I got this Beelink mini pc from Amazon planning to hook it up to my living room TV and play movies and stream TV with. And I was shocked and amazed to discover that this little thing could run games like Hi-Fi Rush and MGSV:PP on max settings! Sure the fans made it sound like a small jet engine, but it never skipped frames or lagged on me even once! I know it’s not a power house: it couldn’t run Yakuza Zero or Neir Automata very well. But I was still thrilled with what it could do!
Well it shipped with Windows 11, and I finally decided to fix that. A couple days ago I switched over to Mint, tho I’m running Kubuntu now. The switch was quick and painless, and honestly getting used to Linux has been pretty fun! But now it runs a lot of my games like a slide show. I’ve been digging at this for a few days now, updating drivers and setting up Proton. I’ve found a lot of helpful guides and stuff on line, but very little about the hardware I have in this situation. Apparently AMD processors are great for Linux, but I feel like it’s not working with the integrated graphics card. Tried to find the right driver on their website, but I haven’t had much luck. So, here’s hoping the community can help. Any tips for a newbie?
CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 5700U (16) @ 4.37 GHz | GPU: AMD Lucienne [Integrated]
Kubuntu 25.04 with Steam .deb, Heroic .deb and Firefox .deb installed and snaps disabled, runs like a charm.
Are you running games via Flatpaks and have not given the Flatpak permission to use GPU acceleration? That has severly slowed down games on my similar AMD-based Minisforum PC. If you are, you can use Flatseal to easily adjust settings.
If gaming is your priority, I found Bazzite pretty easy to set up and run. It’s got most of the gaming stuff (Proton and Steam) built-in, and makes it dead simple to get games running. Very similar experience to my Steam Deck, and if you were able to install Mint and Kubuntu then you’ll be able to install Bazzite.
You shouldn’t need to download any graphics drivers, Ubuntu (and pretty much every other distribution) ships with the open-source AMD driver stack by default, which are significantly better than and less hassle than the proprietary drivers for pretty much all purposes. If you’re getting video out it’s almost certainly already using the internal GPU, but if you’re unsure you can open a terminal and run
sudo apt install mesa-utils
and thenglxinfo -B
to double-check what is being used for rendering.Yup, it lists AMD radeon graphics as what’s in use. The visuals all look fine, no glitching or artifacting, but even with the tuning I’ve done so far I can barely get the frame rate above 20fps.
Framerate above 20 in what with what settings? That’s kinda key information :P
If it’s running an AMD APU, you need to make sure that your power profile is set to “Performance” and not something like “Power Saver”. I know KDE has a lot of issues with power profile management since they nixed the quick settings awhile ago, but I think in your settings there is a place to choose your preferred settings. Limiting the power on those APUs significantly hampers it’s ability to play games.
If you’re going to be gaming, you may want to switch to a distro that does semi or rolling releases. Latest Kubuntu is still on kernel 6.8, and there are MASSIVE performance improvements between that and 6.15 which something like Fedora is running by default. That, and many updated versions of the Mesa drivers.
what exactly got nixed? Its all right there on the sys tray with a handy slider
There have been issues with the default power profiles interface and the AMD P-state manager for many KDE 6 versions depending on the kernel versions (I think 6.9+). THEN the power-profiles-daemon project was archived without notice, so I believe that’s why they disabled/removed the quick menu for it for awhile, but since I believed they moved to the upower managed project and put it back in. Been a bit since I’ve used KDE, so unsure of the eventually fixed it.
but I feel like it’s not working with the integrated graphics card
That’s possible… but it’s also not exactly clear what “feeling” you have about this, and I don’t know what other graphics card it could be using? I don’t really understand this, are you just saying the performance is bad? That I would believe as a possibility due to the distros you’re using, it’s probably fixable with the right twiddling of knobs but whether you want to do all that tinkering is a question I’ll address later. First, let’s address the elephant in the room:
You typically don’t need drivers from a website for Linux, especially not graphics drivers and if you do the OS should be able to get them itself. Which drivers to use are notoriously finicky because they tie in so tightly to the OS itself, and there are competing proprietary drivers that might interface with the hardware better and suck at interfacing with the OS and kernel, and open-source drivers that interface with the OS and kernel perfectly but sometimes suck at interfacing with the actual hardware, and the tradeoff of which is better for a particular OS or particular kernel or particular hardware is really not always obvious or intuitive and changes over time.
In short, I personally find this is a good area to trust the distribution you’re using is picking a good option for you and will provide reasonable alternatives within its own packaging system. Assuming you’ve picked a good distribution, you don’t need to mess around with installing proprietary drivers from the websites manually which tends to just make a mess of your whole OS, which brings us to the next topic we need to address:
Mint and Kubuntu are nice comfortable stable “desktop” variants but they’re not really optimized for gaming, and gaming on Linux is a space that is in very very active development right now and one where it really pays to be on the cutting edge, because projects are improving things rapidly and you’ll only get the benefits of those improvements on the bleeding edge gaming distributions that are quickly integrating those changes. Otherwise, you’ll be stuck on a “stable” distribution that might be years behind graphically, and years is a huge amount of time in Linux gaming at the moment.
While you might think “stability” is an obviously good and important thing to have, the reality is it also means you’re not getting improvements, and sometimes those improvements are really good or even completely necessary for modern and esoteric hardware support, like the kind of modern and slightly esoteric hardware you have. It’s also a bit of a misnomer, all distros try to be pretty stable as far as not crashing or corrupting. It’s not something that commonly happens even on “unstable” distros. Unless you’re using something that has very hard coded environment requirements and dependencies, you’re not likely benefiting from the kind of “stable” that stable distros provide anyway.
A lot of people recommend starting out with Bazzite as a relative newbie to Linux who’s interested in gaming. It’s a pretty safe distro and gets around the stability of crashing vs the stability of the software environment by essentially giving you “snapshots” of each new version that you can choose between or go back to the old version if it’s causing trouble, similar to Windows system restore, but better. It should have good performance and get you quickly and easily set up for all the gaming and media you can handle.
Sorry, I should have been clearer on that I guess. I’d kept reading that AMD drivers were already pretty much included with all distros, but the issue has been performance. At first Hi-Fi (my benchmark for this test) would run at a cool 5-6 fps, and after my tuning it’s gone up to around 15-20 fps, but no better. I know this hardware can run this game, so I’ve been pretty confused.
I have read up on Bazzite, and I’m actually considering the KDE version for my main gaming computer. But I was still hoping to keep a desktop environment on this machine. Do you think KDE Bazzite would fix the issue?
The desktop environment is always available, and from what I understand Bazzite KDE boots directly into desktop mode (KDE is the desktop mode)
I could be wrong though as I’m not super familiar with Bazzite personally. As a relatively comfortable Linux user for many many years, I’m using Pika OS. It seems pretty friendly on the surface although I am comfortable getting dirty in the console so maybe I’m not the best judge. Being Debian-based would make it similar to Mint and Ubuntu though if that’s up your alley.
Having played with these A LOT, my first question is, do you want an all purpose desktop or a gaming console?
If you simply want to play games with it, I’d recommend either Steam OS or Chimera. Some would suggest Bazzite as well.
I have had better success with performance with Debian testing “trixie” with KDE than Kubuntu or Mint.
Just my observations after hours and hours of tinkering with mine. I’ve had both the Ser 5 and 6. My experience was also similar, it simply had better frame rates on Windows. But I fucking hate windows, so I choose to play games faster with less graphical rendering.
I want to make this into an all purpose media machine: TV, movies, games, and internet/youtube. I know this thing isn’t a power house, but I’m kind of annoyed that my games just worked better on windows. I mean come on, MGS5 on max settings?! On this teeny thing?!??! T.T
I’m not against distro hopping. If Bazzite turns out to be my fix, then I’ll be thrilled for it!
Just throwing in my weight here, Bazzite linux worked out of the box on my AMD hardware, and it’s tuned for gaming. I have it set up as a HTPC just like you and it works great.
I would highly suggest trying and sticking with Debian KDE. It does all that and more. I’ve been using it for years. Stable isn’t bad, but I’ve found testing “trixie” better as it has plasma 6. I have done a fair amount of distro hopping on several different types of machines. I prefer anything with plasma 6 over just about anything. Mint is good, but cinnamon feels shackled compared to KDE. Especially with wayland and pipewire on Plasma being nice improvements over the past.
I have a projector, a nice audio system, and a built rig with AMD/AMD all running through Debian with Emby / Steam / Audacious. It’s superb and likely the finest linux experience I’ve had to date.
Love mine ! Tho yea if kodi didn’t do hardware decode on a video it sounded like a jet engine !