arch for a beginner can be a bit too much.
Try Bazzite.
I also heard good things about Nobara in terms of gaming. Haven’t tried it myself though.
I’ve been using Nobara 39 for the last month and it has been a smooth ride. I’m playing Elden Ring with 0 issues and no tweaking needed on my part. The only friction I had was with the installer because I have a Nvidia card but once installed and got drivers updated all issues were gone.
I installed Bazzite on my gaming computer and it just isn’t great, there is screen flickering and occasional crashes:( I am not going back to Windows but it has required more emotional energy to troubleshoot than I wanted
I probably should get an AMD card, but I am going to try Nobara next to see if it just works…
Hi there, whoever suggested linux for your switch played a mean joke on you. Granted, arch works well if you know what you‘re doing, apparently. But no way it is a good starting distro.
I‘m not sure how eldenring works on linux but most games run without problems.
One little caveat is this: you need to understand that windows is a billion dollar product while linux is mostly community driven. It costs nothing, except many people donating their time. So I‘d suggest adopting a „its insane that hobbyists are able to build something like this“ view. Otherwise you‘ll get frustrated and will end up im privacy invasive windows territory again.
If you want a more gaming ready distro, try pop os or bazzite. Good luck
Even if you know what you’re doing:
Arch recommends reading their newsletter before updating.
Exactly my point. I tried installing it and it was great fun but under no circumstances is that “beginner ready”.
I switched my gaming PC to Linux a few months back. I distro hopped for a while due to various issues, and landed on openSUSE Tumbleweed. Everything just works (except for the occasional bug in the updates where I have to wait for the next snapshot for a fix, but that’s NBD).
Caveat: I’m all AMD so no Nvidia stuff to worry about. YMMV.
Same here except I stuck with leap as the newer kernel does not play nice with the suspend function. My little travel laptop has tumbleweed on it no problems. I’m surprised I haven’t seen more suse recommendations because it’s the only one that mostly “just worked” out of the box.
For a long time I couldn’t get a stable distro working on my HP laptop with Intel 4 core & Nvidia 1660ti but after numerous successful daily driving on my desktops + steam deck of course I tried Bazzite which did the trick. Everything runs smoother & I haven’t encountered anything unable to run because the steam proton is mature. Lutris is perfect for anything to do with alternative launchers, roms, I even got modded black ops 2 working and I never thought that would be possible.
I wish you the best of luck.
Thanks for the recommendations everyone! I plan on keeping Linux on my second drive to continue playing around with it, but my gaming will probably go back to Windows. Might give bazzite or popos a try next.
I recommend trying another linux distro for a while. Arch has a pretty steep learning curve. So big respect for getting it to work as a first distro, but there is a lot of stuff you have to setup manually that just works on other distros. If you got more stuff working and get a little more familiar you can always go back to arch.
I use arch nowadays, but the first time i tried to install it i basically gave up a few times. If you just want to try it out in order to learn then it’s perfectly cool to take some time. But if your goal is to play games then arch is just a means to an end. Then it becomes really annoying, because you cannot reach your goal.
Just a heads up, but gaming on an external drive with bazzite is a nightmare (if you end up trying to go that route).
Not an external drive, just my second nvme
My bad, that’s what I mean. Whatever drive bazzite is not installed on is difficult to deal with when it comes to flatpak steam. There’s a bunch of mount params you are supposed to use but for me they didn’t work whatsoever on bazzite.
Bazzite doesn’t use flatpak steam. Standard rpm install with no sandboxing.
If you installed it that’s entirely your fault.
I used what was there. From precious experience with auroraos I assumed it must have been flatpak steam, that’s my bad. Either way, even after following bazzite’s own instructions on auto-mounting drives to a T, external drives still had all sorts of issues. Link to the docs: https://universal-blue.discourse.group/t/auto-mounting-secondary-drives/970
Do people not use Manjaro for this?
FWIW, I’ve got an i7-8700k with an RTX 3080. I initially had two major issues when I replaced Windows with Bazzite:
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Steam doesn’t do great with libraries on NTFS partitions. Supposedly there are workarounds, but I couldn’t get them to work for me. I had to reformat a couple drives as ext4 (and do a bunch of file management in the process) before things would play nice.
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I had my CPU overclocked to 4.8 GHz in Windows. BG3 kept crashing on me on Bazzite. Finally occurred to me to drop the overclock and I’ve played 40+ hours since, solid as a rock. Performance is comparable to Windows with OC. GPU temps are consistently better than Windows. Only thing I’m missing is HDR.
Bonus: GreenWithEnvy (for GPU fan curve) won’t run in a Wayland session yet, apparently, so I’ve been running under X11 instead.
Hope this helps. YMMV. Happy gaming, whatever OS you use!
Are you sharing steam library with windows? Why would you have an ntfs partition?
When I replaced Windows, I had two other disks with NTFS volumes, one of which was full of Steam games, the other with assorted crap. I built this box in 2017. The SSD where Windows was installed is only 256 GB.
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Just out of curiosity, is the mouse bluetooth?
I heard there are some intermittent problems with them on linux because of proprietary blobs and similar driver issues, but I’ve never had one, so I’ve no direct experience.
It’s a wireless Logitech with a little USB dongle. It works from the bios so I wasn’t sure what was up with that.
Yeah I have the same problem, usually you have to turn it on before turning on the pc or just replug the USB dongle
with the issues you’ve had i think it’s perfectly understandable, but I’ll agree with other commenters that arch is not a good choice for a first distro. i recommend trying dual booting windows and a more "beginner " distro like Linux mint or pop_os
What the hell, he uses Arch as a first checkout linux gaming distro?
Bro, you missed one small but crucial information there just at the beginning of your journey…
the reason why arch gets recommend a lot as a gaming distro is that it is bleeding edge. Their for has very up to date drivers and parches that can help gaming. But with the current state of gaming on Linux this is a bit less of a requirement. most distros are new enough for most games. Exception might be debian LTS or something.
So i totaly agree that choosing something other then arch for gaming is a good option if you are rather new to linux.
Bleeding edge should still work though. KDE Plasma does not seem ready for Nvidia. They should have a big-ass banner on the wiki that says “this DE will be janky as fuck if you have an Nvidia card”.
I never said bleeding edge wouldn’t work. But bleeding edge comes with its own complications that might not be suited for a newbie
I’m saying that it doesn’t work. At least not without some pretty serious bugs. Perhaps there are some magic fixes out there that I haven’t found, or perhaps I have some taboo combination of hardware, but so far I haven’t been able to fix the visual and latency bugs that are present with KDE Plasma and an Nvidia GFX card. I’ve followed the wiki thoroughly, and some instructions on some forum threads, but none of it helped.
As a longtime Debian Stable user, I can attest that gaming on it works just fine, whether via Proton or natively.
It was rough at the first half year or so after Steam Linux client launched where system libraries were simply too old and one had to smuggle in libc from Ubuntu, but that got solved by the next Debian release, and it’s been smooth sailing ever since. :)
Of course, I wouldn’t recommend Debian for a gaming system for a newbie. It’s just what I’ve been using as my daily driver for decades, so I did not want to switch to something else just for something as unimportant as gaming.
Funny. I just had to downgrade my kernel from 6.8.9 to 6.1 for my main game to work. So much for bleeding edge… 😅
(Not on Arch btw, but still applies)
Lol try Linux mint, it just works
Linux may very well not be for you, but using Arch first is like jumping into the deep end to learn how to swim. It’s no surprise you’re drowning. I’d recommend you try a gaming-focused distro like Nobara before you go back to Windows for good.
Nobara is great if you’re into Fedora. PopOS! or Linux Mint if you’re into Debian. Those will take you further way faster and with less pain than any Arch based distro.
So for a linux virgin who is planning to jump in - what’s the difference between the two groups?
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Linux is really a superfamily of loosely-related OS’s (called distributions). Arch and Debian are 2 of the more common ones. Arch in particular has a reputation of being really beginner un-friendly, particularly in that, to my understanding, you have to build the OS yourself.
There’s also the caveat that many Linux distributions end up sharing/copying code from each other, so you end up with a kind of “OS lineage.” The most common distribution, Ubuntu, is copied from Debian. And then the most beginner-friendly distribution, Linux Mint, is copied from Ubuntu. Arch, to my knowledge, doesn’t copy code from elsewhere, so much of the advice given from users of other distributions won’t apply to Arch (hence the meme, “I use Arch btw”)
Anyways, the real advice for a Linux beginner is to stick with a beginner-friendly distribution: either Ubuntu or Linux Mint or Pop!_OS. Most or all distributions have various “flavors,” which are basically like how the OS looks. I think the real difficulty is picking a flavor that you like. I personally like the look of KDE Plasma (IMO resembles Windows 10 the most), so my personal recommendation is Kubuntu, which is the KDE Plasma flavor of Ubuntu
Thanks. For a second it sounded like there are different “types” of linux that are fundamentally different, but it’s just endless chain on what specific OS is based on which specific different OS and some of them are used as a reference point for how stuff feels - I think? :D
What are the differences between Fedora and Debian, since those were used as major reference points?
All distro’s differences come down to how the chain of utilities is stringed up together. You have:
- Bootloader
- Kernel
- Init and service daemons
- Package manager
- Display server
- Window manager
- Widget toolkit
- Desktop environment
- User applications
And a whole lot of in-between. Essentially Fedora and Debian each have defined and originated a set of core software that work as standards for the first 4 parts of this chain. Arch is another, even on pure Arch a wizard installer has to deal with those in order to set up a properly working system. For some, those are the most technical and difficult parts of setting up and designing an OS. Then every distro is a variation on the rest of the chain or customizations on the first few parts, but almost always based on one of the —current— three standards.
There are also philosophical differences that drive technical decisions in the background. Favoring one way of doing things over the other. Debian is usually focused on stability, reliability, security, function over form. Arch is usually about the bleeding edge, speed, max efficiency, innovation, customization, user freedom. Fedora is pragmatic and down to earth, compromising between the two and focused on smooth user experience. Usually different distros will provide some variation or adaptation on those themes. Like making Debian more corporate, or updated, or making Arch easier to install, or making Fedora but optimized for gaming, etc.
Thanks for the in depth answer! While most of it is lost on me, but the last paragraf is dumbed down just enough to make sense of things.
Yep give Nobara a shot if you’re going to reinstall anyways. Bet you’ll change your mind
I vouch for Bazzite OS. I have Arch on my main and Nobara on a sibling’s computer for gaming and Nobara works flawlessly with minimal setup. It pretty much works the same as my arch desktop with all the KDE stuff. Highly recommend, even if you’re new or experienced.
First of all nothing to apologize, no one should be forcing anyone to use any OS.
Secondly, you shouldn’t start with Arch, it’s a very manual process that has several small things that can be done wrong. I recommend you try Mint, Pop or any other beginner friendly distro, you can still tinker and customize them as much as you want, but you will be starting from something that works instead of having to build a working system from the ground up without knowing what that looks like.
I second Pop! It’s the best UX I’ve had with Linux so far. System76 really outdid themselves with that distro.
Even Endeavor would be better than going straight to Arch.
Shit that’s crazy, I’m ryzen 3800x with 2070 super and Elden ring runs BETTER on manjaro Linux (arch based) than windows!
I really couldn’t believe it.
