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?

  • vojel@feddit.deEnglish
    7·
    2 years ago

    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.

    • Donny@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      1·
      2 years ago

      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.

  • coffeeguy@lemmy.worldEnglish
    6·
    2 years ago

    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.

  • Dnn@lemmy.worldEnglish
    4·
    2 years ago

    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.

  • Magusbear@lemmy.mlEnglish
    2·
    2 years ago

    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.

    • Donny@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      2·
      2 years ago

      No shame in that. I considered myself a pretty proficient Linux user until I installed arch lol

  • Malix@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    2 years ago

    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.

    • Donny@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      2·
      2 years ago

      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

  • pix@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    1·
    2 years ago

    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!

  • Digester@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    2 years ago

    Congrats on finally using a real OS! Arch is fantastic and teaches you a lot of skills down the road.