Hello all,

At around the mid Nov this year I had enough with Windows especially the latest 23H2 pack that forced a lot of what I call malware back on my system when I had put several blockers from being re-installed.

A bit of a background. I have been using Windows since 3.1 with MSDOS 6.2 since forever and I have seen everything from Microsoft. At the same time I’m a senior Microsoft engineer and have been for more than a decade.

Back in 2018 I decided to maximise my hosting game server and installed Ubuntu. I didn’t have the greatest of times but I always enjoy the tinkering process of solving something, so I stuck with it.

Fast-forward to Nov this year, by chance I stumble upon a YouTube video show-casing Garuda Dragonized edition and how it performed in gaming. I was very skeptical as I tried gaming on Linux back in my college days and it was unworkable and unplayable.

Having had enough with Windows, I took the plunge. Now something about me, when I take the plunge on something, I’m going in both hands and legs. There isn’t a compromise.

Created the boot drive, backed up my data to my NAS and purged the system from Windows. Within 30 mins of installing the OS and updating (slow internet, the OS installed everything from drivers to tools that I needed for gaming. I was surprised to be honest and I actually spend the rest of the afternoon making sure that everything was working by running benchmarks and low and behold, everything was. The CPU (5800X3D) was boosting at default values, the GPU (6800XT) was stable with the built in OC profile and was actually pushing better maximums than I had in Windows.

After my satisfaction that everything was good, it was time to test out and real gaming. I installed Satisfactory as that was the game that I was playing just before the purged. I didn’t have hopes as it is still really access, but to my surprise, worked first try (to add, I did follow the Proton instructions on how to setup Steam prior).

I tried several other games such as Borderlands 3, Hunt Showdown, Assetto Corsa and Planetside 2 and all worked. The only issue I have is that Forged Alliance Forever is currently bugged on Arch and I’m unable to launch custom games but weirdly enough, I can play the game no probs without FAF.

I know this is a Linux forum but to anyone that is browsing, thinking of taking the plunge. Do it! But make sure that you prep before doing so as without prep, you are not going to be smooth sailing.

  • flashgnash@lemm.ee
    12·
    9 months ago

    Provided you don’t want to play one of the few games that refuse to enable Linux support on their anticheat I’ve found my PC can run games designed to run on windows far more smoothly now than they ever did on windows

  • NoisyFlake@lemm.ee
    11·
    10 months ago

    I also switched to Arch about a month ago, and I’ve been so surprised at how easy gaming on Linux has become. Even some games that use AntiCheat like Apex Legends run absolutely great.

    I had to switch to X11 though, but that’s the fault of NVIDIA because the drivers are still causing problems on Wayland.

    • Ultimatenab@beehaw.orgOP
      1·
      9 months ago

      I have the same experience. It’s amazing how easy we to switch for gaming that is. I don’t really use my personal pc for productivity but I do some video and pic editing so I’ll cross that bridge then.

  • terminhell@lemmy.dbzer0.com
    51·
    10 months ago

    Welcome to the dark side XD

    Also, don’t forget to take a look at time shift or w/e it’s called. It’s a tool that creates btrfs system snapshots. It creates them when most updates are installed, and you can make em manually too. Really good if you start setting custom kernel stuff or w/e. Allows easy rollbacks from grub menu.

    Fedora or, the ProtonGE guys spin Naburo (spelling?) Is also a good choice.

  • nublug@lemmy.blahaj.zone
    51·
    10 months ago

    awesome!

    fyi: i used garuda for a few months and while i loved it, i did have some stability problems and couldn’t solve it and also found some garuda team on their forums to be fairly rude in some cases so i switched to endeavourOS. it’s very very similar to garuda, also arch based, except i’ve had no stability issues and found their website faq and articles and forum much more helpful and kind to noobs than most distros and i liked that a lot.

    this isn’t to say don’t use garuda or anything but that if you do have issues then endeavourOS is an easy sidestep with also great gaming performance and similarly solid theming.

    also if you need to use EA app i recommend installing through heroic games launcher; the lutris script seems fucked for now.

    also also look up setting up a single gpu passthrough windows vm and how to hide hypervisor for any games that flat out don’t work on proton like fortnite or in my weird case sniper elite v2, and i think also pubg is borked still. some anticheat games are working but sadly some are still being stubborn. this solves that without dual booting or windows getting it’s own partition.

    • Ultimatenab@beehaw.orgOP
      3·
      9 months ago

      I only have a stability issue with a single game and it is one I gave an example on my op, Satisfactory but that is since the latest update so I’ll eat and see before I say it’s something to do with the OS.

  • Eris@l.os33.co
    3·
    10 months ago

    How did you get planetside working? I thought the anticheat was not compatible with Linux

    • Ultimatenab@beehaw.orgOP
      1·
      9 months ago

      It is a noob answer, but I set the compatibility to the latest Proton 8.0.4 and after an update and verification I was able to launch to the launcher, sign in and play. I don’t think I changed anything else. Maybe something that is installed with the distro that enables it to work?

  • recarsion@discuss.tchncs.de
    1·
    9 months ago

    Assetto Corsa works? I haven’t managed to get it running at all yet (unlike ACC which works beautifully), did you do any tweak?

    • Ultimatenab@beehaw.orgOP
      1·
      9 months ago

      I only launched the vanilla version but I haven’t installed connect manager and the near 200gb of as ones yet.

  • Square Singer@feddit.de
    1·
    10 months ago

    I tried something very similar, but if I set my Nvidia Prime profile to on-demand (use the Nvidia GPU for games, use the Intel GPU for everything else), whenever I start a game where Proton uses DXVK, after a few minutes of playing the whole system freezes. Can’t even get to the console anymore and even shortly pressing the power button does nothing. I have to reset the whole laptop.

    If I set it to use the Nvidia GPU always it works, but then battery life is nothing.

    I spent ~10h so far trying to debug that issue, but it seems to be a bug that was reported in 2017 that floods the syslog with assembler stack traces so hard that the whole system has no resources left to do anything else than logging. All the bug log entries I found said there is no workaround.

    So it can go either way, especially if your device uses Nvidia.

    • Astaroth@lemm.ee
      2·
      10 months ago

      I don’t know about the bug in particular but for the next time when/if your system hangs and seems completely unresponsive:

      I recommend looking into the Magic SysRq Key, it shares the same button as print screen on the keyboard.

      Depending on the keybinds enabled you can kill all processes and reboot the PC, among other things. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_SysRq_key

    • Ultimatenab@beehaw.orgOP
      1·
      9 months ago

      Being in a AMD ecosystem, serms to be a lot smoother transition than nVidia from what I’ve seen.

      • Square Singer@feddit.de
        1·
        9 months ago

        Yeah, heared that a lot.

        But I didn’t specifically buy my laptop for Linux, 5 years ago. And the purpose that would really urge me over to Linux is that this laptop has a 7th gen Intel CPU which just about doesn’t qualify for Win11.

        So buying a new device to use Linux kinda defeats the point.

        But yes, I’ll buy AMD next time.

  • lautan@lemmy.ca
    27·
    10 months ago

    Why Arch? Why don’t you try PopOS? I never had an issue using that distro.

    • Ultimatenab@beehaw.orgOP
      2·
      9 months ago

      That’s the first distro that caught my eye for gaming. I’ll def be looking for other distros in the future, so thank you for the suggestion.

    • MiddledAgedGuy@beehaw.org
      2·
      9 months ago

      I’m not personally familiar with PopOS, but in reading up real quick it looks like it’s selling point is baked in proprietary drivers.

      If you want a “just works with my hardware” distro, that sounds like a solid choice. But, since you’re technically inclined I might suggest avoiding it. Proprietary drivers come with their own problems and I think there’s value in having to consciously choosing to use them, which will make you more able to handle/remove them if needed. There is some personal bias in this I admit. I don’t care for proprietary anything if I have a choice.

    • DarkenLM@kbin.social
      1·
      10 months ago

      The only complaint I have, and it’s not really a problem with the OS itself, is that the Realtek driver is unstable at best, and will crash every five minutes.