I’ve tried to switch multiple times and always found or encountered some issue that got me back to Windows (on desktop PC).
Last year it was after 2 months on Fedora 38 KDE when I had enough with the KDE Window Manager acting weird and broken unusable VRR on desktop and some other smaller but daily issues that I went back to W11 on my PC.
I like GNOME over KDE and back then there was no VRR support on GNOME so I only had to stick with KDE, now it’s a different story.
I still have some minor annoyance which are probably solvable but I don’t know how as I didn’t put enough effort in finding solution.
Namely:
1.) Sometimes my 2nd monitor after boot remains blank and I have to unplug and plug back in the DP cable from the graphics card. Typically happens after a kernel update or restart but rarely on cold boot. I’ve seen others having this issue on Fedora40 but I haven’t seen any solution mentioned.
2.) Steam UI hangs up sometimes for several seconds when trying to navigate fast trough it and especially if it needs to pop a different window.
3.) GPU VRAM OC is completely busted and even doing ±1MHz will result in massive artifacting even on desktop, not a big deal but I would take the extra 5% boost I can have from VRAM OC on Windows :)
4.) After every Kernel update I have to run two commands to get my GPU overclock to work again. I haven’t figured out yet how to make a scrip that can read output from 1st command and copy it into 2nd command so I just do it manually every time which is roughly once a week.
5.) Free scrolling does not work in Chromium based browsers :( Luckily Vivaldi has some nice workaround with mouse gestures but I would still like free scrolling like on Windows.
And these are about the only annoyance I found worthwhile to mention.
Gaming works fine.
The apps I use typically work fine on Linux as well. Mangohud is amazing. No issues with audio unlike my last experience. Heck even Discord has no issues streaming video and audio now despite just using the web app. VRR despite being experimental works flawlessly on GNOME for me. I’m happy.
The Steam UI thing sounds like an issue like maybe hardware acceleration being disabled?
It’s enabled in the Steam settings but whether it actually works I have no idea It’s possible it’s the root of the issue though.
Well, issues 1-3 could all easily be GPU driver related. Which GPU are you using, and what drivers?
RX 6800 XT
1.) I don’t think it’s a driver issue. For some reason the display just does not get picked up during boot. The system still behaves like there are 2 monitors connected though.
2.) Tried disabling HW acceleration in Steam, so far so good but haven’t used it for long enough to see if it’s completely fine.
3.) AMD changes VRAM timings with clock, it’s not just simple clock change, thats why also negative offset affects VRAM stability. I don’t think that CoreCTRL compensates for this with it’s VRAM tune.
Any system logs that might be related to the display not being detected properly?
Since you’re using AMD graphics, you’re using the open source drivers right? The proprietary AMD drivers are not good.
Did some looking around and what I found is it could be a sign that the cable is starting to fail:
https://askubuntu.com/questions/1118738/whats-the-likely-cause-of-a-get-monitor-geometry-assertion
Do you have another cable you could try?
It could also be a bug in Gnome, since you said it only happens after something like a kernel update. I wonder if it would happen if you used a live usb of gnome, and if so, would it happen if you used a live usb of KDE or some other desktop manager.
I’m 100% sure it’s not a cable issue for many different valid reasons one of the main ones being that the cable is able to drive higher res monitor at higher refresh rate without issue.
Also if I just swap cables from my main monitor with the 2nd the same issue still happens with the 2nd monitor but only in Linux, never Windows.
Yes, I’m using the FOSS drivers. I’ll try to look at the logs next time it happens
Regarding 1: if you open up dmesg after it happens and you see an error regarding “No edid read”, your GPU is having a hard time automatically getting the monitor’s edid over display port. My 7800xt has this issue.
If your monitor setup doesn’t change much, you can manually set the edid on a per output basis. Here is a good guide.
Also, regarding 3: you may need to set your amdgpu feature mask in your kernel parameters.
Thanks!
1.) will definitely give it a try 3.) I have set the amdgpu feature mask otherwise I wouldn’t even have access to the power limit, voltages, etc… but VRAM overclocking just does not work. Everything else seems to work fine.
Tracked Steam games working on Linux Mint since I started > 4 years ago (from my final, successful attempt to stop using Windows).
[Edit: only loaded Sea of Thieves and then never played it because it required a M$ account - wish I asked for a refund]Same config and distro as you.
I’ve not experienced the first issue, so I don’t have a great deal of input for that. Could be a display specific behaviour.
For 2, I’ve had the Steam UI hang on occasion, though this has not occurred recently. I’ll try to see if I can get this to repro again.
For 3, there’s a few things worth bearing in mind here. AMDGPU and the Windows Radeon KMD don’t really have a lot on common. I’d be interested in any perf comparisons you have between the two systems even with the default mclk on linux. I find that Fedora is more performant in somewhat surprising scenarios, like with CP2077, Halo Infinite.
For 4, I could show you how to leverage the powerplay sysfs interface and run this via systemd service at login if you’d like?
Unfortunately have no input on 5 as I use Firefox but I hope you find a solution.
1.) IDK, this issue tends to manifest for me with different distros as well sometimes. Forgot to mention that it also happens if monitors go to sleep when inactive and on wake up the 2nd screen sometimes does not wake. That’s why I disabled sleep for monitors.
2.) So far works fine after disabling HW acceleration
4.) no need to waste both of ours time. The script now works fine but thanks for offer. I don’t even know what half of your sentence means :D
3.) On Windows I use MPT to further modify the cards behaviour like SOC voltages, clock, FCLK clock, TDC limits and power limits, etc… Basically I can easily squeeze 10% on top of the typical overclocking available via MSI Afterburner or AMD Adrenaline SW. #73rd place in TimeSpy for GPU score which is kinda ridiculous for air cooled card
Cyberpunk likes to draw a lot of current so my tweaks help alleviate the throttling caused by it in typical OC scenarios as the card hits current limit in the CP2077 benchmark more often than it hits the actual power limit. That’s why the lows on Linux are worse, it’s not related to CPU underperforming. I’d suspect that the lows would be actually better if I could uncap GPU TDC current limit on Linux. Averages would be likely still lower vs Windows due to lack of VRAM OC.
This is not really comparable and I would have to do proper test on both Windows and Linux with the same versions of the game but I’ve tested with the same settings which are FOV = 100, SSR = Low (because it performs like crap on higher settings for no visual benefit), everything else maxed out.
This is screenshot from the run I did in February with my Windows OC… (also had worse CPU and memory tune back then vs what I run now so results would be slightly better now as well).
And this is from right now on Fedora 40… not sure why CP detects it as Windows 10
Would be interesting to keep the same game versions and GPU,CPU,DRAM tune and do a direct comparison but I can’t really be bothered right now to mess with that. What’s important to me that it’s roughly in the same ballpark and there are no massive swings in performance so unless I keep a close eye on monitoring I can hardly tell a difference when playing.
I see. I’m really not keen on the use of MPT since I’ve seen it fairly broadly recommended to more casual users (I’d place the blame on certain YouTubers), occasionally leading to bricked ASICs, though I’m glad you’re seeing tangible benefit from using it.
Please bear in mind that custom tuning isn’t a guarantee between different driver versions; the voltage floor can shift with power management firmware changes delivered driver packages (this doesn’t overwrite the board VBIOS, it’s loaded in at OS runtime (pmfw is also included in linux-firmware)). I’d recommend testing with vulkan memory test with each Adrenalin update, and every now and then on Fedora too.
Please bear in mind that custom tuning isn’t a guarantee between different driver versions; the voltage floor can shift with power management firmware changes delivered driver packages (this doesn’t overwrite the board VBIOS, it’s loaded in at OS runtime (pmfw is also included in linux-firmware)). I’d recommend testing with vulkan memory test with each Adrenalin update, and every now and then on Fedora too.
I’m aware. For now it seems to behave consistently. I observed higher avg clocks on Linux vs Windows with the same OC but then again it may be due to difference in monitoring SW or just polling rate.
For issue number 1, actually, my wife had the same issue on Fedora Workstation 40 when I first moved her from Windows (I never had that issue probably because I just have 1 ultra wide monitor), the second monitor would not recognize the input and needed to be unplugged from HDMI and plugged back in. After a few updates it hasn’t happened anymore. Another annoyance that has also been fixed (almost positive it was the same bug) was that sometimes the monitors would be flipped where the second monitor would be number 1 on boot, super weird, but that issue is gone too.
The monitors being flipped happened as well. I fixed that by flipping the DP cable order on the graphics card.
Good stuff. My wife’s is on HDMI, no dedicated GPU, and it’s been flawless for about 2 months now.
In all fairness, you are not using just “a desktop”. You are using a pretty specialized version of a desktop to run games, and so you’re requiring stuff that a “normal desktop” user don’t need: VRR, OC, weird mice, multiple monitors etc. Soon HDR too? Linux does perfectly the basics, but when you requiring such specialized stuff, don’t complain that an OS run by volunteers that have to reverse engineer hardware to make it work at all, doesn’t work to your liking. Keep it simple, and it will work. Get rid of the weird requirements. If that’s the stuff you want to run, then use Windows, because that hardware was designed to run on Windows, not on Linux. Linux will take years to support them to your liking. And by then, you’ll have moved on to newer hardware, where Linux won’t be supporting them well yet either. So either you’ll have to lower your specs, or you stay with the OS that they were designed for.
I wouldn’t call this a specialized setup. VRR has been there for almost 15years. I’ve dealt with VRR issues on Windows and they are still preset in some instances with mixed non-VRR and VRR monitor setups they just manifest differently on Linux due to different compositor. My experience last year on KDE 5 was fine in games and it was on desktop where VRR was causing me strange issues. Now I don’t have any issues on GNOME despite it being just and experimental feature still.
OC wise, yes. This is kinda niche and I’m glad that it at least works to some extent. I can squeeze more performance out of my GPU on Windows but even the SW that allows me to do it is not well known and very niche and finicky on Windows and for typical OC everything works fine on Linux except VRAM OC.
Weird mice… yes. After setting up my mouse on Windows I’ve saved my profile to the on-board memory and uninstalled that crappy SW so it’s not required for me to have my mouse usable.
HDR… I don’t really care about it right now. I’ve tried it and I still find SDR to look “better” in my subjective opinion.
I really have to disagree with your take that I would have to limit myself to “keep it simple” to use Linux since nothing is guaranteed and you will sooner or later run into some weird issue because of your setup despite thinking it’s “common enough”. Most of these requirements are not even weird in the slightest. And yes, I do appreciate the work that has been and is being done.
Volunteers? I thought fedora/red hat was one of the few professional Linux OSes with this particular distro family focusing in on servers and security?
I could be wrong though.
