Arch Linux for Gaming (or anything else)

I used cfdisk, the TUI "graphical" tool for partitioning because it was available and it’s what I’m used to from installing Slackware.

My layout:

My problem on my first installation was having a more "normal" EFI partition size of 100Mb! But Arch follows another convention that puts all boot data on the EFI partition, so it needs to be much larger. 1Gb should do it, but I wasn’t messing around this time.

After a lot of reading (in the Arch wiki, linked from the install guide above), I decided to go with the EFI partition mount point /boot for convenience Arch is expecting this by default, so everything will "just work" after an install and upgrade.

/mnt is the mount point for the new installation from the installation, so /mnt will be / in the installed file system (and /mnt/boot will be /boot).

(Also, -m creates the directory for a mount point as needed.)

I added some basics along with the kernel:

This is the last piece of the partition and mounting puzzle above. If you choose to mount a large (1Gb or greater) EFI partition at mount point /boot, this part will be very easy.

I chose GRUB as the path of least resistance:

I rebooted into my new installation at this point to test it.

I made some wrong turns here, but ultimately went with the systemd services (shudder) because they were already installed and that’s what the installation media uses.

Otherwise, you’ll need to install any needed packages before rebooting into the new system or you’ll have a chicken-and-egg problem of trying to get packages over the network without a network connection.

I got the device name enp3s0 from ip link:

And enable and start the network link and domain resolution service with:

I knew I was good when I could ping external domains.

This is the end of the Arch Installation Guide. It’s a working system that boots into the Linux console terminal and has networking.

Update: And I later enabled sshd with:

To get X Windows working, I followed the instructions: Xorg on the Arch wiki (archlinux.org).

There are a billion options for window management under Xorg and Arch pretty much has them all.

I usually run the hardcore tiling window manager, dwm, straight from startx on my Slackware machines, but I figured I’d use a more mainstream desktop environment in the form of Xfce (I already use many of the Xfce utilities such as the Thunar file manager and the Xfce terminal.) I love how lightweight and familiar Xfce is. It’s a really easy choice when I don’t think a tiling WM is the way to go.

Finally, I chose LXDM as the display manager for a graphical login.

The package list here includes drivers for my AMD Radeon GPU:

To get LXDM to start Xfce after logging in:

And enable the LXDM service to make it show up on start:

Then reboot…​Nice, I’m in X!

One of the first things I noticed was that my $PATH wasn’t set upon login. The reason is that graphical logins such as that provided by LXDM don’t source .bash_profile by default because the "POSIX shell" is used instead and there’s no guarantee that any Bash-isms will work. So I learned that a good practice is to put anything you always want to run when you login into .profile and then put source .profile in .bash_profile, which will contain everything else you’d want to run in a Bash login shell (if any).

(It’s probably not super clear from the above paragraph, so I’ll state it plainly: LXDM runs $HOME/.profile after you login!)

The next thing I installed was Firefox.

Audio has always "just worked" out of the box with Slackware, so I had no idea where to even begin with Arch when nothing came out of my speakers.

I screwed around with installing Pulseaudio and other horrors, but it turned out that I just needed to set the default "card" and unmute it (muted by default) with Linux’s own ALSA drivers/libraries.

For me, that was:

To make the changes to the /etc/asound.conf file apply, just re-run (or re-start) whatever application you’re using to play sound and it should be using the new settings. There is no need to restart a service or anything.

Also install the alsa-utils library to unmute the master channel:

The alsamixer settings will be kept between restarts, so this should be a permanent fix.

I love the fact that Valve has put so much work into Proton and is one of the few industry forces making mainstream games available to non-Windows platforms. I remember being very skeptical of Steam when it was first announced - I did not want to give up physical ownership of my games. But Valve has earned my trust.

Okay, now the entire point of this arch install and why I’m switching from Slackware on this machine…​games!

Steam and many games are still 32-bit for…​uh, reasons that I don’t want to talk about. So we need "multilib" packages to provide 32-bit libraries for these applications.

I followed the instructions on the wiki:

Steam on the Arch wiki (archlinux.org)

Basically, you uncomment the multilib repo in /etc/pacman.conf to enable it, then do an upgrade with pacman -Syu to make the packages visible to a search. Now you’re ready to install Steam and dependencies (pacman -S steam - and pick the correct 32-bit GPU stuff, lib32-vulkan-radeon in my case).

Again, the wiki page above has the whole list of things to install and do, including some other 32-bit packages and a "stub mode" for systemd-resolved (you make a symlink, I have no idea why, but it worked…​)

And after all of the above, I was able to play most games through Steam/Proton.

(I currently don’t have sound in some "Windows-only" games, but I’m hoping that will be an easy enough fix. I’ll try to update here when I get it figured out.)

I didn’t have sound with certain games (I’m pretty sure they were all Windows games using Proton, but I didn’t check very carefully).

It turns out that Proton won’t read the ALSA configuration from /etc/ (maybe it’s sandboxed?). But it will read the ALSA sound config from your home directory.

The sound fix was as easy as:

The remaining games immediately had sound and after restarting, Steam game trailer videos in the store had sound too (a lack of which did not bother me enough to investigate on its own).