Great post, thanks for sharing your experience with Nvidia in all those distros!
Just wanted to add: if you are stuck with Nvidia but want to get started gaming in Linux, install Pop!_OS . They have carefully tweaked Ubuntu to make even Nvidia “just work”. It works for me so far, on 2560x1440 @75Hz.
I would rather have some distro freedom with an AMD GPU but unfortunately my main (Windows) game (DCS World) does not work well in VR specifically with the RX7000 series drivers yet.
i do own a steam deck and can say with certainty that, after seeing how well it's handled every game i've thrown at it, i will be switching my primary pc to linux once support for win10 ends
I think any gaming on games or boxes post 2019 is just silly. It is a horror minefield of broken and buggy programming and drivers. The best bet is to stick with all hardware and software pre 2018 , preferably running Linux. Windows sucks so stick with pre win10 if u can. Windows is doomed. Hang on to all your all hardware and stick with old games, everything past 2018 is about to slide into a massive shitshow of broken bugs.
IIRC it was already fixed when Linus did this, just not distributed. It was caused by the bluntness Linus developed due to unmeaningful Windows warnings in the 1st place.
The bug was that you couldn't install steam without faking a the installation of a dep that went down the dependency chain ending in a conflict of essential packages. The functionality to still proceed is a feature. Linus could also just have copied rm -rf --no-preserve-root / from the internet as solution and would have trusted it blindly. If you want to be nannied all the way, I'd suggest you switch to iOS for everything.
If Linus would be a non-techie, he would have tried to install it with a graphical AppStore, it wouldn't have worked and he'd either given up or found the flatpak version of Steam, which would have worked. Not restricting power users is a good aspect. If I play around with Windows registry to force the removal of edge, Linus would blame me, not Windows. You have to differentiate between things normal users tried and things Linus attempted because he has some technical knowledge.
Some random user saying anything doesn't make anything true, you don't believe flat-earthers on the internet, either.
There was a library incompatibility between the Steam image in the Pop_OS package manager and the OS. It was caused by a bug introduced by the Pop_OS developers. Linus tried to install Steam using the package manager and it failed. So he went on Google to find out how to install Steam on Pop_OS. A thousand blogs and forums told him to enter "sudo apt-get install Steam", which he did. Unfortunately doing so automatically uninstalls certain important desktop components in Pop_OS.
@JasSmith@miggs597@F04118F@bionade24 lol, that's completely hilarious imo. Still though, that bug is definitely weird, I never got it my self on ubuntu or any of its derivatives. Is it only a pop OS issue then?
If I play around with Windows registry to force the removal of edge, Linus would blame me, not Windows.
He didn't "play around" with anything. He entered, "sudo apt-get install Steam". That comes straight from thousands of blogs and help sites which instruct users to do just that when they have issues installing Steam.
Talking about games, I’m so happy I don’t have any title that I play stuck on Windows. None EAC games always worked for me when I started using Linux full time, but I was only able to delete my Windows partition after Apex added support for EAC on Linux. Ever since I haven’t looked back :)
You’ll get better suggestions if you mention the games you play and the hardware you’re using. For example, destiny 2 is still unplayable in Linux because of choices made by the game devs.
Thanks for mentioning it. Nothing too modern. Fallout 4, Skyrim and Starcraft 2 are my staples but C and C games like Tiberium Wars and older would be nice too. I wouldn’t count on modern games to run perfectly but maybe there’s a chance that older games can?
If you’re not having any issues playing these games in windows, they’ll most likely work perfectly fine in Linux. I had no issues running fallout 4, Skyrim and StarCraft 2.
Distro choice is less important than you think but there’s always distrochooser.
Nobara is my choice. It's based on Fedora, which is a very solid base already, and Nobara adds numerous fixes that will save you days if not weeks of headaches, especially if you have an NVIDIA GPU.
whole point of arch is creating your own environment yes it is the experience we and all those we install for have arch works flawlessly with community constantly adding and improving
Using rolling release distro seems to be great for gaming because you’ll get bug fixes, kernel and driver updates faster. Even steam deck is based on a rolling release distro (Arch). On the flip side, you’ll also get new bugs before anyone else. Doesn’t happen too often but it does happen.
Any popular distro will work fine for gaming. The difference between distros are becoming less and less significant with de advancement of sandbox packaging like Flatpak. Pick which ever distro is exiting to yourself!
If you want a subjective opinion: Fedora is my personal favorite for few years now; otherwise Debian is a very strong and stable distro that I daily-drove for ~10 years.
I don’t know how you all manage to have so much trouble. The only issue of note I’ve had with nVidia is the machine not hibernating by itself. Apart from that, it’s always worked without much fuss for the last fifteen years (not sure what I used before that).
My Nvidia card is rock solid under Wayland. As long as I’m not running something needing 3d acceleration. Using it with 3d acceleration I have to be very careful. If the viewport moves too fast etc. Nvidia just shits the bed. Then I have to drop to terminal and reset my desktop session quickly before it hard locks the system. It’s very annoying and reproducible. So much so that I’m replacing a 1650 with a 6400 with less vram.
Same here. I keep shaking my head in disbelief when I read all this “you need this custom niche distro if you want nvidia without problems” posts, and then look at my totally uncustomized Debian Stable PC, on which I’ve been playing modern games for many years now. :)
Really, the only trouble I’ve had was not Nvidia related at all - in the very beginning when Steam Linux client was released, Debian had too old glibc, and I had to resort to LD_LIBRARY_PATH/LD_PRELOAD tricks with glibc snatched from an Ubuntu package. But next Debian release fixed even that, and it’s been smooth sailing ever since.
I’m having a good time even on an 11th gen mobile Intel processor with its iGPU. For more demanding games I use FSR to get much more bang for buck from the GPU, on Linux it’s pretty easy to activate in almost any game. On a side note, Waydroid (with libhoudini) also has excellent performance on this setup.
Baha i have the particular experience of an AMD card that is a weird age, apparently. I still have an old R9 390 which defaults to using the older-compatibility “radeon” drivers instead of the “amdgpu” drivers. Turns out this card doesn’t work terribly well with those old drivers, and can’t even play videos.
Took me a while to figure out what was wrong, testing out a fresh linux mint install to try and dip my toes in ;p
That said, i still would prefer this over the proprietary drivers and difficulty with that~
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