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.
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.
Even Endeavor would be better than going straight to Arch.
I second Pop! It’s the best UX I’ve had with Linux so far. System76 really outdid themselves with that distro.
I understand your struggle. As others said, Arch is not a beginner friendly distro.
I would suggest trying gaming tailored distros like Nobara, Chimera or Bazzite and see how you feel about them. Don’t install your full steam library during these testing period, try games separately and prioritize the games you play the most.
Learning involves trial and error and the Linux ecosystem has a lot of that.
In the end it’s ok if you say This is not for me right now
Do you have any comments/suggestions on picking one of those distros? I can do my own research so no pressure.
It greatly depends on what type of experience you are looking for. Nobara is based on Fedora with pre installed stuff tailored for gaming and content creation, it’s very configurable as most Linux distros.
Bazzite and Chimera are more SteamOS/Console -esque experience tailored. Still configurable but more limited since they are immutable distros. Bazzite is based on Fedora and Chimera on Arch.
IMO if you only plan to game or mainly game on the PC either Bazzite or Chimera are good options. If you also intend to use the PC as a workstation I would go with Nobara, which is my case.
PS: For those looking for a friendlier Arch experience try Manjaro.
Arch Linux
Unless you’re on a good downstream like SteamOS, I’d suggest switching to something stable cutting edge (Fedora or Nobara if you want to put in zero effort).
Arch by itself will give you way the hell too many possible problems. You could waste hours on DKMS alone.
Mint will also work, but it has the downside of having slower updates to software packages.
I’ve started with Nobara and it’s been working great!
Wait, Fedora is bleeding edge too? I don’t know that
Fedora is what I’d describe as cutting edge, but not bleeding edge. It’s still behind from source, and is semi-rolling release, so it’s further behind than Arch but way ahead of stable/fixed release distros like Debian
Its generally more up to date with newer standards and such than Debian, but it is by no means bleeding edge.
Bleeding edge is generally bad unless you really need some specific thing for a specific reason.
If your whole set up is bleeding edge then congrats, you are a basically alpha testing an OS.
Huh, interesting. I thought that Fedora was following the Debian stable model. Well then my next recommendation would be Fedora based I think.
But I disagree that bleeding edge means you are an alpha tester. That means developers are releasing alpha willy nilly. I’d even argue that at a certain pace of Hardware and Software development, the latest version of software you have the better, since it has a certain possibility that the Hardware will already be supported.
It is not
If you’re a beginner… or hate jank, don’t use Arch. And make sure you’re using a desktop environment that supports Wayland (GNOME or KDE). Gaming on X11 can be buggy, janky and inconsistent
They are running Nvidia. Their only option for Wayland is kde.
What’s bad about KDE?
Nothing, I was just stating that the only real option for an easy Nvidia Wayland experience right now is kde. If anything it’s a complement.
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.
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)
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.
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…
Arch for gaming, what the hell
Works quite well for me. But I would agree it’s not the best to start with if having little desktop Linux experience.
Arch is great for gaming, but it’s not for beginners
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
Lol try Linux mint, it just works
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
This may seem odd, but check if your mobo has a bios update. Often bios break uefi standards to appease Microsofts non-standard requirements.
These get fixed overtime as ACPI bugs are fixed.
Good luck! Linux is sadly not quite yet for everyone, but it’s so much further along than it was when I started in 1999.
I bounced between Linux and Windows for decades, but when the Recall debacle happened, it became clear that Microsoft have lost their collective minds. I wiped my system, put Garuda Linux on it, and everything works quite well for me with no tinkering except with user-level KDE settings. I also changed from an NVIDIA RTX 3070Ti to an AMD RX 7800XT just so everything related to graphics would just work and I didn’t have to wait and hope that explicit sync really does fix everything for NVIDIA on Wayland.
I also use proton-ge for everything (in Steam as well as in Lutris which uses umu-launcher) and every game I’ve attempted to run (thus far on the order of 35+ games), has run great, including Elden Ring. I’ve found in my 25 years experience, the trick with Linux is two-fold: researching hardware to guarantee full Linux support…and having patience. And I’ve fell victim to that last one dozens of times over the years which led me back to windows each time.
No more.
Wayland and Plasma have not been good experiences for me. Gnome on Pop was awesome. I can’t get the flicker to stop. So I’m going to try Gnome on Arch and see if that fixes it. Unfortunately I think it also uses Wayland, so I may have to go back to Pop. I’m not spending another $1000 on a GFX card when I have a perfectly fine 3070 ti already .
Okay.
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.
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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Nobara is a very good starting point for Linux. I personally know Linux stuff from an IT perspective, but personal use/driver troubleshooting is not something I care to fiddle with regularly. I started with Kubuntu since it’s familiar, but eventually swapped to Nobara when I had some issues with the few games I play.
Nobara has been seamless and easy. Having all wine and proton dependencies preinstalled is much nicer and a lot of games Just Work ™️ out of the box.
