True. It’s also good for people who want to get stuff done. I used it for 5-ish years, and it was an incredibly productive, low-maintenance distro. I only switched because I wanted to run brtfs on root, so I figured I’d give openSUSE a shot since they do that by default.
Eh, it has a lot of powerful tools for computing stuff. Like today I wondered if I can download the songs from a playlist on YouTube, checked the wiki, and within 5 minutes I was doing it. It worked perfectly. The AUR also saves a lot of time building packages that aren’t available through pacman, which means they’re probably not available through other distros either. So you can definitely do more than just fiddle with the OS. But getting it working stable with Nvidia cards right now is like a full time job.
I’ve been daily driving arch for like five years now, and this is just flat out not true at all. I agree it’s not a beginner distro, but if you know what you’re doing and know what you want it’s the best.
FWIW, I’ve got an i7-8700k with an RTX 3080. I initially had two major issues when I replaced Windows with Bazzite:
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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: universal-blue.discourse.group/t/…/970
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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’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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Looking for a CS/CoD level experience. Steam might be okay, but I haven’t tried it and am skeptical of anything marketing oriented. I really don’t want to see ads or hype of any kind. I’d much rather ask around and go in search of my options when I feel compelled. In other words, I’m aware of my susceptibility to suggestive marketing and am not okay with others manipulating me through that mechanism so I avoid it all together. I will not enter the space at all unless those terms can be met.
I was just skimming a fedora mag post on gaming and it mentions that Steam packages Proton but there are community maintained versions with more advanced features than are possible on the Steam Deck; the most popular being Proton Glorious Eggroll.
Xonotic was one I played some. It has a different hectic vibe that is not really in that CS/CoD space I liked though. I like to feel like I have a measure of control and not in a situation where reckless speed has an advantage.
I don’t think there are online multiplayer games like CoD or CS that don’t require a platform like steam or good old games to buy, download, and run. I’m not actually sure what you’re trying to do, but if avoiding marketing is your goal I recommend you run steam and change the default page it opens to to be the library where your games are and not the store
I just spent all afternoon and evening trying to figure out Cataclysm CDDA. After not doing anything meaningful for hours, I drove a car into a lake and was mediately attacked by a couple of rodents and died with a kill to death ratio of 1:0. Thanks.
It was nothing like what I asked for, but exactly what I needed to push me back into a FreeCAD project tomorrow.
I spent all day stockpiling, building a soldering iron, and messing around with the Evac, first building area. I’ve figured out some of the tech tree and made my second character freeform and much stronger across the board. I have a barricade mentality for now. I haven’t checked out what anyone else has done, but fixated on barricading the basement of that first house and trying to add solar lighting. I dispatched the two zombies at the house to the south with all the cars and cooking supplies, but haven’t ventured beyond. Maybe I’ll check out the helipad and bride soon.
Terraria and deep rock galactic are good starters, but this post sounds insanely paranoid for the wrong reasons. Just because you got infected with malware in the past doesn’t mean you need to lock down your internet access. You’ll gain nothing from it. All you need is an adblocker (+ something that blocks trackers) and not running suspicious files.
Just because you’re connecting to a remote server (like any website ever) doesn’t mean you’re susceptible to attacks. Ditto for almost any modern video game, there are protections in place so nobody can run code or send you harmful files on your machine.
If a curious desire for awareness of the the details that surround me is somehow offensive or off putting I apologize. I find it is a catalyst for learning and contextualizing information in several areas of personal interest and plugs some holes in my ignorance.
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