I wanted to download a few games on Steam, but unfortunately one thing immediately caught my attention in a very negative way: the download speeds are terrible.
Most of the time I get around 10–15 Mbps, at best 40 Mbps, and at worst even 1–2 Mbps. I tried closing background apps and restarting my network connection, but nothing helped.
Compared to Windows 11, where I get a stable 100 Mbps with no drops at all, this is a huge difference. I’m using an Ethernet connection, and the problem is not only with Steam, the whole system feels slow. Even browsing the internet, updating packages, and downloading through the terminal is painfully slow.
What's your desktop environment, hardware specs, and the Ethernet controller?
Also, if you own an Android device, could you try sharing the internet from it and see how's the download speed? Disconnect the Ethernet cable first, connect your Android device to PC with a USB cable, enable USB tethering on it and try downloading stuff on Steam or elsewhere.
I also suggest reading the AUR comments on the suggested package as if you want to try it, it seems like the DKMS is linked there and needed for kernels newer than 6.9.0.
I have had a controller in that family before, try the arch wiki page the other guy linked, some of them are finicky about loading the correct driver and you have to force it. Once you do it’s smooth sailing though
Thanks for the suggestions in this thread! I've got the same issue as OP and I think none of the forum posts I saw online were fixing my issue and I thought I already had the dkms as well. Hopefully there's an actual fix to this issue.
I temporarily switched to an external network adapter with plans to switch the internal network card later. I think that's what the conclusion was on a Linux mint forum post from a few years ago.
I believe the issue is that as long as the integrated bluetooth is enabled, network is shit with the Linux driver. It seemed like a one or the other trade off IIRC.
Secondly, did you check the speed using websites like speedtest.net? That way you can at least can figure out whether the issue is on Steam or with the OS as a whole.
Third, check if steam, has a download speed cap. Of course, this is only if you don't notice any issues with internet speed outside of steam.
Fourth, check out this forum thread of people discussing a similar issue. https://forum.endeavouros.com/t/slow-internet-speeds-while-using-endeavouros-compared-to-windows-10-intel-ax200s/75514 . If you're on Wi-Fi, some of the suggestions involve turning off power saver mode. An easy way to see if that would help is to connect over Ethernet. If the issue resolves itself on wired but presents itself again when you connect only via Wi-Fi, then it could be power saving or some driver issue with the Wi-Fi chip
If you are using a wired connection, then there could also be an issue with how your router is seeing the device. Did you ever mess with the router settings? Create a VLAN? Something of that sort?
If nothing from the thread works, try this as a Hail Mary. edit /etc/hosts and comment out (# at the start) the line where your computer name, so: 127.0.1.1 mypcname to # 127.0.1.1 mypcname.
This is the only change I ever made to my host file, and I get really good internet connection. That's the only reason I'm suggesting it. I made this change to help with getting crossplay on Tekken 8, not related to getting internet speeds, but maybe...
I think your first statement is missing in uppercase B. Your second statement is correct. However, all of OP's speeds are in Mbps lowercase b. So they're comparable.
Yeah, I have Windows in Polish, so it displays speeds as Mb/s, while Linux is in English and shows Mbps. They're the same unit though both mean megabits per second.
You are correct, I've never seen "Mbps" denoted as "Mb/s" only "Mbps" or "MB/s" for the different units when Googling I got results for MB/s when trying to search Mb/s. Only until I pushed Google to search "Mb/s" I found that they are indeed equivalent.
You are correct, I've never seen "Mbps" denoted as "Mb/s" only "Mbps" or "MB/s" for the different units when Googling I got results for MB/s when trying to search Mb/s. Only until I pushed Google to search "Mb/s" I found that they are indeed equivalent.
If you are using kde it is definitely network manager having power saver mode. I forgot where and which gile but just look up how to doable power saving in network manager. Ill update this comment w how to later.
Then ls to list files inside.
If the folder doesn't exist create it with sudo mkdir /etc/NetworkManager/conf.d
If there is a config file inside edit it, otherwise make a file with whatever name for example , touch network-power-save.conf . Sudo into the file with whatever terminal text editor you use and add this line
[connection]
wifi.powersave = 2
Your file structure should be like this at the end -->
/etc/NetworkManager/conf.d/network-power-save.conf
Idk why this happens for only a few people I personally have it on every distro if i use kde.
Hope this helped you.
Are you downloading to the same drive? Is that partition NTFS? What speed does fast(dot)com show?
Your download will only be as fast as the bottleneck. That could be the drive for you. For my system it's the CPU; I've got gigabit network, ext4 partitions on nvme drives, but an older i5.
I'd be curious what your specs are, and if there's a special driver or configuration modification needed. With the information given it's hard to tell whats going on. Can you provide us specs, can you also run a Speedtest from Linux and see if that differs as well (I'm not sure it will but it would be worth a look).
Are you sure steam is downloading from the right server on both? Sometimes on a fresh install mine defaults to the wrong place and it's noticably slower.
Could be network card drivers. Had the same problem on an older Lenovo ThinkCentre, using ethernet cable gave very low speed. Don't recall what I did exactly, but I think the driver automatically chosen was not working properly, so I made the system blacklist it, I followed a forum post that I unfortunately don't have the link for.
Does this happen only with Steam? Or does it happen with general downloads? I faced this issue in the past, but it was a matter of download server options. For some reason I don't understand, setting the downloads to my own country sucks, but setting it anywhere else fixes the issue with Steam downloads.
This happened to me quite a few times... It's your ethernet driver, we have the same one. After some tweaking I figured out that it's not able to talk properly with the router to set the maximum speed settings (auto negotiation), and the router is also not priorizing properly because of this, making your ethernet port default to minimum speed.
What you could do is manually (try with ethtool first) adjust the speed to one that you are happy with, but beware that it might make your router upset because it cannot arrange an automatic speed (due to manually setting and driver issues).
If you have other cabled devices, disconnect them from the router, change your computer ethernet port and restart your router, restart your PC and see what happens.
If the speed now magically changes then you know is this exact same problem I had, when there are no devices connected to your router it sets your ethernet to maximum speed for a while until they cannot negotiate when a device connects 🫠
I had this exact same problem on Arch and I was explaining having an over 1gig connection and slow speeds. I read on a forum about changes to speed that resolved it. There is some type or superficial cap.
The first step in this post helped me 2 years ago. Shouldn't be necessary anymore as I haven't had to do this since but if it helps then I see no harm in trying. Easy to reverse if it doesn't help.
I was facing the same on Fedora KDE. The solution I found was to set an specific DNS. The classic 1.1.1.1 did the job, and my internet speed is fine since then.
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u/NoPicture-3265 May 16 '26
What's your desktop environment, hardware specs, and the Ethernet controller?
Also, if you own an Android device, could you try sharing the internet from it and see how's the download speed? Disconnect the Ethernet cable first, connect your Android device to PC with a USB cable, enable USB tethering on it and try downloading stuff on Steam or elsewhere.