Hey all, I’m a longtime Ubuntu user for work and recently switched my desktop to arch from windows after seeing how well games run on my steam deck! I’ve wanted to move to Linux fully for years but gaming on it used to be pretty hit or miss.

So far arch has definitely been more involved to get going - but I managed to get a desktop environment that runs great with my gpu and steam. I love how minimal it is out of the box and I’m getting a lot of ideas of stuff to build with it.

Anyway I’m mostly just posting to introduce myself to the community on here and to say how much I’m liking arch so far.

But, if you have any tips/suggestions of things I may have missed to take full advantage of my system when gaming, I’d appreciate hearing it! Also, if you’re running a setup like this, any favourite packages you have?

  • @[email protected]English
    6•11 months ago

    Congrats on the successful install! Arch is pretty tricky to get working (especially the first time) but it’s totally worth it! Anyway, here are some package recommendations, idk how many of these you already know about but here are some that were useful for me!

    • firewalld (block incoming connections, arch has no firewall by default)
    • kde plasma (super flexible and powerful yet lightweight DE)
    • foot (good and fast terminal for Wayland)
    • st (good and minimal terminal for X11, also good entry point for suckless utils)
    • fish (helps you get used to the cli, and you can make beautiful run prompts with starship)
    • bottles (helpful for game launchers like Ubisoft connect)
    • flatpak steam and other packages with 32 bit dependencies (sandbox 32 bit packages)
    • protonup-rs (not sure if it works for flatpak stuff but it’s a nice to have CLI program to simplify the installation of ge-proton builds)
    • heroic launcher (so you don’t have to install epic through lutris/bottles etc)
    • QEMU with GPU passthrough (for those pesky games that won’t work with proton, good to have and super easy to set up)

    I’m also not a pro by any means, and please google these before installing them to make sure they are actually useful for your usecase. More advanced users: please do correct me if something is wrong or a bad idea because I started off not that long ago and I would love to learn more!

    edit: fixed grammar and stuff

    edit 2: I kinda assumed you had this but I forgot to mention, don’t forget an aur helper like paru so you can install stuff easily from the aur!

    • @DonnyOPEnglish
      3•11 months ago

      Thanks for the recommendations! I’ve looked into (and set up) a few of these, but there are a few I definitely need to look into more! Need to learn more about sandboxing apps as well.

      • @[email protected]English
        2•11 months ago

        Me too, honestly. I recently discovered flatpak and so far it’s been great for my proprietary apps like discord and spotify. Flatseal has also been invaluable for managing those without having to dig into cli commands!