I understand your struggle. As others said, Arch is not a beginner friendly distro.

I would suggest trying gaming tailored distros like Nobara, Chimera or Bazzite and see how you feel about them. Don't install your full steam library during these testing period, try games separately and prioritize the games you play the most.

Learning involves trial and error and the Linux ecosystem has a lot of that.

In the end it's ok if you say This is not for me right now

somebody gave you bad advice if you chose arch for your first distro

If you're a beginner... or hate jank, don't use Arch. And make sure you're using a desktop environment that supports Wayland (GNOME or KDE). Gaming on X11 can be buggy, janky and inconsistent

Arch for a beginner can be a bit too much.

Try Bazzite.

First of all nothing to apologize, no one should be forcing anyone to use any OS.

Secondly, you shouldn't start with Arch, it's a very manual process that has several small things that can be done wrong. I recommend you try Mint, Pop or any other beginner friendly distro, you can still tinker and customize them as much as you want, but you will be starting from something that works instead of having to build a working system from the ground up without knowing what that looks like.

Arch Linux

Unless you're on a good downstream like SteamOS, I'd suggest switching to something stable cutting edge (Fedora or Nobara if you want to put in zero effort).

Arch by itself will give you way the hell too many possible problems. You could waste hours on DKMS alone.

Mint will also work, but it has the downside of having slower updates to software packages.

with the issues you've had i think it's perfectly understandable, but I'll agree with other commenters that arch is not a good choice for a first distro. i recommend trying dual booting windows and a more "beginner " distro like Linux mint or pop_os

Linux may very well not be for you, but using Arch first is like jumping into the deep end to learn how to swim. It's no surprise you're drowning. I'd recommend you try a gaming-focused distro like Nobara before you go back to Windows for good.

Arch for gaming, what the hell

Who the hell recommended Arch to you? Arch is for when you've been using Linux for a few years and have gotten bored waiting for the latest updates to hit your repos.

Arch Linux is great for people that want to do nothing but Arch Linux.

This may seem odd, but check if your mobo has a bios update. Often bios break uefi standards to appease Microsofts non-standard requirements.

These get fixed overtime as ACPI bugs are fixed.

If you're not having a good time, stop. Life is too short.

If you're still interested in using linux, LinuxMint or PopOs! are what most people would recommend to a new user, not Arch.

Arch can be perfect for users with the time, knowledge, and effort to perfectly tailor things to suit their needs. They can make it perfectly efficient, without any excess.
I just want to use my computer whenever I want it to work. I am fine with it having a few extra packages/applications that I might never use. I've being using linux as main (or only) operating system on/off for about 20 years, and I currently use Mint.

For a long time I couldn't get a stable distro working on my HP laptop with Intel 4 core & Nvidia 1660ti but after numerous successful daily driving on my desktops + steam deck of course I tried Bazzite which did the trick. Everything runs smoother & I haven't encountered anything unable to run because the steam proton is mature. Lutris is perfect for anything to do with alternative launchers, roms, I even got modded black ops 2 working and I never thought that would be possible.

I wish you the best of luck.

Lol try Linux mint, it just works

Do people not use Manjaro for this?

Good luck! Linux is sadly not quite yet for everyone, but it’s so much further along than it was when I started in 1999.

I bounced between Linux and Windows for decades, but when the Recall debacle happened, it became clear that Microsoft have lost their collective minds. I wiped my system, put Garuda Linux on it, and everything works quite well for me with no tinkering except with user-level KDE settings. I also changed from an NVIDIA RTX 3070Ti to an AMD RX 7800XT just so everything related to graphics would just work and I didn’t have to wait and hope that explicit sync really does fix everything for NVIDIA on Wayland.

I also use proton-ge for everything (in Steam as well as in Lutris which uses umu-launcher) and every game I’ve attempted to run (thus far on the order of 35+ games), has run great, including Elden Ring. I’ve found in my 25 years experience, the trick with Linux is two-fold: researching hardware to guarantee full Linux support…and having patience. And I’ve fell victim to that last one dozens of times over the years which led me back to windows each time.

No more.

Shit that's crazy, I'm ryzen 3800x with 2070 super and Elden ring runs BETTER on manjaro Linux (arch based) than windows!

I really couldn't believe it.

Thanks for the recommendations everyone! I plan on keeping Linux on my second drive to continue playing around with it, but my gaming will probably go back to Windows. Might give bazzite or popos a try next.

sounds like your problem is likely a combo of trying bare arch and also an nvidia card. i'd recommend Pop!OS as i hear it's the best out of the box experience for nvidia owners, and if you want to stay arch based i'd try EndeavourOS as it's arguably the most mature and stable arch based distro today, it's what i use but i also have amd not nvidia so i can't speak for the nvidia experience for endeavour. maybe you want to wait a while before you try again just so you're not burning out on the frustration, too. good luck!

I switched my gaming PC to Linux a few months back. I distro hopped for a while due to various issues, and landed on openSUSE Tumbleweed. Everything just works (except for the occasional bug in the updates where I have to wait for the next snapshot for a fix, but that's NBD).

Caveat: I'm all AMD so no Nvidia stuff to worry about. YMMV.

Are you using KDE? I'm on a fresh install of Arch with KDE Plasma on my gaming computer and I agree, it's janky as fuck. I've gone through everything I can find about how to deal with the flicker, but it's still there and it's an awful experience.

I have none of these issues on my Arch laptop with Gnome, so I'm going to switch my desktop to Gnome too when I have the time. Plasma is not ready for mainstream use if this is the best that it gets. Gnome however is awesome!

So, I suggest changing your DE to Gnome. If that doesn't fix the problem then switch to Pop!_OS. It's a completely plug and play distro and I never had a single problem with it. I only switched to Arch because I wanted to get HDR support which requires Plasma. Well, it's not worth it. I can't even use adaptive sync which is a pretty big deal for gaming.

Good luck, we're all counting on you.

Edit: otherwise Arch is an awesome distro. The power you have with all of the available programs is great! So, now it's just about getting the screen rendering to be stable.