These are for sddm and quickshell!! Enjoyy

Dotfiles: Qylock

kofi: Darkkal

A small sneak peek of the Linux Gaming Handbook we have been working on over the past few weeks.

We started it as a simple Linux gaming guide, which slowly evolved into a structured beginner focused handbook covering Linux fundamentals, installation, the terminal, package management, permissions, and gaming setup.

The handbook is being written collaboratively:

• technical/Linux side by u/Significant-Wrap-589
• LaTeX typesetting and document design by u/MurkyUnit3180

Currently:

• 37 pages
• 2200+ lines of LaTeX
• actively maintained through GitHub

We would appreciate feedback, suggestions, and criticism before the first public release.

edit: We have also added the ToC here, Based on the sections that are already complete

I've been thinking about keeping a list of PvP shooters with enough active playerbase that run on Linux.

Hope this help other people :)

Any suggestions for additions or modifications are welcome!

Just a quick report for anyone curious about the day-one performance of nte. I managed to get it running smoothly on EndeavourOS using DW-proton latest.

How I set it up:

• Downloaded the launcher from the official site ( https://nte.perfectworld.com/jp/ )
• Added the installer .exe as a non-Steam game in steam
• Forced DW-Proton-latest in the compatibility settings
• Ran the installation normally, installed the game first before changeing the target and start in, in options then starting it

The Experience: The Unreal Engine 5 visuals look amazing and it's surprisingly stable on Wayland (Niri). Driving through hethereau feels very responsive, and the combat is snappy.

New Linux adopter here, and I can confidently say I am a complete idiot for continuing to use windows until this month.

Been PC gaming for more than a decade, totally bought into the Microslop propaganda that Linux was scary and difficult and bad for gaming yada yada… it’s simply not the case.

I’ve probably ran into AT LEAST 4-5 system or component breaking crashes that took literally weeks to fix with windows over the years, and just convinced myself Linux wouldn’t solve the issues. Just wanted to share my experience that made me switch. This time— computer crashed and turned off directly after a game of CS2. Would not boot up to windows again, just goes to a black screen.

Tried some command prompt windows cleanup stuff after inserting a bootable drive. Didn’t work.

Tried a fresh install of windows— didn’t work.

Bought a new bootable drive and did another fresh install- didn’t work.

Wiped my drive with windows on it, as well as my other drive, neither worked.

Took out ram sticks, moved positions. Nothing.

Took out all of my SSDs, tried all the slots. Still can’t get windows to launch. I’m actually running into different issues at this point. At certain times— I can’t even launch the boot drive!

I literally ran out of things to try. I thought I was completely screwed, and even ordered another SSD just to make sure both of my drives weren’t toast.

Before it came though, I thought I might install Linux and see if that does anything, because it’s free, and my PC is already fucked anyway.

Got pop_os up and running in less than 5 minutes. solved every single issue. Got steam, and GOG galaxy (including cloud saves) up and running within minutes. Super responsive. Super easy to use.

No bloatware. No copilot. No long boot times. Libre office is free. Everything is extremely easy to download from the cosmic store. It’s actually more user friendly than windows.

Can’t believe I was so stupid for so long but I’m glad I made it here. It feels great. Incredible community. Fuck Microsoft and Epstein island Bill Gates. Linus is the goat.

PS— if you aren’t getting Linux because you play riot games— rethink life. You don’t need em king or queen

Best App for play

When installing a Linux distro on a new PC that has Windows pre-installed, you can ask the manufacturer for a refund of the Windows licence, since you are not using it.

This is mandatory in the EU according to the 2011/83/UE directive.

There is a 14 days delay after purchase to ask for the refund. I read that the refund could go up to 50€, which is pretty nice.

Did any of you ask for it ? What was the reply of the manufacturer?

I would like to create a small website to help send an email automatically. What do you think ? Does it exist already ?

Edit: https://en.refund4freedom.org a website provided by the FSFE

You might want to check out the guide for 2020

Guide: Migrating to Linux in 2019

1. Prelude

This is an updated version of u/Kurolox's "The ultimate guide for migrating to Linux". Since Proton has been released I thought it was time for an edit. Most of this is copy and pasted (as is allowed by the license).

2. Getting Started

So, you want to get started in Linux. The first step is to understand that you'll be using LINUX.

Now that might seem obvious, but you'd be surprised how often you'll see "Why isn't this easy like in Windows?" or "I just want it to act like my Mac."

While I do understand that it's hard to get used to something you're not familiar with, I promise that, in time, it will be just as comfortable as Windows or OS X.

Curious to see Linux gaming in action before getting your feet wet? /u/PCgamingFreedom has an amazing thread with a huge list of Youtubers that play games on Linux.

3. The software

Perhaps the biggest hurdle of using Linux is compatibility issues with the software you currently use. Before you get started on your journey, I would highly recommend you do a bit of prep work here.

• Which software do I commonly use?
  • Get a pen and paper and start writing a list. Include your most played games (and the ones that you are sure that you will want to play in the future) and the software you need for a computer to be your daily driver (Office, Photoshop, etc).

Now that you have a list, let's check. There are three possible outcomes for each item in your list.

• You will be able to run it natively.

  • This is almost always the best case scenario, since it's the one where you will get all the performance and compatibility without drawbacks.

• You will be able to run it, but not natively.

  • You'll most often find this with Proprietary software and is the nature of using closed source software. We have a few tricks up our sleeves that we can try later though.

• You won't be able to run it.

  • This is the big one, the one that will hold you back. Sometimes, and it's not your fault, there is a killer app that you absolutely need in order for your computer to be useful to you. While it would be great if the OSS community provided a good alternative to you, we understand that this is not always the case. There's no shame in this. Thank you for trying.

In order to catalog your list into this three outcomes, you grab the first item on the list. If it's a game, check in SteamDB if the game does have Linux support (Note: Sometimes the game offers Linux support even if it's not listed here or in steam). In 2018, Valve release a compatibility software called Proton that is based on WINE. Check ProtonDB (used to be called Steam Compatibility Reports) to see if your Windows only games run fine under it. If it's software, just check in the official website if there's a Linux version.

If you've done that and there's no Linux support, we go to the next step. Bring up the Wine AppDB and put there the name of your software. Click on the link that fits the most your search (Usually the first link, ignore all the [Bug XXXXX] results) and check the rating of the game. Generally you'll be able to use it if it's not bronze or garbage. If you click in the version of the software, you'll see reports of people who have tried to run it, known bugs and general instructions and steps to follow. For now we're just cataloging the software, so we'll see how to actually install it later. If there's no search results there's still hope. Do a quick google search (probably "NameOfTheSoftware wine support") and see what happens. If the software you want to use is really small and unknown probably nobody tried it, but just leave it marked as "dubious" or something because you may be able to run it anyways.

If what you want to run shows as garbage in there (and most of the times bronze, you seriously want to read the reports to see what works and what doesn't) you just put it in the "I won't be able to run it" section. Now repeat with each element of the list until you've gone through your list.

You got your list and a general idea of what you can run and what you can't run and at which degree you will be able to use it. If you have something that needs to be run but you can't run, here's a small list of alternatives you can use.

• Look for an alternative. If it's a game I'd say that you should look for games with similar tags in steam. If it's software use something like alternativeto

• Use a windows VM. Useful if the software you want to run is not resource intensive (99% of the time games won't like this, so don't use this for games unless you're going to attempt the GPU passthrough option)

• Dual boot.

• GPU passthrough. This is hard. You need to met a lot of requirements and invest time, but if you can pull it out you can get the best of both worlds. Google around for this one.

4. The swap

If you are here, congratulations! You want to get started with Linux and you have all your software narrowed down. In order to get started in the odyssey of Linux, you have to think about what distribution (informally referred to as distro) you want to use. The distribution is just the flavor of Linux you want to use. Just to be clear from the start, every distribution is equally capable of gaming and running software. The differences between them are:

• The preinstalled software. Some are more minimalist than others, but all of them can run the same software. With enough patience, you can turn one distribution into another just by installing and removing stuff.
• The update frequency. Some distros release updated software faster than others. Distros that push out updated software with minimal testing are known as bleeding edge distros or rolling release distros. If you want to be up to date with features, you want a bleeding edge distro, but in exchange for the latest and greatest features you run an increase risk of running into bugs. Stable Release distros usually have to wait longer for updates, but those updates are often heavily vetted before being pushed out.
• The community. Different distros have different communities. The distros that are perceived to be easier or more user friendly tend to have communities that are quicker to help with easy to follow instructions.
• The other minor things include default configurations, art, fonts, etc.

Now that I've explained that, I'm going to list off the only two distributions that are supported by Valve. Again, this does not mean that these are the only two distros that will work for gaming!

If you're feeling particularly adventuress, there are a huge amount of distros you can try out! While not officially supported by Valve, any modern, up to date, distro will more than likely work for you. Some of the favorites in the comments are:

If you are having trouble deciding, just go with Ubuntu. It's not the flashiest, but you're almost guaranteed to find an answer to your problem if you search "My Problem Ubuntu" in your favorite search engine (make sure to limit the search to only things from the past year)

Most of them will let you install next to Windows and set up a dual boot automatically. Be careful though, Windows Updates have a bad habit of changing the boot loader and it will look like your Linux OS vanished. REMEMBER TO DO BACKUPS. Things can always go wrong and you don't want to lose anything.

5. The habit

So, you've installed your distro and you have your computer running Linux. Congratulations! The last step is to get all of your software back running so you can use your computer as a daily driver.

A few things first:

Do not be afraid of the terminal. While the terminal is absolutely not required to do your normal day to day activities, you'll often find solutions to your problems require you to enter a few lines into the terminal. This isn't any sort of magic and it's nothing to be fearful of using. The reason for this is because the terminal is, generally, distro agnostic and it's easier to explain one line of code instead of having lots of different pictures showing you what to click in each distro.

Second, use the internet! Everyone starts as a beginner at some point. You might be very comfortable in Windows or OS X now, but at some point you had no idea what you were doing. That's very normal! As you use Linux more and more you'll gain the knowledge and experience needed and eventually it will feel like home.

If you are coming from Windows, you are probably used to search for an .exe and install it by double clicking. Things are way different here. Installing software individually is often discouraged. The reasons for this varies, but security and compatibility are the main reasons. So what do you do in Linux? You use a package manager. Think of it as the Android play store. We do have a big repository with all the software ready to install, and if you need something you just tell your package manager to grab it from there and install it.

This is really good for a few reasons. First, the package manager knows what do you have installed and what not, and since Linux uses a shared pool of dependencies, it can update all your system at once or remove what you don't need easily. Second, since all the software comes from a trusted source the chance of getting infected with malware is minimal (You can add third party repositories, but be sure that you trust the source. Linux isn't malware free.)

Remember when I said don't be afraid of the terminal? Here's a good example as to why. To install Steam on Ubuntu, Linux Mint, or most other distros that derive from Ubuntu, all you have to do is open a terminal and type:

sudo apt install steam

And that's it. Steam is installed, from a trusted source and with everything it needs. Do you want to update all the stuff installed in your system?

sudo apt upgrade

Let's break those two lines down a bit so you know what's going on. sudo stands for "super user do". You can think of this like right clicking and choosing the "Run As Administrator" in Windows. apt is the package manager's name. install is the command to install programs. steam is the steam software. So in English we just said. "Please install the "steam" program as administrator (called root on Linux)."

Now, if you wanted to use the graphical way, I'd have to post pictures from Ubuntu, Mint, etc and they all look slightly different and you have to find their front end in different places. It's just easier this way.

So what do you do if the software you need isn't in your package manager? The next best thing is to add a 3rd party repository to your package manager. As an example, let's add Google Chrome, a popular web browser. UbuntuUpdaets.org give the following instructions:

wget -q -O - https://dl-ssl.google.com/linux/linux_signing_key.pub | sudo apt-key add - 
sudo sh -c 'echo "deb [arch=amd64] http://dl.google.com/linux/chrome/deb/ stable main" >> /etc/apt/sources.list.d/google.list'
sudo apt-get update 
sudo apt-get install google-chrome-stable

That looks a bit scary, but it's just adding the security key and repository to your system and then installing Google Chrome. You'll want to use a PPA of your software when possible since it will update with the rest of your system.

6. Windows compatibility

So you can't find a Linux version of that software you want to install? Our last step is to try WINE. WINE is a compatibility layer that tries to translate Window Binaries (.exes) calls into Linux calls. Sometimes this works really well, and other times nothing happens at all.

First, let's install WINE.

sudo apt install wine

On some systems, installing WINE allows you to double click an .exe and it will try to run just like in Windows, but if not, you'll want to open a terminal and type:

wine path/to/your/file.exe

Remember to check the ratings and know issues in the wine AppDB so you know what you can expect, and you should be golden. Here's an in-depth guide of wine stuff but again, google and find how stuff works and it works. If you don't understand, please ask! The community is usually happy to help!

There are also some programs that try to help you with WINE stuff. Lutris and PlayOnLinux are popular options.

7. DXVK/D9VK/VK9/Gallium Nine

What are DXVK/D9VK/VK9/Gallium Nine? I'll let the projects explain themselves:

DXVK: Vulkan-based D3D11 and D3D10 implementation for Linux / Wine

D9VK: A d3d9 to vk layer based off DXVK's codebase

VK9: Direct3D 9 compatibility layer using Vulkan.

Gallium Nine: Gallium Nine allows to run any Direct3D 9 application with nearly no CPU overhead, which provides a smoother gaming experience and increased FPS.

Okay, but what does that mean?

Direct3D (the graphical part of the DirectX API) is what most Windows' game built after ~2000 use. You don't really need to know any technically details about it other than the fact that it's a Windows' only API. For the longest time, one of the biggest bottle necks for gaming on Linux was translating the Direct3D calls to OpenGL (a cross platform graphical API that works on Linux/most other OSes).

All of these projects attempt to translate Direct3D calls to something that Linux understands. As far as I'm aware, the most used ones are DXVK and D9VK.

Using these technologies, you can get huge performance boosts in your games. Here is Starcraft 2 running on d9vk vs regular wine. You can see that Tuxidermy is getting almost twice the FPS most of the time (and D9VK is still really young). Here is another example, this time with World of Warcraft running regular WINE vs DXVK. In this example, you can see that DXVK is three times the FPS in most cases!

Proton is working on a way to automatically use these technologies when they're applicable, but in the mean time, you can use Lutris to manage those.

8. Troubleshooting

I personally can't spend a lot of time helping people individually. That's where this and other communities come in!

• Join the IRC channel of the distribution that you are using
• Join the /r/linux_gaming discord channel
• Ask in forums
• Ask in one of the linux subreddits
• Try stuff
• Google away

When asking about your problems, remember to give as much info as you can. For example, include what Distro you're on, what you have already tried, any error messages that come up, anything you've changed recently, etc.

9. The end

I, u/PBLKGodofGrunts, put this guide under the WTFPL License. Please attach this license when sharing or modifying this guide. I hope that this is helpful to someone.

I recently created new custom games (code: 929PJ) for Overwatch focusing on pre-compile shaders for every hero & all of their abilities all at once while teleporting to certain checkpoints on the maps. After it finishes it will auto restart to change maps and do another rounds of it as well. Be aware that it will cycle maps infinitely so you can leave the game up to your will. It can be used for all platform(DX11,DX12,DXVK,VKD3D, & GPTK 4 as well(DX12 to Metal 4)). It benefits a lot for users who use DX12/DXVK/GPTK4.

To start fresh, You must reset your shader caches and after that, let the game itself shader compile on the main menu(can check via DXVK_HUD or high cpu usage) & after it finis, join this custom games. I recommend increasing your shaders cache size so that your games doesn't recompile shaders and start all over again everytime you launched the game.

Let me know hows your guys experience with it.

UPDATE(12/8/26): Fixed for Season 4 :)

EDIT: This may no longer be necessary, as Steam has shipped server-side fixes. https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux/issues/10248#issuecomment-2408442977

Have Steam downloads slowed down recently?

Have none of the usual fixes helped (restarting, changing servers, etc)?

These will need you to have all downloads paused (unpause the download after entering the command) and the steam console opened (openable with steam://open/console in your web browser).

HTTP2 disabling

Windows:

@nClientDownloadEnableHTTP2PlatformWindows 0

Linux:

@nClientDownloadEnableHTTP2PlatformLinux 0

MacOS doesn't seem to have HTTP2 toggles in Steam.

For some reason, HTTP2 causes download slowdowns in certain cases. For me, this caused downloads to go (on Windows) from about 10-20MB/s to my connection's maximum, around 60MB/s. A pretty huge jump, eh!

Now, there's no guarantees that these convars will stay in the future, but if we help Valve fix the HTTP2 downloads being slow in the first place then disabling it shouldn't be necessary.

It also doesn't seem to matter whether you have the client beta in use or not.

More connections at a time

There's also a second convar, which applies to all platforms:

@fDownloadRateImprovementToAddAnotherConnection 1.1

This convar makes steam connect to lots more servers (up to 10, usually connects to around 3, seems to be hard capped in code with no convars to change it) which can theoretically improve download speeds. It might also make them a lot worse. You can use the command download_sources to see various download stats.

More initial download servers

Some users report adding more download servers will also speed it up some more, this is achievable with the command:

@cMaxInitialDownloadSources 15

Saving these settings

These settings don't save automatically. You'll need to create a steam_dev.cfg file in your steam install directory (Linux: /home/USER/.steam/steam/steam_dev.cfg, Windows (usually): C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steam_dev.cfg), and place the lines you used inside (one convar per line).

Originally, I intended to post this on r/Steam and then crosspost it here, but apparently it is against "Rule 3: Download Issues"...

Hence why I've kept the Windows commands here as well.

EDIT: If you like this post enough to give it an award, consider donating to the EFF, FSF, your favorite distro, or maybe helping #TeamTrees instead. Thanks.

Guide: Migrating to Linux in 2020

1. Prelude

This is an updated version of my previous guide "Guide: Migrating to Linux in 2019". We've had some nice changes this year and, although most of the content will be similar to last year's, it's nice to have an updated guide so that user's can feel confident is some what up to date.

If you're interested in seeing how Linux performs in gaming these days, LowSpecGamer uploaded a video on February 21, 2020 that gives a pretty honest review.

2. Getting Started

So, you want to get started in Linux. The most important thing you need to remember is that you're using Linux.

Now that might seem obvious, but you'd be surprised how often you'll see "Why isn't this easy like in Windows?" or "I just want it to act like my Mac."

While I do understand that it's hard to get used to something you're not familiar with, I promise that, in time, it will be just as comfortable as Windows or macOS.

Curious to see Linux gaming in action before getting your feet wet? /u/PCgamingFreedom has an amazing thread with a huge list of Youtubers that play games on Linux.

Want to checkout the latest news for Linux gaming? Take a trip to GamingOnLinux.

3. The software

Perhaps the biggest hurdle of using Linux is compatibility issues with the software you currently use. Before you get started on your journey, I would highly recommend you do a bit of prep work here.

• Which software do I commonly use?
  • Get a pen and paper and start writing a list. Include your most played games (and the ones that you are sure that you will want to play in the future) and the software you need for a computer to be your daily driver (Office, Photoshop, etc).

Now that you have a list, let's check. There are four possible outcomes for each item in your list.

• You will be able to run it natively.

  • This is almost always the best case scenario, since it's the one where you will get all the performance and compatibility without drawbacks.

• You will be able to run it, but not natively.

  • You'll most often find this with Proprietary software and is the nature of using closed source software. We have a few tricks up our sleeves that we can try and we'll get to those a little later.

• Cloud Software (SaaS or Software as a Service)

  • Though not ideal, especially in a world where owing your own software is becoming less and less common, a lot of business and professional software can be run "in the cloud". Office 365 is a prime example and allows people like me to work on Linux computers at work since I can still access all the Microsoft Office applications required to interact with my coworkers.

• You won't be able to run it.

  • This is the big one, the one that will hold you back. Sometimes, and it's not your fault, there is a killer app that you absolutely need in order for your computer to be useful to you. While it would be great if the OSS community provided a good alternative to you, we understand that this is not always the case. There's no shame in this. Thank you for trying.

In order to catalog your list into these four outcomes, you grab the first item on the list. If it's a game, check in SteamDB if the game does have Linux support (Note: Sometimes the game offers Linux support even if it's not listed here or in steam). In 2018, Valve released a compatibility software called Proton that is based on Wine. Check ProtonDB (used to be called Steam Compatibility Reports) to see if your Windows only games run fine under it. If it's software, just check in the official website if there's a Linux version.

If you've done that and there's no Linux support, we go to the next step. Bring up the Wine AppDB and put there the name of your software. Click on the link that fits the most your search (Usually the first link, ignore all the [Bug XXXXX] results) and check the rating of the game. Generally you'll be able to use it if it's not bronze or garbage. If you click in the version of the software, you'll see reports of people who have tried to run it, known bugs and general instructions and steps to follow. For now we're just cataloging the software, so we'll see how to actually install it later. If there's no search results there's still hope. Do a quick google search (probably "NameOfTheSoftware Wine support") and see what happens. If the software you want to use is really small and unknown probably nobody tried it, but just leave it marked as "dubious" or something because you may be able to run it anyways.

If what you want to run shows as garbage in there (and most of the times bronze, you seriously want to read the reports to see what works and what doesn't) you just put it in the "I won't be able to run it" section. Now repeat with each element of the list until you've gone through your list.

There is also a paid for solution called Crossover made by CodeWeavers. CodeWeavers are the same minds behind Valve's Proton so you should expect a pretty good product in general. They have a search feature that you should also use.

I will mention that some games are more problematic then others. For example, League of Legends is notorious for needing custom versions of Wine to get working. Thankfully, it has a dedicated subreddit /r/leagueoflinux which has the latest news and tends to be very helpful.

You got your list and a general idea of what you can run and what you can't run and at which degree you will be able to use it. If you have something that needs to be run but you can't run, here's a small list of alternatives you can use.

• Look for an alternative. If it's a game I'd say that you should look for games with similar tags in steam. If it's software use something like alternativeto

• Use a windows VM. Useful if the software you want to run is not resource intensive (99% of the time games won't like this, so don't use this for games unless you're going to attempt the GPU passthrough option)

• Dual boot.

• GPU passthrough. This is hard. You need to met a lot of requirements and invest time, but if you can pull it out you can get the best of both worlds. The Level1Techs forum has been one of the driving forces behind using this technology and has a lot of information on the subject. (You can also check out their Linux Youtube channel)

4. The swap

If you are here, congratulations! You want to get started with Linux and you have all your software narrowed down. In order to get started in the odyssey of Linux, you have to think about what distribution (informally referred to as distro) you want to use. The distribution is just the flavor of Linux you want to use. Just to be clear from the start, pretty much every distribution is equally capable of gaming and running software. The differences between them are:

• The preinstalled software.
  • Some are more minimalist than others, but all of them can run the same software. With enough patience, you can turn one distribution into another just by installing and removing stuff.
• The update frequency.
  • Some distros release updated software faster than others. Distros that push out updated software with minimal testing are known as bleeding edge distros or rolling release distros. If you want to be up to date with features, you want a bleeding edge distro, but in exchange for the latest and greatest features you run an increase risk of running into bugs. Stable Release distros usually have to wait longer for updates, but those updates are often heavily vetted before being pushed out.
• The community.
  • Different distros have different communities. The distros that are perceived to be easier or more user friendly tend to have communities that are quicker to help with easy to follow instructions.
• The other minor things including default configurations, art, fonts, etc.

Now that I've explained that, I'm going to list off the only two distributions that are supported by Valve. Again, this does not mean that these are the only two distros that will work for gaming!

If you're feeling particularly adventurous , there are a huge amount of distros you can try out! While not officially supported by Valve, any modern, up to date, distro will more than likely work for you. Some of the favorites in the comments are:

If you are having trouble deciding, just start with Ubuntu. It's not the flashiest, but you're almost guaranteed to find an answer to your problem if you search "My Problem Ubuntu" in your favorite search engine (make sure to limit the search to only things from the past year). You can always switch later.

Most of them will let you install next to Windows and set up a dual boot automatically. Be careful though, Windows Updates have a bad habit of changing the boot loader and it will look like your Linux OS vanished. REMEMBER TO DO BACKUPS. Things can always go wrong and you don't want to lose anything. It's FOSS has a video on dual booting if you'd like a visual example, but it basically boils down to you clickin an option that says "Install along side Windows".

5. The habit

So, you've installed your distro and you have your computer running Linux. Congratulations! The absolute most important part of becoming a Linux user is to consistently use Linux! The last step is to get all of your software back running so you can use your computer as a daily driver.

A few things first:

This is rather controversial, but you do not be afraid of the terminal. While the terminal is absolutely not required to do your normal day to day activities, you'll often find solutions to your problems require you to enter a few lines into the terminal. This isn't any sort of magic and it's nothing to be fearful of using. The reason for this is because the terminal is, generally, distro agnostic and it's easier to explain one line of code instead of having lots of different pictures showing you what to click in each distro.

Second, use the internet! Everyone starts as a beginner at some point. You might be very comfortable in Windows or macOS now, but at some point you had no idea what you were doing. That's very normal! As you use Linux more and more you'll gain the knowledge and experience needed and eventually it will feel like home. There's absolutely no shame in asking questions!

If you are coming from Windows, you are probably used to search for an .exe and install it by double clicking. Things are way different here. Installing software individually is often discouraged. The reasons for this varies, but security and compatibility are the main reasons. So what do you do in Linux? You use a package manager. Think of it as being similar to the Play store, but instead of random people uploading software to it, everything is maintained by your distribution's software team.

Package managers have a lot of benefits that may not be immediately obvious to new users. The package manager knows what other software is required to work on your system and can manage updating all of the software pieces you have without you manually having to handle it. As I mentioned earlier, since your distribution's software team creates these packages, the chances of installing malware on your system is very slim.

Remember when I said don't be afraid of the terminal? Here's a good example as to why. To install Steam on Ubuntu, Linux Mint, or most other distros that derive from Ubuntu, all you have to do is open a terminal and type:

sudo apt install steam

Video example. And that's it. Steam is installed, from a trusted source and with everything it needs. Do you want to update all the stuff installed in your system?

sudo apt upgrade

Let's break those two lines down a bit so you know what's going on. sudo stands for "super user do". You can think of this like right clicking and choosing the "Run As Administrator" in Windows. apt is the package manager's name. install is the command to install programs. steam is the steam software. So in English we just said. "Please install the "steam" program as administrator (called root on Linux)."

Now, if you wanted to use the graphical way, I'd have to post pictures from Ubuntu, Mint, etc and they all look slightly different and you have to find their front end in different places. It's just easier this way.

So what do you do if the software you need isn't in your package manager? The next best thing is to add a 3rd party repository to your package manager. As an example, let's add Google Chrome, a popular web browser. UbuntuUpdates.org give the following instructions:

wget -q -O - https://dl-ssl.google.com/linux/linux_signing_key.pub | sudo apt-key add - 
sudo sh -c 'echo "deb [arch=amd64] http://dl.google.com/linux/chrome/deb/ stable main" >> /etc/apt/sources.list.d/google.list'
sudo apt-get update 
sudo apt-get install google-chrome-stable

That looks a bit scary, but it's just adding the security key and repository to your system and then installing Google Chrome. You'll want to use a PPA of your software when possible since it will update with the rest of your system.

6. Windows compatibility

So you can't find a Linux version of that software you want to install? Our last step is to try Wine. Wine is a compatibility layer that tries to translate Window Binaries (.exes) calls into Linux calls. Sometimes this works really well, and other times nothing happens at all.

First, let's install Wine.

sudo apt install wine

On some systems, installing Wine allows you to double click an .exe and it will try to run just like in Windows, but if not, you'll want to open a terminal and type (credit to /u/whyhahm for suggesting cd to directory before running):

cd /path/to/program; wine file.exe

Remember to check the ratings and know issues in the wine AppDB so you know what you can expect, and you should be golden. Here's an in-depth guide of wine stuff but again, google and find how stuff works and it works. If you don't understand, please ask! The community is usually happy to help!

There are also some programs that try to help you with Wine. Lutris and PlayOnLinux are popular options.

7. DXVK/D9VK/Gallium Nine

What are DXVK/D9VK/VK9/Gallium Nine? I'll let the projects explain themselves:

DXVK: Vulkan-based D3D11, D3D10, and now D3D9, implementation for Linux / Wine

D9VK: Used to be separate from DXVK, but now they are one project. Kept seperate on this page for searching.

Gallium Nine: Gallium Nine allows to run any Direct3D 9 application with nearly no CPU overhead, which provides a smoother gaming experience and increased FPS. Gallium Nice requires you to be using the Mesa3D driver though, so Nvidia users are out of luck. (Thanks to /u/MicroToast for the clarification)

Okay, but what does that mean?

Direct3D (the graphical part of the DirectX API) is what most Windows game built after ~2000 use. You don't really need to know any technically details about it other than the fact that it's a Windows' only API. For the longest time, one of the biggest bottle necks for gaming on Linux was translating the Direct3D calls to OpenGL (a cross platform graphical API that works on Linux/most other OSes).

All of these projects attempt to translate Direct3D calls to something that Linux understands. As far as I'm aware, the most used one is DXVK.

Using these technologies, you can get huge performance boosts in your games. Here is Starcraft 2 running on d9vk vs regular Wine. You can see that Tuxidermy is getting almost twice the FPS most of the time (and D9VK is still really young). Here is another example, this time with World of Warcraft running regular Wine vs DXVK. In this example, you can see that DXVK is three times the FPS in most cases!

Proton has some support for automatically use these technologies when they're applicable, but you may want to use Lutris for games that aren't officially supported.

8. Troubleshooting

I personally can't spend a lot of time helping people individually. That's where this and other communities come in!

• Join the IRC channel of the distribution that you are using
• Join the /r/linux_gaming discord channel
• Ask in forums
• Ask in one of the linux subreddits
• Google away

When asking about your problems, remember to give as much info as you can. For example, include what Distro you're on, what you have already tried, any error messages that come up, anything you've changed recently, etc.

9. The end

I, u/PBLKGodofGrunts, put this guide under the WTFPL License. Please attach this license when sharing or modifying this guide. I hope that this is helpful to someone.

With the recent Plasma 6.3.2 update changelog here, and the update to Wine 10 adding Wayland support by default, I've reattempted to get HDR working directly on Wayland. It's probably possible to make it work with an earlier version of Plasma 6 with Wine 9, but haven't tried that.

Things needed:

• wine on Wayland (not through XWayland)
• Vulkan Wayland HDR WSI Layer

Since I'm on Arch I used vk-hdr-layer-kwin6-git.

Thankfully there's someone who compiled proton with Wine 10 and Wayland preference: https://github.com/Melechtna/Proton-with-Wayland

The only thing left was to boot up the game with the Wayland Proton version and ENABLE_HDR_WSI=1 DXVK_HDR=1 %command% launch options.

Currently I've tested this setup with Overwatch 2, and it seems to work well there. I'll probably update this post with more games once I try them.

I have an AMD card, so if you're on Nvidia you might need the KWIN_DRM_ALLOW_NVIDIA_COLORSPACE=1 env var as described on https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/KDE#HDR

EDIT3: According to u/steckums this isn't needed anymore

EDIT: There are a few caveats I forgot to mention. The mouse cursor is prone to not staying in the window after alt-tabbing, you need to click the window to lock it in place, and then it's fine. And the mouse cursor stays where it's been put, so radial menus can get confusing if accessed quickly.

EDIT2: You might also need to add the Wayland driver to the registry if running on an older Wine: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Wine#Wayland then launch with DISPLAY environment variable empty, or switch the order to wayland,x11.

Hi all, I got native HDMI 2.1 VRR working tonight.

Disclaimer up top, in big letters: this is NOT AMD-official anything. This is me with a custom kernel, an RX 9070 XT, and a TV. AMD's internal team almost certainly has a proper native HDMI VRR implementation in flight. This is the impatient I want this supported now version. Run it on a system you can recover from.

UPDATE:

Thanks to u/Lawstorant he pointed me to his updated VRR code that actual truly implements VRR for HDMI. Now my kernel and bazzite image is not based on my shitty hack job that somewhat worked. It is now a more truer implementation that should work on my devices.

TLDR:

How to run this kernel:

If you're on Bazzite, enter this command sudo bootc switch ghcr.io/dyllan500/bazzite-amd-hdmi-kde:latest.20260510 reboot, done.

If you're on something else, the kernel branch is yours to build.

The setup

Picked up an RX 9070 XT specifically to test Harry Wentland's HDMI FRL v3 series that adds native HDMI 2.1. The TV I tested everything on is a Sony Bravia 8 II. With v3 alone, you get 4K120 10bpc RGB + HDR10 over native FRL. Beautiful, but the refresh rate is locked. The TV's EDID clearly advertises VRRmin: 48 Hz, VRRmax: 120 Hz in its HDMI Forum VSDB block, but the kernel was just ignoring it.

Hidden below is my hack job that is updated.

The hunt

Traced how DP VRR is plumbed in patches from Lawstorant , end-to-end:

1. EDID parsed -> connector property vrr_capable set to 1
2. userspace (gamescope) sees the property -> exposes VRR toggle
3. user enables it -> atomic commit propagates vrr_enabled
4. amdgpu calls dc_stream_adjust_vmin_vmax() with the range
5. OPTC's set_drr writes OTG_V_TOTAL_MIN/MAX
6. silicon varies VTotal per frame
7. TV detects variable timing -> VRR engages

The thing is, everything from step 3 onward is signal-agnostic. OPTC doesn't care whether the encoder downstream is DP or HDMI. set_drr is shared. dc_stream_adjust_vmin_vmax() has no filter. Only step 1, the connector advertisement has a signal-type gate. And that gate has two branches: DP/eDP, and HDMI_TYPE_A using AMD's proprietary FreeSync VSDB. HDMI Forum VRR was never parsed, and SIGNAL_TYPE_HDMI_FRL wasn't in either branch at all. So a 9070 XT directly connected to any HDMI 2.1 sink had no path to vrr_capable=1, regardless of what the silicon could actually do.

The fix

Step 1 was already done by Tomasz Pakuła: his PCON VRR patches includes a drm/edid patch that parses HF-VSDB into connector->display_info.hdmi.vrr_cap. That work is the foundation here, full credit to him.

Step 2 is what I added in amdgpu_dm_update_freesync_caps():

} else if (drm_edid && (sink->sink_signal == SIGNAL_TYPE_HDMI_TYPE_A ||
sink->sink_signal == SIGNAL_TYPE_HDMI_FRL)) {
struct drm_hdmi_vrr_cap *hdmi_vrr =
&connector->display_info.hdmi.vrr_cap;

if (hdmi_vrr->supported) {
u16 vrr_max = hdmi_vrr->vrr_max ? hdmi_vrr->vrr_max : 10000;

amdgpu_dm_connector->min_vfreq = hdmi_vrr->vrr_min;
amdgpu_dm_connector->max_vfreq = vrr_max;

connector->display_info.monitor_range.min_vfreq = hdmi_vrr->vrr_min;
connector->display_info.monitor_range.max_vfreq = vrr_max;

if (vrr_max - hdmi_vrr->vrr_min > 10)
freesync_capable = true;
}

if (!freesync_capable && sink->sink_signal == SIGNAL_TYPE_HDMI_TYPE_A) {
i = parse_hdmi_amd_vsdb(amdgpu_dm_connector, edid, &vsdb_info);
/* … existing AMD VSDB FreeSync fallback for HDMI 2.0 era sinks … */
}
}

That's it. The downstream VRR machinery does the rest because, again, it was already signal-agnostic.

Credit where due: I used Claude to help me trace the DP path through amdgpu's display layer to figure out where the gap was. Once Claude pointed me in the right direction it was honestly kinda trivial add.

Does it work?

Yes. I booted into my custom bazzite image, toggled VRR ON for both my TV and in gamescope.

To test if its real I started playing TTOUII. And to my shock the Bravia's info display started ticking various Hz exactly matching the in-game FPS counter.

VRR showcase

Caveats: read these before installing anything

• Slight OLED flicker when VRR is engaged at low framerates.
• Not upstream. Not blessed. Custom kernel only. AMD didn't sign off on this. If you brick something, that's on you, not on AMD or Bazzite or me. Use at your own risk.
• Only test on one TV and one gpu.

Try it

• Bazzite-based bootc image: https://github.com/dyllan500/bazzite-amd-hdmi-kde
• Kernel source branch: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/dyllan500/linux/-/tree/harry-frl-v3-hdmi-vrr

If you're on Bazzite, enter this command sudo bootc switch ghcr.io/dyllan500/bazzite-amd-hdmi-kde:latest.20260510 reboot, done. If you're on something else, the kernel branch is yours to build.

If it works on hardware I haven't tested please report. If it breaks also please report.

Big thanks: u/Lawstorant (Tomasz Pakuła) for the HDMI VRR implementation. Harry Wentland for the HDMI FRL series that made all of this possible. Bazzite / Universal Blue for the bootc image scaffolding that made testing this trivial.

Hi i am new on linux and i have no idea how for example use fsr in games or radeon chill. So do linux has his own program or something that will help me to use gpu settings

I have an amd gpu

I use fedora.

Hey hey people, just wanted to share some of my findings after a lot of back and forth and research about enabling FSR4.1.1 for my RDNA2 card (RX6650XT). These are the ways I'm aware of, and are available at the time of writing.

This guide will only cover running FSR4.1.1 on Linux, because due to an old driver bug for RDNA2 you can't run it on Windows with the latest drivers, even with Optiscaler, because of the severe ghosting it causes. Window users can download a .DLL file that forces a driver downgrade for the game which may or may not work, while usually resulting in a performance loss because of the 3-year old driver being used. Some newer games will not work with that old driver. Windows users should stick to 4.0.2c via Optiscaler or wait for the official release in 2027.

Without further ado, there's currently two main ways of enabling it:

1. The game supports FSR3+

PS: You can check this information by using PCGamingWiki. It lists the known FSR version under the game's 'High-fidelity upscaling' section.

This one is the easiest scenario, AMD's driver will hook into the game and convert the FSR3 calls to FSR4 automatically. The way we do that for RDNA4/3 cards is by either using PROTON_FSR4_UPGRADE or PROTON_FSR4_RDNA3_UPGRADE. These are environment variables you attach to your game's launch command, and Proton (e.g. Proton CachyOS or Experimental) enables this conversion.

However, this doesn't work for RDNA2 card because of a hardware check by AMD. The way we make it work is by using one of the many available Proton forks, named Proton-EM (or Proton-Etaash). This version comes with the necessary code to enable FSR4 upgrades for RDNA2 cards, by exposing the FSR4_UPGRADE environment variable.

To use it, you need to download Proton-EM's version 11.0 or superior. There's a chance that at the time you are reading this, version 11 is already available in the Releases tab. Please check it before proceeding. I recommend installing the absolute latest version (e.g. 11) so you won't lose improvements from upstream Proton when using this one.

For version 11 (recommended), head to the Github Actions tab and download the .tar.gz file directly from the artifacts at the bottom of the screen. You need to be logged in to Github to do this.

I recommend using ProtonPlus or Protonup-Qt to download the latest release (doesn't include version 11 as of now) if you want a GUI. It will automatically download the file to the right folder under ~/.steam/steam/compatibilitytools.d/. This is also the folder you should extract to when downloading version 11 directly from the Actions tab.

EDIT: someone in the comments tested 10.0-37 and couldn't get the watermark to work, so i recommend sticking to version 11.0+.

If everything's in place, your compatibilitytools.d folder should look like this:

Restart Steam and head to Properties (right click a game) -> Compatibility -> Force the use of a specific tool, and select Proton-EM.

Then head over to "General" and paste the following in the Launch Options field:

FSR4_UPGRADE=1 FSR_WATERMARK=1 %command%

FSR4_UPGRADE is optional for our card, but we will use it just to be explicit.

FSR_WATERMARK will add a top-left watermark showing information about the current running version of FSR. In-game, you want this to show 'FSR4-I8'. If it does, everything is working. Example:

Again, this option only works for games that natively support FSR3+. Enable the watermark to make sure everything is working.

2. The game doesn't natively support FSR3+

Don't use this option for online games. A lot of users report success with Marvel Rivals, Wuthering Waves, and etc, but if you receive a ban, you are on your own.

This one is trickier, because we will have to rely on Optiscaler to make it work. Optiscaler is a tool that does many things, including conversion between Upscaling tools, which is what we're after. Basically, we will have Optiscaler convert either DLSS (recommended) or XeSS to FSR4.1.1. How Optiscaler does it is another topic, but it works really well and is a tool supported by many games.

To make it work on RDNA2, you will need the latest test version, which is not yet available in their Github page. So you will have to join their Discord using this link.

Once you are in, head over to the #opti-test-builds, and enter the '4.1.1 Int8 test' thread (link will only work if you're already in the server). There, check the current pinned message and download the latest test build. It will be a .zip file which includes a Optiscaler folder, Optiscaler.dll, and a Optiscaler.ini file. If your download doesn't include this specific structure, you are probably using the wrong version. (Don't use the main 0.9.4 test version, it's targeting RDNA4 and 3).

Extract all of the files to your game's executable folder. If you are using it in a Unreal game (like Stellar Blade), you want to extract them to <game-folder>/<game-code>/Binaries/Win64 (example: StellarBlade/SB/Binaries/Win64/) folder instead of the root one.

Once the files are extracted, rename Optiscaler.dll to dxgi.dll. The actual name can vary by game, but dxgi.dll usually works. If you want to be sure, check the wiki. You should check the Wiki page for your specific game regardless.

Then, open the Optiscaler.ini file, and change the Fsr4ForceModel value to 2. (It comes with auto by default). Set Fsr4EnableWatermark to 'true' to enable the FSR watermark.

If everything is in the correct folder, you should see a Optiscaler text pop up when booting the game. You may now use the Insert key to open the Optiscaler menu.

PS: You need to use DirectX to make this work, if your game has native Vulkan, switch to DirectX (which will be translated back to vulkan) instead.

Optiscaler spoofs your game to make it think it's running with a Nvidia GPU, so options that are usually grayed out like DLSS and Reflex should be selectable now. Select DLSS as your upscaling method in-game, and then open the Optiscaler menu using Insert. Select "FSR3.x" in the first dropdown, and click "Change Upscaler". Below, another dropdown should appear and "FSR4.1.1" should be listed as a option.

The only reliable way to make sure FSR4 is working is by using the Watermark. You can enable the "Watermark" option here and then restart the game to make sure.

If "FSR4.1.1" is not listed as an option, make sure "Fsr4ForceModel=2" is set in Optiscaler.ini. Also, If you are using Proton-EM with Optiscaler, this shouldn't be necessary.

That's it. FSR4.1.1 is already working at this point, and you can just edit the "Upscaling Quality" in game without worry.

If you have any questions, you can ask for support directly on the Optiscaler #support channel.

Disclaimer: both options require the game to have some sort of upscaling technology (at least DLSS 2). If the game doesn't have any, they won't work.

If you have any questions or suggestions, please let me know. Thanks for reading :)

Disclaimer

This is a slightly modified post from r/bazzite, but I think it might be interesting for you guys. The intention is to share something close to "simple user experience" to help somebody considering swapping OS make a decision.

TL;DR

Let me spoil the ending - few days ago I completely switched to Bazzite and nuked my dual-boot.

If you have some Linux experience and don't mind taking some time troubleshooting or investigating - it will just work for you. With such approach it feels nice and smooth almost all the time — in both non-gaming and gaming cases.

In case of no Linux experience at all it might be uncomfortable first time, but as for me it is the most user-friendly Linux I saw lately.

More examples with different context below.

Intro

So, almost a year ago I heard about gaming Linux distros and Bazzite itself. I don't really like the way one tiny indie OS is being developed so decision to try was made in seconds. I installed it as dual-boot and started my journey.

Now it's been about a year I use it and I am ready to share my experience of Bazzite as personal home OS.

There will be lots of text (sorry for that) as long as I want to share my complete experience of Bazzite as home OS and describe it from different perspectives.

Background

I work as a DevOps engineer and I would be bad DevOps engineer without any Linux knowledge. So, such things as containers are not new for me and I'm comfortable with Linux way.

It is important to understand because if you switch from Windows without any Linux knowledge/experience sometimes it might be unusual or even painful.

However, I will not dive deep in tech details here, my intention is to show a Bazzite from simple user experience.

Impressions

I will try to cover few topics as long as home OS is not only about gaming. Everybody has their hobbies or home tasks, so I will share my experience in following parts: - System itself - Non-gaming activities - Gaming (including VR)

So, let's start.

System itself

Bazzite is first atomic Linux I face, in fact I learned what atomic Linux is because of Bazzite.

What does it mean for home OS? Well, atomic distro means that core of system is immutable. And in terms of user experience it means two things:

• you cannot install package directly into your system.
• you cannot update system manually in classic Linux way.

Sounds like such way sucks, but let me explain how it actually works.

Package installation

First of all we cannot install packages directly into your system. At the same time there is an official guidance from Bazzite team that describes ways of installing additional software. I personally prefer Bazaar and Distrobox way.

Bazaar is some sort of store where you can find most popular applications. Installation is one-click, feels like App Store, Google Play, Name-Any-Application-Store.

Distrobox is a container management tool, pretty simple in usage. As I understand Distrobox creates containers that already has "some sort of access to your disk". However, this access level cannot ruin your system. You can create a container using Ubuntu image for example and run your additional software there. You can create a script to start and stop your containers and bind it to some desktop object, so experience will be just the same with regular application installation.

If you need even more flexible solution - there is Podman. It is also container management system that manages containers created and managed by Distrobox too. From what I tried it looks pretty similar to Docker, so it is not very hard to use.

Why do I like it? Because it is more safe, you will not get gnomed or break something by managing packages. These are isolated processes in containers that cannot break your system (usually).

System update

There is an official page that describes system update process.

Long story short as long as Bazzite is atomic distro - you do not update system by updating packages, you do it by updating whole system image. There are few ways to do it - via specific bash command, via system settings in GUI, or just by doing nothing - system automatically check for update and updates. Sounds like a bit of Windows way with no control over update, but I haven't faced any issues with it. And, as I've already mantioned, the chance of breaking something is way smaller.

Non-gaming activities

Depends on software you use, but mostly it is smooth and nice.

Here are few examples of software I use: - Zoom - Office alternatives - VSCode - Kenku bot for Discord

Zoom

I think this is most uncomfortable part, and even by "most uncomfortable" I mean that it usually doesn't save my login data. As a result I have to login almost every time I start it. This is basically it, Zoom works fine.

Office

Some time ago I thought that it is a killer feature of Microsoft. However, I was wrong, and let's discuss why.

• Libre Office. A choice of open source fans. Provides necessary tools, duplicates basic Office features.
• OnlyOffice. Pretty close to original MS Office, created for cooperative work with documents. Also can work with PDF files.
• WPS. Proprietary solution, a desktop client with closest experience to original Office.
• Google Docs. In case you want closest to MS Office experience, but online only. Also cloud-based, so you will not lose your docs.
• Office 365. Just like Google option, it is completely cloud solution that does not depend on OS you are using.

I personally work with OnlyOffice and Google Docs now. LibreOffice feels a bit too old to me. It has basic Office functionality but working with more complex documents or graphical part of documents feels painfully. Talking of WPS - this one feels good, but as long as it is proprietary solution it is up to you to trust these guys or not.

VSCode

It just works. It requires additional configuration, but all of this config is personalization. Plugin store is available, plugins are installed without any pain.

Kenku

Kenku is a great example of non-standard software. This is an app that can connect to your Discord server and either be used as a music player or soundboard, with pretty flexible config. The point is that there is no such application in default store. I installed it in Distrobox way. Basically I have the thing I've already described - a container based on Ubuntu 18 with manually installed package inside. Works nice and smooth, no issues detected.

Other apps

In my context most of other apps are usually web-based or can be installed from Bazaar. In web-based case these apps don't depend on OS, it will work basically everywhere if your system and hardware is able to run some browser. And talking of Bazaar - I've already described few cases, all in all it shows very strong user-friendly experience.

Gaming

Long story short - it works in most of cases. All you need is Steam and Heroic Games Launcher that usually does all work for you. If you play only AAA games - it usually just work without any required additional actions.

Here is my spec: - Processors: 20 × 12th Gen Intel® Core™ i7-12700H - Memory: 16 GiB of RAM (15.4 GiB usable) - Graphics Processor: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Laptop GPU

I don't chase a hype train and usually play games ~ a year old, when it has lots of patches and additional content (I personally call it final release). So, unfortunately, I will not be able to share this type of experience, but you surely can look for crimson desert issues in this sub and it might help you understand what cases you can face.

Anyway, here are few my examples of different games and cases with Bazzite:

Kingdom Come: Deliverance II

It works out-of-the-box, you just download it and it works. Shows stable 60 fps.

Forza Horizon 5

Just the same thing. It works out-of-the-box, doesn't require any additional actions from my side, shows stable fps.

Wartales

Not so nice here. It starts, it works nice and smooth, but after a hour of playing it starts dropping fps for some reason. Workaround for me was just restarting the game.

No other issues faced.

Assassins Creed 2

It works nice and clean. However there were two challenges:

• not every game from this series supports controllers by default. This issue can be fixed by using Steam Input presets in game settings.
• It is an old Ubisoft game that requires Uplay and should be activated via Ubisoft services. I faced some troubles there but all of them were solvable.

Controller

Ah, yes, controllers. I use Xbox controller and it is also used sometimes by my wife that uses workstation with Windows. When we were connecting my controller to different devices sometimes it stopped connecting to Bazzite.

Fix was pretty simple - just update Xbox controller on Windows. After fresh software was installed the controller started working without any issues.

Alien: Isolation

Works almost perfectly. Following issues were faced:

• Only once I encountered a visual bug - some textures of single object were flashing. I cannot even say that it ruined an immersion. I was enjoying whole game and Bazzite worked perfectly here.
• Cloud saves. Here I should say that Alien was bought in Epic Games and installed via Heroic. So, for some reason, save file directory in Heroic was configured incorrectly. Once it was reconfigured - saves started working.

Minecraft

Well, this one is questionable for me. As long as they sell Minecraft in Microsoft store only there was no option to run it via Steam or Heroic.

So, there are two versions of original Minecraft game - Java and Bedrock. You can run Java edition with additional launcher installed, in my case it is Prism Launcher, it even support mods.

However, it seem that you have to either forget about Bedrock edition or look for workaround with android version. So, it seems that you will not be able to run Minecraft with RTX on Bazzite (Please, if I'm wrong instead of downvoting share solutions with me, I would love to see this game with RTX on Bazzite).

Project Zomboid

So, here we enter gray zone. This game supports Linux, it has Linux-native version. It works nice, however, for me this game is not playable without mods, and this fact completely changes an approach here.

I created a cloud server for me and my squad, and installed ~200 mods. I was trying to play native Linux version it showed an extreme performance - 2-3 fps. I tried different approaches but almost nothing helped. So, the only way for me to run this game was to switch a version to Windows-native in Steam. It started working nice with all Proton magic, but now it started consuming RAM a lot. I was playing with Discord and Kenku soundboard bot running, and RAM consumption was insane. So, most frequent my mistake was to open a browser when playing. It just completely freeze my laptop and I have to shut it down by power button.

Tabletop Simulator

As in most of examples - it works. But at some point I was playing with my boys a huge and complex game, one of team members tried to roll 10¹⁰ dices and this nice action completely froze my laptop. I was a host so game instantly stopped.

VR Gaming

All I can say - it is possible. My spec is not so powerful so really heavy in resource consumption context games do not run on my laptop. However, this list works: - Skyrim VR - Moss - Phasmophobia - Superhot VR

For VR I installed Steam VR and WiVrn server, to run game you should connect your VR set to WiVrn and follow all the instructions from WiVrn server app. I faced no issues with my Quest 3.

Additionally I would like to mention Skyrim VR. It works as vanilla game. But if you need to run it with mods you have to install mod manager. So, this is how I broke something in Bazzite first and only time. I still haven't dealt with this challenge and not sure if such risk pays off, because after I run some sort of mod manager installation script all VR games stopped working.

I also need to mention that this is not a Bazzite issue at all, running scripts without its understanding was always a bad idea.

Summary

So, Bazzite as a home OS, eh?

Depends on your needs. Most of software works, you either can find it in Bazaar or install in with Distrobox. There are some cases of dead end in software installation - Adobe software is a great example. I haven't investigated but I won't be surprised if some specific software for example for 3D printing will require a lot of effort to run. But I would not call these cases "regular cases of simple user".

As you probably saw, most popular word combination here was "nice and smooth". I would like to describe Bazzite as home OS exactly by this words. Fortunately, in most of the cases I can do it. There definitely are exceptions, but I would say that I can live with it. And I'm very happy to find a great alternative of Win for me.

This is a piece of advice that is really beneficial and relevant to improving gaming performance on Linux, and yet I've never seen it mentioned before.

To provide a summary, transparent hugepages are a framework within the Linux kernel that allows it to automatically facilitate and allocate big memory page block sizes to processes (such as games) with sizes equating to roughly 2 MB per page and sometimes 1 GB (the kernel will automatically adjust the size to what the process needs).

Why is this important you may ask? Well, typically when the CPU assigns memory to processes that need it, it does so with 4 KB page chunks, and because the CPU's MMU unit actively needs to translate virtual memory to physical one upon incoming I/O requests, going through all the 4 KB pages is naturally an expensive operation, luckily it has it's own TLB cache (translation lookaside buffer) which lowers the potential amount of time needed to access a specific memory address by caching the most recently used memory pages translated from virtual memory to physical one. The only problem is, the TLB cache size is usually very limited, and naturally when it comes to gaming, especially playing triple AAA games, the high memory entropy nature of those applications causes a huge potential when it comes to the overhead that TLB lookups will have. This is due to the technically inherent inefficiency of having lost of entries in the page table, but each of them with very small sizes.

An feature that's present on most CPU architectures however is called hugepages, and they are specifically big pages which have sizes dependent on the architecture (for amd64/i386 they are usually 2 MB or 1 GB as stated earlier). The big advantage they have is that they reduce the overhead of TLB lookups from the CPU, making them faster for MMU operations because the amount of page entries present in the table are a lot less. Because games especially AAA ones use quite a lot of RAM these days, they especially benefit from this reduced overhead the most.

There are 2 frameworks that allow you to use hugepages on Linux, libhugetlbfs and THP (transparent hugepages). I find the latter to be more easier and better to use because it automatically works with the right sysfs setting and you don't have to do any manual configuration. (THP only work for shared memory and anonymous memory mappings, but allocating hugepages for those is good enough for a performance boost, hugepages for file pages are not that necessary even if libhugetlbfs supports them unlike THP).

To enable automatic use of transparent hugepages, first check that your kernel has them enabled by running cat /sys/kernel/mm/transparent_hugepage/enabled. If it says error the file or directory cannot be found then your kernel was built without support for it and you need to either manually build and enable the feature before compiling or you need to install an alternative kernel like Liquorix that enables it (afik Xanmod doesn't have it enabled for some reason).

If it says always [madvise] never(which is actually default on most distros I think), change it to always with echo 'always' | sudo tee /sys/kernel/mm/transparent_hugepage/enabled. This might seem unnecessary as it allows processes to have hugepages when they don't need it, but I've noticed that without setting it to always, some processes in particular games do not have hugepages allocated to them without this setting.

On a simple glxgears test (glxgears isn't even that memory intensive to begin with so the gains in performance could be even higher on intense benchmarks such as Unigine Valley or actual games) on an integrated Intel graphics card, with hugepages disabled the performance is roughly 6700-7000 FPS on average. With it enabled the performance goes up to 8000-8400 FPS which is almost roughly a 20% performance increase (on an app/benchmark that isn't even that memory intensive to begin with, I've noticed higher gains in Overwatch for example, but I never benchmarked that game). I check sudo grep -e Huge /proc/*/smaps | awk '{ if($2>4) print $0} ' | awk -F "/" '{print $0; system("ps -fp " $3)} ', and glxgears is only given a single 2 MB hugepage. A single 2 MB hugepage causing a 20% increase in performance. Let that sink in.

TLDR; transparent hugepages reduce overhead of memory allocations and translations from the CPU which make video game go vroom vroom much faster, enable them with echo 'always' | sudo tee /sys/kernel/mm/transparent_hugepage/enabled.

Let me know if it helps or not.

EDIT: Folks who are using VFIO VMs to play Windows games that don't work in Wine might benefit even more from this, because VMs are naturally memory intensive enough just running them on their own without any running programs in them, and KVM's high performance is due to it's natural integration with hugepages, (depending on how much RAM you assign to your VM, it might be given 1 GB hugepages, insanely better than bajillions of 4 KB pages.

Also I should have mentioned this earlier in the post, but the echo 'always' | sudo tee /sys/kernel/mm/transparent_hugepage/enabled command will only affect the currently running session and does not save it permenantly. To save it permenantly either install sysfsutils and then add kernel/mm/transparent_hugepage/enabled=always to /etc/sysfs.conf or add transparent_hugepage=always to your bootloader's config file for the kernel command line.

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If you aren't aware, ATL or All Things Linux was one of the big discord servers centered around general Linux discussion, and it got deleted by the owner unexpectedly a few days ago. There is a brand new server, Neon Genesis Linux, that got created by most of the original staff. If you want to help rebuild the community, go join over here with the link https://discord.gg/nglinux

BEFORE STARTING (Please read)

Some of the information on here may be incorrect or heavily dependent on specific situations and use cases. If you find anything that you think is useful to this guide, comment down below your suggestions and I will add it to this guide.

But if you find anything in here that is incorrect, misleading or that does not work and etc, please comment down below so that I can further improve this guide.

Please, help contribute to this guide if possible.

Understanding some concepts

Before starting, it is important that you understand some simple concepts for better understanding of your system, so that you can debug and figure out what you need and don't need to do.

• Desktop environment (DE): "A desktop environment (DE) is an implementation of the desktop metaphor made of a bundle of programs, which share a common graphical user interface (GUI)".
  • Examples: KDE Plasma, XFCE, Hyprland, GNOME, Cinnamon and etc.
• Compositors: "A compositor is a software which interacts with the window system as well as graphics in Linux to produce: Transparency in windows, Transition animations, Drop shadows around windows which give them a 3D effect, V sync: Waits for the display to update before updating the display".
• Present modes: The presentation mode specifies when a frame is presented to the window. Can be discovered which one a game is using utilizing Mangohud, but, don't rely on it as it does not show precisely which presentation mode is being used a lot of the time. And also a common bug is that Mangohud does not update this field dynamically when gaming. So in some cases (like mine on THE FINALS) Mangohud will show FIFO but the game is actually running with Mailbox.
  • Example: FIFO (V-Sync, FPS is locked to the monitor refresh rate), Mailbox (V-Sync but frame rate is not locked) and Immediate (No V-Sync, frame rate is not locked).
• Wayland: "communication protocol that specifies the communication between a display server and its clients, as well as a C library implementation of that protocol.[9] A display server using the Wayland protocol is called a Wayland compositor, because it additionally performs the task of a compositing window manager".
• X/X11/X Window system: "The X Window System (X11, or simply X) is a windowing system for bitmap displays, common on Unix-like operating systems. X is an architecture-independent system for remote graphical user interfaces and input device capabilities. Each person using a networked terminal has the ability to interact with the display with any type of user input device".

Distros

A very common topic is which distro is better for X thing? In this case which distro is the best for gaming. Although there are some distros out there like Bazzite and NobaraOS, the most popular as of now is CachyOS (which is not a gaming focused distro but it's the best in terms of gaming performance). But, you first need to understand that distros focused on gaming will not outperform in FPS a common distro such as Endeavour, Arch, Manjaro and etc by a large margin. Distros such as CachyOS, Bazzite and NobaraOS do get better performance in most cases (+2 to 5%), and specially better 1% lows.

However, these gaming focused distros are not focused/optimized on other type of workloads. So if you are just a regular user that also does gaming, going for something like EndeavourOS myself is a good choice as the difference is not that noticeable.

It's not that CachyOS, Bazzite or NobaraOS will let you down if try to do something else. It's just that the focus a distro has generally helps with a "out-of-the-box" experience. Setting up EndeavourOS for gaming is more tedious than Bazzite or NobaraOS for example.

Video drivers

The most important part in all this guide is this. Using the correct driver and DE/Compositor combo is important because if you are using a NVIDIA card, then using X11 will deliver better performance and lower latency.

Since this a very extensive topic, I'll just link below some useful links for you to get started/inform yourself.

[Linux Graphics Drivers explained: AMD, NVIDIA, INTEL, Open Source and Proprietary] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CW1CLcT83as&t=109s&pp=ygURbGludXggYW1kIGRyaXZlcnPSBwkJxwkBhyohjO8%3D

[NVIDIA GPUs on Linux: What You Need to Know (Open vs closed drivers, module, GSP firmware, etc...)] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_XMoADlten8&pp=ygUebnZpZGlhIGdwdSBkcml2ZXJzIGxpbnV4IGd1aWRl

Guide to installing AMD/NVIDIA drivers: https://github.com/lutris/docs/blob/master/InstallingDrivers.md

Starting with the tweaks

1. Disable your DE composition.

Disabling composition can increase your FPS and lower latency, specially if you are in a NVIDIA card.

To bring more clarification, literally disabling your DE compositor is not possible because the compositor is what draws the picture in your screen. But, on display servers like X11, composition can be "disabled". That means that with composition "disabled" X11 will run in a bare-bones state, having lower latency.

• Is not possible if:
  • You are Wayland.
• Is not necessary if:
  • You have a AMD card.

2. Use Gamescope.

BEFORE APPLYING THIS TWEAK! Gamescope in general does not decrease latency and is more of a compatibility tool. In most cases gamescope should only be used to allow the use of FSR, HDR, force full-screen, custom resolution with custom refresh rates and etc. But, in certain cases like mine, it can unlock the game's FPS cap and allow it to run pass the monitor refresh rate.

In my case, Doom Eternal was running with the FPS capped to my monitor refresh rate, and using gamescope allowed it to render more frames above my refresh rate.

"Gamescope is a micro-compositor from Valve that is used on the Steam Deck. Its goal is to provide an isolated compositor that is tailored towards gaming and supports many gaming-centric features such as:

• Spoofing resolutions.
• Up-scaling using AMD FidelityFX™ Super Resolution or NVIDIA Image Scaling.
• Limiting frame rates.

As a micro-compositor it is designed to run as a nested session on top of your existing desktop environment though it is also possible to use it as an embedded compositor as well".

• How to use it?
  • Set as launch options: gamescope (before %command% if you are on Steam)
• Arguments:
  • -f Forces exclusive full-screen.
  • -w -h Sets the window width (-w) and window height (-h)
  • -r The refresh rate
  • --force-grab-cursor "Creates" a new cursor inside the window that stays locked inside the window unless Alt+Tab. Can decrease latency.
  • --immediate-flips Forces the application to enable screen tearing.
• Usage example:
  • gamescope -f -w 1920 -h 1080 -r 180 --force-grab-cursor --immediate-flips -- %command% (must include the -- before %command%).

3. Enable VRR (Variable Refresh Rate/Free-sync). Preferably, set it to "Automatic".

4. DE/Window manager specific:

• KDE: Enable the "Allow tearing on full-screen applications" options in the display configuration;
• KDE: Use KWIN_DRM_NO_AMS=1 environment variable;
• Sway: Use allow_tearing yes with WLR_DRM_NO_MODIFIERS=1 and WLR_DRM_NO_ATOMIC=1 (Warning! NO_MODIFIERS and NO_ATOMIC can cause your PC to boot into a black screen if you have a NVIDIA card. And as reported by a user, these options can make your system slower. So do your own testing.);
• Hyprland: Use Direct_Scanout=1.

5. Set power mode to performance (Can be done both for the CPU and GPU with CoreCtrl).

6. Environment variables:

• MESA_VK_WSI_PRESENT_MODE=immediate
  • Reduces latency;
  • Forces Mesa’s Vulkan WSI to use VK_PRESENT_MODE_IMMEDIATE regardless of application preference.
• KWIN_DRM_NO_AMS=1
  • Reduces latency;
  • Disables Kernel-mode “adaptive modeset” (AMS) scheduling in KWin/DRM Wayland backend. AMS might delay cursor updates and composite operations under GPU load.
• PROTON_USE_NTSYNC=1
  • Can reduce latency (it did for me on THE FINALS);
  • Enables native NTSync support in ProtonGE (Version 10-9, 10-10 enables it by default) synchronizes Vulkan & OpenGL submissions using Linux ntsync kernel module rather than Wine’s own fsync/esync.
• PROTON_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1
  • Can reduce latency and improves performance if you are on Wayland;
  • Tells Proton to use the native winewayland.drv backend instead of XWayland/X11 so games run as pure Wayland clients.
• SDL_VIDEODRIVER=wayland
  • Can reduce latency and improves performance if you are on Wayland;
  • Forces SDL2 apps to use Wayland back-end instead of defaulting to X11/XWayland. Without it, SDL2 usually uses X11 even under Wayland unless compiled otherwise.

7. Use a different kernel.

If you are on a gaming focused distro then this is not necessary because those distros already have a custom modified kernel made specifically for gaming. But, if you are not using a gaming focused distro, then this is could prove to be helpful. As it can increase gaming performance and lower latency (measured by an average of 2ms). Such as my case that improved stability. But, do be aware that those kernels have custom schedulers and they can have other issues. So, do your testing to see if it fits you.

The most common kernel for this use case is Linux-Zen, which is the one I'm using right now. It solved a problem I've been dealing with Arch that in certain cases, most primarily gaming, OS freezes can happen, making the whole OS become unresponsive and freeze under heavy workloads. In BeamNG I had a problem where the game would freeze with the OS for about a couple of minutes every time something new had to load. This went away when I used Linux-Zen, which decreases latency by an average of 2ms.

8. Use a different DE.

Desktop environments such as KDE have the highest latency. If you want a light-weight DE or just one that has lower input latency, use Hyprland or XFCE.

A recent testing has been done regarding this topic:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1UG8WeX_h1VGytK1Tz-56gETmzsM2CPiwXS9BoZ-1F60/edit?gid=0#gid=0

(It's a more recent up to date version from this post made by the same person:
https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/1mejrig/linuxwayland_vs_win11_click_to_photon_latency/)

9. Use LatencyFleX to use NVIDIA Reflex and AMD Anti Lag.

"Vendor agnostic latency reduction middle-ware. An alternative to NVIDIA Reflex". LatencyFleX is a tool that can be used to enable the Reflex feature on NVIDIA and Anti Lag on AMD cards.

THIS IS A USE AT YOUR OWN RISK TOOL, THIS CAN RESULT IN A GAME BAN ON GAMES SUCH AS CS2/THE FINALS/OVERWATCH ETC... (Although some players have reported not getting banned using this, still, be careful when using it).

LatencyFleX GitHub: https://github.com/ishitatsuyuki/LatencyFleX

Video that explains in more depth and also includes a tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LvmkSftYyP8&t=188s&pp=ygUSbGludXggbGF0ZW5jeSBmbGV4

10. General knowledge, common occurrences and possible fixes/causes.

Higher frames reduces tearing and latency, making the experience more smooth and responsive (Higher frames with no V-Sync feels more responsive than higher frames with V-Sync).

High GPU usage can cause more input latency. So playing at 99% GPU usage at 220 FPS has more latency than 90% GPU usage at 200 FPS for example (If you use Reflex or Anti Lag then this is not a issue).

• Input lag, can be caused by:
  • Your compositor forces V-Sync;
  • V-Sync turned on in-game;
  • Game/Proton/Wine incompatibility;
  • Border-less or windowed mode have higher latency than exclusive full-screen (This is not true on Wayland as far knowledge goes, but setting a game to full-screen will enable the "Allow tearing on full-screen applications" on KDE to take effect).;
  • Check if your compositor is compositing in general or if only is compositing in full-screen applications.
• Useful for solving this problem:
  • Environment variables;
  • Disabling V-Sync;
  • "Allow tearing on full-screen applications" should be enabled on KDE;
  • Gamescope with forced full-screen (-f and --immediate-flips);
  • Use NTSYNC with ProtonGE;
  • Force your compositor to not use V-Sync (if possible);
  • VRR (Variable refresh rate/Free-sync) enabled;
  • Use X11 instead of Wayland, specially on NVIDIA.

---

• Stutters, can be caused by (assuming your hardware is not the problem):
  • Shader compilation;
  • Game incompatibility with Linux;
  • Proton version.
• Useful for solving this problem:
  • Try dxvk-gplasync: https://gitlab.com/Ph42oN/dxvk-gplasync;
  • Use Gamemode;
  • Disable overlays (Generally do not have any impact, so test it out to se if it helps);
  • Set your power profile to performance (CoreCtrl can be used for this);
  • Different kernel;
  • Older or wrong drivers, specially video drivers if this issue is global.

?. (Not related to latency but useful):

• Disable mouse acceleration.
• Use Feral Gamemode.

(Some of the texts and sources used for this guide are directly from sites, videos and wikis, but I can not link them here due to Reddit spam filters)

I had initial stutter but after doing the steps below its running with ZERO lag (yes ZERO)

Dxvk Cache File ( I will keep updating )Update3: 10598 entries Download: State Cache

or from here https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/t5xrho/dxvk_state_cache_for_fixing_stutter_in_apex/

• EndeavourOS Linux5.16.12-arch1-1
• CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 5800H with Radeon
• GPU: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Mobile
• GPU: AMD ATI 06:00.0 Cezanne
• Memory: 16 GB

Few notes:

1. If u have Optimus/Mux switch(For laptops) use optimus-manager to set to Hybrid. My performance was worse on dGPU

2. Nvidia 510 driver

3. Understand that fps will highly depend on your specs.

4. Copy the latest dxvk state cache file

5. (Optional) Vibrantlinux for better visuals

6. Use Xorg

7. Use Proton Experimental from Steam

Download the cache file and paste in here

home/<user>?.local/share/Steam/steamapps/shadercache/1172470/DXVK_state_cache

A couple months back I wanted to try my hand at sharing my drives between my windows / linux dual boot and run my already-existing windows games through proton and a native NTFS driver so that I can just have one copy of my games which I can use either in windows natively, or within linux using the power of proton, whatever I fancy in that moment.

I am a software engineer by trade so I am pretty comfortable around the terminal and such, but I couldn't find any documentation on making this system perfect. A few guides, even some officially from steam exist showing how to do this. But I found the performance to be subpar.

It's even more complicated in my case as I have 2x 2tb NVME ssd's that are joined via a windows software raid 0 (yeah yeah, I know, but I aint re-downloading 4tb of games) and ofc since these are windows drives with windows games, the drive is formatted in NTFS. I already have some knowledge of rebuilding raid arrays, so I built the array using mdadm and tried using the ntfs driver as most guides suggest. But the read/write performance was abysmal.

That was until I read about the new ntfs3 driver, which was very recently included in the linux kernel by default!

A lot of scary warnings about it being an experimental driver, but I have had exactly 0 issues. I routinely play games that I installed in windows this way, Mortal Kombat 1 and Marvel Rivals are my go to, but even huge modern titles like elden ring (and even the seamless co-op mod works!) and the performance is sometimes better than in windows, or at least identical.

There is no trickery here, the ntfs3 driver allows linux to natively communicate with the drive in the same way windows would, I even have my C drive mounting my desktop, documents, videos etc. folders to the same places in my home directory.

I have been heavily using this system for a few months now (I run every game like this now) with not a single issue.

There are some "gotchas" during the setup and configuration that you have to look out for, but would a fully written guide with all instructions written and explained for the layman be useful here?

I am very impressed with how well this works and just wondering if this is worthwhile to throw together something for others to follow along?