This isn’t a guide, just something i think may help. To install Steam on an Arch-based distro in most of the cases a simple sudo pacman -S steam will do just fine.

The installation will ask you to select a valid vulkan package from a list. And in most of the cases that’s just fine… most of them.

Then you have your very “picky” old nvidia GPU which works only with a specific old nvidia driver and if you try to install anything else, there will be a conflict. Now you can try to remove the old (working) drivers and try your luck. But looking online i find a simple way to skip this passage and install Steam.

sudo pacman -S steam --assume-installed lib32-vulkan-driver

  • yesman@lemmy.worldEnglish
    5·
    17 hours ago

    I suppose I’m lucky. Catchy installed the Nvidia driver during the install and works/ updates without issue. I’ve got an older card, but not ancient. gtx1660

    I did have issues when I first switched to Linux, but that was on Debian.

    • brisk@aussie.zoneEnglish
      13·
      17 hours ago

      Currently “older cards” is 10xx series and earlier

      This is a deliberate choice made by Nvidia with respect to their proprietary drivers, and has nothing to do with the operating system.

    • Tim_Bisley@piefed.socialEnglish
      2·
      15 hours ago

      Cach6 was the smoothest experience for me. It can be difficult with other wldistros and also with cach6 probably.

    • NutinButNet@hilariouschaos.comEnglish
      2·
      15 hours ago

      Cachy kept freezing on me as did many other distros I was using. I found the common reason was due to Wayland and I’ve been on Linux Mint Cinnamon ever since with no issues like that. RTX 4080 Super

      • brucethemoose@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        11 hours ago

        How recent was this? Cinammon only just got experimental Wayland support, AFAIK. Like, a month or two ago?

        And Cachy KDE Nvidia Wayland was jank for a while (hence it defaulted to X11), but it works fine for me, for now.

        • NutinButNet@hilariouschaos.comEnglish
          2·
          11 hours ago

          I made this change like back in December or so. I had been distro hopping since moving to Linux in August of last year and was on a ton of distros with KDE that all had Wayland.

          I moved to Mint Cinnamon because it seemed to be one of the few that wasn’t using Wayland and my issues stopped. I believe they did have experimental Wayland on one of the versions and I made sure not to use that one since I was under the impression it was due to Wayland and remember trying to decide between the other options they had.