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]
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?
Bazzite desktop is probably your best bet yes.
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.