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Due to Proton I feel like coming back to PC gaming after almost 20 years, great stewardship by Valve there.

The last "rig" I built was for Doom 3 after which I'd never bothered with keeping a NTFS partition again.

Apple silicon just doesn't seem to get to the levels needed for a state-of-the-art Cyberpunk 2077 experience even on pricier high-end Macs. I'm also still not willing to buy any "next-gen" consoles for the first time either (trend of maybe efficient but still glorified PC architecture continuing).

Would anyone have a list of well tested Linux + Proton compatible components?

Nvidia or AMD? Which drivers are better maintained at this point? It would still be cool to run some machine learning workloads for fun of course.

Any pointers would be appreciated.

7 comments

Basically anything recent but not the latest components will work well. If you want hassle-free then going with amd everything is the most efficient IMO.

I'm running a ryzen 3600 and a radeon rx5700xt, and i've not had any driver issues, be it with x11 or wayland. I've been playing a bunch of games from my library but there are still some games that aren't compatible (for ex. Vermintide 2 has non-compatible anticheat) so i keep a spartan windows instal on a 128gb ssd for those and VR. VR is a non-starter on linux.

That being said, nvidia has RT cores now, which can do very fast matrix multiplication which is advantageous for ML workloads (on top of a lot of ml work being optimized for cuda cores). Can't speak to their drivers but older cards should be safer, especially considering the 40 series hasn't been shown to be worth it over used 30 series.

Interesting point about VR. I guess the sets and controllers are married even more so to the Windows APIs and will incur stark penalty on immersion for even slightest lag (due to API translation)?

A bummer for sure.

I also honestly was leaning more towards buying a used RTX 3080 or RTX 3090 from one of the (ex) Ethereum miners. I actually played through Cyberpunk 2077 on Geforce Now "RTX 3080" and am definitely spoiled by real time RT and DLSS now.. The compression artifacts and occasional lags and packet loss did become grating after a while though (to me). Biggest issue with GFN though is lack of games (I still don't understand why they can't just support any game on any of their integrated marketplaces. I mean it's me buying them on those platforms then playing them through GFN instances).

But I also gather here from multiple answers that AMD apparently should still be the choice on Linux. Maybe I need to wait a bit longer for them to catch up on the realtime RT and ML image reconstruction..

> Interesting point about VR. I guess the sets and controllers are married even more so to the Windows APIs and will incur stark penalty on immersion for even slightest lag (due to API translation)?

Its mostly that Valve doesn't seem to be too interested in polishing VR on Linux. They ported SteamVR and eventually ported Alyx but neither has seen any significant update on Linux for ages. It all kinda works but ... not great.

Other non-Valve headsets will probably have even more problems.

I think the VR limitations are more due to graphics. Controllers are just simple bluetooth devices with custom drivers, but graphics is understandably hell. Wayland can't understand how to handle my index being plugged in, and x11 fucks up in ways i didn't think possible.

Hopefully valve is doing what i think they are doing, which is making the steam deck as a test for their hardware platform in order to make a standalone VR headset with a similar chip.

I'm using a 3070 on Linux and it's usable with the latest GNOME/KDE versions on Wayland. If you're purely looking for a Linux gaming solution, Nvidia isn't a terrible choice now. If you want an all-in-one machine with the best support available, you'll probably want AMD or Intel hardware.

My current experience on alder lake + Nvidia 30 series isn't quite a smooth enough experience to move my non-technical fiancee over, but it's close enough that I've considered it.

The AMD drivers are mainlined and they've gotten a lot better about stability than where they were a couple years ago. Valve has done a lot of compatibility testing/fixes for the steamdeck as well.

The Nvidia drivers are also pretty stable and many distros provide them out of the box. They're still going to be your main choice for ML stuff.

For CPUs both Intel and AMD are extremely well supported. There are generally more eyes on the Intel side though.

Thanks for answering.

> My current experience on alder lake + Nvidia 30 series isn't quite a smooth enough experience to move my non-technical fiancee over, but it's close enough that I've considered it.

So you are considering it because stability with Nvidia 30* would still be good enough for you in light of a gaming use case?

Go with wired networking or be careful about your choice of WiFi hardware. Some wireless chipsets have poor Linux support, but there are usually lists of good ones and bad ones. When it comes to graphics, AMD GPUs Vega or newer work incredibly well on Linux. NVidia has a fairly substantial lead in GPU performance, but they have poor Linux support and appear to be actively working to make their hardware a bad deal. Most motherboards have no issues on Linux, but audio and networking can be pain points. CPU brand is not an issue with Linux, but since your choice of CPU and choice of motherboard are tied together, it is something you might have to think about. Perhaps pick a price, find AMD and Intel motherboards that support the features you want and have good Linux compatibility, and then figure out which brand gets you better performance at that price with your desired feature set.

Hardware that requires a proprietary windows app to control can be a problem - think RGB hardware and fancy gaming mice. There is some software to work with these sorts of things and you can get Logitech gaming mice working on Linux but it is somewhat harder than it should be. Stay away from Razer - their software is more troublesome than anyone else's.

Steam has absolutely incredible controller support. It is ludicrously good. If you want to play games on PC with a controller, hope they're Steam games or at least work well when launched through steam.

Use PCPartPicker when you're putting together your build. Their website is a wonderful tool for checking compatibility even though it's not perfect. If you ask someone for advice on your build, being able to give them a PCPartPicker link really speeds things up. If you're looking for a place to get advice on a build, /r/buildapc is generally decent.

If you're concerned about upgradeability or future-proofing, it's not a great time for that on the CPU front. AMD's AM5 socket just came out and probably has a good few years ahead of it, but the first-generation motherboards are awfully expensive and you should never buy first gen mobos anyways. It is also quite possible they will have poor support for Zen 5 CPUs. Intel's LGA 1200 socket is obsolete and current LGA 1700 motherboards probably won't support anything past the 13th generation (Raptor Lake). That said, a new mid or high-end CPU is likely to remain useful for many years since popular games are somewhat limited by the need to support 9th gen consoles. Similar is true for GPUs, but GPU prices are not great at the moment though they are better than they have been in the past few years.

If you have any other questions let me know.

Thanks for the thorough answer, especially insightful with regards to CPU, chipsets and on the peripheral fronts.

To be honest I'm still aching for that realtime RT + DLSS fix without being dependent on GFN "PRO" all without having to go all retrograde to Microsoft world.

Not too interested in any RGB hardware luckily.

I'll play with PC Part Picker for a bit again :) now that I know that in general things seemingly should be expected to be much smoother even with the potential NVIDIA GPU choice on Linux...

> Not too interested in any RGB hardware luckily.

It's still a concern if you just want to turn the damned lights off since they come default now with so many components and many default to full on unicorn puke.

I switched from an Nvidia card a couple of years ago as I got fed up with the crashes and general instability it caused on my system. Running an AMD card was such a breath of fresh air in comparison that I would never recommend Nvidia for anyone wanting to run Linux.

It's a pity you want to do ML though, as I suppose that complicates your decision process. Nvidia "works", but be prepared that a system update might break stuff for you.

Thanks for sharing, appreciate it.

For GPU: AMD (but not _too_ cutting edge is the easy answer here). Any of the Radeon 6000 series will work well out of the box with recent open source kernels.

CPU wize Intel/AMD does not matter.

> but not _too_ cutting edge is the easy answer here

If you are comfortable with building the drivers (Kernel/Mesa) from yourself, then cutting edge GPUs are usually fine too. E.g. Navi 2 support was all there on release day but perhaps not yet in all distros. Not saying that this should be reasonable for everyone but we are on a tech forum.

AMD all the way. Avoid Nvidia on Linux.

You can get a SteamDeck which could double as a desktop PC with a dock.

I pondered the SteamDeck before and it's definitely cool (big Proton push!) but I personally prefer the OLED Switch or my Apple silicon Mac for lighter mobile use cases (indie games, text heavy RPGs).

I don't think the SteamDeck runs Cyberpunk 2077 with anything even close to real-time RT at 1440p @ 40fps minimum?