This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/pcmasterrace by /u/Kragwulf on 2023-10-07 23:19:22.

I used Linux for about a month earlier this year. My experience is as follows:

I started with Mint since it was the “It just works” distro in my mind. It did work for the most part, and I enjoyed being free of the larger annoyances from Windows 11, but with how basic Cinnamon felt, I wanted to move to something with KDE. I spent a little bit of time learning commands in the terminal so I could get used to it, and then I threw myself into the deep end of the pool with a fresh install of Arch.

It… wasn’t a smart thing to do.

I used the archinstall command, but even though I selected Nvidia drivers (I have an RTX 4080) I started without them. Reading the arch wiki was an effort for me and I felt like I was attempting to decipher an alien language, so I looked into Arch-based distros that were more beginner friendly. I ended up going with EndeavorOS due to feeling like I was comfortable enough with the terminal to figure things out as long as I could actually get things setup to begin with.

Everything went fine. the only major issue I had was not having ray tracing or DLSS working at first, but I had learned how to edit things with nano and I knew the commands to add to /etc/environment to get all games to recognize my Nvidia card on start-up. I tested this with Hogwarts Legacy and confirmed it worked.

Thinking I had things good to go, I started the task of installing all 300+ steam games I had onto my 8TB SSD. This caused me to see a small issue. Download speeds weren’t even half as fast as they were on Windows. We’re talking 25MB/s on my gigabit connection. Googling allowed me to find out I had to install dnsmasq and configure it. Turns out Steam has an issue for some users that has persisted since 2014.

This is what led me to fixing the issue, if anyone needs it: Steam Download Speed Issue on Linux · GitHub

After I solved that issue, I was a little frustrated. I let my games download, which took about a weekend, and used that time to mess around with KDE a lot.

Once they were done, I fired up Mortal Kombat 1 ready to enjoy a game that had just come out.

Screen Tearing

Oh god

The screen tearing

Thinking it was due to being borderless windowed mode, I went to change it to full screen. It doesn’t exist. You either play Borderless Windowed Mode, or Windowed Mode. MK1 does not have a fullscreen mode.

I then realized I had spent an entire weekend getting this up and running. I had spent a very large chunk of my free time to learn something new, and now I am fighting it to enjoy the remaining time I had away from work. I went back to Windows 11.

I have since learned that there is a setting in the Nvidia menu that is not turned on by default called “Force Full Composition Pipeline.” It would have likely fixed it, but googling further leads me to learn that you have to turn it off for some games to launch properly.

If I had an AMD card, I would have gladly stuck with Linux. As I am now, I am happier on Windows. I will likely go with Nobara next if my next card is AMD instead of Nvidia, which is very likely after this experience.