I got this Beelink mini pc from Amazon planning to hook it up to my living room TV and play movies and stream TV with. And I was shocked and amazed to discover that this little thing could run games like Hi-Fi Rush and MGSV:PP on max settings! Sure the fans made it sound like a small jet engine, but it never skipped frames or lagged on me even once! I know it’s not a power house: it couldn’t run Yakuza Zero or Neir Automata very well. But I was still thrilled with what it could do!
Well it shipped with Windows 11, and I finally decided to fix that. A couple days ago I switched over to Mint, tho I’m running Kubuntu now. The switch was quick and painless, and honestly getting used to Linux has been pretty fun! But now it runs a lot of my games like a slide show. I’ve been digging at this for a few days now, updating drivers and setting up Proton. I’ve found a lot of helpful guides and stuff on line, but very little about the hardware I have in this situation. Apparently AMD processors are great for Linux, but I feel like it’s not working with the integrated graphics card. Tried to find the right driver on their website, but I haven’t had much luck. So, here’s hoping the community can help. Any tips for a newbie?
CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 5700U (16) @ 4.37 GHz | GPU: AMD Lucienne [Integrated]
Are you running games via Flatpaks and have not given the Flatpak permission to use GPU acceleration? That has severly slowed down games on my similar AMD-based Minisforum PC. If you are, you can use Flatseal to easily adjust settings.
I don’t actually know what flatpaks are, honestly… 😅
Games are downloaded and run from Steam, but I have no clue about the GPU acceleration. I’ll have to check when I get home from work later.
If you installed Steam from the software manager in Mint, you might have downloaded the Flatpak. Flatpaks are a particular way of distributing software which have their own pros and cons vs other ways of installing software, and you will eventually see many people hold strong feelings about this topic (whether or not to use them for instance).
But for now, in order to quickly check whether Steam is installed this way, you can install Flatseal through the software manager. Flatseal provides a GUI for efficient permissions management of Flatpaks. When you open it, it will display all software on your system that is installed in this manner. If Steam is listed there, then you have installed it has a Flatpak. You can then edit the permissions and try to set GPU Acceleration to allowed and see if that helps. If not, you have a different issue.
And for the record, using Flatseal is not a requirement for managing permissions of Flatpaks. You can do that through the command line as well. But it is indeed a quality of life improvement for me at least.
I see, then yes: I installed steam with the built-in software manager. Thanks for the tip about Flatseal, I’ll be sure to look into it after work!