Disk, Steam and Performance issues

Issues & Assistance
1

After hearing and reading so many good things about it I switched to CachyOS to give it a shot. However my start has been more than rough.

The installation all went fine but after that the problems started to pile up.

  • Steam for some reason will stall on a download during the end to the point that it can not be paused and the process itself not even be killed. It goes as far as even stalling a reboot having me force the power off to get my system back.
  • A external NTFS drive I use would also occasionally refuse to mount or just corrupt with the only fix being, plugin it into a Windows machine and running chkdsk <drive> /f. It got me worried enough that I stopped using that drive on CachyOS.
  • When putting the system to sleep the monitors will turn off but the system itself doesn’t seem to follow. Fans and lights remain on.
  • Game performance overall has also been worse than Windows with stutters, load times and graphical fidelity suffering.

I’m not a noob when it comes to software but I’m still quite green when it comes to Linux so if anyone would be willing to at least explain some of the issues to me that would be greatly appreciated!

Technical data:

Kernel: 7.0.1-1-cachyos
CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 3700X 8-Core Processor
RAM: 2x 16 GiB DDR4
GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660 Ti
2

Some tools for your “fix problems on Linux” toolbox:

  • cachyos-bugreport.sh
    • Run this in a terminal during / after an issue occurs. It will produce a link you can share here, so people can see your logs. Without them, it’s difficult to diagnose many issues.
  • sudo journalctl -f
    • -follow the system logs (until you press Ctrl+C) while you do something that triggers the problem. You might see messages that reveal the nature of the problem, or that you can paste in a websearch to find a solution if it’s a common problem.
  • ps aux | grep -i steam → kill -9 [pid]
    • List all processes, filter for ‘steam’, case-insensitive
    • Send kill signal to steam (replace [pid] with number from second column of ps aux output)
    • kill [pid] is a polite “please stop” signal, kill -9 [pid] is a “die now” signal
    • Steam, in particular, has many processes, so you’ll see a bunch of junk in the ps aux output… start from the top, use the first pid you see, kill it, run ps aux again to see if anything survived
    • Alternatively, if you want a GUI, you can try System Monitor. Find the process, right-click, send the KILL signal
    • There are very few situations where a process can survive / not respond to a SIGKILL
  • When an application misbehaves, launch it from the terminal instead of the GUI
    • You will often see logs in the terminal, including ones that won’t show up in journalctl

Some general notes:

  • Avoid using NTFS on Linux. Only use it to copy files from Windows partitions to Linux.
    • It’s “supported” only as a convenience, not intended for heavy/daily use
    • There are efforts to improve this in recent kernel versions, but NTFS is and always will be foreign tech in Linux. On a fundamental level, it is incompatible.
    • Never run Steam games on NTFS, that is explicitly unsupported and will cause problems.
  • Expect, on average, a ~20% FPS drop in games when using Nvidia GPU
    • Nvidia has been improving their Linux drivers, but they still lag behind Windows
    • This will surely even out in the future, but for now we have to live with it
    • AMD often does better on Linux, and Nvidia does better with CUDA on Linux, just not games
    • Always check protondb for performance tweaks you can apply to specific games
3

External drive problem might be because of USB power save. I have no problem with steam library on NTFS on same nvme - after symlinking of course.

And on so old hardware it might be wiser to use LTS kernel. NVIDIA drivers aren’t part of the kernel and 1660 either will be out of newer drivers soon or already.