I’ve been debating making the switch for a long time, but after spending like a week researching Proton, Lutris etc. on Linux, I decided to try it out and nuked my entire Windows 11 drive. :)
So far, every game I threw at it works perfectly fine, including Elden Ring & Cyberpunk.
I had to spend a little time troubleshooting some small issues but it’s part of the fun!
Specs are in the neofetch, my compositor / WM is Wayfire (Wayland) :)
it’s a 5700XT, not sure why it show up as a 5600, and because when I built my PC, GPUs were expensive as hell and it’s all I could get my hands on. I’ll upgrade in the coming months :)
Steam has been working perfectly for me (except Anti-Cheat stuff) Some other titles (especially League of Legends) still don’t work reliable for me. (If you know League, it can be a little … frustrating)
Lutris install + installing wine-lol-bin from AUR as runner has been working near flawlessly for me. Only the event page sometimes bug out, but I never participating one so it doesnt bother me.
Nuking your windows drive and not dual booting is a very brave decision. Not having another OS (where you know the way) waving at you makes the Linux learning experience much more rewarding.
For sure. I wanted to dual boot at first but I had multiple partitions and drives formatted as NTFS. Plus my EFI partition was too small.
I would have needed to nuke everything anyways, create a neat partition table, install windows again, then install Arch. And then I know you get issues like the time being messed up, Bluetooth can be fudged too. I decided to just try this for a few weeks and see how it goes. :)
FYI if you decide to dual boot at some point you can set Windows to use UTC. It’s even less intuitive than how systemd can be set to local time.
Also if you can, if you decide to dual boot I recommend separate drives. Windows has gotten nicer but it still doesn’t play well with others because, let’s be honestly, most of the time it doesn’t have to. So if you run recovery if Windows doesn’t boot, it’s not unusual for it to nuke EFI like it’s still the 90s and Win98 just nuked LILO.
Are you on Nvidia and if so how do you make it not suck? I feel like preformance has gotten worse not better over the years. The exact same games with the same settings preform much worse for me on Linux.
No unfortunately I’m not buying a Radeon I need the Nvidia for work.
Yeah, guys. Can someone please share their experience with Arch and Nvidia? I’m looking to switch for quite some time now, because Windows is just a bloated confusion of an OS, but I always hear that Nvidia drivers are a piece of garbage on Linux. How true is this and can you do something about it?
Arch, i3, GTX 3080 12GB, and no issues. I’m holding off migrating to Wayland for the sake of full compatibility with all screen-sharing solutions.
I’ve never really experienced any issues pairing Linux with nVidia, so I have trouble personally relating to all the hate they catch. There have been a few times where the kernel and the nVidia driver were mismatched, which caused issues trying to start up Xorg, but that’s easily solvable.
I’m in Nvidia EndevourOS (archbased) installed it with KDE X11, honestly didn’t see any issues with it, the only real downside is that you don’t have the profile manager per 3D app like on windows. Neither do you have Reflex, other than that everything works well.
I’m running Arch on my Tuxedo Stellaris 17 laptop with a 3070 and I have basically no issues except I haven’t managed to properly run Sway. But Hyprland and XFCE work great, and so do Steam games.
Arch with a 3080 ti using the nvidia-dkms package. Had to set up some pacman hooks to rebuild init whenever Nvidia driver, Linux kernel, or systemd gets an update, otherwise the system doesn’t boot, and I’ve had to boot from the Arch iso, chroot into my install and then run mkinitcpio. So there was some slight annoyance there.
But gaming I’ve had little to no issues at all. Some games have performed better, some worse, but none of the games I’ve played have been outright broken.
Nope I’m full AMD. I’m not entirely sure how NVIDIA works on Linux. I just know it doesn’t work well with Wayland. And fair enough for not buying AMD. Personally, I would do some research, try some things, but I’m really not familiar with NVIDIA card I’m afraid :(
Don’t apologize! Someone else in the thread asked for it and the original artist was linked. I’m on mobile so linking it will be a pain but if you scroll you’ll find it in better resolution :)
Diablo IV definitely works in Linux. I played Sorc all the way to level 75 just fine. You can install Battle.net via Lutris, Bottles, or even directly via Proton Experimental in Steam and then install Diablo IV from there.
The last time I bothered to try was a few years ago. I didn’t realize it was possible to install Battle.net now. I’ll have to take another look at it on my laptop with Manjaro installed.
Ah fair enough! If you do end up giving it a try, my preferred method is via Bottles - but I’ve heard other people recommend Lutris as well.
I have an Nvidia 2080 and for me the game plays just as well in Linux as it does Windows. From what I’m aware, most of the Blizzard games play on Linux - I’ve personally played D3, D4, and OW/OW2 (which is coming to Steam to make it even easier) on Linux without problem.
I’ve deleted my Windows partition because I would have needed to reinstall anyways, my partition table was not to my liking and I just said screw it. I hope I won’t regret it! I only have a Win 10 VM at the moment.
If you don’t use the Windows drive I’d say, take that space back :)
Beautiful build! I heard people talking about gaming on linux but actually seeing you talking about running triple A games that weren’t made with linux in mind made me get filled with joy, I can’t wait to play Stray.
Thank you! I was super excited too when i did my research :) And Stray is actually what I’m playing right now ! I’m seeing some slight stutters but I haven’t configured anything or tried other Proton versions yet.
You can look up the ProtonDB pages for the games you plan to play, and see how they fare. Some will work out of the box, some will require some tweaks, some will require MAJOR tweaks (I’ve yet to encounter any of those), and some will just flat out not run.
So far, the most “configuration” I’ve had to make was changing the Proton version used by same games. Example: Cult of the Lamb has major issues on the latest Experimental build of Proton, but on 7.0-6, it runs perfectly.
It depends if you’re ready to spend a bit of time on getting bigger games working.
As an addition to what he said. Some game will not work no matter what you do mainly because of anti-cheats. Some examples would be R6S, Destiny 2, any recent COD game, the site AreWeAntiCheatYet shows that list.
It’s not my first distro, as mentioned below, I’ve tried pretty much every “mainstream” distro. I tried Arch on a pal’s computer a few years ago, practiced installing it in a VM and kept it for a few years. I went back to Windows when I built my gaming PC before I didn’t know how far Linux gaming had gone. :) So i’m already very familiar with Arch, just not with Window Managers like Wayfire or Hyprland, learning one config file at a time!
Oh no problem at all :) I already know I will, I was missing it, and getting an itch I couldn’t scratch with macOS. Now I almost want to sell my M1 mac for a cheap XPS 13 or Framework laptop…
Always happy to see another user join the ranks of gamers on Linux. I’ve been gaming for years now since proton came. The fact that it’s just a checkbox in steam to use proton is fantastic.
howwwwww. i have a pretty nice amd chip and radeon graphics card, on arch with wayland. i get stuttering, which i read was normal, on my more intensive games like dead space. deep rock galactic i can’t play with my friends and it also stutters…what were the small issues you troubleshooted?
Yeah, the linux-zen kernel is a good alternative to linux-tkg for gaming that’s available in the official repos. What most likely makes the biggest difference and is probably the issue for @inurblacchole is the lack of gamemode. Depending on the cpu and the default governor used it might not boost enough in games where performance or schedutil is needed.
Actually phoenix showed that the zen kernel has slim to no advantage compared to the vanilla kernel for gaming. But I use it anyway because it’s not worse.
Yeah, I would even say that most custom kernels have a very negligible advantage in gaming. I know the zen kernel aims to reduce latency but I would say it comes more down to compatibility and features. For example one rather recent thing I remember since Fedora changed this as well is that the vm.max_map_count is already set on linux-zen to the same value the SteamOS kernel uses (I think it’s just INT_MAX) that helps with game compatibility on Wine/Proton.
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