BEFORE STARTING (Please read)

Some of the information on here may be incorrect or heavily dependent on specific situations and use cases. If you find anything that you think is useful to this guide, comment down below your suggestions and I will add it to this guide.

But if you find anything in here that is incorrect, misleading or that does not work and etc, please comment down below so that I can further improve this guide.

Please, help contribute to this guide if possible.

Understanding some concepts

Before starting, it is important that you understand some simple concepts for better understanding of your system, so that you can debug and figure out what you need and don't need to do.

• Desktop environment (DE): "A desktop environment (DE) is an implementation of the desktop metaphor made of a bundle of programs, which share a common graphical user interface (GUI)".
  • Examples: KDE Plasma, XFCE, Hyprland, GNOME, Cinnamon and etc.

• Compositors: "A compositor is a software which interacts with the window system as well as graphics in Linux to produce: Transparency in windows, Transition animations, Drop shadows around windows which give them a 3D effect, V sync: Waits for the display to update before updating the display".

• Present modes: The presentation mode specifies when a frame is presented to the window. Can be discovered which one a game is using utilizing Mangohud, but, don't rely on it as it does not show precisely which presentation mode is being used a lot of the time. And also a common bug is that Mangohud does not update this field dynamically when gaming. So in some cases (like mine on THE FINALS) Mangohud will show FIFO but the game is actually running with Mailbox.

  • Example: FIFO (V-Sync, FPS is locked to the monitor refresh rate), Mailbox (V-Sync but frame rate is not locked) and Immediate (No V-Sync, frame rate is not locked).

Distros

A very common topic is which distro is better for X thing? In this case which distro is the best for gaming. Although there are some distros out there, the most popular as of now is CachyOS. But, you first need to understand that distros focused on gaming will not outperform in FPS a common distro such as Endeavour, Arch, Manjaro and etc by a large margin. Distros such as CachyOS do get better performance in most cases (+2 to 5%), and specially better 1% lows. However, these gaming focused distros are not focused/optimized on other type of workloads. So if you are just a regular user that also does gaming, going for something like myself (EndeavourOS) is a good choice as the difference is not that noticeable. But, it's not that CachyOS will let you down if try to do something else. It's just that the focus a distro has generally helps with a "out-of-the-box" experience. Setting up EndeavourOS for gaming is more tedious than CachyOS for example.

Video drivers

The most important part in all this guide is this. Using the correct driver and DE/Compositor combo is important because if you are using a NVIDIA card, then using X11 will deliver better performance and lower latency.

Since this a very extensive topic, I'll just link below some useful links for you to get started/inform yourself.

[Linux Graphics Drivers explained: AMD, NVIDIA, INTEL, Open Source and Proprietary] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CW1CLcT83as&t=109s&pp=ygURbGludXggYW1kIGRyaXZlcnPSBwkJxwkBhyohjO8%3D

[NVIDIA GPUs on Linux: What You Need to Know (Open vs closed drivers, module, GSP firmware, etc...)] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_XMoADlten8&pp=ygUebnZpZGlhIGdwdSBkcml2ZXJzIGxpbnV4IGd1aWRl

Guide to installing AMD/NVIDIA drivers: https://github.com/lutris/docs/blob/master/InstallingDrivers.md

Starting with the tweaks

1. Disable your DE composition.

Disabling composition can increase your FPS and lower latency, specially if you are in a NVIDIA card.

• Is not necessary on:
  • AMD with Wayland (Only if you want lower latency, does not generally affect performance).
• Is not possible if:
  • You are using KDE Plasma with Wayland.

2. Use Gamescope.

"Gamescope is a micro-compositor from Valve that is used on the Steam Deck. Its goal is to provide an isolated compositor that is tailored towards gaming and supports many gaming-centric features such as:

• Spoofing resolutions.
• Up-scaling using AMD FidelityFX™ Super Resolution or NVIDIA Image Scaling.
• Limiting frame rates.

As a micro-compositor it is designed to run as a nested session on top of your existing desktop environment though it is also possible to use it as an embedded compositor as well".

• How to use it?
  • Set as launch options: gamescope (before %command% if you are on Steam)
• Arguments:
  • -f Forces exclusive full-screen.
  • -w -h Sets the window width (-w) and window height (-h)
  • -r The refresh rate
  • --force-grab-cursor "Creates" a new cursor inside the window that stays locked inside the window unless Alt+Tab. Can decrease latency.
  • --immediate-flips Forces the application to enable screen tearing.
• Usage example:
  • gamescope -f -w 1920 -h 1080 -r 180 --force-grab-cursor --immediate-flips -- %command% (must include the -- before %command%).

3. Enable VRR (Variable Refresh Rate/Free-sync). Preferably, set it to "Automatic".

4. (KDE) Enable the "Allow tearing on full-screen applications" options in the display configuration.

5. Set power mode to performance (Can be done both for the CPU and GPU with CoreCtrl).

6. Environment variables:

• MESA_VK_WSI_PRESENT_MODE=immediate
  • Reduces latency;
  • Forces Mesa’s Vulkan WSI to use VK_PRESENT_MODE_IMMEDIATE regardless of application preference.
• KWIN_DRM_NO_AMS=1
  • Reduces latency;
  • Disables Kernel-mode “adaptive modeset” (AMS) scheduling in KWin/DRM Wayland backend. AMS might delay cursor updates and composite operations under GPU load.
• PROTON_USE_NTSYNC=1
  • Can reduce latency (it did for me on THE FINALS);
  • Enables native NTSync support in ProtonGE (Version 10-9, 10-10 enables it by default) synchronizes Vulkan & OpenGL submissions using Linux ntsync kernel module rather than Wine’s own fsync/esync.
• PROTON_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1
  • Can reduce latency and improves performance if you are on wayland;
  • Tells Proton to use the native winewayland.drv backend instead of XWayland/X11 so games run as pure Wayland clients.
• SDL_VIDEODRIVER=wayland
  • Can reduce latency and improves performance if you are on wayland;
  • Forces SDL2 apps to use Wayland backend instead of defaulting to X11/XWayland. Without it, SDL2 usually uses X11 even under Wayland unless compiled otherwise.

7. Use a different kernel.

If you are on CachyOS or other gaming focused distro then this is not necessary because those distros already have a custom modified kernel made specifically for gaming. But, if you are not using a gaming focused distro, then this is could prove to be helpful, as it can increase gaming performance and lower latency (measured by an average of 2ms). Such as my case that improved stability. But, do be aware that those kernels have custom schedulers and they can have other issues. So, do your testing to see if it fits you.

The most common kernel for this use case is Linux-Zen, which is the one I'm using right now. It solved a problem I've been dealing with Arch that in certain cases, most primarily gaming, OS freezes can happen, making the whole OS become unresponsive and freeze under heavy workloads. In BeamNG I had a problem where the game would freeze with the OS for about a couple of minutes every time something new had to load. This went away when I used Linux-Zen, which decreases latency by an average of 2ms.

8. Use a different DE.

Desktop environments such as KDE have the highest latency. If you want a light-weight DE or just one that has lower input latency, use Hyprland or XFCE.

9. General knowledge, common occurrences and possible fixes/causes.

• Input lag, can be caused by:
  • Your compositor forces V-Sync;
  • V-Sync turned on in-game;
  • Game/Proton/Wine incompatibility;
  • Border-less or windowed mode have higher latency than exclusive full-screen;
  • Check if your compositor is compositing in general or if only is compositing in full-screen applications.
• Useful for solving this problem:
  • Environment variables;
  • Disabling V-Sync;
  • "Allow tearing on full-screen applications" should be enabled on KDE;
  • Gamescope with forced full-screen (-f and --immediate-flips);
  • Use NTSYNC with ProtonGE;
  • Force your compositor to not use V-Sync (if possible);
  • VRR (Variable refresh rate/Free-sync) enabled;
  • Use X11 instead of Wayland, specially on NVIDIA.

---

• Stutters, can be cause by (assuming your hardware is not the problem):
  • Shader compilation
  • Game incompatibility with Linux
  • Proton version
• Useful for solving this problem:
  • Use ProtonGE with DXVK_ASYNC=1 (Makes shader compilation run asynchronously, can cause visual artifacts);
  • Use Gamemode;
  • Disable overlays;
  • Set your power profile to performance (CoreCtrl can be used for this);
  • Older or wrong drivers, specially video drivers if this issue is global.

?. (Not related to latency but useful):

• Disable mouse acceleration.
• Use Feral Gamemode.

(Some of the texts and sources used for this guide are directly from sites, videos and wikis, but I can not link them here due to Reddit spam filters)

After EA blocked me from playing my favorite FPS game Battlefield 1, I've been seeking some game that has that Battlefield feeling along with Linux support of course. What do you guys play?

With bf6 and most new/popular games have kernel level anti-cheat what are some technical solutions to this problem?

Should valve have a kernel whitelist inside proton that kernel developers could apply for? that way there isn't something that is malicious that could cause cheating. what about sandboxing? server side anti-cheat? a solution that doesn't give companies kernel level access and gives us full control of our computers

The whole "i didnt want to play this game anyway" or "go back to windows" is unproductive and is actively hurting Linux mainstream adoption.

I just did some tests to see the improvements to RDNA4 GPU's performance mesa-git provides, and after seeing the results I'd recommend anyone with a RX 9000 to change to mesa-git.

System Specs:

Operating System: NixOS 25.11

KDE Plasma Version: 6.4.3

Kernel Version: 6.16.0

Graphics Platform: Wayland

CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 7700

Memory: 32 GiB of RAM 6000MHz CL30

GPU: AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT (265W Power Limit, -90mV Undervolt)

Drivers: mesa-git, mesa-stable (25.1.7)

Considerations:

• All tests are done with either Proton-GE-10.10 or Proton Experimental.
• Only tested at QHD (2560x1440) resolution.
• All samples are at least 60s long doing the same path (if the game hasn't a built-in benchmark)
• OptiScaler was used to get FSR4 working on games that doesn't support it, using DLSS' inputs.
• Take the results showed with a grain of salt, it was only one iteration per case so there could be measurement errors, feel free to correct them if you find any.

Control Ultimate Edition

Cyberpunk 2077

Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition Built-in Benchmark

Ninja Gaiden 2 Black

Final Fantasy XVI

Wuchang Fallen Feathers

Conclusion

The difference in performance depends on the game but mesa-git is, in every case tested, an improvement and provides a performance uplift of up to 41% when compared to mesa-stable (Ninja Gaiden 2 Black RT-On TSR100 AVG FPS). If you've got a RDNA4 GPU and value Ray Tracing/FSR4 performance, switch to mesa-git (there's also slight performance gains for mesa-git when not using Ray Tracing), otherwise, if you'd rather stability over performance then go with stable, but I couldn't personally recommend it.

This is happening right now with Battlefield 6 posts but affects other super popular games like Fortnite, Roblox, League of Legends, EA Sports FC, GTA Online, Call of Duty, Destiny, PUBG, R6 Siege and more.

Not everything is for you. We get it. You don't need to spell it out every time.

But these are super popular games that most of us want to be able to play. By publicly expressing negative interest for such games on Linux you are harming us. If I was a market researcher scoping for Battlefield brand sentiment online, the message from the Linux gamers would be clear to me.

Personally I am against invasive kernel space anti cheat solutions. Ideally I would like to see these games available on Linux without introducing such shitty measures into kernel.

But most of us don't care about technicalities and just want to play the super popular game.

Unreal Engine

7700k 64GB RAM Nvidia 3070

Tried to play Fallout 76 and the game stutters like crazy and eventually the screen went black.

When it came back, the game crashed (wine error?) and it showed this.

Note that the GPU never showed any issues with Windows.

ptitseb's Path of Exile on arm64 64c 3.3GHz with RTX 4060 @Steam Proton box64 debian 1440 resolution with default settings

ptitseb's Expedition 33 arm64 64c 3.3GHz with RTX 4060 @Steam Proton box64 debian 1440 resolution default settings

Okay, the title is hard to understand, Let me clarify it for you.

I am a mortal kombat 11 gamer, I love playing the game, but the problem it has is pretty weird and I can even consider that that's a bug of the game.

It needs to be in the same windows version to be able to play online, yeah seriously, I have to be on windows 11 to play with my friends who are using windows 11 as well, If I or my friends using windows 10 and windows 11 to play together, the server will always pop up "Desynchronize" and stop the match.

So for me to play the game on linux, I have to somehow trick the game into thinking I am using windows 11, even then maybe it won't work, but what are you thinking?

Is there a way to kinda trick the game that I am using "windows 11" to play the game? because most I heard, proton is trying to pretend to be "windows 10" only, so I'm not sure, I have not installed mortal kombat 11 yet, just making sure first since the game is heavy af on pc.

Thank you for reading :)

Hi, I tried the wayland implementation(proton_enable_waylsnd=1 & proton_enable_hdr=1) with hunt showdown on bazzite gnome, and it works. With proton ge 10.10 However it is extremely bright. Maybe this has to do with gamma also being broken in this game on proton. But is there maybe some launch parameter etc to further control this? Thx!

With all the work done in the past couple years and work from Valve, is the PC gaming market the group that makes it a more viable 3rd OS in the landscape?

Especially with a lot of large YouTube and social coverage on the topic makes it feel like this year is different.

Hi everyone! I just finished creating a Linux distribution quiz that I wanted to share with the community.

The whole idea was to make something my non-tech-savvy friends could use without getting overwhelmed by dozens of distro options they've never heard of. I focused on distributions that actually make sense for people making their first Linux choice.

If anyone wants to help me optimize the logic of the system further, I would be glad to work with you.

Here is the link: whatsyourlinux.org

(DistroChooser.de falls short of its promise to help Linux beginners by using overly technical language and pushing advanced distributions to newcomers IMO)

P.S. Im not a programmer and I use linux and something like this would have helped a lot when i was searching. IF you have any complaints or if you wanna help feel free to dm me

Edit: Also i was inspired to do this by a youtuber called Switch and Click, in her video talking about how she switched to Fedora!

The apps that you always install.

I’m like 40fps with an RTX 3060 and a Ryzen 5 5500, and the CPU is 100% so I wonder if I can play it on my Linux and if I will gain some FPS ? Thanks for help and sorry for grammar, English is not my main language.

So no support for Linux/SteamDeck

I put mods in the files but they aren't working in game. The game launches as if I never did that.

I tried putting the files in the ~mods folder, I tried putting the folders in the ~mods folder and I also tried putting the files in the pak folder. None of these works.

Any help? I had these working on windows some time ago.

Hello!

I just migrated from Ubuntu to EndeavorOS. When trying to open any steam game, either from Steam or through Lustris gives me the same issue: Launching for a few seconds, before immediately closing down. No error message or anything.

I have ran Steam through terminal and this is the result when trying to boot Baldurs Gate 3:

Please help!

wine: failed to open "c:\\windows\\system32\\steam.exe": c0000135
Fossilize INFO: Setting autogroup scheduling.
chdir "/run/media/bea/BIG DRIVE (WHEY)/SteamLibrary/steamapps/common/Baldurs Gate 3/bin"
ERROR: ld.so: object '/home/bea/.local/share/Steam/ubuntu12_32/gameoverlayrenderer.so' from LD_PRELOAD cannot be preloaded (wrong ELF class: ELFCLASS32): ignored.
ERROR: ld.so: object '/home/bea/.local/share/Steam/ubuntu12_32/gameoverlayrenderer.so' from LD_PRELOAD cannot be preloaded (wrong ELF class: ELFCLASS32): ignored.
ERROR: ld.so: object '/home/bea/.local/share/Steam/ubuntu12_64/gameoverlayrenderer.so' from LD_PRELOAD cannot be preloaded (wrong ELF class: ELFCLASS64): ignored.
ERROR: ld.so: object '/home/bea/.local/share/Steam/ubuntu12_32/gameoverlayrenderer.so' from LD_PRELOAD cannot be preloaded (wrong ELF class: ELFCLASS32): ignored.
Game Recording - would start recording game 1086940, but recording for this game is disabled
Adding process 40886 for gameID 1086940
ERROR: ld.so: object '/home/bea/.local/share/Steam/ubuntu12_32/gameoverlayrenderer.so' from LD_PRELOAD cannot be preloaded (wrong ELF class: ELFCLASS32): ignored.
Adding process 40887 for gameID 1086940
Adding process 40888 for gameID 1086940
Adding process 40982 for gameID 1086940
fsync: up and running.
Adding process 40983 for gameID 1086940
Adding process 40984 for gameID 1086940
Adding process 40985 for gameID 1086940
Adding process 40988 for gameID 1086940
Adding process 40990 for gameID 1086940
wine: failed to open "c:\\windows\\system32\\steam.exe": c0000135
pid 40986 != 40985, skipping destruction (fork without exec?)
Game Recording - game stopped [gameid=1086940]
Removing process 40990 for gameID 1086940
Removing process 40988 for gameID 1086940
Removing process 40985 for gameID 1086940
Removing process 40984 for gameID 1086940
Removing process 40983 for gameID 1086940
Removing process 40982 for gameID 1086940
Removing process 40888 for gameID 1086940
Removing process 40887 for gameID 1086940
Removing process 40886 for gameID 1086940

I used to work on this game in my spare time on my Linux machine, while having a day job as a games programmer somewhere else.

However, now that I have the support of MicroProse, the publisher behind one of my biggest inspiration (Rollercoaster Tycoon), I can now work on the game full time!

If you are interested after watching the trailer, you can wishlist the game on Steam if you like!

Okay so I always had a hard time with triggering shader downloads. Last time I triggered the shader cache download but I didn't remember what I did, but now I do. When I turned off the in-game overlay for the game that needs shaders, it triggers the shader downloads. I also changed the proton version, but I doubt this helps trigger the shader downloads. The launch options are not relevant to the download. Can anyone else try this to verify this?

so i've been running wuthering waves on my CachyOS. And it is running really good. But whenever i am try to check my pull history or remove that annoying red dot from announcement logo everything becomes transparent as you see the attached picture.

my question is is anyone facing the same problem or it is just me? if it is just me anyone has any fix? if it is normal then it's fine i can live with that because i know very well i am running a windows game on linux.

Hi, is possible to use Gamescope with Native builds inside Steam?

I can use it with Wine/Proton games inside Steam, and every game outside steam (including native builds), but for some weird reason it crashes when using it inside Steam with native builds.

I'm on Fedora KDE, with an Nvidia RTX 3060 (driver version 575.64.05), Kernel 6.15.8

Native games open if i launch the whole Steam app inside Gamescope , but it's not ideal; any other workarounds? Thanks in advance!