My end goal is to get my desktop running functionally like a high-powered Steam Deck with my HDR monitor. I’m beyond fed up with Microsoft and really want a Linux distro to be the primary OS on my PC (and ultimately the only OS once Ubisoft decides to support R6: Siege on Linux). Eventually I’ll switch from my NVIDIA GPU to AMD since everything I’ve read makes AMD out to be far more consumer and Linux friendly than NVIDIA, but in the time being I’d love some help getting this working on my current hardware.
To get KDE Plasma 6 with HDR running, so far I have tried installing the latest HoloIso and Manjaro’s official Plasma desktop stable branch. Before doing all of the below I made sure that the option to use the iGPU ports was disabled in my BIOS.
For HoloIso, I’ve followed the directions from the GitHub readme file and installed from a USB drive to one of my internal 1 TB SSDs. I’m able to boot from the ISO on the USB drive and run the installation tool in HoloIso. The installation seemingly runs successfully and tells me to restart. After restarting and booting into that drive, I see the GRUB menu which disappears quickly, and then I see nothing but a black screen. I have tried booting with both of my monitors connected to my GPU via DisplayPort, and booting with only one monitor connected to my GPU via DisplayPort. Neither seems to solve the issue.
I then went on to try what seemed like a more stable distro that was similar to SteamOS - Manjaro with Plasma. Installation went smoothly and I was able to actually boot into Manjaro after installation. Noticing there was no HDR option in the display settings I did some Googling and found that I was using X11 and not Wayland (which is where the HDR support lies). I did some more Googling and found a guide to switch to Wayland (I can’t find the guide again now dangit) but upon doing so and restarting, all I saw was a black screen.
Honestly, if anyone has any suggestions for what to try I would love some help. I’m familiar with navigating Linux but relatively unfamiliar with installing it and VERY unfamiliar with display technologies so any suggestions for what to try are appreciated.
Since you want an arch based dostro, i can highly recommend EndevourOS. Its comes with an easy to use installer, many desktop env options and a few quality of life tools like a comandline tool (nvidia-inst) to install nvidia drivers. And if you choose KDE Plasma in the installer, it will default to wayland.
AMD is still by far the better gpu choice for linux, but since explicit sync support is now in the 555 nvidia driver and kde plasma 6.1, most problems that nvidia had (i had) with wayland have seemingly just vanished. So no need to imeadiatly buy a new gpu.
I’m surprised I didn’t see any reference to EndeavourOS when I was looking for alternatives to SteamOS, but with how many people here have recommended it I’ll be sure to see if I’m able to work with that