Hey all, I’m a longtime Ubuntu user for work and recently switched my desktop to arch from windows after seeing how well games run on my steam deck! I’ve wanted to move to Linux fully for years but gaming on it used to be pretty hit or miss.
So far arch has definitely been more involved to get going - but I managed to get a desktop environment that runs great with my gpu and steam. I love how minimal it is out of the box and I’m getting a lot of ideas of stuff to build with it.
Anyway I’m mostly just posting to introduce myself to the community on here and to say how much I’m liking arch so far.
But, if you have any tips/suggestions of things I may have missed to take full advantage of my system when gaming, I’d appreciate hearing it! Also, if you’re running a setup like this, any favourite packages you have?
Congrats on making the change!
One piece of gaming software I have not seen mentions yet that I really like is Lutris. It is a unified launcher (steam, gog, epic…) that really helps to keep game installations organized and also helps to manage wine prefixes. I recommend checking it out.
Oh this seems great, definitely checking this one out
I am an Arch gamer too. Use the zen kernel for slightly better performance. I installed most of the stuff the steamdeck brings. So gamemode, mangohud, protonup qt. I tweaked some settings for better performance. There is that one Tool for Steam Deck that sets some performance tweaks, I forgot the name but should be easy to find.
Is the zen kernel actually still more performant? I remember a long thread in the linux subreddit from some kernel developer recommending against zen for gaming now and for tkg-dps scheduler (among others) instead.
my impression was that the scheduler helps prevent starvation, so while it may not squeeze out the absolute top performance it feels smoother because it stays responsive even if a single thread is going crazy. I use arch btw.
I guess you could say it depends. From a quick search, tkg seems to be focused on gaming, while zen is more generally desktop focused.
I gues how much of an impact either makes depends on what exactly is happening an what is limiting your performance in games. It’s not going to overclock the GPU and get more frames that way.
Nice, I’ll have a look at those when I’m home from work! Gamemode is pretty cool I never even thought about installing that.
Such a long post and not a single “BTW”. Welcome and have fun! It’s such a great feeling not having to worry about the horrors Microsoft comes up with next.
The start menu was getting so painful 😭
I also run Arch…BTW
Arch rocks!
inching towards making the same jump.
Currently the things holding me back are music production stuff (mainly vst/vst3 plugins and their draconian drm). If anyone has any first hand experiences with eg. iLok and the plugins working under wine, it would be grand <3
Games wise… does raytracing in games work under linux? eg. Cyberpunk 2077, gog -version.
there are folks that do audio stuff on linux and from what i can tell it is a lot of work and your workflows will change a bit.
Check out Unfa on youtube, my man does everything using linux apps.
Trying to do live audio stuff in wine may be a struggle, from what I gather most audio production folks switch to a realtime kernel build which may chip away performance on the very top end but prevents lost samples because of competing resources. With that in mind I don’t know how windows apps would perform for live audio. BUT if you’re just processing already captured stuff then you might be fine.
All that to say take a peek and see if ardour can support the plugins you want or has an alternative that can meet the same goals. It probably won’t be as easy but I bet you’ll find something that works.
No experience with audio stuff but I feel you in terms of photo editing. Lightroom is gonna be sad to lose but darktable seems pretty good and if I’m being honest I mostly edit on my iPad anyway.
For games if nobody answers your question I’ll test it out when I get home from work
I switched to Darktable years ago and haven’t missed Lightroom at all. It takes some getting used to but it’s very good.
Congrats on the successful install! Arch is pretty tricky to get working (especially the first time) but it’s totally worth it! Anyway, here are some package recommendations, idk how many of these you already know about but here are some that were useful for me!
- firewalld (block incoming connections, arch has no firewall by default)
- kde plasma (super flexible and powerful yet lightweight DE)
- foot (good and fast terminal for Wayland)
- st (good and minimal terminal for X11, also good entry point for suckless utils)
- fish (helps you get used to the cli, and you can make beautiful run prompts with starship)
- bottles (helpful for game launchers like Ubisoft connect)
- flatpak steam and other packages with 32 bit dependencies (sandbox 32 bit packages)
- protonup-rs (not sure if it works for flatpak stuff but it’s a nice to have CLI program to simplify the installation of ge-proton builds)
- heroic launcher (so you don’t have to install epic through lutris/bottles etc)
- QEMU with GPU passthrough (for those pesky games that won’t work with proton, good to have and super easy to set up)
I’m also not a pro by any means, and please google these before installing them to make sure they are actually useful for your usecase. More advanced users: please do correct me if something is wrong or a bad idea because I started off not that long ago and I would love to learn more!
edit: fixed grammar and stuff
edit 2: I kinda assumed you had this but I forgot to mention, don’t forget an aur helper like paru so you can install stuff easily from the aur!
Thanks for the recommendations! I’ve looked into (and set up) a few of these, but there are a few I definitely need to look into more! Need to learn more about sandboxing apps as well.
Me too, honestly. I recently discovered flatpak and so far it’s been great for my proprietary apps like discord and spotify. Flatseal has also been invaluable for managing those without having to dig into cli commands!
The AUR is the best part of Arch.
All kinds of great stuff in AUR and much of it more up to date than a lot of other distros packaging systems.
Awesome! I made the jump as well a couple of weeks ago. Struggled hard with the installation because I was being dumb during some parts. When everything worked I got this nagging feeling that I must have forgot something or done something wrong, which is why after I was done with everything, I installed EndeavourOS. Still an arch distro and I went through the installation, so I’ll just pretend I’m one of the gang.
No shame in that. I considered myself a pretty proficient Linux user until I installed arch lol
In your defense, the installation is a rather terse process. But once you’ve mastered it, you’ll find that you can install Arch in 1/2 the time that it takes to get other Linux distros installed.
If you have no sound in older games make sure you have lib32-pipewire installed
Welcome to Arch fellow gamer!
Congrats on finally using a real OS! Arch is fantastic and teaches you a lot of skills down the road.
