Sorry I can't do it.

somebody gave you bad advice if you chose arch for your first distro

Linux may very well not be for you, but using Arch first is like jumping into the deep end to learn how to swim. It's no surprise you're drowning. I'd recommend you try a gaming-focused distro like Nobara before you go back to Windows for good.

Who the hell recommended Arch to you? Arch is for when you've been using Linux for a few years and have gotten bored waiting for the latest updates to hit your repos.

with the issues you've had i think it's perfectly understandable, but I'll agree with other commenters that arch is not a good choice for a first distro. i recommend trying dual booting windows and a more "beginner " distro like Linux mint or pop_os

Arch Linux is great for people that want to do nothing but Arch Linux.

Arch Linux

Unless you're on a good downstream like SteamOS, I'd suggest switching to something stable cutting edge (Fedora or Nobara if you want to put in zero effort).

Arch by itself will give you way the hell too many possible problems. You could waste hours on DKMS alone.

Mint will also work, but it has the downside of having slower updates to software packages.

First of all nothing to apologize, no one should be forcing anyone to use any OS.

Secondly, you shouldn't start with Arch, it's a very manual process that has several small things that can be done wrong. I recommend you try Mint, Pop or any other beginner friendly distro, you can still tinker and customize them as much as you want, but you will be starting from something that works instead of having to build a working system from the ground up without knowing what that looks like.

If you're not having a good time, stop. Life is too short.

If you're still interested in using linux, LinuxMint or PopOs! are what most people would recommend to a new user, not Arch.

Arch can be perfect for users with the time, knowledge, and effort to perfectly tailor things to suit their needs. They can make it perfectly efficient, without any excess.
I just want to use my computer whenever I want it to work. I am fine with it having a few extra packages/applications that I might never use. I've being using linux as main (or only) operating system on/off for about 20 years, and I currently use Mint.

If you're a beginner... or hate jank, don't use Arch. And make sure you're using a desktop environment that supports Wayland (GNOME or KDE). Gaming on X11 can be buggy, janky and inconsistent

sounds like your problem is likely a combo of trying bare arch and also an nvidia card. i'd recommend Pop!OS as i hear it's the best out of the box experience for nvidia owners, and if you want to stay arch based i'd try EndeavourOS as it's arguably the most mature and stable arch based distro today, it's what i use but i also have amd not nvidia so i can't speak for the nvidia experience for endeavour. maybe you want to wait a while before you try again just so you're not burning out on the frustration, too. good luck!

Arch for a beginner can be a bit too much.

Try Bazzite.

Thanks for the recommendations everyone! I plan on keeping Linux on my second drive to continue playing around with it, but my gaming will probably go back to Windows. Might give bazzite or popos a try next.

I understand your struggle. As others said, Arch is not a beginner friendly distro.

I would suggest trying gaming tailored distros like Nobara, Chimera or Bazzite and see how you feel about them. Don't install your full steam library during these testing period, try games separately and prioritize the games you play the most.

Learning involves trial and error and the Linux ecosystem has a lot of that.

In the end it's ok if you say This is not for me right now

Lol try Linux mint, it just works

Arch for gaming, what the hell

I'm sorry but I'm going to have to stick with Windows for gaming.

That's ok, I forgive you.

Seriously, Windows works better for a lot of people, and that's fine. I went back to Windows several times before I made the switch permanently to Linux. You just gotta do what works for you.

If you decide to try Linux again, I would recommend a distro like chimera OS, nobara, or just vanilla fedora. I've personally had a lot of luck with those distros.

I switched my gaming PC to Linux a few months back. I distro hopped for a while due to various issues, and landed on openSUSE Tumbleweed. Everything just works (except for the occasional bug in the updates where I have to wait for the next snapshot for a fix, but that's NBD).

Caveat: I'm all AMD so no Nvidia stuff to worry about. YMMV.

FWIW, I've got an i7-8700k with an RTX 3080. I initially had two major issues when I replaced Windows with Bazzite:

1. Steam doesn't do great with libraries on NTFS partitions. Supposedly there are workarounds, but I couldn't get them to work for me. I had to reformat a couple drives as ext4 (and do a bunch of file management in the process) before things would play nice.

2. I had my CPU overclocked to 4.8 GHz in Windows. BG3 kept crashing on me on Bazzite. Finally occurred to me to drop the overclock and I've played 40+ hours since, solid as a rock. Performance is comparable to Windows with OC. GPU temps are consistently better than Windows. Only thing I'm missing is HDR.

Bonus: GreenWithEnvy (for GPU fan curve) won't run in a Wayland session yet, apparently, so I've been running under X11 instead.

Hope this helps. YMMV. Happy gaming, whatever OS you use!

Nobara is a very good starting point for Linux. I personally know Linux stuff from an IT perspective, but personal use/driver troubleshooting is not something I care to fiddle with regularly. I started with Kubuntu since it's familiar, but eventually swapped to Nobara when I had some issues with the few games I play.
Nobara has been seamless and easy. Having all wine and proton dependencies preinstalled is much nicer and a lot of games Just Work ™️ out of the box.

Hi there, whoever suggested linux for your switch played a mean joke on you. Granted, arch works well if you know what you‘re doing, apparently. But no way it is a good starting distro.

I‘m not sure how eldenring works on linux but most games run without problems.

One little caveat is this: you need to understand that windows is a billion dollar product while linux is mostly community driven. It costs nothing, except many people donating their time. So I‘d suggest adopting a „its insane that hobbyists are able to build something like this“ view. Otherwise you‘ll get frustrated and will end up im privacy invasive windows territory again.

If you want a more gaming ready distro, try pop os or bazzite. Good luck

Wrong distro. Start again.

Popos

Good luck! Linux is sadly not quite yet for everyone, but it’s so much further along than it was when I started in 1999.

I bounced between Linux and Windows for decades, but when the Recall debacle happened, it became clear that Microsoft have lost their collective minds. I wiped my system, put Garuda Linux on it, and everything works quite well for me with no tinkering except with user-level KDE settings. I also changed from an NVIDIA RTX 3070Ti to an AMD RX 7800XT just so everything related to graphics would just work and I didn’t have to wait and hope that explicit sync really does fix everything for NVIDIA on Wayland.

I also use proton-ge for everything (in Steam as well as in Lutris which uses umu-launcher) and every game I’ve attempted to run (thus far on the order of 35+ games), has run great, including Elden Ring. I’ve found in my 25 years experience, the trick with Linux is two-fold: researching hardware to guarantee full Linux support…and having patience. And I’ve fell victim to that last one dozens of times over the years which led me back to windows each time.

No more.

No point in forcing it upon itself, you'll just hate it Just if you are to try again, remember you can always ask about recommendations, maybe there will be a setup for you which works smoothly and out of the box

This may seem odd, but check if your mobo has a bios update. Often bios break uefi standards to appease Microsofts non-standard requirements.

These get fixed overtime as ACPI bugs are fixed.

Are you using KDE? I'm on a fresh install of Arch with KDE Plasma on my gaming computer and I agree, it's janky as fuck. I've gone through everything I can find about how to deal with the flicker, but it's still there and it's an awful experience.

I have none of these issues on my Arch laptop with Gnome, so I'm going to switch my desktop to Gnome too when I have the time. Plasma is not ready for mainstream use if this is the best that it gets. Gnome however is awesome!

So, I suggest changing your DE to Gnome. If that doesn't fix the problem then switch to Pop!_OS. It's a completely plug and play distro and I never had a single problem with it. I only switched to Arch because I wanted to get HDR support which requires Plasma. Well, it's not worth it. I can't even use adaptive sync which is a pretty big deal for gaming.

Good luck, we're all counting on you.

Edit: otherwise Arch is an awesome distro. The power you have with all of the available programs is great! So, now it's just about getting the screen rendering to be stable.

Just out of curiosity, is the mouse bluetooth?

I heard there are some intermittent problems with them on linux because of proprietary blobs and similar driver issues, but I've never had one, so I've no direct experience.

Can't blame you. I put a Windows PC together again just so I could play Helldivers 2 a bit more consistently. There's nothing wrong with wanting to enjoy your leisure time.

To use (and enjoy) Linux properly, you've got to "unlearn" several things including the bad habit of expect everything to "just werk". If you are expecting to "double click your cares away" on Linux, then it's (very) likely you'll be disappointed.

With that aside, your best bet is to go for Linux Mint and not Arch Linux.

For a long time I couldn't get a stable distro working on my HP laptop with Intel 4 core & Nvidia 1660ti but after numerous successful daily driving on my desktops + steam deck of course I tried Bazzite which did the trick. Everything runs smoother & I haven't encountered anything unable to run because the steam proton is mature. Lutris is perfect for anything to do with alternative launchers, roms, I even got modded black ops 2 working and I never thought that would be possible.

I wish you the best of luck.

I switched to Linux Mint a few weeks ago and I'm not having any problems with games. Everything in my Steam library plays fine.

Do people not use Manjaro for this?

Shit that's crazy, I'm ryzen 3800x with 2070 super and Elden ring runs BETTER on manjaro Linux (arch based) than windows!

I really couldn't believe it.

Allow me to piggyback on this a bit, s'il vous plait.

Is there a Linux distribution that will run Adobe CC out of the box, games from Steam, and VR headsets? I need a new desktop badly, but I need to be able to use Adobe products as part of my job. (No, I can't switch to GNU products, because I get files from clients, and I have to be able to work to industry standards.) I've used Tails before, which is not a user-friendly product, and it doesn't play nicely with any other software.

As someone who recommends Arch to new users that have some familiarity with CLI AND also likes to tinker, I will always advise to check their wiki and forum. Check for the very specific problem you're having. Even the model sometimes helps. From other comments, I see you're mentioning logitech, maybe this wiki entry will help, but maybe it won't. In which case, search for more information. Check their wiki entry for other logitech mice, for wireless mice, for general mice.

Now, onto the next issue, what do you mean by not launch right? From there, maybe I can help with the issue.

This is also why I recommend this to someone that would like to tinker with their system. Arch requires a lot of reading. But once you understand it, it becomes "yours" and you obtain a lot of knowledge about the system that you're using.

Now, for everyone who doesn't like to tinker, use bazzite. I heard that it just works™.

Ok

Y u no SteamOS?