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?
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.
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.
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.
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.