I’ve been using Arch on an old laptop for a few years now, but I use Pop on my gaming desktop. I’ve wanted to switch to Arch for a long while now, but haven’t had the motivation (if it ain’t broke, and all that). I’m finally ready to do it, but I’m a little concerned about my gaming experience. Are there any gotchas for gaming with an i7 and a 3070 ti that I should be aware of before I make the switch? Is it pretty seamless? Can I still use a freesync monitor with the g-sync compatibility setting? Is it easy to install the Nvidia drivers and well documented on the wiki? I’m open to information about any other sticky scenarios you guys encountered getting Arch set up for use as a daily driver and gaming computer.

Edit: is there any way to backup my internal drive mappings and mounting points, or will I need to set all of that up again?

I’ve only ever used Gnome for Arch, but one of the things that has me motivated to switch is that KDE 6 supports HDR. Does anyone have experience with it? Is it a pretty slick and simple DE?

  • AwkwardLookMonkeyPuppet@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
    2·
    5 months ago

    I’m replying here at the top of the thread again because it’s getting pretty crowded down there. I got steam installed and it’s working. I ran Baldur’s Gate 3, which worked flawlessly on my Pop install with Gnome, but in KDE Plasma on Arch the screen is going black for about 10 seconds at a time, then the game shows for about 5 seconds, and it goes black again. Is that the flicker issue you were talking about? It’s a pretty bad issue. I’ve been unable to resolve it so far. I’m pretty burned out working on it for now, so I’m going to take a break. But I wanted to see if that describes the flicker you were talking about or if I’m experiencing something different.

    Edit: I disabled screen tearing in the KDE options and it stopped. I also made some changes to my config files, so I probably should have tested without disabling screen tearing first, but at least it’s fixed! Sweet! I have a working Arch Linux gaming setup now.

    • Lojcs@lemm.eeEnglish
      2·
      5 months ago

      That’s not the flicker I was talking about but I do remember the screen intermittently going black in games for like half a second when the 550 driver first came out. Had to downgrade the driver to get rid of it. Eventually upgraded again and it didn’t happen so I thought it was fixed. Maybe those two or three bugs are related

      • AwkwardLookMonkeyPuppet@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
        1·
        5 months ago

        Ah okay. I think I did see the flicker too when I was playing the game. It happens when changing views, like going to a loading screen, or opening a menu. That’s at least tolerable for a game like Baldur’s Gate. You said if I just resize the window it will stop?

        • Lojcs@lemm.eeEnglish
          2·
          5 months ago

          Resizing the window stops steam glitching, I haven’t tried in full-screen games but maybe it would work