Huh, a Windows VM might be a brilliant solution to this.
And now I'm wondering - could I maybe use something like Bottles or Wine to install the Windows software that handles Sapphire LEDs? Or would these apps not see the dGPU when virtualised like that?
Sapphire Pure RX 9070 XT.
Well, to be fair, there was A LOT of weird stuff happening. Steam wouldn't open at all (unless called from the terminal), or would open with just a black screen (GPU acceleration issue). At some point, I'm pretty sure, I had three instances of Steam installed. It was chaos.
I have been using Steam and Heroic as flatpaks for a long time, and never had any issues.
I have two NVMe drives - 1TB and 2TB. I keep the OS and "regular apps" on the first one, games go on the second one. Moving the libraries was DIFFICULT on Flatpak. Had to use external software (Flatsomething, can't remember right now) to give permissions and even then, for some reason, sometimes installation would just fail with a "drive error". Oh, and I had to search online to provide the appropriate Steam path for Heroic because, by default, it doesn't see Flatpak Steam.
I'm pretty happy with the state of the OS and GUI as it is right now. Just moved a couple of things around, basically.
I do have a problem with Flathub, though - in theory, it's great. But I'm going to be playing games on this PC and Flathub causes MASSIVE problems for Steam and Heroic Launcher, their libraries and Proton compatibility. Love the idea, don't like the execution.
Garuda (or maybe it's an Arch thing?) does a phenomenal thing with AppImage files - when I launched the first one it asked me if I want to add shortcuts to Application Laucher and tuck the AppImage away in a safe spot, so that it doesn't sit in Downloads. LOVE that feature.
Since I REALLY wanted to just not be bothered with the issue of drivers (especially AMD drivers) I went for one of the "gaming" distros - Garuda Linux.
And I have to say, I'm very positively surprised. Judging by the images on their website, I was afraid it'll be one of those, you know, "pro gamer, full RBG rainbow" bullshit designs, but no - it's actually very pretty live, looks much better than on their website.
Runs on Arch (Zen?) and has a bunch of things that I like - for example an app called "Garuda Rani" which is basically: "you're a noob, here, press these buttons to make things work". It even includes installation shortcuts to some popular applications (Heroic Launcher, Steam, for gamers, but also Wine and Proton, AnyDesk, Discord, VLC, some emulators, a bunch of Linux games (they have SuperTux here!), etc.)
Overall, other than a slight issue with my favourite browser* and repositories**, everything so far seems to be smooth sailing.
* Created a profile, had it running, changed the hostname and it, apparently, screwed the browser over as it was looking for the profile on the old hostname. Weird stuff. Nuked the profile, recreated it, all is well.
** One of those "press these buttons to make things work" includes merging the mirrorlist. Since I knew nothing about it, I just merged one file to the other, didn't think a second about it, and then when I tried installing Steam, I got an error about a "missing repository for extras". Managed to fix it after finally reading what the # signs mean in the mirrorlist file (everything was commented out - every single server...).
I ended up switching to a different distro and now everything seems to be working fine. Tuxedo OS really didn't like my new graphics card.
Haven't had the time yet, but it's on my to-do list. Just not sure if they will support this as I'm running it on my own hardware, not their laptop.
6.11.0-109019-tuxedo.
Not the latest, right? I guess I'll wait for an update.
Does the system also freeze on lock screen without the sleep? superkey(winkey)+L
No, lock screen works fine.
Cheers for the links, I'll look into that!
Don't need to check, I built the PC myself - it's currently running on the iGPU from the 7800x3d.
I would rather disable it on the OS level because I'm slightly paranoid that the dGPU dies at some point and then I can't even access UEFI, because the iGPU is disabled.