I played ARK on windows before switching to linux, and I've seen comments on protondb that it's playable in single player (my preferred play style), but I'm having issues with the downloading process.

It keeps trying to install 1.3Gb then open, but obviously fails. I tried clearing the download cache and even went to properties to force it to download via proton experimental. It starts to download the proper 63ish Gb, but then switches to 1.3Gb again less than a minute later.

Has anyone else had encountered and had success with this?

Title. to me, it seems weird that they don't. If the concern is disk space, I would argue most people can acquire a 16GB USB that can hold a little more storage. It gives Nvidia users a smooth out of the box experience in a live environment instead of nouveau which is often buggy and outright crashes on my own hardware.

I remember Pop OS doing this when I tried it once and it streamlined a part of setup. Despite this, many distros still expect you to go out of your way to install Nvidia drivers after running their installer. Most drivers on Linux don't need to be actively installed with DKMS or anything, so why not go the extra mile and make things easier for a large segment of desktop users?

I'm curious if there's technical limitations preventing this from becoming reality.

https://preview.redd.it/w3r5rcn8gnzf1.png?width=736&format=png&auto=webp&s=daeab38c5f684df183bf090420c9bcb8c81fb8b7

Hey guys, I'm new to Linux. Sorry. to make a long story short: I wanted to undervolt my 3070 GPU, so I searched online and found this app: LACT

My undervolt on the OC tab seems to be working, but for some reason, here on fan curve, my GPU fans are still spinning even under low load. As you can see on the pict, the GPU temperature is 40°C, but the fans are running at 1192 RPM.

Does anyone know why this might be happening or how I can fix it? Any help would be appreciated.

Hey Guys - I am completely new to the whole Linux but I want to get started - right now I have real big Desktop-PC but I want to keep it Windows (at least until I know how to interact with Linux). For that Reason - I want to buy a MiniPC. On Amazon, there are different Mini-PCs from 200-400€.
Do you think one can get started on those with Linux -how can a I find out about that? And if so - could I try bazzite and make a small gaming station for simpler games (retro and 2D)?

Thanks in Advance!

Many said that my protonDB+ project doesn't make sense since there is winehq, so I wanted to separate some points about winehq that I don't like about those who disagree with my points that I have here at your disposal.

• winehq is complicated to add games: games on winehq ask for a lot of information to add and describe problems since from what I saw it would be focused more on applications and protonDB+ is focused more on games like portonDB. winehq is more for wine developers so needs specific information, but protonDB is for gamers for gamers and not wine programmers
• have active winehq users: I see very little content and updates from appDB, many people said "you're also not helping appdb with reports and create another website" I created it for the ease of reporting and adding games if you liked using appDB, congratulations to you. As Linux has several options for several people, my goal is to help several people and not a specific group of people.

I appreciate the comments that helped me improve my site and my perspectives on winehq

Last time I used a 1060 on Linux, it was one of the worst gaming experiences I had. But that was before the famous 555 driver that brought Wayland support and all the other upgrades.

But when I tried installing Fedora on a PC with a 1060 later, I couldn't even boot into the desktop. It barely showed GDM and was unusable. I couldn't even try to install the proprietary drivers.

Is this the same on all Wayland only distros?

Before 555 driver I was forced to use xorg, and only gnome kinda worked for that, I also tried XFCE but had massive issues with games.

And I think I heard somewhere that anything below the RTX series is no longer supported...

Can someone share their experiences with 10 series, Nvidia drivers and Wayland?

Hello,

TL;DR : With the same hardware and BIOS config, I have random crashes during GPU-intensive games on Linux, not on Windows, without overheat, and I'm looking for ideas on where to find more logs to solve this crashes.

I'm trying to move from W11 to Linux for my gaming computer (I choosed Ubuntu 24.04). I'm quite experienced on linux servers, but not at all for linux desktop/gaming computer.

Overall it works well, but I had two complete system crash (unexpected reboot), which I never had on Windows (really never ever). So I'm wondering if I really should switch to Linux (I don't want to be scared of a crash every time I run a game). Before cancelling this idea, I'd like to have informations from you on how to diagnostic what could happend;

As it's a hard crash/reboot, logs are mostly inexistant, so I don't know where to search. One user on reddit mentionned UEFI logs, but it seems that my motherboard don't log these.

Here are my thoughts:

• Reminder : for the same games, I never had any crash on Windows. The only change I did is install Ubuntu, no hardware/BIOS change.
• The two crashes happened on different games : one on Two Point Museum, one on CS2. Both are native linux (I think, I'm still not a proton expert)
  • I played 10 hours to "Roottrees are dead" (also native linux), very less GPU-intensive, without a single crash, so it might be related to GPU usage
• While gaming, the CPU stays at ~65°C, GPU ~50°c, no thermal throttling.
• not a single crash outside of these two games (but I used only 4 games)
• I ran intensive tests with OCCT (GPU and CPU at 100%) for 30minutes without a crash/overheat

The main problem is the lack of useful logs. kern.log/dmesg tells nothing, journalctl -b -1 -e is filled with appArmor denied access and nothing is related to hardware except for this block I hade one time, but minutes before the crash, and maybe not relevant because it's a "corrected error" (and again, same hardware on windows without a crash):

kernel: [Hardware Error]: L3 Cache Ext. Error Code: 4 kernel: [Hardware Error]: cache level: L3/GEN, tx: GEN, mem-tx: GEN kernel: [Hardware Error]: Machine check events logged kernel: [Hardware Error]: Corrected error, no action required.

Harware: I use a RTX 4070SUPER + Ryzen 7 5800X3D on a X470 Gaming Plus with 32GB RAM. The PSU is 1 year OLD and is a Gold Corsair 850W. Nvidia drivers are the one installed by Ubuntu at installation (the propietary one) v580.95.05. Ubuntun 24.04 is up-to-date, with Gnome on X11.

Thanks for your help!

EDIT : sorry for the mispelling in title, I can't change it / Moved TLDR to top / spelling

Hey everyone! I'm wondering which system performs better in regular games like Minecraft and other mid-range titles I want to know where I’ll get better FPS and smoother performance

My laptop specs: Intel Core i7-1165G7 Intel Iris Xe Graphics G7 8GB DDR4 RAM NVMe SSD 128GB Has anyone compared Fedora or Arch to Windows 10 LTSC 21H2 for gaming? How’s the performance and overall experience?

And it’s only the .dll file for any version of DSfix that does this. Every other mod with a .dll file I have to point to in Properties immediately works the second I put it in launch options. This one just crashes the game immediately, no questions asked. I get the white screen, so it is starting, and then it closes a second later. I’ve given up on figuring this out, but maybe someone will be able to troubleshoot it.

Oh yeah, I did get an error message when I lowered my Proton to 5.0 instead of an immediate crash. ‘Loading of specified dinput wrapper failed with error 127: Procedure not found.’ It does this with every version of the mod.

I am running xfce, and wondering if anyone compared Cinnamon to it as a daily driver on same install/system (alternating between them)

Are there a real downsides to using Cinnamon for gaming?

Do apps that you install under xfce just move over to Cinnamon DE if you select it during login?

So I wanna switch from windows to most likely bazzite and was wondering if there's any third party alternatives for wired VR with a meta quest headset as my wifi router is on the other end of the house so wireless vr looks like ass

I didn't read through the whole FAQ, but I did read through the distros section. For a gaming focused subreddit the recommendations are outdated at best, harmful at worst. They may have made sense back when they were written, but not today.

First of all, I know it says "The following recommendations are not ranked, so please don’t just pick whatever’s on top of the list", but a ton of people aren't ever going to read that part, they'll just jump to the sub heading they're looking for. And why even mention some of these distros at all?

Two bad recommendations:

• Pop!_OS
  • Yeah, Pop was cool back when it was cool, and I understand why it was written down initially. But it's 2026 soon, and the latest Pop!_OS release was almost 4 years ago.
  • Just get this thing off that list, just don't ever recommend it.
• Linux Mint “Edge”
  • Linux Mint used to be the king, back when all other distros sucked ass and were hard to install. But that's no longer the case, other distros like Fedora, CachyOS, Bazzite, Ubuntu, openSUSE have caught up and are just as easy to install and use.
  • Mint is quite literally one of the only distros out there still running on X11. This means that modern features like HDR, VRR, fractional scaling, VR headsets, and DLSS/FSR might not work properly or at all on Mint. Here's a GNOME team developer explicitly stating that developers don't focus on X11 anymore, they barely fix critical bugs.
  • While the FAQ does recommend the Edge version at least, that too runs on X11 and Mint team in general doesn't have gaming in mind. Edge happens to be good enough in some cases, but that's not even an afterthought, that's a side-effect.
  • Don't get me wrong Mint is still great for home servers and whatnot where you don't need new hardware or games or desktop features, but it's just not for gaming and not really for desktop use either at this point (until they transition to Wayland).

Two missing recommendations:

• Fedora
  • Along with Ubuntu, this is one of the two "basic" general use distros for new users. It should 100% replace Mint on the list.
  • Super simple installation with the Fedora Media Writer that you can run on Windows and get a perfectly working USB drive. No need to download ISO manually and burn it with a separate tool.
  • They ship with Wayland. They are actively dropping support for X11. They are modern and forwards looking, not old and slow.
  • Great out-of-the-box support for both KDE Plasma and GNOME.
  • Similar to Ubuntu, they release a new version every 6 months. That's stable enough to not break things, but bleeding edge enough to support new hardware and whatnot.
  • The only caveat is that the consumer needs to install RPM Fusion to get all the codecs and whatnot. It's one command line instruction, but it's a small minus for sure. This should be mentioned in the FAQ ("Fedora with RPM Fusion").
• openSUSE
  • This would go in the "advanced" section for sure, but Tumbleweed is the most stable and reliable truly rolling release distro out there. If you just want the latest and greatest GPU drivers or whatever, and don't want to actually tinker with your Linux, then there's no reason to pick Arch or EndeavourOS over Tumbleweed.
  • openSUSE's openQA tests run automatically on every release, and they basically ensure that your system will stay stable. Of course mistakes can happen, but in openSUSE's case they're extremely rare.
  • Snapper is probably the best snapshot and recovery tool out there. If your system was to ever break, it's extremely easy to revert back and just wait for a fix before upgrading again.
  • With the new Agama live installer, the installation process is no longer difficult.

That's all, free to discuss and disagree or add new recommendations even. And please, avoid anecdotal "well it's been good enough for me thus far" comments. Just because something can be good enough for some people doesn't mean it should be openly recommended to all the beginners.

Hi guys.

I don't have much space left on my main drive where Steam is installed, so I want my Steam background video recording and screenshots folder to be set to another drive. However, for some reason background recording doesn't work when the recording folder is set to another drive OR a different location outside of Home directory.
Please help 😢

I recently moved my gaming setup to Linux Mint and I’m curious about your experience modding the DRM-free Skyrim Special Edition from GOG.

How smooth is the process on Mint specifically? Any problem workarounds you’d recommend?

Also what would your must-have mods list be for someone playing Skyrim for the 20th time, but modding it for the first time? I’m looking for those “I can’t play without this anymore” type mods, gameplay, immersion, or graphical.

Same as title

What are the most popular distributions to switch from Windows to Linux? I would like to know which one you were with or which one you recommend for a person who wants to change in 2025, without getting very dizzy and that the system is as versatile as Windows and also serves to play

I currently dual boot Kubuntu and Windows 11 just for the games that aren't supported on Linux. I have an AMD graphics card and when I just used Windows, I always used AMD's cleanup utility to fully remove the graphics driver before installing the new one. Now that I am dual booting, should I still be ok to do this without impacting my Linux drivers? Thanks in advance.

Price is probably the biggest one, but what are some things on Linux that make going back to Windows difficult?