Questions before Installing as a Dedicated Game Server

General system EndeavourOS installation
1

Hello all,
I had a few questions I wanted to ask before converting a windows server over to Linux. I have a small form factor machine currently running Windows 11 Home that I have been using as a dedicated game server for things like Satisfactory, Factorio, and sometimes Palworld. I also use it from time to time to transcode video using Handbrake. I have an AMD 7700 CPU on an Asus ROG Strix X670E-I motherboard. I am also using an Intel Arc A770 GPU to help with the transcoding and give it a bit more GPU power if needed. I can provide more specs if required.

So the questions I wanted to ask are these.

  1. Do I need to do anything to the kernel to get that Arc card to work? I remember when they first came out you needed to modify some files to get the system to recognize the card.
  2. Assuming the kernel sees the card fine, what driver to I install? I think it just uses the Mesa drivers like AMD?
  3. If the Arc card uses a different driver will there be conflicts between the integrated AMD GPU and the discrete Arc GPU?
  4. I assume I will want to use the LTS kernel, is there any reason to run another kernel instead? I don’t plan on updating any hardware on this machine for quite some time.
  5. What file system would be recommended here? I really like the BRTFS snapshots but would EXT4 be superior in this case? Palworld was pretty notorious for corrupting its saves so I need a good backup solution.
  6. Backup Solution, what would be recommended? I have a Synology NAS that I currently use to backup the windows install. I can’t use their software as it doesn’t work with Arch or BTRFS, but I am sure there are other options out there,
  7. Is there an alternative to Handbrake that is fairly easy to use? That software doesn’t seem to play well with AMD GPUs and the Mesa driver. I’m not married to the software, it just worked really well on Windows.

I appreciate you all taking the time to help me out if you can.
Thanks,
OBX

2

should run fine by default… i have an arc 750 and it was not needing anything special.
GPU driver will not conflict basically… you can run with multiple GPUs installed nowadays.

Personal i would question the OS choice to run as a server… not an issue by default, as of its a home server, but in case nothing special arch is needed to run i would recommend something less rolling as a server base?

With arch you will need to setup things from scratch, other Distributions offer a wide spectrum of things preconfigurable like you have with ubuntu server.

3

if you run this on a headless server, go for commandline tools and create some scripts to use that and copy things at place…

4

Adding to that, Handbrake itself has a CLI version:

https://handbrake.fr/docs/en/latest/cli/command-line-reference.html

That’s what I use for video encoding — via my personal scripts that regurgitate the set of parameters that, after experimentation, work best for me.

5

Besides the fact that I just like Endeavour/Arch, I have had more success with it in the past. I currently run Nobara on my main gaming machine and it has not been as stable and had buggier updates than I ever did with Endeavour. I ran EOS for about a year on another machine and I can’t remember having any issue with pacman/yay or the foundational system itself. Most of my issues were with Plasma 5.x. Besides this is just a gaming server, it can have downtime and I can tinker with it if needed. Nothing important is relying in this device.

What sort of things would I need to setup. I figured there wouldn’t be much to do besides maybe let some ports through on the firewall.

As for Handbrake, the issue I ran into was it not seeing the AMD hardware encoders. From my research I needed to use the AMD Pro drivers. I assume the command line version would be the same. This appears to be a Handbrake only issue because OBS works just fine.