Hi all, I bought a gaming PC with the intention of installing Linux to play recent games. I chose AMD for the GPU because I know the drivers are more optimized on Linux.
After receiving and assembling my machine, I installed Fedora without any problem. I found a lot of software on Github to replace the proprietary software for my AIO and headphones. Everything worked the first time except… Steam! Unable to launch it, black window which restarted in a loop.
After searching on the internet, I found that it was enough to modify PrefersNonDefaultGPU on steam to solve my problem (but I understand that ordinary people do not want to bother with this kind of hack and prefer the windows experience that works out of the box).
Then I installed Cyberpunk and… well the game runs at 120fps in ultra, what more can I say… Oh yes, the keyboard preset is in Qwerty even though I have an azerty keyboard (sorry Baguette) and in the first hour of play, I was able to notice a bug in a rather disturbing shadow/light and in the drops of water on a windshield which appeared and disappeared in a strange way.
So with my €1500 machine I got a little upset… and I wanted to install Windows out of curiosity.
Installation is…complicated! No driver for my network card, a ton of software that I don’t need, in short, Windows…
I installed steam, launched Cyberpunk and… my keyboard is recognized, 120 fps too (I am offered raytracing which does not interest me and makes me lose fps but it is available) and in the first hour of play NONE bug.
So here I am, I hate Windows, but it runs my games better than Linux and I’m really lost. I’ve just discovered Nobara, I would have loved to try it but I’m tired of starting the first 3 hours of cyberpunk again and I’m convinced that I’ll have some graphical bugs with it.
(also another problem, there are too many Linux distributions, too much choice kills choice)
TDLD: I bought an expensive computer to play under Linux, but a few bugs made me reluctantly install Windows.
Linux isn’t for everyone, but jumping in on fedora might not have been the best choice. Give Pop! OS a shot. It’s a more balanced experience.
Fedora is pretty straight forward as an os for newbies, main benefit that popos has is installing Nvidia drivers
Yup. The only issues I had going from Ubuntu to Fedora was finding drivers, and that was solved with a few minutes of searching online.
I don’t use either anymore and getting NVIDIA setup hasn’t been an issue. I used Arch for a few years (just install a couple packages and reboot), and I use OpenSUSE now (just install a couple packages and reboot). It’s not a difficult problem to solve.
Maybe Pop!_OS would’ve solved the graphics switching issue and azerty keyboard thing (probably not), but the rendering thing would very likely be the same as on Fedora since it’s likely related to GPU drivers and Proton, which the distro has no control over.
Any KDE environment is much easier to get into for Windows users than those Gnome / Apple type of desktop environments.
Yes, do as I say! :P
Dunno bro everything works for me on mint. I also have higher frame rates and better stability. Getting Stable Diffusion working on my AMD card is probably the hardest thing i have had to do. Even that is three lines in the terminal now. You may need to dick around with proton settings and read the forums to find what Cyberpunk runs on best if you want to deal with the bug.
It works on AMD GPUs now? Or just the latest gen?
I’m using Stable Diffusion on my 6000 series card and it works fine. Obviously a lot slower than Nvidia cards, but definitely usable.
I’ve been using it the last couple days on a 7800xt. It works but has been fairly unstable. Hopefully that’s just new hardware driver problems that will get sorted out eventually.
Is it just in Stable Diffusion or in general? I’ve been happy with my 6800xt so far, but it’s always nice to know what’s available. I keep meaning to try it with the Arc A750 I have laying on the shelf, according to some benchmarks I’ve seen it’s better than my card at image generation.
You can always dual boot, Linux for working is amazing. And your can also install a VM but I haven’t tried it for gaming
I don’t work with this computer, my company provides us one. But thanks for the idea!
VMs are slow and not suited for gaming.
You can even tunnel your hardware directly to the VM, e.g. graphics card and have like a 2% loss on the virtualization side. Not much of a deal, if you know what you’re doing. Bonus: You can restrict the VMs network, do external backups etc.
You’ll need two GPUs, no? Passing a GPU through is relatively easy, but trying to share one isn’t going to work for gaming.
But if you have the extra hardware and lots of cores, VM gaming can be a very good experience.
You can do it on a single GPU system but you can’t use Linux and Windows at the same time.
Isn’t that just a dual boot with extra steps? Or are you saying you could have a SW rendered Linux GUI while Windows is using the GPU, then switch Linux to use the GPU later? I thought there were lots of issues with swapping GPUs between host and VM without a reboot?
Could you provide more info?
It’s just like a dual boot but slightly faster. You also don’t need to worry about having two drives, messing around with partitions or having Windows overwrite your boot loader.
As you pass your GPU to the VM, Linux can’t use it anymore so all you see on your screen is the VM. When you start and shutdown the VM, a script runs to prepare the VM to boot or to hand over the GPU back to the host.
So can you launch it straight from a graphical desktop and just suspend the graphical bits somehow? Or do you need to drop to a vtty first? Does it work properly when loading from a snapshot, or do you have to boot each time?
I don’t need to use Windows very often, but it would be nice to run a script to get into it, then he back where I was after closing out.
There’s also Ameliorated which helps debloat hour Windows and 9/10 times get a better experience using it. There’s different playbooks which help optimise to the experience you like (eg. gaming). Could give it a try :)
I do doubt Windows didn’t work out of the box, as with the thousands of installations I’ve done, I have had ZERO issues since Win7. Very few to none in Vista. The issues were prevalent in XP and before but that was the before times when the similar Linux issues were 10000x worse.
The only gripe I have is moving people to online accounts. Just run the oobe command from the installer to limit network requirements and voila, local accounts created.
All that extra bloat can be removed but who cares. The stuff that sits there barely affects anything, like you saw the frame rate is the same.
If Windows works for you, as it does for 90% of consumers, then use it. If you want to tinker forever with Linux, then do so. Some find that fun. I’ve moved into the “my OS is an appliance” phase of life.
I ran arch for years then Manjaro. I had zero issues running doom eternal except if I switched workspaces then back. I’d have to kill -9 the app and relaunch. Was enough to make me dual boot to beat that game. I’ve been running Manjaro since, because I don’t have the time like I used to to fuck around with settings. I still prefer Linux overall as my daily drive though. It’s not a slow, buggy, ad ridden pile of shit. Imo windows is so buggy and slow since like 8 or 10
Maybe try another distro:
Won’t speak for anyone else but I’ve been running ChimeraOS for a couple of weeks now and it’s WAAAAAY better than using Windows.
Could you explain why?
I mean how much time do you have? 😂
On Windows I get pop-ups for unknown reasons, I have no control over what software is on my PC or what it is doing, trying to fix that usually breaks other things. I can use a controller for just about everything I need. I can boot it up and load up a game in about 10 seconds. I can change the volume, change the speakers, adjust game settings, adjust the HUD, all without leaving the game. Exiting games is a generally laborious process full of menus and loading screens, where on GamepadUI you just hit “exit game”. My internet connection seems more stable for reasons unknown. I could go on…
If you need any help in french even through vocal, PM me
Merci beaucoup !
Avec plaisir :)
Windows also doesn’t work out of the box like you demonstrated in your post, people are just familiar with how to get it working. Like, Linux isn’t more complicated than Windows, it’s just both complicated and unfamiliar to a lot of people.
software for my AIO and headphones
wtf kind of headphones require extra software?
Everything worked the first time except… Steam! Unable to launch it, black window which restarted in a loop.
What package exactly did you install and from which source?
the keyboard preset is in Qwerty even though I have an azerty keyboard
If you set the layout correctly during installation of the system / in your system settings then that’s not really Linux fault.
I was able to notice a bug in a rather disturbing shadow/light and in the drops of water on a windshield which appeared and disappeared in a strange way.
Very well explained.
So here I am, I hate Windows, but it runs my games better than Linux and I’m really lost. I’ve just discovered Nobara, I would have loved to try it but I’m tired of starting the first 3 hours of cyberpunk again and I’m convinced that I’ll have some graphical bugs with it.
Why restart? Back up your home folder to a different drive, install the OS and copypasta the home folder back into the new system. This is literally easier than under Windows because everything non system related is in the home folder. Games, save & config files, everything.
I chose a distro with Steam preinstalled, it was ualinux (not maintained any more so i’m not recommending it). If your primary use case is games I recommend a gaming specific distro, everything works out of the box.
Also, how do the French people walk in games? ZSAD?
French keyboard is called “azerty”
So they would move with
Z Q S DNot to be confused with the Belgium azerty which is 90% similar. But different enough to be annoying if you’re used to one or the other.
Affinity Photo and Capture One are the only things keeping me from migrating. Yes, I tried your GIMP and RAWTherapy. They’re horrendous.
They aren’t. You’re just used to doing things one way and expect other software to work the same way.
If affinity launched Linux versions of their software I don’t think I’d ever need to log into windows again.
Publisher is brilliant and there’s an absolute lack of good typesetting software on Linux. I can’t do my job on it.
The Windows experience was worse, but at least your raindrops were rendered correctly.
It feels like you used a detail that you could not resolve to go back to the cozy arms of what you are familiar with.
And that’s OK. I also went back to Windows a few times until I felt at home in Linux.
Try it again sometime in the future and see if it fells more comfortable.
Sounds like his Linux experience was worse?
OP only has to force the dGPU to be used, and that’s it for Linux. For the azerty issue, the solution is usually to install qwerty as keyboard 1 and azerty as keyboard 2 and always use keyboard 2. I do that with Dvorak and most games work without needing remaps (though I’ll occasionally need to fiddle).
On Windows, OP needed to install drivers, which can be a massive pain, esp for Wi-Fi drivers. Also, most software needs to be installed individually, which can take a while vs Linux’s package manager. For me, a typical install of Linux takes about 30-45 min from installation media to having all my software installed, whereas on Windows it’s like 1-2 hours because I have to go track down every installer I need, find drivers, disable a bunch of privacy-violating stuff, etc.
So the net result was:
- azerty issue - easy fix
- rendering issue - imo, sounds minor, and it’s probably just that game; maybe fixable by tweaking in game settings
Not bad for running a Windows game on a completely different platform.
Installing WiFi drivers on Windows is actually very weird. I’ve never had to do that. Not with a dongle, not with a brand new motherboard with built-in WiFi.
Really? I’ve had to do it pretty much every time I’ve installed Windows. Sometimes I have more luck with a dongle, so I keep a couple around so I can get Internet to go find the proper driver. Sometimes its not recognized, sometimes it just doesn’t connect.
To be clear, I’m talking about installing from an ISO, not using whatever the factory installed. And almost every time I’ve done it, on board Wi-Fi doesn’t work until I find an installer. Sometimes dongles work (I think they have installers on the card?), and I think Intel NICs work, but I really haven’t had good luck.
Once I have Internet, it’s just a matter of tracking down whatever drivers Windows update can’t find (usually 3-5 of them). And Windows is really helpful here, and I have to search by hardware ID.
On Linux, it usually works fine, unless I’m using a really crappy card or something, though better drivers can help with stability. My system setup time is like 30 min from installer to using the system on Linux, and on Windows it’s like 1-2 hours. I’ll probably need to install random things on Linux here and here, but it’s just a package manager command away.
All my PCs are hand built by me since 1990-s. All Windows installations are from ISO. I haven’t installed a single network or WiFi driver since Windows 7. XP - yes, nothing worked out of the box. But W7 and above the only drivers I install are NVIDIA drivers (it works without them, but the default driver doesn’t have all game optimisations) and printer drivers. Even Bluetooth works out of the box. You don’t even need ADB driver for your Android phone anymore, everything just works out of the box.
I’m also not sure what you’re installing for 1-2 hours, it takes about 10 minutes or so over here. It might be dependent on how fast your storage is though.
This was Windows 10, and it’s mostly drivers and utilities. I had a ton of trouble getting my wife’s mic working, which apparently needed some user space utility to be configured, and this was just a simple 3.5mm mic (AMD audio card apparently). And then there was random stuff in Device Manager that didn’t have drivers that I needed to track down (motherboard level stuff, not accessories). I spent like 30 minutes messing with a weird flickering issue (only happened in games), and it was solved by switching which monitor was primary (she apparently can’t use her 144hz monitor as primary, but whatever).
The actual Windows installation process was quick (she has an NVMe drive), it’s just all the nonsense afterward to get stuff running correctly. And that doesn’t include installing applications (she handled most of that, I hate tracking down SW on Windows), this is just to get the hardware to work properly.
On Linux, I just install the system, install packages from the package manager, and I’m done. No googling anything, no configuration, I just install the handful of packages I need that don’t come with the base system and I’m done. I had more trouble in the past (muted audio, Wi-Fi cards that need to be force enabled, etc), but the last time I had anything like that was something like 10 years ago. I do pick my hardware carefully which certainly helps, but surely Windows should provide a better experience since that’s what manufacturers target.
That never works like that on Linux though :)
