Best distro for steam /gaming for someone kinda new to Linux?

So installed Bazitte on my purpose build itx system a few days ago and am after some help.

As I have a RX 9600 XT GPU I was under the impression I could enable features like FSR4, AFMF, Radeon Anti-Lag 2 within SteamOS but cant seem to find any options relating to these features.

Disabling the 'Frame rate limit' option seems to send the fans on my RX 9600 XT into overdrive, is this normal behaviour. I know I'm working with an itx build in a small case so thermals will always be an issue but the fans seem to ramp up within seconds on disabling 'Frame rate Limit' option.

Have paired my Series X pad to the built in Bluetooth receiver on my mobo and seem to get a fair bit of lag and unresponsiveness. Is this the limitations of Bazitte at the moment or would getting a Bluetooth dongle be better, not sure how the signal strength usually is on mono Bluetooth receivers?

Any help and pointers for a newbie Bazitte user would be much appreciated
 
Been on the kde version of bazzite for a week now, couldn't be happier, run wireless mouse and keyboard and have no issues with lag, native steam support for games is something else, i have gotten uplay to work via heroic launcher and can play avatar and the division with no problems, discord was also easy to install and use, going from windows 11 with nvidia i had thought it wouldn't be as smooth, but everything just works which is great.

Before launching games i have to compile shaders which makes my cpu usage go to 95-100% and my fans go a bit mad, but in games afterwards my system is lovely and quiet, smooth as butter fps even at 4k, some titles work with dlss but most run with taa or fidelity fx 3.1 with a bit of frame gen, very impressed. still lots to get my head around being a new user but I’ll get there eventually :cry:
 
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Run into my first CachyOS rolling release issues after week 7 it feels like now. Just get a black screen and mouse cursor when the monitor wakes up from monitor power saving. No doubt it will be fixed soon. But also compounded issues either new or existing: power button doesn't work so can't do controlled shutdown. Ctrl+Alt+F3 terminal but then can't log into an account I know exists.

So I'm now looking into a 'stable gaming distro' which sounds like Nobara, apparently it should still give me same gaming performance as CachyOS, it's just lacking v4 cpu optimizations.

Update: Apparently it was a KDE lock/monitor wake up bug and Nvidia driver thing, so changing distro wouldn't have helped. Now updated and fixed after a week of not being able to sleep monitor or lock my PC!

I'm going to juggle nvme drives around and have main 2TB drive with CachyOS on, move Windows to 1TB drive just as a backup. I also wanted to run some Linux vs Windows benchmarks in Cyberpunk.

CachyOS is a very usable OS, also get ~100fps in 4K Cyberpunk PT, mods, DLSS ultra performance, frame gen x2, but you do need to figure out how with ProtonDB and Gemini assistance.
 
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Tried Bazzite for few days, loved it but went back to W11 due to Vortex not being supported for modding games. Hopefully by end of the year Vortex will be available on Linux so can go back. Shame really as Bazzite experience was superb.
 
Spleen Sauce said:
Just so you're aware, distro updates are a nightmare and I've been stung twice in the past.

The black screen on wake issue is an nvidia problem, not a distro problem. I get it on Fedora too.
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Thanks yeah I'm getting that vibe. This is the issue with rolling release distros and Arch/Cachy, it depends how quickly you want the Nvidia drivers.

It's hard to pin down the best time to run an update (maybe Monday) but I'm not planning on updating for a while now :) Sometimes you have to though when installing something.

I've modded Cyberpunk manually this time around, I 'only' have about 70 mods although that does grow. It start becoming an issue when switching between UV and VTK.
 
After running Cachy for almost 2 years; I've come to the conclusion there is no "best" time to run an update :)

One thing I am careful of is on major revisions of the kernel (ie. 6.18 > 6.19) and sometimes leave it a few days to settle down from when the update first becomes available.

One thing in Cachy's favour is that (so far) I've always been able to fix it after reading up. YMMV of course.
 
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Just a heads up if you’re using Bazzite, especially the big screen version. My display settings are set to automatic. For the first time ever, I clicked on it to see what would happen and there’s an option for 4K@120hz… I’ve been trying to get this running for a while now and couldn’t see the option to select it so I was stuck at 4K@60hz. Even 1440p wouldn’t run at 120hz probably because I hadn’t selected the correct display option. I had 120hz selected on the Desktop but that wasn’t translating to the Big Screen view.

In short, if you didn’t know about this option, don’t assume the automatic selection is correct, and click on it to see what’s available to you. I’ve been on Bazzite for so long now that I can’t remember if I ever had 120hz working and I’ve then changed a setting or if I’ve never had it working. Whatever, it’s working now!
 
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