It doesn’t really matter what distro you go with, just don’t go with something like Debian Stable because of how old their packages are. You don’t need a rolling release system, but you also don’t want something too old because of performance reasons.
Have you ever tested Debian stable vs Debian sid? You’ll notice a clear performance difference. Why? Because Debian Stable has older packages that don’t include performance related patches found in the newer ones. This is basic knowledge.
Newer = more feature & performance related patches at the cost of stability.
Older = Stability & downstreamed security patches. This is how releases cycles work.
Just look at it in terms of kernel version.
Debian Stable by default is at what? Kernel 6.1.0 now?
Arch is at kernel 6.6.3.
If you follow the Linux Kernel news you’d know that there’s pretty huge optimizations between these, some of which directly impact gaming on wine & proton.
Then there’s Mesa :
Debian Stable, Mesa 22.3.6
Arch Linux, Mesa 23.2.1
Huge performance patches between these.
Yes, I have, as well as developed and packaged software for both. And not just a little. Your comment about how release cycles work is patronizing, and your diatribe is misleading.
Arch is at kernel 6.6.3.
Debian Stable currently has kernel 6.5 for those who choose to install it. Not that it matters, because a higher kernel version number doesn’t magically grant better performance. Specific changes may help in specific cases, but most kernel revisions don’t offer any significant difference to games. The more common reason to want a new rev is to support specific hardware.
Unless you have a very new GPU (released less than a year ago), your games are not likely to get any benefit at all from the latest kernel.
And unless your games require the very latest Vulkan features and you run them without Steam, Flatpak, or any other platform that provides its own Mesa, you’re not likely to get any benefit from a distro providing the latest version of it.
Practically everything else that games need is comparable across all the major distros, including Debian. (Arch might have hundreds of other packages that happen to be newer, but those won’t make games run faster.)
OP, choose a distro that makes you happy, not one that some random person claims is best for gaming. If what Debian offers is appealing to you, rest assured that it is generally excellent for gaming.
Bruv. I’ve packaged software for all 3 and beyond.
Which btw is completely irrelevant here so get off your high horse.
There’s clear performance differences between 6.1 and 6.6.3 Why? Because there’s several performance related patches & bug fixes that effect various APIs both Wine & Proton take advantage of.
Ofc, you can install newer kernels, you could install kernel 6.6.0 if you wanted, but you’d be going outside of the stable repo to do it which kinda defeats the entire purpose of Debian Stable. Not to mention that mixing and matching packages can lead to problems in the future. Like accidently using the wrong dkms driver version on the wrong kernel version, and other general compatibility issues.
I take it that you’re not active in the kernel development space, which is fine. However I personally am. Hell, there’s going to be even more of a noticable difference in kernel 6.7 thanks to FUTEX2 improvements.
There’s clear performance differences between 6.1 and 6.6.3
As already stated, kernel 6.5 is available on Debian Stable.
Ofc, you can install newer kernels, you could install kernel 6.6.0 if you wanted, but you’d be going outside of the stable repo to do it which kinda defeats the entire purpose of Debian Stable.
No, it does not. Stable Backports exist for exactly this reason.
Not to mention that mixing and matching packages can lead to problems in the future. Like accidently using the wrong dkms driver version on the wrong kernel version.
I don’t know how you might have managed to do those things, but no, installing the Stable Backports kernel would not cause either of them.
“Stable Backports” what a joke, Backports can and have destabilized user systems.
Let me just take the thing that’s not ready, configure it a bit differently and by some magic it’s “stable”, make it make sense.
At that point you have a semi-stable system, so… Ubuntu, PopOS, LMDE.
Even the Debian devs tell you to use the Backports with care.
Ignore reality, I don’t care. Go do it on someone else’s time.
Changing the subject away from Debian’s gaming performance is a strange tactic, but since you’ve shifted to mocking the name of the distribution, Debian Stable’s name comes from this sense of the word:
stable 3 of 3 adjective
1b : not changing or fluctuating : unvarying
I would expect someone so familiar with “all 3 and beyond” of the Debian distros to know that.
To indulge your sophistry, though, practically all operating systems have released broken packages at some point. Debian Stable has a well-earned reputation for doing it less than others. Even with kernel Backports. Trying to scare people away from it is a disservice to the community.
A question here: plan to upgrade to 7800xt sometime in the near future. The card is quite new, so i have doubts after your reply above. I am mainly gaming and do basic office stuff (Libre office is enough). Also, though I can install Ubuntu - press X to win type install works for me - I am new to linux, so not big on fiddling with obscure packages. Just want games to run well - so, in this specific usecase, what distros would you recommend to try?
That GPU is indeed new, and I don’t have one, but I think the amdgpu driver has supported it since kernel 6.4 or 6.5. Any distro offering that and recent AMD firmware will probably work. (You could also manually install the firmware files if you change your mind about fiddling and want a specific distro that hasn’t caught up yet.)
I don’t generally recommend specific distros, since people’s needs and preferences vary so widely. However, I would probably try Linux Mint (and the KDE Plasma desktop because I dislike Gtk) if I were in your position. Mint gets a lot of praise for being an easy distro based on the good parts of Ubuntu. It also maintains a Debian edition (LMDE), which I think is a good insurance policy in case Ubuntu ever goes off the rails and becomes unsuitable as a base for Mint.
If you find yourself struggling to choose, remember that you’re not married to whatever distro you try first. If you run into a problem that’s not easily solved, you can always switch.
The fiddling bit is not that i am particularly against, it just requires learning things that have no other use for me outside of playing a random game in my free time (so spending that valuable time on learning about OS internals instead of things i actually care about).You can call me a perfect user for windows - i just am tired of them trying to track me, changing their shit constantly and pushing their services within the product i paid for with my own money. Hence linux.
So what i am looking for is an out of the box experience that will not turn my eyes red.
For what it’s worth I have an RX 7900XT and it works great with the Free software driver. The other reply is right that amdgpu is supported. I use Endeavor and was a bit confused about setting it up at first, but the nice guys at the GamingOnLinux discord helped me out and now it’s extremely painless to use and upgrade.
It’s just what it sounds like: the driver is Free software. This is in contrast to the situation with Nvidia where there’s a Free software driver that doesn’t perform well and a proprietary driver from Nvidia that performs better, but is kind of a pain in the ass for users and distro maintainers to maintain. You’re reliant on Nvidia for support so you’re forced to use certain versions of kernels and libraries (I think). The AMD driver is free, open source, performs well and is more flexible.
If something doesn’t work on one drive and then magically works when you install it on another drive…
How is your drive formatted? Is it NTFS and not keeping the right Linux file permissions or something like that? It’s been a decade since I had a Windows formatted drive, but I seem to remember there were issues using NTFS in Linux.
I don’t think you actually could put the OS on NTFS, it literally cannot store Linux file permissions and I have no idea how badly that’s going to break the system.
You certainly can use an NTFS drive for data storage in Linux but Windows has some default behaviors that make it hard to share that drive.
I decided to install LM Cinnamon as the main OS on my new PC, and I can’t get GOG Cyberpunk to work for the life of me - tried Lutris where it doesn’t launch at all, and Heroic where it launches but has no sound. I’m ready to give up and go back to Windows at this point.
Use proton and/or a distro actually meant for gaming (Linux mint is simplified, more for beginners imo and not one I’d personally recommend). Try Pop!, Manjaro or Garuda.
As someone contemplating a move, posts like this and many others make me nervous. I have used mint a few weeks for just documents and browsing and had planned it for my main PC. Now you say it isn’t meant for gaming?
Sometimes reading about Linux is a mix of you can do anything with anything but shouldn’t do anything with somethings.
Linux mint specifically is great for documents and browsing but other distros are gonna have better gaming presets is all I was saying. Imo, It’s a “typing laptop” OS when you probably want Pop! Instead. That or the other ones I listed have extra drivers and whatnot by default. Just trying to be helpful!
I jumped right into Mint without trying other distros because I was coming from Windows, and it sounded like Mint is the least-needy next step. But my experience so far has been: If it’s not easily fixed with a version upgrade/downgrade, it’s not getting fixed. There are lots of forum posts to look at for guidance, but the fixes are always really specific to the OP’s system and not applicable to mine. I’ve seen a lot of people on Lemmy using Pop!; maybe I’ll try that next before giving up completely
You absolutely should, sounds perfect for your use case. It’s meant for gaming PCs, and as you’re starting out don’t be afraid to take advantage of the several different package managers out there (I think pop has one built-in but there are others like snap). Finding and installing programs via command line isn’t as hard as you might think either and is usually more secure/ideal. If you need something more cutting edge and are willing to dive into stuff like that I’ve had great experiences with garuda and manjaro too. There are lots of FAQ’s out there, and it can be really daunting at first but I promise it’ll be rewarding somehow. I personally love all the different free software repositories and having apps like fortune run when I start my machine- there’s something so cozy about configuring a PC to be a little fun and reflect your own personality a bit.
Love to hear it! Hope that does what you need it to for a long time! being a commercial product (kinda, system76 mostly makes money off hardware with it iirc) there should be great support and I’m pretty sure it has its own forum too like many other distros. Good luck!
I greatly appreciate the help. So then something like Pop caters more with drivers one may need.
I’m just tying to make sure my step into Linux is a good one. I have only used Ubuntu and Mint a bit and not what I would call extensively.
I was tempted by Arch but I don’t salivate at the idea of creating my own desktop environment like others seem to. Hmm. I have my research to do as I had not looked at Pop.
If you don’t like it there are always other options (if you like a lot about arch, Garuda or Manjaro would be my next suggestion) but I do think Pop is great for those adjusting to the new ecosystem from windows
Disclaimer: my experience is only with Arch Linux (daily drive for 2 years) and a little bit of Linux Mint on a relative’s PC.
For me I found it more tedious to get games working through WINE on Linux Mint compared to on Arch Linux, some packages I wanted seemingly don’t exist in the apt repositories (wine mono and wine gecko) and had to be manually installed.
I also had some trouble because the package names were different compared to on pacman, especially the lib32 ones, but to be fair I would probably have had the same issue on Arch if I first used Linux Mint then Arch so not having the same package names isn’t inherently a fault of Linux Mint.
But it wasn’t that it wasn’t doable, it was just more tedious, and to be fair daily driving Arch for 2 years compared to using Linux Mint every once in a while means I’m way less familiar with Linux Mint.
Arch sounds both wonderful and terrifying. I’m still watching videos to pick a distro but aur sounds like the wild west. I also am not sure how much effort I want to put into creating my own desktop environment. Videos talk about building it all but provide little info on what length of effort and maintenance that will take. Are things more likely to break? I’m unsure and trying to find out.
Arch is made out to be a lot harder and unstable than it really is. And AUR is a great resource but realistically you won’t even use it that much. At least I haven’t. I used it for Brave Browser package before switching to Firefox, some WINE gst plugin, and some other small stuff I don’t remember.
Also keep in mind even if it’s a AUR package, you can just install the package like normal if it’s a binary (it will be named with a -bin at the end, like brave-bin), so just because you’re using some packages from AUR it doesn’t mean you have to build lots of packages from source every time you update.
People hear scary stuff about some random update breaking the system but it’s exaggerated.
You definitely can break stuff with user error and sometimes if you’re not paying attention while updating you can get problems (combination of bad defaults + user error).
Main problem is that you can do whatever you want, but you might not actually know what you really want to do or you might not be doing what you meant to do, and Arch Linux will let you do it even if something breaks due to it.
And well that’s going to be same regardless of OS but it’s more accessible on Arch.
However you shouldn’t be too worried about it, in the basically worst case scenario you might need a Live USB and another device with an internet connection to look up and what you need to do to fix what’s wrong, but you can always count on that there’s a fix.
Most other OSes if you have a problem, depending on what it is you might just be stuck with it.
Biggest noob mistake I recall doing was that I had my old windows hard drive as extra storage and slowly moving stuff over once in a while, so I hadn’t reformatted it and I also wasn’t aware of that the default Linux NTFS driver wasn’t very good and that I should’ve gotten NTFS-3G if I weren’t going to reformat.
Well one day while not paying attention while updating my system through pacman (yay actually) I was also copying files from my old windows hard drive and I didn’t even look before just pressing accept on some AUR package rebuild.
Well it turns out that package was formerly part of Extra repository and thus it used to be a binary package, but now since it was moved to the AUR and it didn’t have -bin it was changed to a package to be built from source, and if I were to continue using it I should’ve changed which package.
But I just hit accept and it started chugging away, and it needed more RAM that I have and apparently there’s no safe guard for this (at least not by default) and by the time I noticed that my RAM usage was getting to high the system already got too sluggish and I was too late to end the process.
I also didn’t know about SysRq at the time so the only option I knew was to force shut down by holding down the power button for 5 seconds.
My actual system was still fine and all but my old windows hard drive that was transferring files got borked. It wasn’t completely bricked so I eventually salvaged it and it’s since been reformatted too, but I thought I had bricked it at the time.
Well that might still seem a bit scary but that was me making several user errors in a row, and at the end of the day it still wasn’t even a big problem.
If you are using a packaged version, try compiling it from source. On Arch the package from the repo would just not output and video, but after building from source it worked fine … some of the time.
It is still very hit and miss for me. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. I’m really hoping that the new Steam Link VR works on Linux.
Since that 545 drivers, I cannot play with Proton 8 at all. Open source drivers don’t have this problem (their problem is performance), so it seems Nvidia f*cked up as usual. However first time hearing this. Can you play native games at least?
But I don’t know about Linux capabilities unless you use the GameCube dongle with a GC to USB adapter in which case it should be fine because these are meant to work on real hardware.
First step there would be to get some logs. Launch steam from a terminal and output to a file:
<span style="color:#323232;">steam 2>&1 | tee steam.log
</span>
Launch a game and watch the terminal to see what happens.
If you moved games after launching them, clearing their Proton containers can help. I had some games set to extremely old Proton versions that couldn’t launch because the version jump was too big. I’ve also seen vanilla wine prefixes break when moved due to some symlinks.
But those are guesses, the logs will tell you. Sometimes it even actually tells you how to fix it!
Thank you, actually having a log to go through was very useful! Kinda. I managed to suss out that vkBasalt was having a config issue, which I eventually fixed. Now all my OS drive games seem to launch fine, except SteamVR (still).
I was able to do a little more research with info from the log and I found out running SteamVR the usual way was broken. Launching Steam from /usr/lib/steam/ makes it…sorta work.
Yeah, turns out it happened to be a separate issue from my initial problem, but with the same symptoms.
Just a thought, does the path to the games on your OS drive have a space anywhere in it? I remember a lot of old Windows games would throw a shit fit if they had a space anywhere
I’m currently experimenting with Garuda gnome. Pacman is frustrating for me. Games run incredibly smooth using proton I’m constantly amazed it’s this good now. I keep waiting for something to break though.
I have horrible luck with any OS. They always break down and require me to reinstall even with minimal usage and zero tweaks. It has one good side effect of teaching me how the system works but it is exhausting having to fix stuff that shouldn’t be breaking. I work in IT and my coworkers agree I might be cursed. Stuff works when I walk in the room for people that ask for my help which is weird. Not complaining about that. It’s just that if it’s something for me it usually breaks.
I don’t expect apps to work the same way. I was trying to adapt to these new apps. They just don’t do what I want them to do. They’re amazing for base users. Not for doing it for living.
If you like Ubuntu but don’t like the direction it’s going, you can try Mint. It’s Ubuntu, but with the bad decisions reversed. Or use LMDE, which is Mint but Debian based.
I didn't know about any of these, but terminal ads by itself would be enough to make me switch to something else. So would the affiliate links. Why would they think that's a good idea? Well, aside from money, obviously.
But the ads are just for Ubuntu pro, which is free for personal use so it’s more of a tip. And the Amazon part was to my knowledge just in the unity days. Not defending Canonical, just showing more of the picture
They were just MOTDs, which are few lines of text displayed on the terminal when you first launch a session. You just have to edit one line in a config somewhere to get rid of them. Annoying but not exceptionally so.
Haha I mean fair, sort of. But if Ubuntu worked for me better than pop os in other ways, I could easily justify commenting out that line in a script or whatever
Yes, of course. But nothing helped really. There is a small difference between the used Proton version. With 8.25 GE i get 13 fps and with 6.4 GE1 i get 19 fps. Using PROTON_USE_WINED3D11=1makes it more worse than ever, with only 5 fps.
Okay, I hadn’t seen it mentioned in the post and was hoping that was all it would take. I have played it before, and I can’t say I noticed any major issues like you’re describing. I run an AMD card though, so that may make the difference on Linux.
I wish I had some other ideas, but ideas I’ve found on ProtonDB were always my best option. I will say that I’ve noticed performance issues on some Unity games previously. Whether it’s from the engine or bad optimization I don’t know though.
Yes, I think the card is the weak point here or better the weak driver support. My next laptop will definitely have a AMD card. But I have absolutely no idea which one is good enough to handle actual games with full details and usable fps. I don’t expect Desktop like experience but at least 40 fps with full details in an actual game would be fine. Im not a professional gamer, but when I have the time to play, it should be fun and not frustrating. Mostly I do coding with VSCode and some database stuff in different flavors. So a not to small display is a must have.
Can you recommend a good GPU? For the rest I can do my own research…
Sorry, I thought I had responded to this, but obviously not!
I’m not sure what your price point would be, but my general recommendation would be to look at the recommended requirements of the most graphics intensive game you own or would like to play. Sometimes it lists an older card that isn’t available anymore, but it can give you a rough idea. Generally if you get a GPU that is a step higher than that you’ll be able to at least meet the minimum requirements for similar games for a while.
I don’t have a lot of experience with the entry level AMD cards, but I would guess that anything in the Radeon 6500 or 6600 bracket would be good for low to mid level gaming. They came out last year, so pricing might be a bit better. The Radeon 7600 is the entry level mobile card in the current generation so far, and would most likely be a good option as well. As I said though, I’m not that familiar with the cards in that bracket, so I could be off the mark.
It’s hard to convey and interpret tone in text-format comments, especially short ones. I can kind of see where he’s coming from, but it’s not really hostile enough to warrant an accusation. It’s curt at most.
Many readers are overly sensitive these days. If you use things like a period on the end of your sentences, and don’t include emojis, then anything you say will be called out as “hostile” by some people.
Also, I’ve noticed many people ignore qualifiers in speech. If you use qualifiers thoughtfully, having them ignored by the reader can lead to miscommunication. I think the fact that so many people have used them without thought has led to a blindness for qualifiers. OTH, not including qualifiers can make us sound authoritative and even arrogant to some people.
For instance, in my first sentence, above, I said “Many readers…”, and “…things like…”, and “…by some people.” If you ignore those qualifiers, what I said takes on a very different tone.
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