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]
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.