Usage

Gaming and emulation

Steam, gamescope, EmuDeck, ES-DE, Heroic, Android and controllers.

SkillFishOS was born to play. The whole gaming stack is preinstalled and configured; you add your games and your ROMs.

Our Mesa (Vulkan driver)

The Games section of the Control Center can turn on our Mesa/RADV build, which opens the compute queues the stock driver keeps closed on this GPU: measured +4% in Cyberpunk 2077, +12% with FSR 4 on. It applies per launcher (Steam, Heroic) through a flatpak override, or system-wide (desktop included). It needs the SkillFishOS kernel: on a different kernel those compute queues wedge the GPU and the system-wide switch refuses to start. 32-bit programs stay on Debian’s driver.

Steam and Proton

Steam (via Flatpak) is integrated with gamescope (Valve’s micro-compositor), gamemode and MangoHud. A dedicated console session (gamescope, Big Picture style) is selectable at login. Windows games run through Proton: the Control Center’s Games section installs and sets as default GE-Proton 11-6 and GE-Proton 10-34, shared between Steam and Heroic.

Non-Steam games: Heroic

Heroic Games Launcher manages Epic Games and GOG titles, and Windows games via GE-Proton. With ProtonUp-Qt you can install other Proton/Wine versions by hand, on top of the ones the Control Center already installs. Heroic games can be added to Steam (with their cover art).

Emulation: EmuDeck + ES-DE

EmuDeck installs and configures, in a few clicks, a complete set of emulators (Flatpak): RetroArch, Dolphin, PCSX2, PPSSPP, melonDS, PrimeHack, Ryujinx, ScummVM and more. The frontend is ES-DE (EmulationStation Desktop Edition).

On SkillFishOS the ~/Emulation folder can point to a network NAS (BIOS, ROMs and saves shared across machines).

Warning: ES-DE rewrites its settings file on exit: edit them while the program is closed.

Warning: For Ryujinx, firmware and keys must be imported by the user: the firmware expects each NCA as a directory. Games, ROMs, BIOS and keys are not included in the system — a deliberate legal choice: SkillFishOS provides the tools, you supply the content.

Android and more

Waydroid for Android apps/games (binder in the kernel, iptables support and ARM libraries);
Sober as a Roblox player — not preinstalled, grab it from the store with flatpak install flathub org.vinegarhq.Sober. It is an 18 MB app that drags in 1.1 GB of GNOME runtime: keeping it out of the image is what keeps the ISO small.

Note: local AI and Android should not be used together with heavy games, because they share the same GPU and memory.

Controllers

The recommended, tested configuration:

2× DualShock 4 over Bluetooth — with gyroscope (useful for motion in games like Mario Kart), connected to the integrated Realtek adapter;
controller over USB — a data cable makes it appear as an Xbox 360 (xpad driver, XInput), without a gyroscope.

The xpad, hid_playstation and hid_nintendo drivers are included in the kernel. To re-pair a DS4: hold Share + PS until it blinks, then pair from the Bluetooth GUI.

Upscaling

Our Mesa carries FSR 4 through OptiScaler on the game’s DLSS path: GE-Proton 11 downloads OptiScaler by itself when it finds PROTON_USE_OPTISCALER=1, the game must be set to DLSS, and AMD’s FSR 4 library (amdxcffx64.dll, from AMD’s Windows driver) goes next to the game. The alternatives are gamescope upscaling (FSR1/NIS) and XeSS, where a game has it built in. For CPU-bound titles (e.g. Black Myth: Wukong), lowering resolution or GPU clock won’t help — see GPU and overclock.