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
I gave up on my old 970 and switched to an AMD card (you don’t even have to install the drivers for AMD GPUs, they’re just baked into the Linux kernel).
Turns out, performance is degraded for GTX 9xx series cards on Linux in general. I’m glad I discovered that because otherwise, I’d have probably thought I still had a driver issue even if I had gotten it working.
This is funny because I recently retired my 750ti which I had been using for server work and it ran great with the latest Nvidia driver (although I heard they’re gonna drop support soon and move the driver into a legacy package on rpmfusion).
The poor thing couldn’t even do H.265, had 2 Gb of VRAM, and needed specially compiled libraries for pytorch/tensorflow stuff because CM 5.0 was over 10 years ago, but it chugged along just fine.
I’m personally still on a 1660ti because despite OpenCL’s best efforts, CUDA has everyone by the balls, but now that I have a beefier server setup, I’ll probably go with AMD on my next build.
Assuming I’ll actually want to make a new build with these insane prices lol.
I have a GTX 980 Ti, so this is interesting. After toying with Arch for the past few days, I’m considering switching to AMD in the near future.