Linux gamers, what distro are you currently on?

I’m currently on Win11 but I’m getting that familiar Linux itch and want to dual boot a while again. I tend to gravitate towards Ubuntu simply because it’s so big and well supported by most things.

I’ve run Arch in the past but I’ve gotten too old and lazy for that if I’d be completely honest. I have played with manjaro and endeavour though… and opensuse tumbleweed, rolling is kind of nice.

Not sure what I’d try out first this time so I figured I’d get some inspiration from you guys!

simonced,

In my case, I use Fedora exclusively (no dual boot).

I tried PopOS, but I had problems with each update.

nlm,
@nlm@beehaw.org avatar

Any particular reason for Fedora or is that just what you are comfortable with?

simonced,

No real reason I think.

I had problems with PopOS, but I could have gone Mint since it’s the one I knew the most.

But since I was reinstalling, I gave Fedora a try, and I liked it so I kept it.

nlm,
@nlm@beehaw.org avatar

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.

regulatorg,

PopOS is best for out the box gaming, its similar to Ubuntu so you'll be familiar with it

nlm,
@nlm@beehaw.org avatar

What’s their biggest advantages against Ubuntu?

averyfalken,

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

nlm,
@nlm@beehaw.org avatar

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.

averyfalken,

Don’t know how different it is with buntu I know mint does extra things. I’d you like the cinnamon desktop mints the best bet

noodlejetski,

EndeavourOS with Plasma. migrated from Manjaro after one too many questionable decision on their side.

nlm,
@nlm@beehaw.org avatar

What bugged you about Manjaro?

noodlejetski,

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.

nlm,
@nlm@beehaw.org avatar

Sure, there are some bad mistakes in there but that site feels like a personal vendetta though.

winged_fluffy,
@winged_fluffy@kbin.social avatar

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.

ezri,
@ezri@beehaw.org avatar

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

nlm,
@nlm@beehaw.org avatar

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?

Sharmat,

Currently running Fedora on my laptop and Arch on my desktop, though I’ll probably migrate from Fedora to openSUSE next month.

nlm,
@nlm@beehaw.org avatar

Oh, an openSUSE fan! There’s dozens of us! :)

I do really enjoy Tumbleweed with Plasma to be honest. It just feels so polished.

ANuStart,

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.

Sharmat,

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.

nlm,
@nlm@beehaw.org avatar

Yeah I remember it happening for me at some point as well and I think this fixed it. It was quite some time ago though so I’m not sure at all. :P

lertsenem,
@lertsenem@mastodon.lertsenem.com avatar

I weirdly did not see anyone mentioning SteamOS? Formerly based on Ubuntu, now based on Arch, I believe.

It's the distribution that the is packaged with, and so it's become my main gaming distrib now. :]

nlm,
@nlm@beehaw.org avatar

Are they providing the arch based version for download now? I was under the impression they’ve only set it up for steam decks but not for general use?

EmpiricalFlock,
@EmpiricalFlock@beehaw.org avatar

According to the website the public release is based off of Debian still.

nlm,
@nlm@beehaw.org avatar

Yeah, thought so. Hope they’ll publish their newer versions as well soon.

lertsenem,
@lertsenem@mastodon.lertsenem.com avatar

@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).

nlm,
@nlm@beehaw.org avatar

Ah cool!

Not something I’d use now then but still neat that you can get it :)

jakepi,

I tried HoloISO and had pretty mixed results. I’ve had much better luck with ChimeraOS.

The devs on ChimeraOS are excellent too, they take in community feedback and are very helpful.

sailsperson,
@sailsperson@kbin.social avatar

Here's my config (no hardware):

  • OS: Arch
  • Kernel: linux-zen
  • Window Manager: i3-gaps
  • Compositor: picom

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.

nlm,
@nlm@beehaw.org avatar

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.

sailsperson,
@sailsperson@kbin.social avatar

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.

nlm,
@nlm@beehaw.org avatar

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?

I’m a bit out of the loop there though.

hobbsc,

Mint Cinnamon. Things generally work put of the box. There’s the occasional weird config mess to get into but it’s Linux.

BananaTrifleViolin,

Yeah I use Cinnamon too. It's fairly polished and can delve into Ubuntu or Debian when missing something you really want. I find the Nvidia drivers are easy to set up and maintain, and Steam works reasonably well (I have had a few quirks but nothing that I couldn't resolve).

Bucket_of_Truth,

The standalone Nvidia driver install panel makes installing the right gpu drivers a breeze.

The only problem I ran into is that it won't boot with my main monitor (1440p 165hz) plugged in. I have to use my secondary monitor (4k 60hz) to install the OS and Nvidia drivers first, then shutdown and plug in the main monitor and everything works on the next boot.

TrinitronX,
@TrinitronX@kbin.social avatar

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.

nlm,
@nlm@beehaw.org avatar

Geez… you guys are making this hard… now I’m bouncing between ubuntu, pop, endeavour and manjaro…

Nicely formatted post by the way :)

soulsource,
@soulsource@discuss.tchncs.de avatar

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.

nlm,
@nlm@beehaw.org avatar

Gentoo is… well I wouldn’t exactly call it nice, but neat? :)

I’ve played around with it a bunch but grew impatient with it. The compile times was terrible for me back then.

Gentoo and Arch do have their niche though. Takes a bit longer to set up but they’re quite customized to your liking when you’re done.

soulsource,
@soulsource@discuss.tchncs.de avatar

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…

nlm,
@nlm@beehaw.org avatar

I can see the charm in that tbh.

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.

soulsource,
@soulsource@discuss.tchncs.de avatar

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.

nlm,
@nlm@beehaw.org avatar

Or openSUSE Tumbleweed :)

Is Debian Testing actually rolling I thought they froze it before new stable releasea?

soulsource,
@soulsource@discuss.tchncs.de avatar

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.

nlm,
@nlm@beehaw.org avatar

It’s strange really. I’ve used Ubuntu on and off since… 8.4 or something like that but I’ve never tried Debian. Don’t even know why.

soulsource,
@soulsource@discuss.tchncs.de avatar

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.

nlm,
@nlm@beehaw.org avatar

Isn’t it kind of strange that a lot of us equal stable with boring? I know I do at times as well.

There’s something satisfying with stuff breaking and managing to fix them I suppose

thegreenguy,
@thegreenguy@kbin.social avatar

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.

Bucket_of_Truth,

That's a huuuuuge problem seeing that Nvidia has like an 80% gpu market share.

nlm,
@nlm@beehaw.org avatar

Yeah, that’d be a no for me.

Especially problematic since I’m on a laptop so I can’t really switch out the GPU either.

icydefiance,

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.

Atemu,
@Atemu@lemmy.ml avatar

Nvidia drivers works just fine. Well, as “fine” as they work on any other distro.

Only thing you need to do is add “nvidia” to https://search.nixos.org/options?channel=23.05&show=services.xserver.videoDrivers&from=0&size=50&sort=relevance&type=packages&query=nvidia. You might also need to accept unfree packages but you’ll need to do that anyways for Steam.

hallettj,
@hallettj@beehaw.org avatar

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:


<span style="color:#323232;">hardware.opengl.driSupport32Bit = true;
</span>

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:


<span style="color:#323232;">home.packages = with pkgs; [
</span><span style="color:#323232;">  (lutris.override {
</span><span style="color:#323232;">    extraLibraries =  pkgs: [
</span><span style="color:#323232;">      # List library dependencies here
</span><span style="color:#323232;">    ];
</span><span style="color:#323232;">    extraPkgs = pkgs: [
</span><span style="color:#323232;">      wine-staging
</span><span style="color:#323232;">    ];
</span><span style="color:#323232;">  })
</span><span style="color:#323232;">];
</span>

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.

Chobbes,

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 :).

hallettj,
@hallettj@beehaw.org avatar

Good to know, thanks! Do you find steam-run to be helpful even for non-steam binaries that need an FHS? Or do you use it mainly for games?

Chobbes,

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.

Joker,

Which packages do you add to extraLibraries? How do you find the dependencies? I’m struggling with this at the moment.

hallettj,
@hallettj@beehaw.org avatar

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.

Atemu,
@Atemu@lemmy.ml avatar

32-bit libraries are in pkgs.pkgsi686Linux.* if you need them.

Put the libraries into extraLibraries; it’ll add them for both µarches. No need to explicitly use pkgsi686Linux yourself.

hallettj,
@hallettj@beehaw.org avatar

Oh good tip, thanks!

Nyanix,
@Nyanix@beehaw.org avatar

I’ve been on Manjaro for 3 years, honestly love it, it’s treated me great for gaming and given me so little to have to fix that my wife has also been running it for 2 years.

nlm,
@nlm@beehaw.org avatar

Got to love the wife rating :D

But yeah, I had manjaro on an old chromebook at University, it was pretty nice!

Nyanix,
@Nyanix@beehaw.org avatar

It’s funny, she’s become more of a Linux evangelist than me, she really went all in.

nlm,
@nlm@beehaw.org avatar

Sounds like a keeper! :)

Nyanix,
@Nyanix@beehaw.org avatar

She certainly is <3 celebrating 10 years this year

nlm,
@nlm@beehaw.org avatar

Good for you guys!

Nyanix,
@Nyanix@beehaw.org avatar

Thank you!

Xeelee,
@Xeelee@kbin.social avatar

I've been using Mint without any issues for a while now. I only play Steam games, though.

green_witch,
@green_witch@beehaw.org avatar

Also on the latest Mint. I really like it. I was previously on PopOS and enjoyed that, too.

elehayyme,
@elehayyme@kbin.social avatar

I've been running Pop for a bit over a year now and am (mostly) satisfied with it. The only issues I had were due to kernel updates, it would cause flickering on my screen and (like someone else mentioned) had to revert to an older kernel until the situation was resolved.

MT_Book_Wyrm,

Pop here also. I tried several different distro's, pop worked out of the box. Only issue was my cheap little Bluetooth USB wart, but five minutes of searching showed me how to get it working. That's it. I like it. Familiar enough for a windows refugee, plays enough steam games without issues to keep me happy. No crashes, no freezes, unlike windows 10/11.

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