I keep going back and forth between KDE and Gnome. KDE is great on my desktop where I always have a mouse plugged in, but on my laptop I really like the workflow and gestures that Gnome on Wayland has.
Sway mixed with KDE,
games don’t really like it and Pipewire doesn’t work for video recording for some reason (it has to do with the KDE xdg-desktop-portal) but it’s a small price to pay for salvation I guess.
I know Sway is a window manager, not a DE - but KDE applications and services seem to fill the gaps.
They’re not necessary, but you won’t catch me dead with a GTK file chooser popup open, and I haven’t figured out how to set up Ranger to replace Dolphin (nor do I really want to).
Been trying to get this running for a few days now with quest 2 on pop OS 22.04 as well but with a 3080. Unfortunately I’m still getting error 307 steamvr fail with this on both normal and beta steamvr. ALVR connects and disconnects constantly at the pairing screen for me saying the connection was refused as it was already in use.
As Steam keeps breaking things for Linux(all for their stupid chromium UI overhaul) its been really hard to use VR unfortunatly.
Last resort: Try uninstalling steam and delete all steam related files(except the folder with all you downloaded games), delete all Steam and VR related files in .config and .local. This is as much of a fresh start as you can get and it should work. Use latest ALVR nightly.
Most games run in Linux these days. It’s especially easy if you have your game in steam and enable proton in settings. As for a favourite. That’s hard to say. I have accumulated so many games over the years, I can’t name a favourite. I played a lot of overwatch before they messed it up with the f2p patch. Otherwise, I’ve been playing some rimworld lately and some don’t starve together. Edit: It just struck me. Underrail is a game I could count to my all time favorites.
I’ve been struggling trying to get ALVR working on POP_OS 22.04 with a quest 2 and a 3080 for about 12 hours now over the course of a few days. Still getting various errors and it essentially just disconnects and reconnects constantly. I did get it working momentarily (into the steamvr home) using the linux beta of steamvr but it was bugged out anyways and I have been unable to replicate it since.
Every step of Wow64 progress brings a smile to my face. I look forward to being able to run my old 32-bit Windows software without having to maintain 32-bit libraries & utilities in my Linux installation.
I just went through this decision. I landed on Garuda with Nobara a close second. I was coming from Manjaro which was almost completely stable for the last 3.5 yrs. I was only moving because I picked up a new SSD and wanted to see what else was out there.
I chose Garuda not because of the better gaming or perf, but for the preconfigured BTRFS with auto snapshots on upgrade and the presence of a distributed team reduces the “bus factor” problem that Nobara has for future updates and support.
I’ve been caught out a few times from upgrades on rolling distributions, so the simplified approach to rollbacks is greatly appreciated.
Now for the caveats:
You won’t get Wayland with Garuda and Nvidia by default (at least with their “stock” dr460gonized edition on KDE). And if you have more than one screen, I’d say that’s probably for the best right now (especially if they vary in resolution, refresh rate, or orientation).
I’ve found that there’s a few little polish things that leave me a bit wanting, but they’re by no means deal breakers: one of my USB hubs won’t reinitialize after waking from suspend (which worked just fine in Manjaro) and color codes (but not full escape sequences) are printed in terminal applications (eg man journalctl prints 1mDescription0m and the like). They’re both probably issues with the Garuda customizations, so I figure debugging them will help me understand things a bit better.
If you’re willing/able to hop between distro for a bit, I’d suggest trying at least a couple on for size and seeing how they fit you!
I’ve been using Nobara for the last year on my main gaming computer, it’s been great. Pop_OS is solid too, Ive used it on my laptop for a bit, pretty smooth too.
Most mainline distros will work fine. If you just plan on gaming mostly and want an easy solution, Nobara is really good.
Personally, I feel like any distro works for gaming these days, especially since you have an Nvidia card and don’t need to stay super up to date with kernel and Mesa. My advice is to go with whatever distro suits your daily needs, not just gaming. As long as it isn’t some super stable enterprise-centric distro like RHEL or Debian stable, you’ll be fine.
No, I was just saying that with Nvidia, the need for the latest Mesa and kernel is lessened somewhat since you’ll most likely be using the proprietary drivers instead. With AMD, its pretty important to be on the latest Mesa and latest kernel, especially for newer AMD GPUs. On Ubuntu, this usually means adding a bunch of additional PPAs, whereas on other distros like Fedora and Arch, those driver updates just come through the regular system updates.
On the subject of AMD vs Nvidia in general, it really depends on your usecase. I feel like a lot of Linux users on Reddit and the Fediverse are really biased towards AMD while being blind to the cons of owning an AMD card. It basically boils down to:
AMD Pros
Better performance / dollar (for rasterized graphics only)
Wayland
FOSS drivers that work out of the box
Better support for hardware video acceleration in browsers.
Nvidia Pros
Much better raytracing performance
DLSS
CUDA / Optix
Better video decoder and encoders (when they’re supported by the software you use at least)
Better support for compute and AI workloads
Better day one support for new hardware and usually adopts Vulkan extensions faster
Corporate loyalty is stupid and should be left on Reddit. Make your own decision based on your personal needs. Anecdotally, I own both AMD (Vega 7 and Radeon 680M) and Nvidia (RTX 3090) hardware. AMD tends to be less stable in my experience, but I know others have experienced the opposite.
Nobara has been an absolute pleasure and “works out of the box” experience. Mainly due to having things preinstalled or prompting for installation of gaming dependencies and software up front.
My “get into Linux gaming” distro was Pop. Solid distro tho and having isos depending on your hardware is super helpful and cuts down on a lot of issues you may encounter with other distros. You can’t go wrong either way. If you are looking for a “do it for me/minimal tinkering and installing” go for Nobara. If you are looking to “possibly tinker/install a bit more up front” go for Pop.
Edit: Forgot to mention my specs are somewhat the same as your. i5 with 16gbs of RAM, 1080ti and 1tb ssd. Both Pop and Nobara run smoothly with heavy games like Cyberpunk as an example.
I wasn’t familiar with Nobara before your comment but now I’m really intrigued. I loved Fedora generally, but getting it to work with my older mobile nvidia card was a nightmare. I might give Nobara a spin based on your recommendation. Thanks.
It is indeed. Just remember normal sysadmin/security stuff still applies just like any other OS/distro. For example, update regularly, backups, test your backups every now and then, etc.
Honestly you learn most by doing it yourself. Where to start depends on how versed you are with system administration, Linux, self hosting, etc. If you are an absolute beginner then start with Linux sysadmin videos (for example, what are the top most important things to do to a new Linux server, how to secure a Linux servers, etc). Once you have a list of “you should do x” then dive deeper into each topic to make sure you understand why and how.
Just don’t run random commands that you don’t understand what it does. You said you were learning right? Then take that command and learn why and what you are running.
I can help further if you have specific topics you need help with. This community is also amazing but some times a search on the community yields exactly or close to what you are looking for so leverage that too!
holoiso is great for a gaming focused distro, essentially the steam deck os but you can install on most devices, but may not play so great with Nvidia cards.
geruda Linux is an arch based distro that is built with gaming in mind and has many flavors of desktop environments to choose from.
I am curious to know whether the performance differences are just due to Linux not being completely optimized on the M2 yet and whether MacOS fairs any better with some of the benchmarks, provided that they have MacOS versions.
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