Hi all, I bought a gaming PC with the intention of installing Linux to play recent games. I chose AMD for the GPU because I know the drivers are more optimized on Linux.
After receiving and assembling my machine, I installed Fedora without any problem. I found a lot of software on Github to replace the proprietary software for my AIO and headphones. Everything worked the first time except… Steam! Unable to launch it, black window which restarted in a loop.
After searching on the internet, I found that it was enough to modify PrefersNonDefaultGPU on steam to solve my problem (but I understand that ordinary people do not want to bother with this kind of hack and prefer the windows experience that works out of the box).
Then I installed Cyberpunk and… well the game runs at 120fps in ultra, what more can I say… Oh yes, the keyboard preset is in Qwerty even though I have an azerty keyboard (sorry Baguette) and in the first hour of play, I was able to notice a bug in a rather disturbing shadow/light and in the drops of water on a windshield which appeared and disappeared in a strange way.
So with my €1500 machine I got a little upset… and I wanted to install Windows out of curiosity.
Installation is…complicated! No driver for my network card, a ton of software that I don’t need, in short, Windows…
I installed steam, launched Cyberpunk and… my keyboard is recognized, 120 fps too (I am offered raytracing which does not interest me and makes me lose fps but it is available) and in the first hour of play NONE bug.
So here I am, I hate Windows, but it runs my games better than Linux and I’m really lost. I’ve just discovered Nobara, I would have loved to try it but I’m tired of starting the first 3 hours of cyberpunk again and I’m convinced that I’ll have some graphical bugs with it.
(also another problem, there are too many Linux distributions, too much choice kills choice)
TDLD: I bought an expensive computer to play under Linux, but a few bugs made me reluctantly install Windows.
As someone contemplating a move, posts like this and many others make me nervous. I have used mint a few weeks for just documents and browsing and had planned it for my main PC. Now you say it isn’t meant for gaming?
Sometimes reading about Linux is a mix of you can do anything with anything but shouldn’t do anything with somethings.
Linux mint specifically is great for documents and browsing but other distros are gonna have better gaming presets is all I was saying. Imo, It’s a “typing laptop” OS when you probably want Pop! Instead. That or the other ones I listed have extra drivers and whatnot by default. Just trying to be helpful!
I jumped right into Mint without trying other distros because I was coming from Windows, and it sounded like Mint is the least-needy next step. But my experience so far has been: If it’s not easily fixed with a version upgrade/downgrade, it’s not getting fixed. There are lots of forum posts to look at for guidance, but the fixes are always really specific to the OP’s system and not applicable to mine. I’ve seen a lot of people on Lemmy using Pop!; maybe I’ll try that next before giving up completely
You absolutely should, sounds perfect for your use case. It’s meant for gaming PCs, and as you’re starting out don’t be afraid to take advantage of the several different package managers out there (I think pop has one built-in but there are others like snap). Finding and installing programs via command line isn’t as hard as you might think either and is usually more secure/ideal. If you need something more cutting edge and are willing to dive into stuff like that I’ve had great experiences with garuda and manjaro too. There are lots of FAQ’s out there, and it can be really daunting at first but I promise it’ll be rewarding somehow. I personally love all the different free software repositories and having apps like fortune run when I start my machine- there’s something so cozy about configuring a PC to be a little fun and reflect your own personality a bit.
I switched to Pop_OS and everything had been working great;thanks for the rec 👍
Love to hear it! Hope that does what you need it to for a long time! being a commercial product (kinda, system76 mostly makes money off hardware with it iirc) there should be great support and I’m pretty sure it has its own forum too like many other distros. Good luck!
I greatly appreciate the help. So then something like Pop caters more with drivers one may need.
I’m just tying to make sure my step into Linux is a good one. I have only used Ubuntu and Mint a bit and not what I would call extensively.
I was tempted by Arch but I don’t salivate at the idea of creating my own desktop environment like others seem to. Hmm. I have my research to do as I had not looked at Pop.
If you don’t like it there are always other options (if you like a lot about arch, Garuda or Manjaro would be my next suggestion) but I do think Pop is great for those adjusting to the new ecosystem from windows
Disclaimer: my experience is only with Arch Linux (daily drive for 2 years) and a little bit of Linux Mint on a relative’s PC.
For me I found it more tedious to get games working through WINE on Linux Mint compared to on Arch Linux, some packages I wanted seemingly don’t exist in the apt repositories (wine mono and wine gecko) and had to be manually installed.
I also had some trouble because the package names were different compared to on pacman, especially the lib32 ones, but to be fair I would probably have had the same issue on Arch if I first used Linux Mint then Arch so not having the same package names isn’t inherently a fault of Linux Mint.
But it wasn’t that it wasn’t doable, it was just more tedious, and to be fair daily driving Arch for 2 years compared to using Linux Mint every once in a while means I’m way less familiar with Linux Mint.
Arch sounds both wonderful and terrifying. I’m still watching videos to pick a distro but aur sounds like the wild west. I also am not sure how much effort I want to put into creating my own desktop environment. Videos talk about building it all but provide little info on what length of effort and maintenance that will take. Are things more likely to break? I’m unsure and trying to find out.
Arch is made out to be a lot harder and unstable than it really is. And AUR is a great resource but realistically you won’t even use it that much. At least I haven’t. I used it for Brave Browser package before switching to Firefox, some WINE gst plugin, and some other small stuff I don’t remember.
Also keep in mind even if it’s a AUR package, you can just install the package like normal if it’s a binary (it will be named with a
-binat the end, likebrave-bin), so just because you’re using some packages from AUR it doesn’t mean you have to build lots of packages from source every time you update.People hear scary stuff about some random update breaking the system but it’s exaggerated.
You definitely can break stuff with user error and sometimes if you’re not paying attention while updating you can get problems (combination of bad defaults + user error).
Main problem is that you can do whatever you want, but you might not actually know what you really want to do or you might not be doing what you meant to do, and Arch Linux will let you do it even if something breaks due to it.
And well that’s going to be same regardless of OS but it’s more accessible on Arch.
However you shouldn’t be too worried about it, in the basically worst case scenario you might need a Live USB and another device with an internet connection to look up and what you need to do to fix what’s wrong, but you can always count on that there’s a fix.
Most other OSes if you have a problem, depending on what it is you might just be stuck with it.
Biggest noob mistake I recall doing was that I had my old windows hard drive as extra storage and slowly moving stuff over once in a while, so I hadn’t reformatted it and I also wasn’t aware of that the default Linux NTFS driver wasn’t very good and that I should’ve gotten NTFS-3G if I weren’t going to reformat.
Well one day while not paying attention while updating my system through pacman (yay actually) I was also copying files from my old windows hard drive and I didn’t even look before just pressing accept on some AUR package rebuild.
Well it turns out that package was formerly part of Extra repository and thus it used to be a binary package, but now since it was moved to the AUR and it didn’t have
-binit was changed to a package to be built from source, and if I were to continue using it I should’ve changed which package.But I just hit accept and it started chugging away, and it needed more RAM that I have and apparently there’s no safe guard for this (at least not by default) and by the time I noticed that my RAM usage was getting to high the system already got too sluggish and I was too late to end the process.
I also didn’t know about
SysRqat the time so the only option I knew was to force shut down by holding down the power button for 5 seconds.My actual system was still fine and all but my old windows hard drive that was transferring files got borked. It wasn’t completely bricked so I eventually salvaged it and it’s since been reformatted too, but I thought I had bricked it at the time.
Well that might still seem a bit scary but that was me making several user errors in a row, and at the end of the day it still wasn’t even a big problem.