Gaming on linux in big 2025 | Juno in Cyberland

Table of Contents

Introduction

2025 is the year of linux gaming (or at least that’s when I fully switched to linux)

This guide is for arch linux and mainly focused on wayland users.

Prerequisites

You must have configured your GPU’s drivers before following this guide. Check out my NVIDIA guide if that’s what you’re running.

STEAM

Honestly this is all you need to run games

Installation

Install steam ttf-liberation vulkan-icd-loader lib32-vulkan-icd-loader

ttf-liberation is optional for steam as a replacement for microsoft’s arial font.

Config

To improve Vulkan shader compilation process you can increase the number of threads used by creating a file in ~/.steam/steam/steam_dev.cfg

unShaderBackgroundProcessingThreads 4

Or outright disable as it can hog a LOT of space (up to 100GB in some cases), and many other issues. steam > settings > Downloads > Enable Shader Pre-caching, and turn it off.

Audio

Install pipewire-pulse and enable it, this is required to have audio in some games.

systemctl --user enable pipewire-pulse

MangoHud

MangoHud is that fancy overlay youtubers use to brag about how good their PCs are (yeah i’m salty because i’m stuck with an old system).

Installation

Install mangohud and lib32-mangohud (if you want to run x86 games).

If you’re using steam you can enable it in the game’s launch options like so:

mangohud %command%

Config

This is a basic config that I use.

~/.config/MangoHud/MangoHud.conf

font_size=20
position=top-left
text_color=ffffff
background_alpha=0.3
background_color=020202
no_display
toggle_hud=F11

# CPU
cpu_stats
cpu_temp
cpu_color=007AFA

# GPU
gpu_stats
gpu_temp
gpu_color=00BD00
vram
vram_color=00801B

# System
ram
ram_color=B3000A

# Application
fps
arch
io_read
io_write
engine_version
gamemode
engine_color=B200B0

graphs=gpu_load,cpu_load,vram

Gamemode

Gamemode can help improve your game’s performance by altering some system config before running the game and reseting them after.

Installation

Install gamemode and lib32-gamemode

Add your user to gamemode group

sudo usermod -aG gamemode your-name

Enable GameMode

systemctl --user enable gamemoded

Config

If you’re not gonna use the [gpu] modifications then create a file in ~/.config/gamemode.ini. If you will apply the [gpu] modifications then use/etc/gamemode.ini or /usr/share/gamemode/gamemode.ini (do not create the latter file manually).

Copy the default config from here and change it https://github.com/FeralInteractive/gamemode/blob/master/example/gamemode.ini

My settings:

; everything default except renice
; Docs allow values 0–20, but values above 10 fail
renice=10

If you want to set a renice value higher than 10 then check the Arch wiki

Note: the GPU config for NVIDIA currently (2025) doesn’t work on wayland.

If you’re using mangohud and want it to show gamemode status then you need to run it like this LD_PRELOAD="/usr/lib/libgamemode.so" gamemoderun mangohud %command%

Sources:

Proton (And It’s Flavors)

Proton is valve’s JVM for windows games, it allows you to run stinky windows games on your glorious (Arch) Linux system.

Disclaimer: proton can’t run all games, especially those that rely on anti-cheat software

Proton has many versions but 4 standout

Proton x.x this is the stable proton release, it doesn’t guarantee it will run all games, but it will handle all games that were released before it
Proton Experimental this is the beta branch of Proton, in my experience this is stable enough to replace proton stable and gets updated more frequently

Aside from the official proton provided by valve, there are some community forks that ship with more up to date libraries

Proton-GE the most popular one from what I can see
Proton-TKG my go to proton for wayland support

Proton-ge also has an AUR package proton-ge-custom-bin but it’s not worth it imo as it takes up almost 3Gb of space.

Config

You can configure proton by adding environment variables to your game’s launch options in steam like this

PROTON_LOG=1 PROTON_USE_XALIA=0 %command%

A list of official proton variables can be found on their github page.

To enable certain options for all games using that proton version you can edit .steam/steam/steamapps/common/Proton X/user_settings.py (X here is the proton version you’re using) There will be a a sample file with the same name, just make a copy of it and use it.

The file is a python dictionary (string, string) that will be passed as environment variables when you run a game with that proton version, so technically you can add any environment variable you want and it doesn’t have to be related to proton.

Here’s my config:

user_settings = {
    # everything is default except the below

    "WINE_FULLSCREEN_FSR": "0",
    # this enables DLSS even for non RTX cards
    "PROTON_ENABLE_NVAPI": "1",
    # enable OBS game recording (obs-vkcapture)
    "OBS_VKCAPTURE": "1",
    # disable xalia, this is for steam deck on screen controls.
    "PROTON_USE_XALIA": "0",
    # log dir has to be full verbose path, no variables allowed
    # else it will be relative to the game's directory
    "PROTON_LOG_DIR": "proton-logs",

    # if you're using proton-ge or proton-tkg
    # enable wayland by default because it's way better than xwayland
    "PROTON_ENABLE_WAYLAND": "1",
}

System Config

You can either apply these configs or install a custom kernel like linux-tkg or linux-zen.

Personally I prefer sticking to the normal kernel

Up Your Virtual Memory

/etc/sysctl.d/80-gamecompatibility.conf

vm.max_map_count = 2147483642

Apply changes without reboot

sysctl --system

Sources:

Change Kernel Parameters For Response Time Consistency

These improved my FPS in elden ring nightreign from 20-35 to 30-40

/etc/tmpfiles.d/consistent-response-time-for-gaming.conf

#    Path                  Mode UID  GID  Age Argument
w /proc/sys/vm/compaction_proactiveness - - - - 0
w /proc/sys/vm/watermark_boost_factor - - - - 1
w /sys/kernel/mm/lru_gen/enabled - - - - 5
w /proc/sys/vm/zone_reclaim_mode - - - - 0
w /proc/sys/vm/page_lock_unfairness - - - - 1
w /proc/sys/kernel/sched_child_runs_first - - - - 0
w /proc/sys/kernel/sched_autogroup_enabled - - - - 1
w /proc/sys/kernel/sched_cfs_bandwidth_slice_us - - - - 3000
w /sys/kernel/debug/sched/base_slice_ns  - - - - 3000000
w /sys/kernel/debug/sched/migration_cost_ns - - - - 500000
w /sys/kernel/debug/sched/nr_migrate - - - - 8

If you use swap then add this, it lowers the priority of using swap

w /proc/sys/vm/swappiness - - - - 10

If you have 32Gb of ram or more and it’s mostly unused then add this (will increase ram used)

w /proc/sys/vm/min_free_kbytes - - - - 1048576
w /proc/sys/vm/watermark_scale_factor - - - - 500

If your games don’t use TCMalloc (source games use it, but not through proton)

w /sys/kernel/mm/transparent_hugepage/enabled - - - - madvise
w /sys/kernel/mm/transparent_hugepage/shmem_enabled - - - - advise
w /sys/kernel/mm/transparent_hugepage/defrag - - - - never

Reduce Buffer Bloat On Storage Devices

Enable BFQ on all HDDs and SSDs, and disable the scheduler on all NVMEs.

/etc/udev/rules.d/60-ioschedulers.rules

# HDD
ACTION=="add|change", KERNEL=="sd[a-z]*", ATTR{queue/rotational}=="1", ATTR{queue/scheduler}="bfq"

# SSD
ACTION=="add|change", KERNEL=="sd[a-z]*|mmcblk[0-9]*", ATTR{queue/rotational}=="0", ATTR{queue/scheduler}="bfq"

# NVMe SSD
ACTION=="add|change", KERNEL=="nvme[0-9]*", ATTR{queue/rotational}=="0", ATTR{queue/scheduler}="none"

To target a single drive just set it’s name instead of regex KERNEL=="sda"

Force udev update without rebooting

sudo udevadm trigger

Enable TRIM For SSDs

sudo systemctl enable fstrim.timer

Set CPU To Performance Mode

This is not required if you’re using GameMode

On intel CPUs you can alter the power state (pstate) to make it prioritize performance.

First make sure your cpu has pstate and HWP enabled:

$ cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu*/cpufreq/scaling_driver
# prints 'intel_pstate' for each physical core you have
intel_pstate
intel_pstate
...

$ lscpu | grep hwp
# prints a long string with 'hwp' in red
Flags: ... hwp hwp_notify hwp_act_window hwp_epp vnmi ...

Next write a script to enable performance mode for all cores

#!/bin/bash
for CPUFREQ in /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu*/cpufreq; do
    echo performance > "$CPUFREQ/scaling_governor" 2>/dev/null
    echo performance > "$CPUFREQ/energy_performance_preference" 2>/dev/null
done

The script has to be run as root to work!

Notes:

You don’t need to reboot the pc for this to take effect.
You have to re-run the script every time you reboot the pc.
You can’t run this in the gamemode config because it requires root permissions.

RISKY!!!

CPU Security Mitigations

According to some phoronix benchmarks disabling CPU security mitigations can improve CPU performance by up to 20%. Now this is an AWFUL idea unless you’re desperate for any extra performance you can get, and even then It’s still an awful idea, but I still want to mention it for the sake of completeness.

Note that this only will benefit Intel 10th gen and below, and AMD 5000 series and below.

In your /etc/default/grub

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="...minitgations=off..."

Then re-create the grub config

sudo grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg

Reboot your PC and run lscpu to verify that you’re now Vulnerable :)

Sources:

CachyOS

For more optimizations check out the CachyOS wiki