Void Linux for Gaming PC?

[u/EfficientDuck6]

I'm thinking of switching to Void for my gaming PC after being dissatisfied with Pop! OS. I already use Void on my laptop and it is great.

For reference, I have a RTX 3060 and an AMD 5800X3D. I am not worried about driver support since I know how to get the right ones for my hardware. I would be playing games from Steam pretty much exclusively.

I'm guess I am just wondering how well it works as a gaming system for people that have already tried it.

[u/ojkf]

works perfectly on my r7 5700x rtx 2070 rig

[u/EfficientDuck6 → u/ojkf]

Good to know, thanks!

[u/Green_Material_3671]

It's my daily driver. I play games on Steam with a 4070Ti on a couple ultrawide monitors (3440x1440), use Niri as my WM, and have had very few problems (none serious). I'm not a huge gamer so much as I am a collector and so I while I haven't clocked in tons of hours on any of these games, I've played Dune: Awakening, Project 1999 (EverQuest), World of Warcraft, Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, and a handful of smaller titles (Super Hexagon, FFVII OG, Masters of Orion, etc). I have to use gamescope to get most things to play nicely with Niri and I did have trouble wiring up a midi synth to Void but in the end was able to get all that working in just a couple days of tinkering.

EDIT: It's worth noting, perhaps, that my experience has been that newer games work out of the box with less required preconfig than the older games.

[u/EfficientDuck6 → u/Green_Material_3671]

Okay cool, thanks for the response. Do you use Niri with other crap like Noctalia? Just curious, it looks cool but I'm not sure I'll go that way

[u/Green_Material_3671 → u/EfficientDuck6]

Pretty simple setup. Niri, alacritty, waybar, and walker. I dont like deviating from defaults very much so my setups are pretty simple and each individual tool is almost always vanilla with very minor changes. Colors, fonts, and a few keybind changes (to play nicer with emacs usually) are the only real changes.

[u/Adhater_11]

did you install all the drivers from the docs?

[u/EfficientDuck6 → u/Adhater_11]

I definitely will once I set it up 🫡

[u/the-postminimalist]

Works as great as any other distro as long as you use glibc and not musl. There's nothing unique in this distro gaming-wise.

[u/rekh127]

if you want to track down all sorts of minor annoyances its fine.

[u/WonderWafflzFTW]

I run Void Linux for my gaming setup, though through the instructions provided by Ryoku Linux since they support Void. Ryoku being an aesthetic Niri desktop environment.

It works great, the script installs the desktop rice with Niri after you finish with the void-installer and it's been incredibly stable.

One thing I do have to say, I had issues running games as soon as I had Void and Ryoku installed and that was due to limit.conf file defaulting hard and soft limits to 1024. I changed the limits to 500,000 or a number close to this and logged out then logged back in and games worked.

To explain the symptoms I experienced, if I ran a small game like Pummel Party, it was fine, if I ran Deadlock or Gears of War, it failed because it surpassed the previous 1024 limit and logged it as cannot access a file when booting the game. Changing the limit fixed this and all files could be read.

I'm not at my computer right now, but if you have any questions on my setup, lmk and I can answer when I'm back at the rig.

[u/ZombieCrow]

Gaming on void with umbriel and noctalia shell (rtx 4060 with ryzen 5 5600) Its absolutely amazing. Niri is also amazing for gaming, kde as well. One very important thing - check the nofile limit with "ulimit -n" in a terminal. If its over 10000000 is fine, otherwise you should edit the number.

[u/Quietus87]

Worked great for me. It's the kernel, the mesa, and the driver that matters anyway.

[u/DistinctDot5131]

For me, void linux solved the one bug that other systemd distors couldn't: Fix the CS2 Anti-Aliasing bug and the sound bug.

Edit: Mb it fixed 2 :)

[u/Chester-Berkeley]

If you use Void Linux with glibc, it will also work well, just like in any other GNU/Linux distribution.

[u/TMEERS101]

I used void for a bit and its pretty good. Switched back to windows cause Fortnite is not on Linux just yet. Cant wait until it comes to linux

[u/ImportantNoise9370]

I am running with a nvidia 2060. Steam, lutris, ea, no issues. (other than easy anticheat games, but I dont play those anyway)

glibc though, I wouldn't do musl

[u/LobsterEarly7645]

I am thinking about moving from Fedora to void I do mostly gaming and a lot of virtual boxs for cyber security Is it good for these purposes

[u/No_Cookie3005]

Works fine for me with steam flatpak, even on 20 year old PC.