I finally separated some overkill hardware from my server rig (an RTX 3080 and a Ryzen 5800X3D) and put them in their own chassi. Installed Arch, again, of course. The server got a “new” Ryzen 5700G , which apparently is a repurposed laptop APU.
A few years ago, I used to fire up my desktop environment (dwm on X11) and launch Steam from a pseudo terminal.
On my reborn gaming PC, could I skip installing a desktop environment and still play games on Steam? Will it run directly from the console like - for instance - mpv does?
The purpose would be to minimize any overhead from dwm and X11. Which sounds ridiculous now that I “say” it out loud, because it’s negligible, but still. My question still stands.
You can’t run steam with no compositor whatsoever, but you can use the steam deck’s solution of using their
gamescopemicro compositor for everything. You should be able to install gamescope and just rungamescope -e {other CLI options} steam(assuming you’re using the native Arch package and not the flatpak).My experience using gamescope for steam has been very mixed, but I’ve seen a tutorial somewhere on doing exactly this.
Gamescope isn’t necessarily the best option for every game, and having a normal compositor (which, for now, must support XWayland) is just a much more flexible solution.
This may also be possible with something more general like
xwayland-satellite, but frankly steam and all its games still run on the X11 protocol, so if you really don’t need a GUI you might be able to install a vanilla X11 instance and hook to that directly. I can’t speak to either of those options directly.But is this worth it, in a practical sense? No. You have a reasonably powerful system, and the only performance you’d be saving is a few percent of a single core on the CPU, which in your config is absolutely not worth it.
Thanks for the input! As the post says, I don’t actually have performance issues. It was more of a “is it technically possible?” type of post.
Interesting about the gamescope solution!
Back in the olden days we used to run games buikt with SDL on the console without a desktop. But they have to be built for it and Steam doesn’t fit that bill.
Well, you just opened up a whole new world for me. :D
Unfortunately I don’t think the latest SDL works with the Linux console frame buffer anymore, but thanks for the links!
If you mean running a game directly without any display server of whatever running, i don’t think that’s possible, but the closest thing to that might be gamescope i think? Gamescope should be able to run directly as a graphical session instead of it being nested inside an X server/wayland compositor, but gamescope still runs on wayland regardless.
FWIW the SteamDeck running official SteamOS does have a full desktop environment, it’s just hidden by starting Steam in Big Picture mode.
So… you could benchmark the “gain” but I doubt it’s significant, if any.
Also if you do like to play with hardware for gaming across networks checking Selkies or Moonlight to stream from your machine to your machine, no intermediary, little latency or overhead.
I am not sure that is fully true. Or at least not fully explained. The Steamdeck has a full KDE environment installed and it uses this when in desktop mode. But steam is not running in big picture mode in front of this.
KDE is not running at all when in the game mode of the Steamdeck. In that mode it uses a compositor written by valve called gamescope. Switching between these is effectively logging out and back in again to switch the compositor.
Also it now has a way to run the desktop as a nested session in game mode but that is winning kwin inside gamescope.
I haven’t tested this myself but I assume one could benchmark both and see if there is noticeable performance loss.
