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!

Kuujaku,
@Kuujaku@kbin.social avatar

Currently on Artix, but planning on changing to Gentoo soon.

suddenlythequietrose,

I’ve been on pop os for at least 2 years now, been loving it. Most of my gaming is through steam so compatibility issues are the exception, not the rule. It’s a bit of a dream come true to play God of War on Linux, it feels like all the stars aligned.

Even when I bork the install by fucking around in the kernel I wind up getting back on pop rather than finally taking the dive into arch.

LoafyLemon,

Pop!_OS ᕙ( •̀ ᗜ •́ )ᕗ

Icarus,

My last two laptops have been System76 models. The first time I didn’t really love Pop!_OS but the most recent laptop I gave it another shot and it’s come a long way. Really enjoying it overall (still prefer KDE over gnomey stuff tho, lol)

wet_lettuce,

Pop!_OS for life!

Gatsby,

I use Arch, but I have two graphics cards in my system and I run a stripped windows VM for any game that I want ray tracing or 4k in.

My arch setup has an older Nvidia Quadro card and can run everything on like medium settings, but my virtual machines have a 3080ti. I didn’t want the wear and tear on my 3080ti just to watch YouTube or play indie games that don’t need the horsepower, but I still want to try stuff like portalRTX or stable diffusion and the like that needs an enthusiast graphics card.

This to me is the best of both worlds. I can run the VM in the background so I can use my desktop(connected to the TV) as a media center and have cyberpunk playing totally hidden and streaming to my steam deck for ray tracing maxxed settings.

Hell I even play Half life:Alex VR in a virtual machine and stream it over wifi to my Oculus quest.

nlm,
@nlm@beehaw.org avatar

Ok, I want your setup. Can I have it? Please? :)

Sounds pretty nice!

Gatsby,

I can help you set yours up like mine if you want!

But you’d need to make sure you have two graphics cards. I have the 3080 disabled from Linux until a VM starts, so it won’t load the Linux desktop or anything. Even a CPU with integrated graphics works, but a physical GPU is obviously better.

I really like the Quadro series for this as its physically thinner, lower power, and has the performance around a 1060. They’re on ebay for like $60

nlm,
@nlm@beehaw.org avatar

I’m currently stuck with a laptop thats creeping towards potato status so it’s a bit hard to upgrade parts of it. :)

I’m happy just being able to run it almost to the ground as it is!

lividhen,
@lividhen@kbin.social avatar

How's your vm setup?

Gatsby,

Depends on my needs, my desktop itself has a 8core @ 5GHz, around 50Gb ram, a Quadro and a 3080ti.

For gaming I’ll usually pass through 6cores, 30Gb ram and the 3080ti to a windows VM, leaving 2cores 20Gb and the Quadro for my linux host.

sometimes I’ll do more of a 50/50 split or if I’m just updating windows or downloading a game I’ll only pass 2 cores like 10Gb ram and no gpu.

But if you mean how did I do the initial setup, any arch based disro will be the easiest (but you can do it on others if youre more technically inclined) by following this guide:

PCI PASSTHROUGH VIA OVMF

Ive done this process on so many systems I can do it off a fresh install in probably 30 minutes now.

Once the Linux host is finished, I install windows in the VM, strip as much bloat from it as I can, install my universal programs(Firefox, 7zip, VPN stuff remote desktop stuff, GPU drivers, etc)

For gaming, the best programs I’ve found are Looking glass to pass the VM GPU’s video to a window on the client with no latency, and SCREAM audio for the same with sound.

Once that’s all set up and windows is fully updated, I make a backup of that VM, and basically never open the original again. If I need a new VM, just clone that setup and everything’s ready to go. I can rn clone the original setup, and use my private collection of interesting viruses on that windows VM without fear of it damaging anything.

Rassilon,

Was running the same setup pretty much, I really miss it. Was running arch with an 8c/16t cpu, with 32GB ram, a 2070 Super (for passthrough), and a cheap GT710 (for i3wm on host). I've heard of Looking Glass and SCREAM but never tried it, instead I would switch inputs on my primary monitor and keep i3 on my secondary. Just used an Elgato Stream deck with Streamdeck_ui and would set attach and detach commands for peripherals, and others like power/pause.

Ended up helping someone troubleshoot their PC, which turned out to be a dead GPU, and I gave them the 710 as a better then nothing card. Was still able to play a lot of my games native or via proton on the 2070, but some new games had performance/compatibilty issues and I couldn't use RTX. Ended up installing Windows over my Arch to play them, you know just till I could get a new host GPU.

Now I have a GPU for the host again, but I'm using Microsoft Storage Spaces for my RAID 10; and, being lazy as I am, I just keep putting off copying all of that to spare drives and rebuilding with mdadm. Plus the fear of losing terabytes of data during migration is intimidating.

Sizousho,

With some of the news going around about the new windows versions and what-not, this sounds really interesting. I have a couple questions if you could answer them, that would be awesome!

How does a new release of Windows affect the compatibility of this set up? I know programs with for a while on older releases, but after a time, that version will be phased out. That might be more about the VM than your setup, but I don’t have a lot of experience with those either lol.

Does this introduce some system lag for input in any way? If I ever do get the confidence to abandon my system to go to Linux, it would suck if this really cool sounding method added response time to inputs.

Gatsby,

So the only problem is you’d have to update every VM over time to get security patches, this is mainly a problem if you’re on limited internet(like me). Im capped at 100gb a month and my download speed is almost always less than 1mb/sec.

Windows has a feature that if one system on your network is updated, other systems on the network can download locally from that one and save your data, which is wonderful. But you still need to update Nvidia drivers for each VM, and update games, etc. You can connect a hard drive(virtual or physical) to multiple VMs, but only run VMs with a common hard drive one at a time.

And mind you this isn’t to save compatibly, for me once it works it works. I just like to keep security patches updated because I download a lot of sketchy programs lol.

Latency is non-existent. I use a program called lookingglass, which allocates like 32mb of GPU memory to be dedicated to passing frames between the VM and the host. Or non-existent for my level of perception. If you’re Spidey senses tingle more easily you can pass through a secondary keyboard and mouse and just literally have two screens two keyboards two mice one box. It would have the same latency as bare metal. And even have two people play multiplayer games together off of one box if you have the horsepower.

Sizousho,

So, there are a couple of things that have happened recently. I have an old laptop that I’ve messed around with different distros of Linux on. I installed Arch on it and am trying to do some different things. It’s not a good laptop, so the VM set up I’m really interested in won’t happen until I get a few more drives for my main PC and set up a dual boot abd some other things. I am really interested in this set up because it just sounds neat.

Are there some things I should try to do to help me get better at working with this OS? I’m currently seeking up a server with a reverse proxy using nginx and its… Going. The server works I think, but the proxy doesnt yet.

HubertManne,
@HubertManne@kbin.social avatar

Im really surprised that I don't see zorin os on these types of threads. Its main stick is to be chock full of out of the box software especially around windows compatibility. wine and play on linux are ready right away and I can run most windows programs right after install.

nlm,
@nlm@beehaw.org avatar

It looks pretty nice straight out of the box too. You used it long?

HubertManne,
@HubertManne@kbin.social avatar

yes. years now. I keep on trying something else but I don't have much patience now and take the easy way out.

nlm,
@nlm@beehaw.org avatar

It’s pretty nice that linux has gotten far enough that we can have that luxury these days. :)

s900mhz,

A little background for context. I’m gamer and professional software developer. I’ve been dual booting windows 11 and pop os for awhile. Windows for games and pop os for everything else… Over the weekend I switched to NixOS. This came with a learning curve which I spent a day or so learning. I’ve been getting the hang of it now and I love it so much. I definitely recommend it. I managed to get steam working without much fiddling and my emulators. It’s been great! The benefits for programming are obvious. Allowing me to basically stop using docker dev containers.

I completely removed windows from my computer and I’m very happy.

nlm,
@nlm@beehaw.org avatar

We used to run Ubuntu at my last job, it was so nice! I’m back in Windows land now though…

s900mhz,

Yeah my job recently started letting developers choose between windows and Mac now which is a step in the right direction… their excuse is that all their security software doesn’t run in Linux… Ill accept using a Mac over WSL though, that was a huge pain

nlm,
@nlm@beehaw.org avatar

I’m still happy WSL exists, it’s definitely better than nothing if you’re stuck in Windows land!

s900mhz,

Yeah absolutely! I know I dissed it, but I was happy to have it when I was stuck on windows for work.

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.

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.

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!

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!

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.

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

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 :)

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.

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.

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