Hello all,
At around the mid Nov this year I had enough with Windows especially the latest 23H2 pack that forced a lot of what I call malware back on my system when I had put several blockers from being re-installed.
A bit of a background. I have been using Windows since 3.1 with MSDOS 6.2 since forever and I have seen everything from Microsoft. At the same time I'm a senior Microsoft engineer and have been for more than a decade.
Back in 2018 I decided to maximise my hosting game server and installed Ubuntu. I didn't have the greatest of times but I always enjoy the tinkering process of solving something, so I stuck with it.
Fast-forward to Nov this year, by chance I stumble upon a YouTube video show-casing Garuda Dragonized edition and how it performed in gaming. I was very skeptical as I tried gaming on Linux back in my college days and it was unworkable and unplayable.
Having had enough with Windows, I took the plunge. Now something about me, when I take the plunge on something, I'm going in both hands and legs. There isn't a compromise.
Created the boot drive, backed up my data to my NAS and purged the system from Windows. Within 30 mins of installing the OS and updating (slow internet, the OS installed everything from drivers to tools that I needed for gaming. I was surprised to be honest and I actually spend the rest of the afternoon making sure that everything was working by running benchmarks and low and behold, everything was. The CPU (5800X3D) was boosting at default values, the GPU (6800XT) was stable with the built in OC profile and was actually pushing better maximums than I had in Windows.
After my satisfaction that everything was good, it was time to test out and real gaming. I installed Satisfactory as that was the game that I was playing just before the purged. I didn't have hopes as it is still really access, but to my surprise, worked first try (to add, I did follow the Proton instructions on how to setup Steam prior).
I tried several other games such as Borderlands 3, Hunt Showdown, Assetto Corsa and Planetside 2 and all worked. The only issue I have is that Forged Alliance Forever is currently bugged on Arch and I'm unable to launch custom games but weirdly enough, I can play the game no probs without FAF.
I know this is a Linux forum but to anyone that is browsing, thinking of taking the plunge. Do it! But make sure that you prep before doing so as without prep, you are not going to be smooth sailing.
I tried something very similar, but if I set my Nvidia Prime profile to on-demand (use the Nvidia GPU for games, use the Intel GPU for everything else), whenever I start a game where Proton uses DXVK, after a few minutes of playing the whole system freezes. Can't even get to the console anymore and even shortly pressing the power button does nothing. I have to reset the whole laptop.
If I set it to use the Nvidia GPU always it works, but then battery life is nothing.
I spent ~10h so far trying to debug that issue, but it seems to be a bug that was reported in 2017 that floods the syslog with assembler stack traces so hard that the whole system has no resources left to do anything else than logging. All the bug log entries I found said there is no workaround.
So it can go either way, especially if your device uses Nvidia.
I don't know about the bug in particular but for the next time when/if your system hangs and seems completely unresponsive:
I recommend looking into the
Magic SysRq Key, it shares the same button as print screen on the keyboard.Depending on the keybinds enabled you can kill all processes and reboot the PC, among other things. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_SysRq_key
Thanks, that's a really cool hint!
I'll try whether that works in the locked-up state
Being in a AMD ecosystem, serms to be a lot smoother transition than nVidia from what I've seen.
Yeah, heared that a lot.
But I didn't specifically buy my laptop for Linux, 5 years ago. And the purpose that would really urge me over to Linux is that this laptop has a 7th gen Intel CPU which just about doesn't qualify for Win11.
So buying a new device to use Linux kinda defeats the point.
But yes, I'll buy AMD next time.