Ah thank you for the history update on Squad and related things!

Once upon a time, I was one of the first, fairly long term beta testers for Project Reality... waaaaay back when it was just a mod for BF2, before something like half the team formed into OffWorld, made Squad.

I distinctly remember basically reverse engineering one testing session... that dbzao had made a simple character handling mistske that was breaking the entire kit/squad system, before the 0.5 release. Basically, he forgot that player names can have non-alphanumeric characters in them. Any time they did, those players could request infinite numbers of any kit, probably because somewhere, he wasn't handling strings properly in python.

He screamed curses i did not understand, when he double checked the code and realized that simple mistake had been the last blocker for the 0.5 release, lol.

As to your pc/game performance... you could find and run... some linux distro, that is built around a kernel from around the same time as your last good/stable Nvidia drivers on Windows.

It might be that Nvidia just fundamentally fucked their drivers for older cards, and carried that forward into Linux as well, where with your hardware, its... even more fucked, basically.

Looks like that would be... either R535 ot R550?

Which... I think means that you want to find a Linux distro that is based around v6.15 or lower of the Linux kernel.

Which I think would give you potentially better performing on your hardware distros of:

Ubuntu 24.04 LTS

Debian Stable 12 'Bookworm'

Fedora 38, 39, 40

Arch-LTS

Linux Mint 22

PopOS! 22.04 LTS

... there are probably more options than this, there are... /a lot/ of linux distros.

But yeah, unfortunately in your case, most 'gaming oriented' distros use a pretty modern Kernel, to be able to support more modern gaming hardware. Some of them may offer a kind of LTS/legacy variant of themselves, but I'm not aware of any off the top of my head.

You having older hardware, but still quite gaming capable... yeah, probably go with one from that list above, and ... it might/should work better?

Nvidia will probably yell at you to force you to upgrade your kernel if you just try and do things their 'normal' way for their linux drivers... so... you may have to figure out a specific way to get a specific kernel compatible version of the linux drivers installed.

Because if you let the normal Nvidia drivers... jump your kernel to a new version... on an older or LTS distro... that will basicslly break most or all of your OS.

Here's Nvidia's extremely user friendly linux driver archive:

x86_64:

https://download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86_64/

Arch64:

https://download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-aarch64/

Alternatively... you might just try the Nouveau drivers. You having a 30 series GPU... I think Nouveau should work at least decently well, as... their shit works much more reliably on hardware that has been around longer, though you'd likely lose DLSS and FrameGen and such.