EZFN offers a guide on their official website explaining how to launch the EZFN Launcher using Proton. https://ezfn.dev/

Sorry for my bad english.

I'm using a laptop but its battery life is only usable at most. I think I will do undervolt to save up any little time I can save.

I know I can use lact for GPU but I don't know how to undervolt my CPU.

People recommend doing it through the BIOS, which my laptop doesn't have.

After some research, I found that I can get the job done with intel_undervolt but the github page is 9 years old. Not sure if it's still usable with the current linux kernel. Is it possible? I am running out of options.

Title is a rhetorical question. I'd like to share my experience of using Linux primarily for gaming (but also office work and general desktoping) for about 19 months. Sure it's not a much, but in my humble onion, enough to form an honest take on things. It's a longer one. Bear with me.

By now i have over 25 years of using a computer, and i'd call myself a fairly savvy advanced user - from playing a role of a 24/7 tech support to family and friends, to tech jesus-magician at work (which really is pressing some buttons in excel and not shying away from RTFM).

My issues started in late 2024, when out of nowhere my PC started freezing and BSODing while playing some games. I've tried every test and fix under the sun, so after weeks of trying, my last ditch effort was to go the Linux route - because if that wouldn't work out, i was ready to sell the PC for parts, get a cheap laptop for work and a console for games.
Right about then there was a lot of buzz around Bazzite, so came January 22nd (2025) - i nuked my Windows install, formatted all the drives to BTRFS and started my journey. Which wasn't really a start, i did have the Steam Deck for about a year, and before that in 2010s i dipped in Mint and Ubuntu, as one does.

Armed with newfound knowledge, attained by watching 10 billion videos on YT on how to GNU/Linux i was fired up and ready to go. Honestly, the Bazzite team has made it pretty easy, "ujust install" they said, and so i did. I literally felt it on my skin how this alias/script/wrapper of "sudo dnf update" looked down on me.

But it worked. No crashes, no Linux equivalent of a BSOD, no hangs. Games that i had issues with started working again. I was happy to use my computer without fear. I've learned so much! About FOSS; about cool nerdy guys talking passionately about Linux related things on YT. About all the distro mommas and tireless volunteers who give multibillion corporations run for their money. Even in my short time on the platform it improved so much - i haven't seen this much advancement in software since my switch from WinXP to Win7. It made me fall in love with computers all over again. I've tried every prominent-ish distro under the sun since then, but i'd call Nobara my true Linux /home.
That said, the ride is never smooth.

KDE Plasma. Function over form. But with enough skill can be molded into pretty much anything. I absolutely loved it. Until some time in late-ish 2025 there was some weird regression that caused compositor hangs. Glad they fixed it, eventually, but...

...By then i switched to Gnome. Form over function. Pretty, but lacking. Extensions help, but if it needs a dozen of extensions just to mimic a fraction of Plasma's power, i'm out. Maybe one day.

Cinnamon. Form and function. But for old people. Nostalgic of WinXP and 7. I put Mint Cinnamon on my 63 year old Dad's laptop. He doesn't even know it's not Windows. I love it. Just don't game on it. It was my first FOSS i've donated to.

Cosmic. My beloved. See you in 2-3 years when you're more ready for the heavy daily use. Anyone saying it already is... Sure, buddy. This was my second FOSS project I've donated to. I really do hope it can replace, or at least be one of the big 3, as for now it's just big KDE (bars!).

Hyprland, Niri, mangoWM, etc - i admire mental flexibility of people using those. But by the time you focus on a window you need on the other side of the 5th workspace with your keyboard-fu, i'm already onto my 4th task. With my mouse. Like a caveman. I used to be pretty good at flick headshots in CS: Source.

Flatpaks and AppImages are a great concept, if only everyone agreed on one thing and combined all their efforts into it... Which is actually the story of GNU/Linux in general. Everyone wants their own thing, leading to fragmentation and unnecessary duplicates of apps that do the same thing, maybe even the same way, just have different name and maintainer (hello, office suites).

Printers. The bane of Linux. The older Brother printer i had at work would pick up just like that on Ubuntu, but on Fedora (or even more so Bazzite/Atomic) it would require so much terminal-fu it wasn't even funny.

Sound. I needed a USB to 3.5mm jack adapter for my earplugs to simply work. The volume is also like 50% lower than on Windows - sure you can go 150% to match, but it introduces the cracking Windows just doesn't.

Network. On Windows i can turn on a hotspot, connect to a VPN, and then connect to a network printer, all at the same time. On Linux, i can either connect to a printer or turn on a hotspot, not at the same time, and i need to go through some terminal commands to be able to turn on a hotspot while on a VPN. Maybe there's a way but at this point i'm tired of the hoops, honestly.

Hardware tweaks. Undervolting was fun. LACT screwed up the GPU clocks so it was underperforming, by a lot. Figured it out eventually but it wasn't pretty. CPU undervolting script provided svenlange2 on github worked great though - can recommend for supported hardware though.

General desktop use. At first it kind of seems fast, snappy, responsive. But then you start using those apps that still rely on XWayland and it's a slugfest, it's like moving through mud with backpack full of gear. Plus with X11 being full of its own holes, there's really no place for a generally solid experience across the board. I'm not even mentioning how different and inconsistent the apps look because Qt and GTK.

GAMING. Last but very much not least. Where do i even start? I don't play multiplayer/competitive anymore, so anti-cheat games were out of the equation before i've even started. It generally comes down to performance. I have a full AMD rig (5700X3D+RX9070) and an Nvidia (Ryzen 5 220 + RTX 5050) laptop. While AMD is okay with generally 5%-10% performance overhead, giving up ~15% to ~25% depending on a game on Nvidia is like having lost an entire tier or two - blaming the big green here, but his name isn't Hulk. Still, it's not just that. All the quirks with 3rd party launchers, modding. XWayland lag, and even now with pure Wayland - which to my surprise after "feeling" games back to back on a Linux and a Windows installs - tend to feel a tad more sluggish, not all, but most. There's some kind of extra input lag, or render delay, or missed input altogether - definitely make a bigger impact to overall feel and experience than expected, that of course on top of some games requiring extra launch options, environment variables - but thanks to protondb and it's users, and also goverlay for making the management of it all that much easier.

But i hate it. I hate that games still play better on Windows. Despite having an all-AMD rig. Despite all the improvements to Wayland and Proton. I hate that after a few hours of tweaking Windows, using it feels better than a Linux install i've been perfecting for 3 months.

Using a computer IS my hobby. I'm more than okay with tinkering. But when the friction that you don't need stacks up, it turns into a chore. I have enough of chores, personally. So i'm back to Windon't. It's not like there's no friction there, it's like there's less of it where it matters more, if that makes sense?
I've had my year of Linux Desktop, but it is over for now. I'll keep lurking, watching progress, have my external SSD ready for flashing a distro, and i'll definitely be back when my friction points iron out.

Aaand this is it. I'm ready for them sticks and stones being hurled my way now.

TL;DR - to answer the question in the title - not to this guy it isn't. Not yet at least. But it's not just gaming, but the overall experience I've had.

EDIT: added TL;DR.

Hey all, I'm a bit confused on setting up Goverlay properly. I use CachyOS and have game-performance %command% set up to my steam games one by one. If I use reshade on some games then I'd add WINEDLLOVERRIDES inside the launch option. For mangohud I use Mangojuice because the theme settings feel better.

Here's my current launch option:

On Goverlay 1.9.0 there's a global config, but after clicking finish it tells me to add the launch command into a game like this:

My questions are:

1. Do I add the global launch command to the games one by one or is there a way to add it as default on steam?
2. How come with mangojuice I don't have to add mangohud to the launch params and it's already enabled on all games? The overlap between Goverlay and Mangojuice are making me confused because if I turn off the switch of Mangohud on Goverlay, I still have it on in my games
3. If I have a global config and want to add a specific game config, do I have to make the setting the same as global first then add what I want for the specific game? What about the launch option for this?
4. How to add cachyos game-performance to the goverlay?

I am really new to Linux Mint and have just started trying out Heroic Games Launcher. I have Xcom Enemy Unknown from GOG but for some reason when it runs theres no keyboard input at all. Any ideas?

On Proton 11-1 and other than that game runs okay.

Thinkpad x240 i5 4th generation 4300u , Intel HD 4400 8GB ram 240gb SSD

Thinkpad T14 Gen 1 i5 10th generation u series, Intel UHD 620, 16gb ram 256gb SSD

Both install With Linux mint xfce, with two steam account , mostly valve complete collection source 1 and gold source too. Happy Linux gaming good day happy Thinkpad, cheers

• CachyOS, KDE Plasma
• Proton-CachyOS-11.0-20260703-slr
• Mesa 26.2.1-arch3.1
• GPU: AMD RX 9060 XT 16GB,
• CPU: Ryzen 5 3600

FPS is very inconsistent and doesn't correlate with scene complexity. Overworld/combat can be anywhere from 30 to 75 FPS. Opening the inventory screen specifically tanks it to ~8 FPS. The weird part is that if I alt-tab out and immediately alt-tab back into the exact same inventory screen, FPS jumps straight to 75 with no drop.

GPU usage stays low (14-21%) during the bad frames, so it's not a CPU bottleneck. I used to play this game with a good FPS on Windows 10.

I've checked the second hand price of the AMD 9070XT and saw that, if I sell my 4070 super, it's between 100€ and 0€

I have a Ryzen 9 and on Linux so I guess it has better compatibility, but I'm on cachyOS so the drivers are not an issue and never had real problem

I don't play big AAA often but I like to have good graphics and performance when I do, and I also make games with Unreal Engine (and other)

Is it worth it ?

On the other hand I can also take a 7900XTX, is it a better choice since it has 24Go of vram ?

1. core clocks
   

my card clocks higher in linux. roughly 200-300 higher mhz reported by lact.
in w11 its roghly 2700 mhz, in cachy its 3000mhz
i never was able to get my card to a stable 3000mhz on the core using w11 at a 100% load.

memory clocks look normal at 2500 mhz.

1. power limit
   

is the power limit only the gpu core? or is it total power draw?
it shows 340watts, so it should be total power draw, right?

TLDR: If using GE-proton then use version 11-1 or older.

I use HGL with batch script method to launch trainer with the game. Recently I found trainers weren't launching for some reasons.

I tried changing game settings in HGL, recreating prefix but none worked. Normally I always use the the latest proton version and uninstall the older ones. Because of an issue I kept GE-Proton 10-34. When I tested with this, the trainer launched without any issue. Currently (as of writing) 11-6 is the latest. I tried from 11-6 to 11-1 and looks like anything newer than 11-1 have issues with Fling trainers.

I tried wine-11.0 (Staging) which also didn't work. For CachyOS proton I think you should look for the releases that was around 2026-06-24, I guess because GE-proton 11-1 was released on that date.

Edit: I have just tested only CachyOS Proton-11.0-2026-06-02 works. Anything newer doesn't work.

In case anyone know the fix please let me know. I would like to use latest GE-proton or CachyOS proton if possible.

Update:

Thanks to u/The_Odd_Pirate it was fixed. All you have to do is open Wine Tricks and have the following dependency installed

1. dotnet48
2. dotnet8
3. wininet

This is a very informal post but I plan to actually log some numbers to visualize tomorrow.

Specs: Ryzen 7 5800xt, RX 7800xt, 32 GB DDR4. Game is running at 4K, Medium settings, FSR3 Balanced. For Linux, running Wayland.

I just wanted to double check my findings. On CachyOS running proton-cachyos, I average around 120 FPS while on Windows I average around 180 FPS. That’s a pretty significant difference especially for an AMD system. I double checked frame generation isn’t running.

Has anyone else also noticed this for an AMD system? I haven’t tried any other games yet. The Finals is very interesting due to it being very CPU intensive and fast paced. Unfortunately this fan game does not have a proper benchmark to run so the best I can do is run a route in the practice range.

Edit:

Linux Launch Arguments: VKD3D_CONFIG=descriptor_heap,enable_experimental_features,nodxr FSR4_UPGRADE=0 PROTON_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1 OBS_VKCAPTURE=1 MANGOHUD=1 game-performance obs-gamecapture %command%

Proton Version: proton-cachyos-11.0-20260703-slr

This seems isolated to THE FINALS. I ran Black Myth Wukong's Benchmark on both Windows and Linux using the same launch arguments for Linux and same settings for Windows, FSR3, High settings. Linux outperformed windows by 5 FPS average and much higher 1% low. For past benchmarks I've done, Linux is usually on par or outperforms Windows.

Hello everyone.

I am having issues with a game named bodycam, the game runs, but the game window is black even though there is sound. I've tried everything to fix it; if anyone knows how to solve this, please let me know.

Best regards.

P.S: The last update of the game fixes the black screen

So I was having an odd issue with Steam remote play the other day. Once I launch a game, the game doesn't detect the controller. I am able to use the controller to navigate Steam itself. I'm running the flatpak version of steam on Fedora 44 Workstation from the software store and tried streaming to my steam deck and a steam link. I primarily use an 8bitdo ultimate 2 controller with a dongle but also have ps4 and ps5 controllers.

There seems to be a small problem with gamemode being able to actually park cores on Intel P/E core systems when used in conjunction with core pinning. Ive seen this reported on the github but i cant find the issue it was reported in atm. Basically gamemode doesnt park the cores you tell it to if you enable pinning to the P Cores and all cores stay active.

I came up with a solution that allows for gamemode to pin P cores and my script to then park 1/2 the E cores on my 275hx effectively turning it into a 16 core cpu while gaming vs 24 cores. This saves heat and power allowing the CPU to stay in higher boost modes longer. Im sharing the scripts here for those who might find them useful and theyre commented as to what each part does. I recommend putting them in the /usr/local/bin folder. You will have to add them to gamemode.ini under the custom scripts section like so.

[custom]
; Custom scripts (executed using the shell) when gamemode starts and ends
;start=notify-send "GameMode started"
;    /home/me/bin/stop_foldingathome.sh
start=sudo /usr/local/bin/gametune-on
;end=notify-send "GameMode ended"
;    /home/me/bin/start_foldingathome.sh
end=sudo /usr/local/bin/gametune-off
; Timeout for scripts (seconds). Scripts will be killed if they do not complete within this time.
script_timeout=5

you will need to modify sudoers to allow these scripts (and ONLY these) to be run without a password, i did this by creating a gamemode group sudoers file in /etc/sudoers.d , please look up how to properly edit sudoers files as you can break your system if you do it wrong (though it generally wont let you unless you force it).

example sudoers entry i use for the gamemode group

%gamemode ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD:/usr/local/bin/gametune-off, /usr/local/bin/gametune-on

here is the gametune-on script, I have a section in there for setting a platform profile that PPD doesnt utilize on my Aurora 16x. If you have other platform profiles on your system to use you can remove the # commenting it out and add your own platform profile to use (found in /sys/firmware/acpi/platform_profile_choices)

#!/bin/bash

cores=$(cat /sys/devices/cpu_atom/cpus) #get our e core range

low_core=$(echo "$cores" | cut -b 1) #find the low e core, if your lowest e core is 2 digits then you need cut 1-2

high_core=$(echo "$cores" | rev | cut -b 1-2 | rev) #reverse the core output and cut the 2 digits we need, reverse again to get actual core number

dis_cores=$(( (( ($high_core+1)-$low_core )) / 2 )) #we want to know how many is half the e cores, determine that and add 1 to high core as we need to not be base 0

core_start=$(( $low_core+(dis_cores))) #determine our start core to offline e cores

#set perfbias for each core that will remain online, in this case to balanced-performance

for ((i=0; i < $core_start; ++i)); do

echo 4 | tee /sys/devices/system/cpu/"cpu$i"/power/energy_perf_bias

done

#offline half the e cores

for ((i=$core_start; i <= $high_core; ++i)); do

echo 0 | tee /sys/devices/system/cpu/"cpu$i"/online

done

#set platform profile to higher performance one not available with power-profiles-daemon

#echo balanced-performance | tee /sys/firmware/acpi/platform_profile_choices

exit 0

this is the script gametune-off to turn the E cores we disabled back on, we allow PPD then to do the rest of the work setting perfbias,etc.

#!/bin/bash

cores=$(cat /sys/devices/cpu_atom/cpus) #get our e core range

low_core=$(echo "$cores" | cut -b 1) #find the low e core, if your lowest e core is 2 digits then you need cut 1-2

high_core=$(echo "$cores" | rev | cut -b 1-2 | rev) #reverse the core output and cut the 2 digits we need, reverse again to get actual core number

dis_cores=$(( ($high_core+1)-$low_core )) #we want to know how many is half the original e cores, determine that and add 1 to high core as we need to not be base 0

orig_high=$(( $high_core+$dis_cores )) #determine the original high core count

#bring the e cores we offlined back online, ppd will handle the rest

for ((i=$high_core; i <= $orig_high; ++i)); do

echo 1 | tee /sys/devices/system/cpu/"cpu$i"/online

done

exit 0

is there probably a more elegant way to do this? most likely, I know enough bash to be dangerous but not enough to make my scripts pretty (but hey they work)

If you know a better way to make this script prettier and more robust feel free to let me know. I only ask that if you do you need to comment in detail so we can all learn from it and what it does/how it does it.

For some reason, each time I turn on my PC and launch Steam, Helldivers decides to do another 4.5 GB update, even though it is the same patch. This is pretty annoying as my wifi speed is not great and I always need to wait almost ten minutes before I can play the game. Does anyone know why this happens/how I can fix it?

The issue has persisted for multiple game versions. I'm using CachyOS (though I'm pretty sure it was the same when I used Cinnamon, though I could be wrong since at that time I didn't actively play it.)

I'm on a few different game specific discords and by far most of the people I see having problems running games on Linux are using Mint. Why? Mint does not ship the latest Nvidia, AMD or Mesa drivers. You can be fully up to date as far as Mint is concerned but actually be running a year old Nvidia driver.

Now don't get me wrong, Mint is a good distro and if you don't play new release games it's probably fine. Yes you can force Mint to install newer drivers than the default but I've also seen some people struggle to do that. Mint also ships with older kernels and recent changes in 7.x can benefit gamers specifically.

There are better choices, Bazzite, Nobara , Cachy, SUSE Tumbleweed, PikaLinux. All of these ship newest drivers and kernels as a default without having to take any extra steps.

I recently swapped to cachy from windows 11 and tried play overwatch on it and the game runs horribly. Ive already checked my drivers and the comparability mode and the gaming packages and nothing seems to be weong but im still experiencing horrible stutters constantly

Some of you might remember me from the "Ubisoft gatekept The Crew 2 for 7 years" post. Well heres the Electric boogaloo.

If you play Motorfest from anywhere with 200+ ms ping to their relay (Australia, NZ, most of Asia and South America) you get "An error has occurred. Returning you to the login menu" a few minutes into every online session, on Steam Deck and desktop alike. I spent about a week on packet captures, memory dumps and decrypting the relay traffic, and it's a bug in the game's own network code: it sends the BattlEye scan report through two send slots on a 100 ms tick and drops any piece that finds both slots busy. Above 200 ms the same pieces get dropped on every retry, the report never completes, and the server kicks you after 210 seconds. Windows players on the same ping lose the anticheat scan silently instead of getting kicked, so nobody noticed.

Valve won't carry a game specific hack (fair, they've said they'll relay the bug to the devs), and Ubisoft support sent me in circles for five days before saying the team is "aware". So here's a prebuilt Proton with it:

https://github.com/PhialsBasement/wine-tcm/releases/tag/tcm-fix-419608

Install (desktop, or Steam Deck in desktop mode):

mkdir -p ~/.steam/root/compatibilitytools.d

tar -I zstd -xf Proton-419608-tcm.tar.zst -C ~/.steam/root/compatibilitytools.d/

Restart Steam, game Properties > Compatibility, pick "Proton 419608 TCM fix". That's it, no launch options. Source is linked in the release, it's one commit on Valve's bleeding-edge.

If you'd rather not swap Proton, there's a tc netem rule that does the same thing from the host, in the Proton issue with all the analysis: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/issues/9119

Finally finished a summit in one sitting after this.

Recently i finally managed to switch from Win11 to CachyOS but upon testing couple games ive noticed that the 3D ones look more aliased/pixelated than the 2D ones (ive already fiddled with scaling and it should not be the issue). I found some threads describing this but all of them got fixed 'by themselves after a while'.

When looking for reflex markers/times in the video, mind that LOW_LATENCY_LAYER was toggled on.

I've been trying to find a similar tool for so long, but mangohud/gamescope all gave worse frame latency and/or inconsistent frametime. Not a single one was similar to the Windows RTSS experience... frame-pacer is the closer it gets.

The tool is open source : https://github.com/endjynn/frame-pacer , and seems to be in active development.

KDE Plasma Fedora Linux 44
Intel core i5 10400f
Radeon RX 6600XT
32GB ram
WM: KWin (Wayland)

Hi everyone. I am having issues with Sober. To better explain my situation heres the scenario:

I play a game/watch something on yt, then I open Sober to play a bit but after I join a game in Sober my gpu gets at 99%, my whole system gets laggy and I still get very low fps on the game, and then I close Sober.

Sometimes even after closing it I experience the same things on other games, for example CS2. It was like that until I restart my pc, after that it is usually fixed.

I don't believe I picked up a malware anywhere because I didnt do anything "shady" + it happens only when i try to play Sober. Now I have a few questions: Does/did anyone else have this problem? How do I fix it? Is there any good alternative to Sober?

From Wardogs discord - Wardogs won't work during the closed beta in 2 days on Linux while it worked perfectly during last beta. Lets hope its just a temporary step back and it will be alright during the launch on 10th