Pleasantly surprised that Arch tops the chart. Then again, and I might be wrong about this, but to me a clear bias in the ProtonDB data is that those who submit reports to ProtonDB are usually users who are likely used to submitting bug reports and stuff, so obviously not your average “freshly migrated from Windows” gamer.
Arch is very powerful and flexible, but definitely not newbie friendly. I only made the jump after 7 years of using Ubuntu and Debian, and I still had a learning curve.
I think part of this that I’m not seeing talked about, and perhaps confused for “more tech savvy users”, is just the user hostility of Windows.
9 times out of 10 when a Linux app or game crashes I get a verbose error and more often than not one that I can simply copy and paste.
9 times out of 10 when Windows, or much of windows software, crashes it gives some random number or code and in a window I can’t even copy and paste out of.
My skill level doesn’t change. Linux just isn’t user hostile in nature making it easy to search for fixes and report issues. Where as on windows I can’t summon the care or effort to manually transcribe the error so I can then do something with it.
If the interactive session is still up, just screenshot it and OCR the image. Takes a few seconds, but it’s still easy. Win+S, select the area, paste into OneNote, right-click copy text.
It could be mostly steamdeck users, but for me arch is the only distro that works well. You know what you install which makes troubleshooting easy, and it’s documented very well.
You don’t need logs because in Windows 95 they made a tool that always 100% diagnoses and fixes the issue and it runs every time dispite never actually returning a fix or error code.But wait there’s more here’s a hex code to some memory allocation rather than creating a reference library in human so you can search forums where the only advice is reformat or don’t worry guys I fixed it.
But you are not allowed to look at the actual run time logs as we’re a polished environment.
bought my first Gateway PC when Windows 95 came out. Lockups every day drove me to Slackware install from a dozen floppy set I d/l’d. Mac OS 8.*/9 was no better. OS-10 brought apple back from the dead. wanted to buy stock, was/am poor
I’ve personally switched over to Arch because steamos is arch based. I know it will probably be just as smooth for other distros but I’ve wanted to switch to arch before the steam deck anyways. I’m happy with everybody just embracing linux and the distros they feel comfortable in.
I’ve been using arch exclusively for years now. Pacman and the wiki are just too good for me to go elsewhere. I’ve used Gnome and Kde both extensively and I just like Gnome more. Kde just has a lot of jank that doesn’t make it feel like a modern system imo. Gnome is a much smoother experience. Both work perfect for gaming though. Just started experimenting with hyprland this week and I’ve been loving it. It has some weird stuff with running games, but that just might be user error. I have friends who swear by mint too which I haven’t seen mentioned in this thread much.
I put Garuda on my wife’s gaming PC, she absolutely loves it & it does everything it should, no problems whatsoever. And it’s based on arch, so if there is something, I know how to fix it. Awesome beginner gaming distro imo, recommend!
Try setting the game to exclusive Fullscreen instead of windowed or borderless maybe, or vice versa. This is a window manager issue, so start digging there. If it doesn’t happen with every single game, it could be a combo of game engine and WM.
It does happen with every game I’ve tried so far. Games are fullscreen by default, but it doesn’t seem to matter what the default is - it always happens.
I’m using KDE but I haven’t managed to find anything that is relevant for my problem :(
I’m on X11, I have an nvidia card and Wayland is way too buggy right now, even with the recent 545 driver.
As always, the Arch Wiki had the answer, I just didn’t see because it seems to describe a different issue. SDL_VIDEO_MINIMIZE_ON_FOCUS_LOSS=0 environment variable seems to do the trick.
I know you solved it, but another workaround for this type of issue is to run the game with gamescope. Assuming you have an AMD or Intel card (Nvidia historically didn’t have great support for it).
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