by whalesalad 8 hours ago
I just wiped my gaming rig (win11, 12700k, 7900xtx) and installed CachyOS a few days ago. KDE Plasma doesn't work, but Hyprland and Gnome do. I was playing Arc Raiders with a friend within an hour of starting the install. So far everything works, and it even sleeps and wakes without issue.
I did _exactly_ this 3 days ago after I hit a random keyboard chord on accident and brought up CoPilot (which I don't recall installing). I had held on to Windows for gaming just because I didn't want to fuss with Linux, but it was the straw that broke the camel's back. Instantly installed CachyOS onto a USB stick and formatted my entire drive.
I use KDE Plasma and it worked just fine. In fact all of my games (including Arc Raiders) are working just fine on Proton 10, maybe running slightly worse. The only issue I've run into is getting battle.net working through Lutris; I ended up manually installing it through Proton 10 on Steam and it worked just fine. Wish I made the switch earlier.
Lutris by default will use an older WINE version (something based on WINE8 IIRC) by default for reasons I don't quite understand. You can, however, configure Lutris to use proton-cachyos by default, to which I was able to get Battle.net to install and work correctly without issues. Not sure what feature was implemented in later WINE to make that work better, but it works.
I got Battle.net working through Steam. The way I have it is I add the battle.net installer into steam, add proton compatibility, once you run it it installs, but next time you run it, it just opens the launcher unless it needs an update. Then you can install World of Warcraft and other games there and run.
So far so good running CachyOS and KDE Plasma.
I've been using CachyOS with Plasma desktop for a long time now. Including my gaming PC. Zero problems. But I don't play any online games.
I love KDE, but it's too buggy for me. About once a day the bottom dock would just disappear. I really wish they'd focus a little more on stability.
I use Sway on CachyOS, and to me it's the perfect DE. Being able to switch between windows in under a quarter of a second indispensable once you've experienced it.
> switch between windows in under a quarter of a second
I would hope so! 250ms is an extremely long time to switch windows.
You'd probably want to use an X11-based DE like Cinnamon instead, many games still don't play well with wayland.
This has not been my experience. I've an Nvidia desktop and AMD HTPC, both running Wayland and a wide variety of games. What's more, they both do variable sync and HDR.
Don't Steam Deck games run on Wayland?
AFAIK, Steam Deck runs a Wayland compositor, then runs most (or all?) games via XWayland, to the point that gamescope doesn't even expose Wayland to clients by default. How to count this is left as an exercise to the reader.
I haven't used X since 2022. Wayland has been pretty solid for me - although the fractional scaling issue is going to plague us well into 2030 at this rate.
I'll give it a spin though, worth a shot.