Okay so in the next week I want to reinstall arch linux base and set it up for gaming but need some advise on specific parts.
Amd foss driver over ccc
Has it improved recently havent really tried it for gaming
What kernel to use?
Latest stable or testing kernel for newer tech?
Lxqt or other DE?
SSD Improvements to increase read/write performance just to boot faster
Emu software for stuff likeboarderlands 2 and ff8... stick with wine?
Thats it really
Thanks
Well if you're not going to run a fully free distro I don't see a point is using the free AMD drivers. I've never used the free AMD drivers on Linux before but if they're anything like the free Nvidia drivers I'd stay away from them just because they don't work well.
If you're able to I'd just follow this: https://teksyndicate.com/forum/linux/what-if-i-want-everything/157480
I think it's time you made your own distro XDroidie626.
If Spatry and MMoore can do it, anyone can lol.
"The free AMD drivers are 80% the performance ..." -Quote Zoltan
I'm kinda in the same boat, I recently took the attitude “if xf86-video-ati drivers can't handle it, then I won't play the game”. Instead of installing the proprietary drivers you should create and manually tweak /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/20-radeon.conf.
...Actually I should start tweaking them too; Civ5 runs faster than before in Windows but crashes every time at a leader screen, which makes the game unplayable.
About “if foss drivers has improved recently”; a patch improving the free ati drivers will ship with kernel 3.16 later this summer, whereas they were last improved with 3.12 (not 100% sure about this). Atm it's in RC 3 so you could try it already out.
For the SSD, at system install do not use cfdisk to partition the drive since the program cannot align the drive with correct block sizes. Go with fdisk or gdisk.
Enable TRIM to keep places tidy by adding "discard" to /etc/fstab, and if the SSD is the only storage in your PC you could add "elevator=noop" to /etc/default/grub for I/O scheduling.
To simply improve boot-times run "systemd-analyze blame" to view launch times for each daemon and disable unnecessary services, also enable readhead to run remaining daemons as soon as they are accessed at boot.
Also you might want something to control the CPU. I just use "irqbalance" from arch official repos
( # systemctl enable irqbalance.service )
As for the desktop I can't say what you should run, and I doubt the DE has any effect on games, but I use xfce and idle RAM usage is at 300 MB so that's light enough for me.
I can assure you, the free AMD drivers are far faster, more stable, and more feature-complete than the free Nvidia drivers. Partly because AMD is fairly open about how to work their GPUs, and partly because they actually employ a handful of people to work on the free driver full-time.
Intel's free drivers are another huge step above AMD's drivers. It does OpenGL much better than their Windows driver.
Would love to but I am no where near that good with Linux lol, although Arch allows me to create something that I would consider my own distro :)
Okay so LXQT and some general SSD settings, but what I/O scheduler? also what CPU profile would be best for it, bare in mind this is a laptop not a desktop so raw performance is not always the better idea.
Also I take it I should just stick with Wine, I prefer Wine of PoL due to it crashing a lot in my experience.
Also what about x64 over x86? I have 8GB RAM and I know Linux can see over 4GB on a x86 system, but what about security and performance? I know in Windows X64 is supposed to increase security (Although Windows cant ever really be called secure).
Seems like a stupid question but its one I would like to know about
The kernel's default CPU profile is ondemand, and I wouldn't honestly bother changing it to performance even on a desktop. Even Intel has stated this, as the performance gain of changing to performance is negligible.
The dealdline scheduler seems to outperform no-op. But again, the boost is measurable, not noticable.
Can't say what difference changing architectures would bring, apart from that x86 would probs cause less headaches with fex. Steam and it's libs.