You may have read in a recent post that I’m moving away from Windows 10 to Linux for my gaming PC needs. Nobara Linux is a crazy awesome project, just like many other Linux distros . . . but I ran into some problems just in the first week that is making me move onto another distro.

First, I never turn my gaming PCs off for any reason other than the fact that a storm is coming and I just need to protect it from possible power outages. I just don’t see the need; I want to have my PC ready when I’m ready. And sure, it’s fast enough to boot up in less than a minute but ya know, habits are habits. I noticed that when leaving my PC on for more than 48 hours, my CPU would spike up to a constant 50%+ utilization and just stay there. Looks like Gnome Shell was the culprit for no good reason. Is the latest version of Gnome that unoptimized or is it just this build/distro? I typically like having Gnome too compared to other WMs.

Second, the NVIDIA drivers were having some really odd artifacting when maxmizing and minimizing windows. Doing the ol’ ALT-TAB between a game window and something like Firefox caused a lot of graphical issues that I just couldn’t ignore.

I had to make a decision to move on from Nobara because I don’t think that flipping over to KDE would really make it that much better. Heck, because I only use this PC for gaming purposes, why do I need a heavy WM like Gnome or KDE anyway?

My choices were either Manjaro or EndeavourOS; I don’t really have experience outside of the Ubuntu/Arch realm of distros. Manjaro is one that I’ve used in the past but apparently there is some controversy behind it. EndeavourOS is an Arch-based distro that prides itself on being light and little to no defaults. Sounds pretty good for what I need!

Once I got EndeavourOS installed, I had a few issues but got past them fairly easily I guess, mainly it was a little patience and luck:

  • eOS does NOT have Bluetooth enabled by default, however a simple SystemCtl Enable command will fix that. You also have to edit the Bluetooth config file to enable Fast Connectivity and a higher retry count. If you don’t do this, your BT keyboard won’t connect on boot and then you can’t log in. You would think that someone in the Linux world would have this “fixed” by now…
  • Installing XONE for the XBOX Controller+Adapter wasn’t difficult at all, although I had to reboot twice for things to “click”.
  • Since I rip DVDs and Blu-Rays, I installed MakeMKV via the AUR, but I noticed that my BR drive was not being picked up. Running ‘modprobe sg’ loaded the drive in Linux. I had to create a “config” file to have this load on boot up.

Other than that, things are super fast with XFCE and games perform very well as I would expect from Steam and Proton. MakeMKV works perfectly too.

But the real test will be how it holds up over a period of time with no power offs.

This is day 12 of #100DaysToOffload.