alt Hacker NewsI tried to leave Windows 11 for Linux - it just didn't work for me. I installed EndeavourOS onto my main gaming desktop. It worked great for a while and ran all the games I played with my friends. However, one night when I went on to play a game I ran a system update and it seemed to completely break my nvidea drivers - I tried reinstalling them and also using the open source driver. This meant I just couldn't play any games that night and was simply diagnosing linux issues.
I probably chose the wrong distro for this but I really just want the PC to work for playing games without any issues. I don't use it for anything other than playing games so for my time I just went back to Windows 10 and will use that until apps stop working.
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Haha, exact same thing happened to me a couple weeks ago. You probably had the same issue as me. The driver dropped support for older cards and you had to switch to a legacy AUR package. I fixed it with some frantic googling while my friends waited a half hour. Not sure how you would know this without subscribing to some arch news feed or something. Not ideal.
I have been 'enjoying' this with Debian on a PC with a 1080Ti nvidia card, which is no longer supported by the nvidia v590 + drivers. I've had to pin to v580, but the whole "oops, I updated, rebooted and 'look ma, no high-resolution anymore'" got tired really quickly. You have my sympathies.
EndeavourOS is apparently Arch-based so I've got no useful suggestions for fixing there, sorry.
Never heard of that Linux variant. Use one of the big names: Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian.
If you have a choice don't use nVidia either, but the bigger distributions do handle them well.
The fix is not buying Nvidia, even though some people here will tell you how much AMDs drivers actually sucked in 2009 and how good Nvidia is now and all that noise.
Buy full AMD in 2026, and you'll have no problems with games.
Also, Bazzite would have saved you from this.
This is why I go the console route. I tried building a PC after being inundated with people saying it was better. Even on Windows it felt like it turned into a sys admin job that I didn’t care for. I just wanted to play some games after work.
I think using an atomic distro like Bazzite would have solved your problem.
I can't understand this reasoning. System updates obviously don't become less risky because of the OS they're updating. But going back to Win10 means having less control over when those updates happen (and much less control over, and understanding of, what is updated), and waiting much longer for them to complete.
The mistake is that you did a system update when you wanted to use the computer. Not implying that system updates should be a dangerous thing to do, but just something learnt from experience - I’ve had similar issues, especially with Nvidea drivers and kernel versions getting updated at the same time. The take away is keep the updates to when you have an hour to debug or get comfortable rolling back updates.
> I probably chose the wrong distro for this
Indeed. Arch-based distros ought to be managed by intermediate-advanced users. Linux Mint is better suited to beginners.
> but I really just want the PC to work for playing games without any issues.
If you decide to give it another go, and you have the means, I suggest using an AMD graphics card. Nvidia's drivers are notorious for being troublesome on Linux, and although they can usually be made to work (either by the user or by a distro developer), the drivers for AMD GPUs are much better integrated with the OS.
I switched to AMD a few years ago and have been very pleased with the results, both in games and in non-gaming tasks. (I don't use my GPU for LLM development, though, so I can't speak to the current state of things in that area.)