Hi, I’m about as new to Linux as you can get. I have heard that you should never run a command you don’t know, but I really have no clue what I’m doing. I bought a Steam Deck and I was convinced that linux is in a good enough state thanks to Proton for me to be able to try and daily drive it on my desktop, as my main limitation is gaming. Issue is, I’m not a programmer. I don’t know linux except some very basic things, so I am sure there are answers to lots of my questions but I don’t even know how to search for them most of the time.
Basically, I try running everything, even non-steam games like World of Warcraft and Star Citizen thru steam and forcing compatibility with Proton, though Star Citizen has been giving me some trouble (Also I initially tried installing World of Warcraft via lutris, and the game would simply not start when hitting play in the launcher, so I ran the installer in Steam as stated before and it went smoothly.). For now, I’d just like to be able to know how to make sure I’m using the latest drivers and stuff like Vulkan is installed and working properly. Also how to check and install updated drivers as they come.
I’d appreciate any other advice, things to know about, lingo, or common issues to watch out for. So far I’m satisfied and learning is slow but I can play games and that’s alleviated most of my worry. Please let me know if there is any info you want from me as well. Thanks!
It sounds like you already understand the basics like concepts of ‘terminal’ and ‘command’.
After that a great first step is getting familiar with -h, --help and man.
With these you should be able to navigate an understanding of how most things work.
In a moment I’m going to ask for the output of an inxi command.
First you can take a look at how inxi works using any of the following;
inxi -h
inxi --help
man inxi
(this final man command will overtake the terminal window and you can exit using Q)
While not all terminal utilities will have --help flag or a man page … they will usually have at least one of the above methods of providing information on how to use them.
Please run the following and copy its output here:
inxi -Farz
Note: Please use the </> button above the forum text box to keep code snippets formatted.
Extra information like that including other ways to format etc can be found here:
It looks like the amdgpu is being used by default.
Now I will ask for some other info;
mhwd -li -d
and some tests;
glxinfo | grep 'renderer string'
DRI_PRIME=1 glxinfo | grep 'renderer string'
prime-run glxinfo | grep 'renderer string'
Note: If you do not have the glxinfo command it is provided by the package mesa-utils.
PS
This isnt really OS-dependent or necessarily of high importance, but I do notice you have BIOS updates available. Indeed in your case some of those updates are marked for security and performance.
If my search was right: B650 GAMING X AX V2 (rev. 1.x) Support | Motherboard - GIGABYTE U.S.A.
Alright, I’ve setup zram per the how-to and reboot to check the status.
I’m not sure if that’s what I want or not. I assume the AMD gpu is integrated, and display gets switched over to the nvidia for anything graphically intensive. But my monitor is plugged into the nvidia 4060S. Not really sure if it’s good or bad as-is but I presume it’s not ideal the way it is?
Following are outputs from the commands you requested.
It seems I don’t have whatever prime-run is installed, I did some googling and found it’s a way to manage hybrid graphics using nvidia-prime, and it must be that I do not have nvidia-prime installed?
If it helps to know, when I was first installing Manjaro it asked me something about proprietary or open source. I didn’t really get it so I chose open source, and I only realized later it was asking about whether to use nvidia’s proprietary drivers or nouveau, and I figured that was a mistake in my case. So I ran some commands I found elsewhere in the hope it would switch over from nouveau to proprietary, but it’s likely I either did something wrong or didn’t do enough. It’s possible I even used commands intended for another distro that used different package handling or something, there’s just a lot of different things to come to grips with.
Ah this is not good, as we see above that the nvidia driver is not loaded, yet the nvidia card is being used as the default.
There is some mixup going on here.
I also notice the mhwd profile you probably want is not installed.
Please execute the following;
sudo mhwd -r pci video-nvidia
sudo mhwd -f -i pci video-hybrid-amd-nvidia-prime
Then please reboot and show us the inxi and glxinfo outputs again;