cross-posted from: https://discuss.online/post/34255100
Thought I’d create a distinct thread from the previous one asking about daily use, because I really do want to hear more on people’s pain points. Great to know people are generally sounding pretty positive in those posts who recently switched, but want to know your difficulties as well! This way old and new users can share their thoughts, hopefully to inspire a respectful discussion.
If you’re new to Linux you should go with either Bazzite or Cachy for gaming.
Nobara is more for people who like messing with their Linux build, since the dev mostly made it for themselves and their dad rather than for the general public.
Cachy is next in the list. Bazzite I believe doesn’t support my hardware (i5-4460 & gtx 750). If Cachy ain’t it, I’ll try Mint and after that if nothing lies well I am going for Win 10 LTSC IoT :(
You may want to try Pop!_OS at some point too. I’m not sure if it’ll support your card ootb, but it’s supposed to have better initial Nvidia support than other distros. Like Mint, it’s based on Ubuntu, but System76 has customized it a bit to be more gaming-focused.
That card only supports Vulkan 1.2 in hardware and Steam’s Proton does not run well on that (it needs Vulkan 1.4), so most games crash (or have graphical issues) because the DirectX calls cannot be translated properly.
I have a 780Ti card and I used Proton-Sarek from here, it makes it work with a lot of games: https://github.com/pythonlover02/Proton-Sarek
In general, I would recommend an AMD card for Linux. Nvidia is just painful, especially older cards that aren’t well supported on Nouveau.
Those old Nvidia GTX cards also don’t support adaptive clocking, so they run on low clockspeeds by default. You might need to set the clocks manually if you want (kinda) the same performance you get on Windows.
You can list the available power states with
cat /sys/class/drm/card0/device/pstateand then set one like this (if 0f is the one you want):echo 0f > /sys/class/drm/card0/device/pstate(only if you use the nouveau driver, not the one from Nvidia)