I ran various Ubuntu flavors, Mint, Pop!, and Debian on a wide array of devices for almost a decade before switching my gaming rig to EndeavourOS last year. I didn’t appreciate the snap package issues I was having, and the AUR is an excellent tool to have in the box.

I tried straight arch and probably would have stuck with it if I hadn’t royally borked up my audio during the pulseaudio/pipewire transition. I practically live in the command line, but I’m happy to let a well-appointed installer deal with the menial stuff, especially with the knowledge that I’ll inevitably have to reinstall someday. It’s not like there’s a shortage of shit to mess with or a dearth of dumb mistakes I’ll make. No matter what you choose, my best advice is to make a separate partition for both home and root. At the very least, that’ll give you the ability to easily evaluate different distros or reinstall without worry.

IME running newer kernels tends to be a boon for newer hardware and arch-based distros in particular are a good choice for gaming due to the rise of the Steam Deck. I still prefer Debian on servers and SBCs. Probably never going back to Ubuntu again. YMMV.

I’ve just finally and fully spun down a proxmox server I’ve been running and updating as my home lab for six years.

Every major update seemed to break something. Upgrades were always a roll of the dice as to whether it would even boot. It’s probably at least partially my fault for using an old R710 and running docker directly on the OS instead of within a container, but it was still by far my least reliable piece of kit.

The last apt update removed sudo, and I can’t be arsed to rebuild, so I’ve moved the critical bits to a fleet of SBCs. Powering that fucker down was a huge relief.

Beehaw has already chosen not to be a part of the fediverse. There’s no real purpose in asking us; only you can resolve Beehaw’s identity crisis.

You’re right about kernel-level anticheat like Vanguard not working, but there is EAC support for Linux; see Apex Legends.

I have an RDNA3 card (upgraded from a 1080) and am running a multi-boot triple-head setup with mixed refresh rates (60, 144).

Pros: most things work and work well. Installation of the physical card went without a hitch and it was relatively simple to install the drivers. No issues with web video, streaming, video encoding, or standard use.

Cons: mesa, amdgpu, and Windows drivers are all lacking significant features - I am still unable to reliably control fan curves/speeds, clock speeds, etc. FreeSync is unusable as well. I have also been experiencing regular crashes on certain games (BG3, Apex Legends, etc.) and support has been nonexistent, despite similar complaints from other users. When the card does crash, it usually results in a ring timeout and an accompanied total session crash. AMD does not seem to be responsive to these issues in either their official forum or any other space where people are lodging complaints.

The hardware seems fine; the drivers are the main issue. If I had to do it over again, I’d hold my nose and buy NVIDIA.

EDIT: regarding the cursor issue, I’ve had to switch to a software cursor on Linux. The hardware cursor wasn’t showing up at all.

Regarding game-specific issues, it seems a lot of problems stem from either a greedy low power mode or DirectX issues. I’ve had to set udev rules to alleviate some of my issues, but it hasn’t solved everything.

EDIT 2: For anyone who comes across this post, it seems like the vast majority of the crashes on linux have been resolved as of kernel 6.7. Still lacking fine-grained control over fans/clocks, but stability seems much improved.

I’ve had a mixed experience with my newer AMD card, and that’s being charitable.