Technically, EndeavourOS is Arch for dummies, with CachyOS more of its own thing. But both can be fixed by using the Arch wiki.

Steam games should be easy. Just make sure that a suitable Proton release (I prefer experimental because of little trouble in practice and the newest code base) is set as the default compatibility tool in Steam settings, otherwise you'll have to set it per game.

2 hours ago, Bjoern said:

Technically, EndeavourOS is Arch for dummies, with CachyOS more of its own thing. But both can be fixed by using the Arch wiki.

Steam games should be easy. Just make sure that a suitable Proton release (I prefer experimental because of little trouble in practice and the newest code base) is set as the default compatibility tool in Steam settings, otherwise you'll have to set it per game.

Many thanks!

Steam installed no issue as you note. 

I didn’t install any of those games yet because I got “distracted” searching for XP addons that will work well on this potato 😁

Edited May 9May 9 by UrgentSiesta

3 hours ago, Bjoern said:

Technically, EndeavourOS is Arch for dummies, with CachyOS more of its own thing. But both can be fixed by using the Arch wiki.

Steam games should be easy. Just make sure that a suitable Proton release (I prefer experimental because of little trouble in practice and the newest code base) is set as the default compatibility tool in Steam settings, otherwise you'll have to set it per game.

Oh and p.s. re Endeavour and such: I came across that somewhere during the search for a distro. Seems as you say 🙂

I ended up with CachyOS as it seemed to be the distro most frequently cited as having above average nVidia compatibility. Which seems to be a relatively new thing, sadly - but also seems to be improving. 

So far the Cachy experience is pleasant enough that I’m going to re-pave a couple other older laptops for generic use and further learning. Esp in light of the larger institutional shifts away from MS to Linux that have been coming across the feeds lately. 🤙

But first I’ve got to dig out that old Saitek HOTAS I have - it’s explicitly mentioned as easily recognized and mostly functional with Linux these days 😁

 

Edited May 9May 9 by UrgentSiesta

21 hours ago, UrgentSiesta said:

I ended up with CachyOS as it seemed to be the distro most frequently cited as having above average nVidia compatibility. Which seems to be a relatively new thing, sadly - but also seems to be improving. 

Arch and NVidia have always played along well. I think Cachy just saves you the manual installation step for the proprietary drivers.

 

21 hours ago, UrgentSiesta said:

So far the Cachy experience is pleasant enough that I’m going to re-pave a couple other older laptops for generic use and further learning. Esp in light of the larger institutional shifts away from MS to Linux that have been coming across the feeds lately. 🤙

If you have the hardware for playing around, try some other distros. Or relive the old days of computing (hack commands into a console that you're reading off another medium) by installing pure Arch.

 

21 hours ago, UrgentSiesta said:

But first I’ve got to dig out that old Saitek HOTAS I have - it’s explicitly mentioned as easily recognized and mostly functional with Linux these days 😁

HOTAS is plug and play nowadays, but be aware that mapping software may refuse to work.

2 hours ago, Bjoern said:

Arch and NVidia have always played along well. I think Cachy just saves you the manual installation step for the proprietary drivers.

 

If you have the hardware for playing around, try some other distros. Or relive the old days of computing (hack commands into a console that you're reading off another medium) by installing pure Arch.

 

HOTAS is plug and play nowadays, but be aware that mapping software may refuse to work.

Huh - interesting. According to YouTube, nvidia has been a problem (at least for gaming?).

I had wondered about that since it’d exclude a huge number of otherwise useable computers…

And I noted with some irony that XP seems to run better with nVidia on Windows than AMD, yet a pure AMD setup is the preference for Linux gaming in general?

IDK - I only watched a couple hours of YouTube specifically searching for gaming friendly distros (not just XP, but gaming specifically, esp Steam since I have a couple other games there).

That’s neither enough time nor a necessarily authoritative source for an informed opinion, I realize… 😉

I’m not sure about trying other distros just yet, but since my other spare hardware are vanilla “WIntel” laptops, I suppose it doesn’t matter - so I’ll keep an open mind there for sure.

I don’t presently use mapping software for my HOTAS in any game, just the in-game setup. So as long as the in-game mapping works, I should be good! 🤞😁

32 minutes ago, UrgentSiesta said:

nvidia has been a problem

Their tune has been gradually changing as the LLMs that have made them wealthy are basically all being developed and then run on linux.

That's aside from the fact that lately both major vendors (if amd could be considered "major" compared to nvidia) really seem to have their heads on backwards as they write (are they actually writing?) their driver code. Difference there is that the better amd drivers in linux are not written by amd (all praise Gabe), so nobody notices.

The thing with Nvidia is that you need to install the proprietary Nvidia driver. The open source driver is in general not recommended for gaming.

 In general, Nvidia was the better choice for gaming under Linux four years, but possibly my knowledge is outdated since Steam gaming is working mostly with AMD hardware.

20 hours ago, UrgentSiesta said:

Huh - interesting. According to YouTube, nvidia has been a problem (at least for gaming?).

I had wondered about that since it’d exclude a huge number of otherwise useable computers…

From years of experience with Linux laptops using a NVidia dGPU, I find the oft perpetuated notion that Nvidia is problematic a bit ridiculous. Yes, you need proprietary drivers and yes, the drivers tend to be locked to a kernel release delaying package updates on your distro, but once you set everything up, it works and is stable enough for day to day use.

 

20 hours ago, UrgentSiesta said:

And I noted with some irony that XP seems to run better with nVidia on Windows than AMD, yet a pure AMD setup is the preference for Linux gaming in general?

Yup. AMD even performs better than on Windows and the drivers are included by default by most distros. And even stone age AMD GPUs still get the odd driver update for compatibility. It's overall the better GPU ecosystem on Linux.

 

20 hours ago, UrgentSiesta said:

That’s neither enough time nor a necessarily authoritative source for an informed opinion, I realize… 😉

I’m not sure about trying other distros just yet, but since my other spare hardware are vanilla “WIntel” laptops, I suppose it doesn’t matter - so I’ll keep an open mind there for sure.

Well, you know the saying about opinions and that's especially true for Linux distros. But in the end, everybody can just try any distro they want. They're free after all.

Just keep the fingers off Debian if you value staying up to date.

 

20 hours ago, UrgentSiesta said:

I don’t presently use mapping software for my HOTAS in any game, just the in-game setup. So as long as the in-game mapping works, I should be good! 🤞😁

Unity engine based games may act weirdly when it comes to controllers when run on Proton, but those bugs get fixed eventually.

Use https://www.protondb.com/ for basic compatibility info on Steam (mind to filter the results for "PC"), with users sharing instructions if some tinkering is required. In the header of the game's page, there also is a "Github Issue Search" link. Github issues are used to report (potential) Proton related bugs with a game and share workarounds (if any can be found).

 

17 hours ago, soaring_penguin said:

 In general, Nvidia was the better choice for gaming under Linux four years, but possibly my knowledge is outdated since Steam gaming is working mostly with AMD hardware.

Nowadays, you only want NVidia for the better raytracing performance on Linux.

amd's catching up in the raytracing. Slowly. Gradually.

Most of the reputation for problems with anything proprietary in the mix is the fact that none of the most popular distros from a decade ago were rolling releases. This meant you were stuck on a specific generation of nvidia driver for a year or more until the new distro release happened. If an app (e.g. XP in my case) demanded a specific version of driver that Debian happened to not offer yet, you had to go the manual route and that sometimes caused compatibility problems.

Most folks never had to deal with the real issues nvidia caused. Linus' famous middle-finger-event happened because they were being a pain in kernel dev space. User space never really had to deal with that fallout because Linus worked around it. Hence the middle finger. The reputation propagated because it's opensource world.