I’ve switched to Endeavour OS after my frustration with Arch Linux reached 110%, after (amongst some other reasons) one of the updates (suspected Mesa) broke graphics - no acceleration, low fps and I couldn’t even play video on a browser or Freetube. I’ve found out that EOS with Wayland worked OOTB and was happy with that for some time, but recently some update broke graphics again.
On an oldtimer, music player laptop, FPS dropped to 20. On ancient gaming PC some glitches occurred that broke shadows into display black frames around windows. I’ve discovered it by an accident, when tried to disable all possible graphic effects.
After some short time of useless inquiries, including using eos-hwtool or switching to Nvidia driver, when I’ve had enough again, I’ve found workaround solution: switching to X11 on choosing session with SDDM. Poof! Problems disappeared.
I’ve been told that them at Wayland may be messing up again… maybe with Mesa.
I still don’t understand where’s the source of the frustrating problem, that until one of hundred updates similiar thing appears again. In my conjectures about Mesa, I base at what I’ve been told at Telegram or what… AI tools say, but I have no proof and a reason to prevent such problems in the future. On Arch, back in the days, none was able to help, I’ve asked at IRC and forum, but I’m not coming back to Arch never again. I’d just like to prevent such GUI problems in the future on EOS.
It’s quite odd that you went to EndeavourOS which is Arch-based so you will probably run into things that you ran into Arch too as well. Because there’s not much difference between Arch and EndeavourOS and the most important things is EndeavourOS uses the Arch repos.
The nouveau drivers are far from perfect. It is not uncommon to have problems with those, especially when gaming.
For that older gaming PC, I would consider switching to some LTS distro that keeps older stuff around for longer like debian. Your hardware is just very old. There is nothing wrong with that but older tech like X11 is probably more likely to work. The GTX 260 is likely to have more success that way.
The laptop should generally be fine. If you are using KDE, try disabling all the animations and effects which should make it lighterweight on the GPU.
Yeah, I wouldn’t expect a lot of performance from that GPU. It’s 18 years old.
The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 260 was a high-end desktop graphics card launched in June 2008, featuring 896MB GDDR3 memory, a 448-bit bus, and DirectX 10 support. It was released in two main versions—192 and 216 stream processors—with the later “Core 216” model offering better performance.
That GTX260 should work with the nvidia-340xx-dkms drivers. Which might work better than the nouveau driver. But there might be a patch missing to get the drivers to work with a current kernel (newer than 6.19.6), as mentioned in the comments of that package here.
Downgrading is only a temporary workaround, from my point of view.
I would rather choose a stable distro, as dalto already suggested.
And personally, a CPU with two cores, without hyper-threading, no L3 cache at all and only 2mb of L2 cache that still has a TDP of 65 watt is simply not energy efficient. Given the fact that I may only deliver the performance of a Raspberry Pi 5, which would consume significantly less energy.
With 15+ years old hardware you enter the “tinker” zone: people who are deliberately putting in the effort to keep hardware running way past their reasonable economic lifespan. There’s just not the amount of user base or developer activity to catch or fix bugs.
The beauty of Arch (or EOS) is its flexibility, you can probably make it work - putting in the effort. But as was said before, it’s maybe best to pick one of the older still supported LTS distros for these devices instead of Arch/EOS.
Well, I guess in terms of the CPU, mainboard and such, the age isn’t that problematic in terms of the drivers (capacitors gone bad is a different aspect). But one wouldn’t necessarily benefit from the bleeding edge kernel.
It’s most likely the nVidia card that didn’t aged well, it has been an hassle to get nVidia cards running properly, even at the time when it came out in 2008.
