I’ve been evaluating NixOS to make sure I can run games on it. I’ve only tried a machine with Intel graphics so far, but I see that AMD and Nvidia drivers are packaged. It seems convenient now that I’ve figured out the setup.
Vulkan is set up out of the box.
It’s necessary to enable 32-bit DRI support by adding this line to /etc/nix/configuration.nix:
To use Lutris install the package and use its UI to install runners. I didn’t have to configure any extra libraries to get Battle.net running. You can configure the “system wine” that Lutris sees, and extra libraries your games might need like this:
Those lines go in a Home Manager config file, like ~/.config/home-manager/home.nix. That installs Lutris, and any listed dependencies at the same time.
NixOS does not put dependencies in the file paths where programs usually look for them. That traditional directory structure is called the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard, or FHS. But Nix packages can create a virtual FHS where needed, and that is what the Lutris package does. That lets software that isn’t built for Nix work, like Lutris’ Wine runners. That means that for games to access libraries those libraries must be listed in that extraLibraries option so that they are included in the FHS.
32-bit libraries are in pkgs.pkgsi686Linux.* if you need them.
I haven’t tried Steam yet, but I think it has an option similar to the extraLibraries one for Lutris.
A nice feature of NixOS is that if you add a bunch of libraries to your config trying to get a game to work, those libraries are automatically unlinked when you remove them from your config so your system stays nice and tidy.
I’ve been having a great time with games on NixOS. Steam just works when you enable it. I believe you can specify extra libraries for the filesystem hierarchy hackery, but I haven’t needed to yet. One thing you should know about (if you don’t already) is steam-run which is a simple command line tool that automatically wraps things in a normal FHS. Super convenient for the occasional binary :).
Yeah, exactly! For steam itself on NixOS you don’t have to manually use steam-run, but steam-run is a handy little tool to wrap / run other commands with the FHS that NixOS sets up for steam. I’ve mostly used it to run a few Linux games that I have binaries for, but don’t have on steam… I’m pretty sure I used it for another Linux program too, but I can’t remember what right now.
It depends on what your games need. I haven’t added any libraries yet, but I haven’t tested many games yet either. If something isn’t working you might be able to determine a missing library from the log output. In Lutris the Play button has an arrow on it that you can click on to find the “Show log output” button.
NixOS. If you played around with Arch you'll be fine. My only gripe (although it's kind of important) is NVIDIA doesn't work. Call me lazy but I haven't felt like switching to an other distro, plus I'm not much of a hardcore gamer.
Unfortunately it's pretty much impossible to support Nvidia on Linux unless you have a large enough team to test each of their GPUs individually and find workarounds for all of the bugs. Their Linux drivers are really bad.
The bigger projects have been able do that, but if it's a relatively new project with only a handful of people working on it, and it's not used on the steam deck, there's basically no chance it'll support Nvidia.
I’m running Gentoo on my gaming PC, and would not want anything else.
It’s very customizable, as it allows to tweak packages’ optional dependencies at compile time. It’s also rolling release, so no stress with distribution upgrades. Despite that, it’s also very stable (most of the time…).
So far the only downside I’ve seen is that updates can take a while, as almost all packages get compiled from source.
The compile times are quite OK on relatively modern hardware. I’ve been using a Ryzen 1700X up to last week, and except for WebKit I had no reason to complain. On my slightly dated Haswell laptop (from 2016) they are now starting to get on my nerves, but it’s still tolerable.
The only exception is WebKit, which takes forever to compile and which also tends to get installed multiple times, in slightly different versions (one version for Evolution, one for Liferea, one for Epiphany - and yes, those 3 programs all belong to the Gnome desktop). I’ve now set up ccache just for WebKit, but haven’t had to install a WebKit update since, so I have no idea how much the ccache helps…
Sorry for going on a tangent here. Back on topic: The setup for Gentoo takes as long as you are willing to invest time into it… The more time you invest, the more customized the system gets.
I’m currently running Sway window manager, with a ton of other not-so-usual tools (some of which I wrote myself, like my status bar application), and I’m really happy with how my PC currently feels. My desktop looks like it just escaped the early 1990s, but it’s so fast and just doesn’t get in the way ever…
I like the idea of Gentoo, it’s a pretty cool concept. Just a time consuming one as well. :) I remember my problem with it was that I couldn’t really decide how I wanted my system to end up while I was setting it up… which kind of defeats the purpose a bit I felt.
Yeah, and most of the customization you can do on any other distribution too. The main advantage of Gentoo is that it’s Rolling Release, so there won’t be any distribution upgrades breaking the cusotmizations.
The same is true for Debian Testing or Arch too, though.
Yeah, it’s not fully “rolling”, as new (non-critical) updates can get delayed for quite some time while packages are getting stabilized for a Stable release.
I’ve used Debian Stable some years ago at University on “my” office PC. For a work PC it was the perfect distribution. The “stable” in the name is well deserved. It’s so stable, it’s a bit boring, to be honest. However, that’s just what one needs at work. The PC has to run (a crash equals lost work), and maintenance burden needs to be low.
In the past, I had been using Ubuntu LTS releases for my main HTPC. That original install had been upgraded many times, but actually started out as an Ubuntu spin-off called Mythbuntu. Of course since Steam on Linux was first released, Ubuntu was the most well-supported distro at the time, and still technically is (Look in Steam's .local install directory and you'll still find ubuntu12_32, ubuntu12_64 folders which are pre-packaged dependencies & libraries for steam-runtime built against Ubuntu's core libs for each architecture). It ran many games fine, and the added bonus of a distro focused on being an HTPC meant that I could use mythgame as a frontend for emulators, steam, or whatever else needed a launcher. Meanwhile, the main focus of MythTV was being an OSS DVR that supported TV capture cards, commercial skip, and transcoding.
It ran all those things well, except trancoding (no VAAPI, only VDPAU & not many codecs), up to a point when my original Nvidia GT240 card became deprecated by Nvidia's binary blob drivers. Thanks to the version-pinned 340 proprietary drivers not being well supported on newer kernels, I have been forced into a hardware upgrade cycle. Decided to go with AMD this time around, but the first card has some kind of hardware issue (9 times out of 10 after a reboot, the amdgpu driver says the SMU won't init properly... same on windows but no helpful error messages, just doesn't work at all). The card arrived without an OEM box, and seemed suspiciously in used condition although it wasn't sold to me as a used model. Thanks to testing in a rolling-release distro based on Arch, I was able to prove that it wasn't due to software, but instead was a hardware issue. I'm going to send that GPU back and get another one to replace it once prices get less insane.
I tested out various Manjaro LiveCDs to check if it was a software or driver problem, and did get the GPU working about once every 10 reboots. I decided to go with a full install of Manjaro Sway edition to try and test out wayland & a more minimal window manager. I didn't think I'd like it at first, as I'd always avoided using i3wm in the past... but actually it's starting to grow on me and I think I'll try this out as a daily driver for a while. After following some instructions on the Arch wiki to identify missing steam-runtime dependencies and installing them via pacman, everything works, including Proton-based games. Technically Steam is still running under Xwayland, as evidenced by xlsclients output, but it works and seems much snappier than running on Ubuntu with X11.
I've been running this for several years now across multiple PCs, all with different hardware, including Nvidia and AMD for graphics, and Intel and AMD for CPU - and it's been working really well for me right up until recently.
After this paragraph, I will talk about the issues I've exeprienced as a gamer using my particular config. Please note that it's just a couple of minor issues, and the rest of the experience has been more than wonderful, convenient, functional, and beloved, and I do recommed Arch as a gaming setup as someone who's been running it to play games for several years in a row.
The most recent Steam Next Fest (June 2023) has revealed several demos that behaved like they launched, i.e. Steam changed my status to "in-game", changed the Start button in library, updated the playtime properly, etc., yet the game did not, in fact launch at all. I managed to play the affected demos when I switched to the KDE Plasma desktop environment on the same PC... and back on the same config after that as well.
I would consider that a one-time error that was gone by, essentially, reloading the X server, but there's been another consistent issue that I have only managed to observe in this i3+picom config. Ever since Steam's most recent UI beta, the floating elements, such as the buttons that let you install the game's demo, wishlist it, or navigate the store by the tags applied to the same game, all of which appear when you're hovering your mouse pointer over the game's thumbnail in Steam, are basically ignored; when clicking any of them, the click registers on the element that is supposed to be underneath the element you're actually trying to click: for example, if you're hovering your mouse pointer over a game and want to click the green wide "Install Demo" button, which is floating over another game's thumbnail, you'll click that thumbnail instead and open its Steam page. This particular issue persists between full PC reboots, X server restarts, i3/picom restarts, etc., and never occured in XFCE or KDE Plasma.
As I haven't been using any of the store features in Steam prior to the June's Steam Next Fest, I failed to notice any of the above, but now, I can't deny that it's been annoying. I really like my current configuration for everything I'm doing at my PCs: it's great for my work, it's even great for my gaming, it's great for my leasure, and I don't want to ditch it, because I have already tried many other tiling window managers, and i3-gaps is the one that stuck with me the most.
Now, I know there's sway, which is supposed to be a drop-in alternative, i.e. I can use my i3 config with it no problem, but sway uses the Wayland compositor, so I can't run it as easily: I'll have to set up the SDDM display manager instead of the dead-simple lightdm in order to keep the convenient multi-user setup I have, and probably sacrifice some of the performance my GTX 1080 has been giving with the proprietary drivers (I know, disgusting, but it has worked the best for my hardware as compared to the nouveau, unfortunately). I guess it's just time for me to tinker again.
You know… at least for me, I think I’m past the stage of being horrified over having to use proprietary drivers. I know it’s not as nice as a pure open source system, but still… it gets my system to run better, it’s free and it’s still Linux. So in my opinion it’s a good tradeoff still.
I do get why purists would hate it though and I wish you’d get the same performance with a completely free system.
As far as I know, it's not entirely about some purism ideal they have in mind - the difference between the two nvidia camps on Linux is the functionality you gain with both drivers, and the proprietary driver is simply more restrictive, so, yeah, I agree that they have a point.
This is the reason I know very well that my next GPU is going to be an AMD one (given that their hardware has proper open source source by that time, that is). I bought by GPU back in 2017 or 2018, I think, a couple of years before using Linux and even considering it - had I known that today's me was going to run LInux, I would've gone for an AMD GPU right away.
Even skipping the Nvidia driver debates, the AMD hardware has been a much more consistent and pleasant experience for me on Linux overall across several AMD-based laptops that I have installed Linux on. While I did manage to get things going on my desktop that has an Nvidia GPU, it definitely caused me more headache than I expected.
Good points all around. I suppose AMD would be a better choice when the time comes to upgrade. There’s no real down sides to them either compared to Nvidia except maybe not supporting the same ray traving tech?
@nlm You're right, but there is an unofficial version (with some tweaks to work on standards PC) available here.
It works as intended, but I would only recommend it if you intend to use your PC in a console-like setup (ie, plugged to a big screen, with a game controller).
While I like Tumbleweed and Plasma, I can't for the life of me figure out why KDEWallet keeps asking for my password to get on wifi every time I reboot.
Yeah, that happens sometimes for me too. I usually just disable it in the settings, but irrc, if you set the kwallet password and the user password to be the same, it shouldn’t ask for it.
I'm currently on Pop! OS 22.04 LTS. For me it worked out of the box. That installer with the NVidia drivers already included was a dream, so I didn't have to set up anything special. I did end up preferring the KDE desktop over Gnome, so I just went screw it and installed KDE plasma on top of it. It's been my daily driver like this for years.
Though, honesty requires me to mention that over the 4-ish years I've been using it they pushed a kernel update twice which killed the nvidia drivers, causing you to be unable to boot to the desktop. Solution was as simple as just rebooting into the previous kernel for a while and waiting for an update which fixes it, but still...
Other than that, pretty happy with it and I'm unlikely to change anytime soon.
I tried PopOS but had several issues immediately, including the display flickering despite updating my Nvidia driver. Other than that it just felt like a somewhat worse Ubuntu to me, so I quickly went back to Ubuntu
One thing that bugged me last time I wanted to try out Pop was that my Efi partition was considered too small. It was 500mb, you’d think that’d be enough?
basically every thing on https://manjarno.snorlax.sh/, one by one. I just reached the point when I decided to hop to another distro at the next reformat.
Truthfully it comes with nvidoa drivers pre installed.
Personally I run mint and its just a couple of clicks to get it installed in mint. I tried pop is didn’t like it that much and gave me less stability with some of my use cases
Yeah, that’s basically what I figured. Plus some bells and whistles in the design department. Might just as well go with *buntu and install drivers then.
Feels like that’s pretty common these days. Most of the big distros are polished enough to get the work done without jumping through too many hoops really.
The problem are only native linux games runned trought Steam. In hybrid mode they will not use the discrete graphic card. For the rest I have no problem
I know. I try to explain better. My laptop has the intel integrated graphics and the nvidia dedicated. From PopOs I usw the hybrid mode, zo both the card are running. From lutris and heroic I have no problem. I switch the toggle andthe game will run with the nvidia card. From steam all the games that will use proton use the nvidia card as default. While all native linux games not, they will use the intel ones if not specified.
Debian is a stable distro, so software versions will remain pretty much the same over the life cycle. This is good if stability (software not changing out from under you) is desired, but if you want to take advantage of new features as they are added to whatever software you’re running, it’s less beneficial. So, if you’re going to run debian as a desktop os, I would recommend switching your apt sources to point to the unstable branch: sid switching your apt sources to point to testing (see below).
You’ll probably see a lot of older tutorials and stackoverflow posts that use apt-get, which predates apt, instead of apt as the package manager. apt is the recommended frontend; apt-get will work, but apt will have a nicer user experience.
Also, on the topic of apt, there are three ways to run updates that you’ll probably see online; this stackexchange post provides a pretty good explanation of the differences between them.
General linux advice that I think is worth sharing
Man pages are pretty helpful once you know how to navigate them. Some tips regarding that:
You mentioned that you tried manjaro, so I think you probably already know what man is, but just in case: man is the command that you use to pull up manual pages for basically everything.
You can search through the man database for a keyword with the apropos or man -k commands. For example, apropos video pulls up a list of all the man pages that have the word video in their names or descriptions.
You might notice when running the above command that there are numbers in parentheses after the manual names. This is because the manuals are broken out into 9 sections based on the types of pages they contain. You can put the section number before the name to specify which section to pull up the manual from. So, if you had two manuals named foo in sections 1 and 3, to pull up the one for section 3 you would use the command: man 3 foo. If you want to read more, man has it’s own manual page, which you can pull up with man man.
You can search for text in man with / and ?. / performs a forward search and ? performs a backwards search. You can jump forward to the next result in the search with n or back to the previous result with p.
The bottom of man pages will have a ‘see also’ section, which lists related commands. Some man pages will also have an examples section.
Another good place to look for documentation is the arch wiki. A lot of the information on there translates to other distros fairly well, and it’s got huge amounts of well written information. If you use duckduckgo, the bang for it is !aw.
The shell is pretty intimidating for a lot of new users. While it’s not strictly necessary for most things, I do think that you’ll have a smoother linux experience if you become at least a little bit comfortable using it. Here is a bash guide aimed at beginners.
Finishing Thoughts
Looking back at what I’ve written, I realize that I have dumped a lot of information on you. So I think the best piece of advice that I can offer is this: Becoming comfortable with linux (or any new operating system) takes time and can feel overwhelming. Don’t feel pressured to understand everything immediately and don’t be afraid to go slow; Rome wasn’t built in a day.
I’ve been running linux as a daily driver for 6 or 7 years now, and I run debian on my servers, so if you have any questions now or in the future, I am happy to try to answer them.
I would recommend switching your apt sources to point to the unstable branch: sid.
Strongly disagree with this. Most users should use Debian stable, or if you needs new versions of specific software, then maybe testing or backports.
Unstable is intented for Debian maintainers, and people who do QC and debug Debian. Unstable means more frequent bugs and breakages, which only makes sense if you’re working on detecting bugs and fixing them before new packages arrive in testing/stable.
Using unstable without being an advanced Debian users is asking for trouble, because you risk more frequent breakages that requires manual intervention and in-depth Debian/Linux knowledge to fix thing. Veteran Linux users may be comfortable with this, but it’s the wrong choice for most new users.
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