PopOS is currently using modified GNOME on Xorg. It’s impossible to get mixed refresh rates on Xorg/X11 (which is the legacy display protocol) and with your setup you are pretty much stuck with Wayland (the modern display protocol still, still progressing as a platform) - which is what you tried first if you used Nobara, whether it’s KDE or GNOME.
Note that PopOS 24.04 (that will be released this fall iirc) will in fact run on Wayland with all new Cosmic desktop (it’s first full DE written from scratch since like 90s) and promises great NVIDIA support - which can definitely be the case given recent updates.
Now on the flickering issues that you experienced, they’re specific to the NVIDIA driver and are just being ironed out. There is the new explicit sync Wayland protocol, new NVIDIA driver, patches for XWayland, patches for Mesa, maybe something more. It still might require pulling something that didn’t make it to stable distro repositories, but I think Nobara provides that and for sure will when 40 will get released soon-ish. I don’t have NVIDIA GPU, but I saw conversations on Nobara Discord and they help each other get NVIDIA going so maybe ask there.
The time frame is a bit of a problem here. If you want to avoid tinkering, hold for a little longer and in few months most distros (that ship a Wayland session) will most likely just work with your setup. If you want it now, feel free to get your hands dirty and find a way to run NVIDIA on Wayland with explicit sync support.
I found that copying directories was much more convenient for this kind of experimentation, since I was usually already working in a filemanager anyways. And thanks to BTRFS's copy-on-write support it was also instantaneous and didn't take up any additional space. So in the end very similar to snapshots.
I use BTRFS on root on openSUSE and it works fine. I don't interact with the snapshot feature much beyond system updates (and very rare rollbacks), but it's nice. I use an encrypted boot w/ an NVMe drive, and things work fine.
I'm not sure what the point of ext4 is for a system drive vs BTRFS, BTRFS on root has served me well for years (5-ish on my desktop, 7-ish on my NAS).
You can set up subvolumes and whatnot to snapshot just part of the tree as well. Or you can copy/paste the whole directory and run dedup (should work, haven't tried).
There's no reason btrfs shouldn't work for every use case.
That said I think the slight performance gains of ext4 over btrfs make it worth sticking to ext4 for games. Imo it's similar to as if you had you main system on an HDD but ran games off of an SSD; that's how much faster it feels.
I would install games to a separate ext4 partition but steam to btrfs (for configs) in that case.
And even then, you should probably be using RAID 10 instead. Resilvering a RAID 5 array is hard on the disks, so there's an elevated risk of the entire RAID failing. RAID 6 should eliminate this, but in a desktop system, do you really have enough space to make it worthwhile? You'd need 5+ drives to beat RAID 10 capacity, and that's a lot of space. IMO, RAID 5/6 is just not a great option in general. Don't cheap out on your RAID setup, do the industry standard, which is RAID 10.
I use BTRFS in a RAID 1 on my NAS (plan to upgrade to RAID 10 when I run out of space), and no RAID on my desktop. Everything important gets backed up to my NAS.
Like you I've tried to game on Linux and each time have had to go back. I really want it to work, and to be fair, it DOES work. I love my Steam Deck and it's proof that with enough tuning you can get a good experience.
However if you want to get more than a game just running, that's when you have some issues. Like you I had the X11 multiple monitor issue people describe. Wayland is the fix these days but there were still issues using both different high refresh and VRR at the same time (may be fixed now).
My current issue is trying to get gamescope running when launching games from steam on Fedora 40. I have the flatpak of each and guides say it should just work, but every time I use gamescope as a launch option nothing launches. I imagine there must be a log somewhere but I don't know where that is. I found some open bug reports that say gamescope just broke a few versions ago with Steam, who knows.
The only reason I need to use gamescope is that there is no AMD control panel, so no way to get FSR. This is a lower end GPU and I really need FSR for this particular game to run well. This is the biggest issue IMO, with only basic GPU drivers the community has to figure out how to implement the latest gaming features on their own, which means it is years behind. The VRR/High Refresh multiple monitor issue for example is something windows was doing with ease several years ago and Linux is getting it now.
So you have to give up a lot of multiplayer games, and you have to be OK with just running the game, not anything modern like DLSS or frame gen, or whatever is cutting edge. For this reason I can still only recommend gaming on Linux if you're on a Steam Deck, or if you're a techy person who mostly plays single player titles. Anything more and you will be messing around more than playing.
Yes I am. I appreciate the help though. It seems pretty clear that it's failing to recognize the gamescope argument because even if I use it barebones without any resolutions or FSR arguments it still fails to launch. Wish I could see thr output somewhere so I could know what to look into.
That said, I have since looked into Nobara and Bazzite and they look really promising. They should have all this stuff I'm trying to do baked right in. The point still stands though that these are extra complications that I wouldn't have on Windows with a full driver suite.
Nope. I was actually able to get it working the other day after ditching flatpak and re-installing Steam, Gamescope, and MangoHUD with DNF instead. All the guides I read said that flatpak would be no issue, but it was clear that as soon as I referenced any of the above applications in the launch arguments it would fail to load because it didn't understand what I was asking to launch.
So, all in all, I now have Rocket League running at a high framerate with FSR on integrated graphics. It only took two days :P
what filesystem you use to store your games on shouldn't matter. as long as the file system is able to store the files you need and supports the file permissions unix systems use it doesn't really matter.
i recall things like file management are a little faster on btrfs, but it has no impact on game performance or loading times for as far as i'm aware
I found PopOs in my experience when first switching full time to Linux was awful . I literally couldn't get a single game to run . I switched to Ubuntu and had a lot less issues but when using alot of different applications like lutris and yuzu the version on the Ubuntu software app where outdated and gave alot of issues so most software I downloaded from other places . Right now I have 90% of what I want working but might switch distros again soon or at least doing a fresh install since I have installed alot of stuff when learning and testing. Also virtual machines won't work since updating to the latest kernel .
I use openSUSE Tumbleweed and it has BTRFS and snapper (snapshot manager) set up by default, with all necessary system subvolumes already created. It’s been a great experience for gaming so far, and actually the best experience with NVIDIA drivers I’ve had! All you would need to do is create a separate BTRFS subvolume and snapper config for your games folder and you’d be good to go, without worrying about any other setup! No need to use EXT4 at all. Additionally, there is very detailed snapper documentation on the openSUSE website.
Since you're on EndeavourOS, I suggest using btrfs-assistant instead of timeshift, since it was created by one of the devs and offers more functionality with snapper. Just create a new profile for your root partition and then configure how often you want it to take snapshots.
You can also install snap-pac so that you get OpenSUSE-like automatic snapshots everytime pacman executes a install/remove/update command.
To answer the direct question, BTRFS works fine for gaming. Garuda uses BTRFS by default and I've been daily driving it for a few years now. My gaming machine hasn't had an unrecoverable failure that wasn't my fault (not checking consple output for errors when updating and then rebooting). Games on an ext4 file system work fine - that's what I do for games I don't play often. The main NVME is for games that are played regularly and everything else goes to the storage SSDs.
Correct me if I'm wrong, it seems like you want an immutable distro more than BTRFS for what you want to do.
What do you mean splitting the disk? I just recently removed windows, moved and resized both boot and primary partition to take over all the space, now it is a pure Ext4 disk. I would not use BTRFS for your use case but that is up to you.
I saw the other comments, BTRFS appears to work fine, I wouldn't use it because it is unfinished (there are some features not ready according to the status page) but I guess it is stable.
The main issue with btrfs is the RAID 5/6 write hole. If you aren't planning to use RAID 5/6, it's fine.
There are some other problems too, but those don't affect data integrity. The most annoying one currently is that defragmenting breaks reflinks, such that snapshots get turned into full copies, potentially wasting a lot of space. (I have honestly no idea how noticeable fragmentation is on SSDs, and if defragmenting is even worth it nowadays.)
Popping in to give an update before calling it a night!
First of all, thank you for all the help! I've been reading through all the comments here and trying a few things out. The first thing I tried was switching the default desktop environment from the default Gnome to KDE. I much prefer KDE to Gnome since I have experience with it on the Steam Deck, so this is the solution that I had the most hope for. Sadly though, things are much worse in KDE. Unlike in Gnome, KDE has the terrible screen tearing that was mentioned in X11, but is still similarly unable to support running the monitors at different refresh rates. Since a lot of the comments here mentioned Wayland though, that was my real end goal in getting KDE installed. Unfortunately, witching over to KDE Wayland, things became significantly more unusable and it was about the same experience I had while trying to install Nobara. Both displays were totally unresponsive for seconds at a time and I was only able to interact with things during brief moments when they would stutter along instead. This was pretty painful to log back out of and was an overall mess like a couple of you had mentioned it might be.
I went back to Gnome after this. Since KDE didn't seem to be they way forward, I figured I might as well try enabling Wayland on Pop_OS's built in solution. Wayland support was hidden by default on NVIDIA as mentioned, but one quick config edit later and the option appeared. Things seem to be going much better now! I'm running Gnome Wayland right now and while things aren't flawless yet they're significantly better than before. Both monitors are working at their full refresh rates now without any screen tearing or flickering. As for gaming, so far I only have Helldivers 2 installed running through Proton, and performance is about 8% worse than in Windows on the same graphics settings while on the ship. I am also getting an odd visual bug where the in-game menu looks like it opens and closes very quickly every once in a while. It's not actually open or intractable though, it's more like the game randomly displays a single frame from when I did have the menu open to change the graphics settings. Tomorrow I'll try enabling Proton experimental and see if that fixes anything, and also try installing some more games.
I'll come back again to give an update on how things are going then! I'm still lacking HDR and there are other bugs that look like they need to be ironed out, but I'm much more optimistic about this than I was before. I think I'll keep dual-booting for now, at least while I'm still trying to get everything working properly, and hopefully that next version of Pop_OS brings HDR support. For now, it's at least nice to know that different monitor refresh rates are working.
Thanks for the update. When it comes to dual monitors, I’m in the same spot. Reading through the comment section, I found that Bazzite OS is what might suit me. As for the environment, I was going for KDE; however, after reading your update, I’m sceptical about it.
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