One of the things that got me to change my gaming desktop from Mint to Arch was the fact that you get the cutting-edge version of everything; kernel and amdgpu being the most important, but also getting the latest version of Lutris and things is nice too. Brought me from “usually about 50 fps outdoors in Elden Ring” to “usually about 60 fps” on the same machine.

Makes sense for a gaming machine to only include the services you actually want, which Arch enables. Supports my hardware better too - my audio gear works perfectly in Pipewire but is ropey in ALSA, so rather than “install Mint -> install Pipewire -> remove ALSA -> hope ALSA is gone”, the sequence is “install Arch -> install Pipewire”, which make more sense.

Other cutting-edge rolling release distros are available, of course, but once you learn Arch, it makes a lot of sense for gaming.

Can confirm that this does work perfectly for Lutris, for upgrades at least. I’ve got my home directory on an NVMe drive and my games installed on a slower disk; as long as you don’t move or rename any of the partitions, it just keeps rocking along.

My laptop and desktop have a different list of games installed, but because Lutris uses SQLite as its backing store, it’s not terribly easy to keep ‘some parts’ synchronised and others not. I’ve spent a bit of time getting all of the icons, banners, release dates, etc all correct and looking pretty, and it’s a shame that it’s tough to reuse. (Lutris does this automatically for Wine installs if you get the name ‘just right’ to start with, but not for all your other emulated stuff - all the DOS games and things.)

My last upgrade was from a GTX1070 to a 6700XT. That was both a big performance upgrade, and a massive “not having to fuck about” upgrade.

It’s not like it’s colossally difficult to install Linux, install the build-essentials, download the latest NVidia driver, stop your window manager, run the shell installer remembering to select the x86 packages for compatibility, disable Nouveau, and restart (repeat when there’s updates). But compared to keeping AMD up-to-date, which is just ‘install Linux and let your package manager handle it’, then it’s much more time consuming and prone to error.

I’ve also been having less graphics glitch issues, but whether that’s the driver change, or whether that’s the fact that Linux has been getting much much better at everything related to gaming this last few years

Do it. I did it years ago, never looked back, and it’s only gotten better since then - Proton has been off like an absolute rocket lately, and publishers considering the Steam Deck a ‘first class’ target should mean an end to them bundling the broken anticheat that stops 100% compatibility.

You remember correctly. From the DXVK conf file:

# Report Nvidia GPUs as AMD GPUs by default. This is enabled by default
# to work around issues with NVAPI, but may cause issues in some games.
#
# Supported values: True, False

# dxgi.nvapiHack = True

Well; it’s either going to be people who are sufficiently privacy-conscious to remove as much as possible from their user agent string, or more likely people who have written bots and scrapers that hit popular websites on an absurdly frequent basis. Team penguin, in any case ;)

No probs! And that sounds correct. Doesn’t have to be supported by the game to work, it should be supported by everything. (Trust you’re using the wine-glorious-eggroll-whateveritis option in Lutris, as well?) And yeah, you’re not going to see much difference on ‘old’ games (well, depending on what it is) - if you can already run it at your monitor’s refresh rate, it just has the effect of making everything a little blurrier, it can’t improve the FPS any.

Okay - you don’t need to switch it on in the game’s settings, it’s just “switched on”. Set an environment variable for the FSR quality that you want, and it’ll appear as one of the ‘resolution options’ in game, and then when you select it, it’ll open at the resolution you select.

So, for me who wants Elden Ring at max settings on my 2560x1440 monitor, which doesn’t quite reach 60fps, and wanting ultra FSR, I’d choose GE8-7 as my ‘run Steam games using this tool’ option, and set my command-line properties to:

WINE_FULLSCREEN_FSR_MODE=ultra mangohud %command%

When the game starts, I’ll see 1970x1108 as one of the screen resolutions that’s offered. When I select it, MangoHud tells me that my fullscreen resolution is actually 2560x1440, and my frame rate is a good bit better than what I’d expect. (MangoHud isn’t essential here, but it’s handy for monitoring resolution and frame rate.)

‘balanced’ is the default, so I should see 1506x847 as an option for absolutely every game that I start with GloriousEggroll, regardless of any other environment variables, and that’ll run it with FSR for me. I don’t need it for most games, and it’s a bad choice for games with lots of text, but it’s always there.

That’s it.

Reference:

• it’s just switched on page: https://github.com/GloriousEggroll/proton-ge-custom/releases/tag/GE-Proton7-29
• list of the resolutions it applies to: https://github.com/GloriousEggroll/proton-ge-custom/releases/tag/GE-Proton7-25

Oh yeah. If the options for getting 60+ fps are either:

• turn down the rendering quality

• leave all the settings turned up, but switch on FSR

…then I find that FSR generally gives the better result. Obviously it would be nice to have a monster graphics card that can keep a high frame rate on max, but if that’s not an option then it’s good to have a plan B. Really nice for having it available for every single game, as well.

Nice one, GloriousEggroll - keeps on making Linux gaming a delight.

I decided to try exclusively gaming on Linux for a few months as a “new year’s resolution” back in 2019, see if I could stop dual booting just for games. Never went back, deleted my Windows partition completely that Summer.

There’s a couple of important things to note, which you didn’t have in your post:

• which graphics card you have. If you’re AMD / Intel, the drivers are integrated into most distros, and they just work. NVidia is a bit of a ballache - once you know how to install their proprietary ones and disable Nouveau, they’re reasonably trouble-free. Reasonably.

• what kind of games you’re into. And really, the question is ‘are you into MMOs / online shooters’ that are likely to have troublesome DRM, because mostly everything else works.

ProtonDB has an entry for nearly every game on Steam with some compatibility notes, but really, Proton, DXVK, and the advent of the Steam Deck have really pushed things forwards - gaming on Linux seems less troublesome to me now than gaming on Windows used to be

Someone above mentioned ‘trouble with Lutris’? Works pretty damn well with my non-Steam games, but then, those are mostly from GOG, so a bit older and DRM free.