I finally separated some overkill hardware from my server rig (an RTX 3080 and a Ryzen 5800X3D) and put them in their own chassi. Installed Arch, again, of course. The server got a “new” Ryzen 5700G , which apparently is a repurposed laptop APU.

A few years ago, I used to fire up my desktop environment (dwm on X11) and launch Steam from a pseudo terminal.

On my reborn gaming PC, could I skip installing a desktop environment and still play games on Steam? Will it run directly from the console like - for instance - mpv does?

The purpose would be to minimize any overhead from dwm and X11. Which sounds ridiculous now that I “say” it out loud, because it’s negligible, but still. My question still stands.

  • IrritableOcelot@beehaw.org
    7·
    20 hours ago

    You can’t run steam with no compositor whatsoever, but you can use the steam deck’s solution of using their gamescope micro compositor for everything. You should be able to install gamescope and just run gamescope -e {other CLI options} steam (assuming you’re using the native Arch package and not the flatpak).

    My experience using gamescope for steam has been very mixed, but I’ve seen a tutorial somewhere on doing exactly this.

    Gamescope isn’t necessarily the best option for every game, and having a normal compositor (which, for now, must support XWayland) is just a much more flexible solution.

    This may also be possible with something more general like xwayland-satellite, but frankly steam and all its games still run on the X11 protocol, so if you really don’t need a GUI you might be able to install a vanilla X11 instance and hook to that directly. I can’t speak to either of those options directly.

    But is this worth it, in a practical sense? No. You have a reasonably powerful system, and the only performance you’d be saving is a few percent of a single core on the CPU, which in your config is absolutely not worth it.

    • durinn@programming.devOPEnglish
      1·
      20 hours ago

      Thanks for the input! As the post says, I don’t actually have performance issues. It was more of a “is it technically possible?” type of post.

      Interesting about the gamescope solution!

      • IrritableOcelot@beehaw.org
        2·
        15 hours ago

        Ahhh got it. I thought it was a “I know this is inadvisable, but dammit I’m going to do it anyways” type of post :)