I finally separated some overkill hardware from my server rig (an RTX 3080 and a Ryzen 5800X3D) and put them in their own chassi. Installed Arch, again, of course. The server got a “new” Ryzen 5700G , which apparently is a repurposed laptop APU.
A few years ago, I used to fire up my desktop environment (dwm on X11) and launch Steam from a pseudo terminal.
On my reborn gaming PC, could I skip installing a desktop environment and still play games on Steam? Will it run directly from the console like - for instance - mpv does?
The purpose would be to minimize any overhead from dwm and X11. Which sounds ridiculous now that I “say” it out loud, because it’s negligible, but still. My question still stands.
You still need X11 or Wayland somehow. I would suggest something that can run in “kiosk” mode. That’s essentially what you want - boot a single app and run that.
If you don’t care about wayland, just install xorg-xinit (since you said Arch) and put this in
~/.xinitrc:exec steam -bigpictureRun startx to launch it on its own. There may be other dependencies you need for steam or for games, but you don’t need a whole DE.
If you want, you can even enable auto-login and then set up auto-start by adding this to your
~/.bashrc(or whatever shell you use):if [[ -z $DISPLAY ]]; then startx fi