Comment by alimbada
1 month ago
I dual booted Fedora back when it was still called Fedora Core from version 6 until 11-ish. I had it installed on a laptop and had a lot of driver issues with it and eventually didn't bother with dual booting when I moved to a new laptop.
I'm now looking to get off Windows permanently before security updates stop for Win 10 as I have no intention of upgrading to Win 11 since Linux gaming is now a lot more viable and was the only remaining thing holding me back from switching earlier. I've been considering either Bazzite (a Fedora derivative with a focus on gaming) or Mint but after reading your comment I may give vanilla Fedora a try too.
So far I've tried out the Bazzite Live ISO but it wouldn't detect my wireless Xbox controller though that may be a quirk of the Live ISO. I'm going to try a full install on a flash drive next and see if that fixes things.
Give it a try! Although, I do all my gaming on a Playstation. In Fedora, the Steam and NVIDIA Fusion repos come preinstalled and can be enabled during installation or in Gnome's 'Software' or the package manager later, but I can't speak to that. The opensource AMD drivers are in the main repo no action needed. ROCm too, but that can be messy and is work-in-progress on AMD's side. Can't vouch for the controller, but people claim they work. Guess, that's the live image. I heard, games with anti-cheat engines in the kernel categorically don't work with Linux, but this may change at some point. In that case, or if you want "console mode", a specific gaming distro may be worth considering, otherwise I would stick to vanilla. Good luck! Hope I didn't promise too much ;)
So I cleared out one of my SSDs and installed Fedora yesterday.
I still had the issue of no gamepad detection. I had to install xone which took some trial and error. Firstly, I didn't have dkms installed and secondly, soon after installing Fedora the kernel was updated in the background and on reboot my display resolution was fixed to 1024x768 or something for some reason (that's gonna be another issue I'll have to look into). I rebooted and went back to the previous version and then dkms complained the kernel-headers were missing. However, the kernel-headers were installed for the latest kernel but not the older version I had rebooted to. I'm not used to Fedora or dnf (I run Proxmox+Debian in my homelab) so after a quick search to figure out how to install a specific version of a package (it's not as simple as <package>@<version> but rather <package>-<version>.fc$FEDORA_VERSION.$ARCHITECTURE) I got kernel-devel installed and was able to finally run the xone install script successfully and have my gamepad detected.
The most frustrating thing is that the xone install script doesn't fail despite errors from dkms so after the first install (where I almost gave up because I thought something was wrong with my setup) I had to run the uninstall script each time there was a problem and then run it again. The xone docs also mention running a secondary script which doesn't actually exist until the first script runs successfully so that added a lot of confusion.
Lol. Well, that does sound terrible!
My understanding is you only need xone for the special adapter right? Have you tried cable and plain bluetooth before? Also Steam seems to come bundled with their own drivers for it, so the controller may just work within games in Steam, regardless.
I feel a bit bad, but honestly gaming on Linux is not my thing. From a quick glance, messing with the kernel like that may cause problems with secure boot and maybe that's causing your issues. Maybe you need to sign your modules or disable secure boot.
Have you tried the Copr repo? https://copr.fedorainfracloud.org/coprs/jackgreiner/xone-git...
And of course Bazzite seems to have addressed this out-of-the-box... :D
Quite frankly, if you want to do anything but gaming on that machine, at least for me, manually installing kernel modules from GitHub would be a deal breaker, since that seems rather unstable and prone to cause nasty problems down the line.
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