I’ve been using Arch on an old laptop for a few years now, but I use Pop on my gaming desktop. I’ve wanted to switch to Arch for a long while now, but haven’t had the motivation (if it ain’t broke, and all that). I’m finally ready to do it, but I’m a little concerned about my gaming experience. Are there any gotchas for gaming with an i7 and a 3070 ti that I should be aware of before I make the switch? Is it pretty seamless? Can I still use a freesync monitor with the g-sync compatibility setting? Is it easy to install the Nvidia drivers and well documented on the wiki? I’m open to information about any other sticky scenarios you guys encountered getting Arch set up for use as a daily driver and gaming computer.

Edit: is there any way to backup my internal drive mappings and mounting points, or will I need to set all of that up again?

I’ve only ever used Gnome for Arch, but one of the things that has me motivated to switch is that KDE 6 supports HDR. Does anyone have experience with it? Is it a pretty slick and simple DE?

    • AwkwardLookMonkeyPuppetOPEnglish
      2•6 months ago

      Holy hell! The first time I installed Arch for my laptop it took me like 40 minutes, but I forgot to install a DE and had to go back to the live USB mount every, chroot in, and install Gnome. All in all it took about an hour. This time it took me literally the entire night and part of the afternoon too!

      I installed grub and ran the command to install it on the EFI, but I forgot to make the config file. So I spent hours trying to figure out why the hell it wouldn’t boot into Arch. I ended up completely reinstalling Arch 3 times in case I had borked the install since I have another EFI partition, another OS on this drive, and 7 partitions total. When I finally figured out that I skipped the config file I wasn’t even mad. I was so freaking relieved to figure out what I had done wrong that I was happy.

      Then I installed Plasma, but it needs a bunch of other packages that either aren’t in the man page, or I missed them since I was pretty tired by that point. Got that all installed finally and set up, restarted, and realized that I can’t even log into KDE with a root account! Haha. I had to go back to the live CD and install sudo, and set up the sudoers file.

      Holy shit man, that was the hardest time I’ve had with an install in over a decade. I’ve been doing this a long time and it usually goes pretty smoothly, but I guess my brain was in my pocket or something today. But it’s done!

      KDE Plasma seems pretty slick. I still need to install my Nvidia drivers, steam, and all that jazz, but it’s way past bedtime now. I’ll do it after work tomorrow.

      Oh, I installed yay too and wow, what a time saver! On my laptop I’ve been manually making packages for stuff like Firefox and whatever the whole time I’ve used it. I don’t have a lot of software on that laptop since it’s old and mainly just an Internet portal, but I’m definitely going to be using yay for that from now on.

      If you’re still reading, I’m so exited to have finally made the switch and have it done. None of my friends are into this kind of stuff and my wife has no idea about any of it, so I just had to tell someone, and you seemed kind of invested earlier. Thanks for listening! Lol.

      • @[email protected]English
        2•6 months ago

        Happy that you made it! Why didn’t you use archinstall? It would save a lot of trouble

        • AwkwardLookMonkeyPuppetOPEnglish
          2•6 months ago

          I guess I felt like that would kind of eliminate one of the benefits of Arch, being able to manually select every package that gets installed. I totally should have though, because in my frustration I installed the kde-applications package, which includes like 50 packages, including a bunch of games and stuff, instead of kde-desktop. Now I need to go through and uninstall all the ones I don’t want. Oh well! Next time.

        • AwkwardLookMonkeyPuppetOPEnglish
          1•6 months ago

          Hey, have you ever run into an issue where the Nvidia driver is installed, and listed as working, but the Nvidia control panel doesn’t have any options? The graphics information section is completely blank. I’ve done a bunch of troubleshooting, and I’m pretty sure that I’ve completed every single requirement. I even tried a different Nvidia driver in case that was the issue, but with that one it was really clear that it is the wrong driver since it threw a bunch of errors. I’m confident that I’m running the right driver, I have grub set up to load it early, I have all of the modules listed in the intramfs config, I ran Nvidia options config and all the other stuff, but I am still seeing blank options.

          • @[email protected]English
            1•6 months ago

            If you’re on Wayland, nvidia settings doesn’t support it. Although I just checked X too and nvidia settings doesn’t have an options tab there neither. Is there a separate nvidia control panel than the nvidia x server settings?

            • AwkwardLookMonkeyPuppetOPEnglish
              2•6 months ago

              Oh! So it’s not even supported at all?

              I don’t see a different UI app for Nvidia options, just X Server Settings. So, if I can’t use that, how do I control the more advanced features of my GFX card? Command line only?

              • @[email protected]English
                1•6 months ago

                I remember searching about setting a fan curve on Wayland and iirc the ‘solution’ I had found was running the thing on an x server on a different tty. Didn’t look into overclocking

                • AwkwardLookMonkeyPuppetOPEnglish
                  2•6 months ago

                  Okay, then I guess I’m done. Heh. I just wasted a bunch more time trying to get that GUI working. Time to install steam and try a game!