d3Xt3r

You should still have the previous package in your cache right? If so, extract that and the current package, and then compare the two folders to see what's changed - meld is a good tool for that.

The problem is that games don't run at all or require major effort to run without issues.

A major cause for that is the distro - when it comes to gaming, the distro makes a huge difference as I outlined previously. The second major cause is the flavor of Wine you chose (Proton-GE is the best, not sure what you used). The third major cause is checking whether or not the games are even compatible in the first place (via ProtonDB, Reddit etc) - you should do this BEFORE you recommend Linux to a gamer.

In saying all that, I've no idea about pirated stuff though, you're on your own on that one - Valve and the Wine developers obviously don't test against pirated copies, and you won't get much support from the community either.

The following list of software packages is required for ntfs file system support: ntfs-3g / ntfsprogs.

First of all, make sure you install ntfsprogs-ntfs3 from the AUR (this package doesn't install the old/buggy ntfs-3g driver).

Once it's installed, you can then then attempt to fix drive using sudo ntfsfix /dev/nvme0n1p2 --clear-dirty.

Run it a second time to verify, and that should do the trick. No need to boot into Windows.

Btw, in case you're mounting this drive manually, make sure you specify -t ntfs3, otherwise it'd use the old/buggy ntfs-3g driver - which we don't want. In fact, I'd say get rid of ntfs-3g if you've got it - no point keeping it around if you're on a recent kernel.

Unfortunately you chose the wrong distro for your friend - Linux Mint isn't good for gaming - it uses an outdated kernel/drivers/other packages, which means you'll be missing out on all the performance improvements (and fixes) found in more up-to-date distros. Gaming on Linux is a very fast moving target, the landscape is changing at a rapid pace thanks to the development efforts of Valve and the community. So for gaming, you'd generally want to be on the latest kernel+mesa+wine stack.

Also, as you've experienced, on Mint you'd have to manually install things like Waydroid and other gaming software, which can be a PITA for newbies.

So instead, I'd highly recommend a gaming-oriented distro such as Nobara or Bazzite. Personally, I'm a big fan of Bazzite - it has everything you'd need for gaming out-of-the-box, and you can even get a console/Steam Deck-like experience, if you install the -deck variant. Also, because it's an immutable distro with atomic updates, it has a very low chance of breaking, and in the rare ocassion that an update has some issues - you can just select the previous image from the boot menu. So this would be pretty ideal for someone who's new to Linux, likes to game, and just wants stuff to work.

In saying that, getting games to run in Linux can be tricky sometimes, depending on the game. The general rule of thumb is: try running the game using Proton-GE, and if that fails, check Proton DB for any fixes/tweaks needed for that game - with this, you would never again have to spend hours on troubleshooting, unless you're playing some niche game that no one has tested before.

Since you asked...

As an actual M1+Asahi user and a gamer: Asahi is not there yet. Right now, if you're on macOS, Crossover (or Porting Kit) and/or Parallels is able to run more games and with better performance compared to Asahi (using krun + FEX). Also, Steam on macOS (non-native) is much more peformant compared to Asahi, where it's currently slow and glitchy.

But that will all change in the future once the Vulkan driver and TSO patches are ready. FEX is also seeing a lot of improvements, so by the end of the year, there's a good chance that gaming on Asahi would be much better than macOS.

Why not just leave them as NTFS for now? The new in-kernel NTFS3 driver is actually pretty decent (since kernel 6.2), and shouldn't pose any issues if you're just using it as a bulk data store.

Eventually when you replace the disks, you can can format your new disks as ext4 (or even better, use btrfs or bcachefs).

It's not that simple. The biggest issue is that Apple Silicon uses 16K memory page sizes instead of the 4K pages used by pretty much every other architecture out there. This means you'd need a kernel patched for 16K pages - but that would also cause an issue with drivers and other apps designed with 4K pages in mind. So there's a lot of work done in that area to get both the kernel and apps working. Even then, some apps may never work, and so you'd have to resort to using hacks like microVMs to run a 4K kernel and then run the app on top of it, but that introduces it's own set of issues of course.

Then there's the issue of hardware components - of course Apple hasn't open-sourced any of their firmware/drivers, so most of the Asahi drivers were developed by reverse engineering. The GPU was the biggest piece of work, the reverse engineering done to get it to a workable state by the Asahi team was nothing short of genius. In fact the current state of the OpenGL driver is so good that it's far, far more compliant to the spec compared to macOS itself - macOS only supports OpenGL upto 4.1 and is not certified either (and technically no longer supported by Apple), whereas Asahi supports up till 4.6 - and it's still being improved. See: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/02/asahi-linux-projects-opengl-support-on-apple-silicon-officially-surpasses-apples/

Similarly, a lot of wizardry was done to get the sound going, and not only did they get it going - they even improved the DSP so it sounds even better than macOS! (Scroll down to the speakers section here: https://asahilinux.org/2024/01/fedora-asahi-new/).

But in spite of all that, there's still a lot of work to be done, such as getting Thunderbolt and DisplayPort going, as well as improving compatibility with x86 apps (using krun and FEX) and more GPU improvements etc and support for the M3 and newer chips.. Even then, Asahi is already in a usable daily-driver state for many users, and it's improving at a rapid pace.

So long story short, the Asahi team had to do a ton of work to get it all going on a complex, closed piece of hardware like Apple Silicon - and it's genius levels of work, the level of which I can barely comprehend - and isn't something any random distro can pull off.

ElementaryOS doesn't work on Apple Silicon, so that's not an option.

Bazzite. Here's why:

• Optimised for gaming (gaming optimised kernel, common tweaks pre-applied, all common gaming apps pre-installed like Steam, Mangohud etc)
• All necessary drivers pre-installed (game controllers, RGB, and even proprietary nVidia)
• A Steam-Deck like gaming experience, if you want (the Deck variant boots directly to Steam)
• Immutable and atomic (image-based OS updates, so updates either work or don't - there's no chance of a broken state)
• Easy rollbacks (just select the previous image in the GRUB menu)

But since you said:

how to squeeze the best performance out of this

and if you're really serious about squeezing the best performance, then check out the Arch-based CachyOS - unlike most other Linux distros, Cachy has optimised x86-64-v3 and v4 packages in their repos, which means apps can make use of advanced CPU instructions such as SSE3, AVX512 etc. Most other Linux distros on the other hand still use x86-64-v1 for compatibility reasons, which unfortunately means that you'd be missing out on all the cool new optimised CPU instructions introduced over the past 16 years.

You can read more about microarchitecture levels (aka MARCH) here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86-64#Microarchitecture_levels

In addition to the MARCH, Cachy's packages have other optimisations such as LTO/PGO, optimised kernel with the BORE and Rusty schedulers which are better for gaming, plus several performance-oriented tweaks which you'd otherwise have to do manually on Arch (such as makepkg.conf tweaks, pacman.conf tweaks etc).

Finally, Cachy are always on the bleeding edge when it comes to gaming/driver/kernel/performance related stuff, so you'll get all the good stuff even before Bazzite or other optimised distros. For instance, Cachy was the first distro to include the new nVidia driver which has explicit sync support for better Wayland compatibility, and they're always on top of major Arch developments and provide detailed announcements which are relevant to gamers and performance freaks.

Eg, here's their recent recent nVidia announcement:

Hi @here,

as you maybe noticed, we have rolled out the new NVIDIA Driver, which includes the explicit sync protocol and tearing for Vulkan. We have been prioritized to move this forward to finally resolve the wayland situation. Additionally arch has pushed CUDA to 12.5, which is NOT compatible with the current 550 driver (it needs the 555 Driver).

The beta driver is not perfect, but so far we are applying some fixes to avoid issues and restore performance problems with disabling the GSP Firmware load. This is handled via the "cachyos-settings" package.

Anyways, since some people maybe have problems with this driver, here is a short instruction to manually downgrade and block the driver:

[...]

If you are facing issues with the new NVIDIA Driver, reproduce the issues and then run "sudo nvidia-bugreport.sh" and report it to their forum: https://forums.developer.nvidia.com/c/gpu-graphics/linux/148

We are also shipping now an precompiled nvidia-open module. This will be also as default installed for users, which have supported cards as soon NVIDIA releases the 560 drivers.

The CachyOS Team

So as you can see, they're pretty on to it with this sorta stuff.

Now the Bazzite team are also like the Cachy guys and keep up with this stuff, but because they're based on Fedora, they can't be as bleeding edge or as optimised as Arch. So it's up to you - if you prefer stability, a primarily gaming-focused optimisations, and want something that "just works" then get Bazzite; or if you want an ultra-optimised distro to squeeze out the most performance out of your box but also don't mind ocassionally diving into the terminal and getting your hands dirty, then get CachyOS.

cc: @[email protected]

I wouldn't recommend it in your case. Mind you, Arch is easy enough to install with the archinstall script or say using EndeavourOS, but the issues come afterwards. For starters, you'll need to occasionally deal with .pacsave/.pacnew files when you do an update, keep up with Arch news and be aware of breaking changes which may require some non-trivial manual intervention, like in this post for example: https://lemmy.nz/post/7648427

So if you're after something that "just works", then Arch isn't for you. Since you're into gaming and you're lazy, Bazzite would be an excellent choice as its an immutable OS with atomic updates (updates either work or don't, there's no middle/broken state). But if you're after a more traditional distro (ie, non-immutable), Nobara or Pop!_OS also work well for gaming.