I am a KDE fan and i have decided some weeks ago to try another distro.I am an OpenSuse fan , i ve liked Simply Mepis in past along KDE 3.4. I simply like the graphical effects that KDE shows off and thats it. After trying latest Mageia 6 , it took some time to install it from a DVD the final outcome was simply a choppy desktop , so i have decided to try something different and install Archlinux 64 bit. At first I was a little surprised about the installation procedure.No interface to set up anything just a black page and cmd Simply Mepis , Ubuntu , Kubuntu , Fedora , Open Suse , Mandriva , Mageia and so on had a normal interface to partition the HDD and install the OS ,but this one doesnt feature such. Anyway using a second machine I was able to use the internet resources and with the network connection i had installed the OS , it just needed some time.It is easier than it looks The surprise was big after the KDE environment showed up.You have the minimal set-up and all you need to do is tell PACMAN (OpenSuse has it too ) what you need , pacman -S will just install the package for you nice and clean. I needed a video player and VLC was there , i ve needed a music player installed Amarok and Audacious and along x plugins it worked, needed a browser installed Firefox , anyway after some minutes everything was ready for a casual desktop user. What about Steam i ve said to myself , and the answer came fast ,Steam installed just fine NATIVELY via pacman and TF2 worked out of the box .As such the tiny but not weak R3 graphics showed around 40-60 FPS. As they have released CS:GO free i have installed that one today and it also runs nativelly at about 30 fps at low details. Have no ideea if it would run better with more system RAM (4Gigs/3,3G may not be enough) as a lot of swaping was taking place. KDE Plasma 5.13.4 KDE Frameworks 5.49.0 Qt 5.11.1 Kernel 4.18.5-arch1 Renderer AMD Kabini OpenGL version 3.1 Mesa 18.1.7 Desktop idle shows 1% on cores here and there and around 300-400MiB RAM. Great visual effects windows sliding , windows deformation and so on , lower system load that OpenSuse it seems and an auto update feature that works and doesnt brake the OS after restart. If you run VLC load is at about 40-50% on the CPU-s , a little lower compared to OpenSuse. At OS start-up there would be a archlinux homecall (for internet connectivity check-update feature) and some calls for the desktop apps if any like weather or clock.
Seeing the info that Steam beta adds emulation features for DX based games i have tried to see how they go on my Steam account.Steam allowed 2 proton choices in there. As i ve already posted CS:GO and TF2 work nativelly quite ok via OpenGL The Kabini 5350 also offers support for Vulkan , beeing a GCN architecture. As such i ve installed some free ,trial games and benchmarks that should work in my view. Amongst others i ve Installed Quake Champions , Warface , 3D Mark benchmark , S.K.I.L.L , some Trackmania demo , Black Squad and some other unknown UT engine based games.They all downloaded and seemed to install. Only 3 of this atempted to show some kind of spalsh screen. Quake was crashing at a black screen , Black Squad was stopping while it gave an error regarding battleeye installation (which does really nothing in the windows version ) , Warface with a broken launcher screen and S.K.I.L.L based on the UT3 engine , that showed a splash screen and some strange buttons , but failed to launch as well , with an error that is reported for Windows users as well.So apart from the S.K.I.L.L fps game nothing showed Windows like operation The mesa driver had the latest Vulkan installed. To bad the developers that use the UT engine or the Quake one do not take the time to release a linux-openGL/Vulkan version of their games. The OS behaves well after a few updates , small system usage in normal tasks , quite a viable alternative along Open Suse from the linux world to a windows based PC. Couldnt make firejail work though
