You could try to pick up a used one second hand.

Sounds good! Let us know how it goes ^^

Just to narrow it down further, were you getting bad performance on Linux Mint too, or did you only install games on Kubuntu?

Another user mentioned that the power settings can have a huge effect, which also seems like a good lead to look into. You should be able to check it by opening your settings panel and going to the Power Management section. In there should be a Power Profile setting. If it’s set to power save mode, it’ll limit your performance quite a bit.

Ahh okay. The big thing I was concerned about was if you’d installed graphics drivers from the AMD website, as those would likely be worse performing compared to what comes with Linux built in, and can do wonky things if done slightly wrong, so most avoid them unless they need to do like, scientific compute stuff.

The performance of the Linux driver is very good compared to the Windows one, usually being at parity or even slightly better. Proton can introduce a slight overhead, but not enough to explain the delta in your experience.

The only thing jumping out to me is that you mentioned running hi-fi rush at maximum settings as your benchmark. I looked into the recommended hardware for that game on its steam page, and while it does have a fairly low minimum requirement, the recommended specs are actually very beefy, suggesting an RTX 2070 or RX 6600, which are multiple times more powerful than the integrated graphics on your Beelink.

When I look at what other people are able to achieve on Windows with the same APU as yours in hi-fi rush, their graphics settings appear to be set to low/medium settings, and with a small resolution of 1366x768. At those settings, they seem to be getting around 60fps.

Are you absolutely sure you were maxing out the graphics settings in hi-fi rush on Windows, and at a higher resolution than 1366x768? If you drop the settings to match what is displayed in the linked video, can you achieve similar performance on Linux?

Its been a while since I used AMD graphics on Windows, but I seem to recall that the Windows AMD driver had an ability to automatically set graphics settings for you for an optimal experience, and I suspect it may have lowered the settings automatically without you realizing it, making the performance seem surprisingly good.

What drivers did you update, and how?

Yes, but mixing in 3D hardware acceleration was apparently quite difficult to achieve until systemd came along to make it somewhat painless.

True, for anyone who has a more modern AMD laptop, it would fare well with Parsec.

I will admit I became a bit giddy at the prospect of using a beefy Linux rig like it’s 1971, as our Lord and Saviors Dennis Richie & Ken Thompson intended. 😌

The only reason any of this is easily possible by laymen is thanks to Systemd.

You still can, as far as I know! It’s just that I don’t think X would have the throughput for games. I recently learned about that functionality in a Cathode Ray Dude video, where he shows how it even got ported to Windows 3.11!

Well I’ll be damned! AMD does seem to have up their encoder game with the Navi series onward.

They were rightfully called out as having pretty bad encoders before that though, which I personally experienced on an RX 480 I used to have in my system. It made parsec a bit blurry and added quite a bit of latency.

Also, I would stand by the recommendation to avoid older office PC’s with AMD graphics, since none of them are going to have Navi graphics.

Hm, I thought he mentioned it in his 6.4 juicy video, but I can’t find it either. Apologies, I must have confused it with something else.

I did manage to find this rounded corners proposal, and unfortunately it doesn’t look like it’ll be in kwin anytime soon.

I think native rounded corners were introduced in one of the latest versions, Nicco Loves Linux did a video on it, I believe.

Older desktops can have a somewhat hefty idle power draw due to the overall system consumption contributing more than expected, such as the southbridge. According to this old review of the i7-2600k, the system idles at 74w, which at $0.12 per KWh, would cost you roughly $77 per year. Though you might want to confirm that with a Kill-a-watt meter if you can (libraries sometimes lend them out), since I’m pretty sure that total system power chart includes a discrete GPU, so the real number for a GPU-less system is probably around 40 or 50w at idle.

If that is accurate, you could potentially replace your i7-2600 with a used Dell Wyse 5070 thin client from ebay for about $40 (in the US), and that idles at 5w, which would only cost you $5 a year at the same rate.

Older thin clients and laptops tend to have much better idle power draws compared to desktops. For other people reading this, if you’re using a desktop for a low-power use case, it’s probably worth finding out what its idle power consumption is and doing the calculation to determine if it’d be worth replacing it with a more efficient used thin-client or office mini-pc.

Thankfully Fedora retracted the 32 bit proposal.

I suspect a VM would introduce latency (big no no for music production), and I can’t imagine getting ASIO working would be easy (though I’ve never tried it).

According to WineHQ, Ableton’s compatibility with wine isn’t stellar. FL Studio works quite well in it, but switching DAWs can be a pretty major undertaking.

For Linux native DAWs, Reaper and Bitwig are the two best options. Reaper is the most affordable at 60 bucks, with an infinite free trial.

One possibility is using it exclusively to access its grammatik grammer checker as a non-AI and non-subscription based alternative to ProWritingAid or Grammarly.

More info here.

Otherwise, it’s still genuinely a solid option for those who want to do word processing in a terminal, which is a niche use case, but some people are into that. Perhaps as a distraction free writing environment.

TrilliumNext Notes is a great one.

Coincidentally, I made a post about the merits of replacing ProWritingAid or Grammarly with Grammatik, a grammar checker from 1998.

More info here.