- Which distribution are you on?
- What does it do well?
- What could be improved?
- Are you considering swapping to another distro, which one(s)?
I like that Pop OS packages their own Nvidia drivers and tests them before pushing the package. It’s nice to automatically be on a recent-ish graphics driver without needing to research what they decided to break in the latest update first. It’s on 525 currently; I expect they’re skipping 530 intentionally since a lot of people had issues with it.
I tried PopOS! for a bit. I thought it was very nice out of the box with all of the features as well as having nvidia ready to go. The main thing that prevented me from staying was non-standard keybinds. I am used to Gnome’s default keybinds, and I would have had to change everything back.
I moved to it from Ubuntu and the keybinds felt the same to me. What’s nonstandard about it?
It has been a while since I tried it last, so I do not remember which binds were different. They weren’t bad, but I didn’t want to change my muscle memory when my desktop was keeping a more stock gnome configuration.
- Gentoo.
- Gives me Wine, it works. And if it doesn’t, there is an easy and out of the box way to apply patches. Also it gives me libvirtd for (offtopic), it also works. Upd: and doesn’t do anything stupid, so native games (rimworld, factorio, etc) don’t break.
- Not sure, I’ve got all I need. Maybe some nice sandboxing tool, writing apparmor configs is a pain. Although it’s not really a distro’s responsibility.
- Nope.
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I’m on Debian stable, and until this month’s 12.0 release, I’ve had to make do with older nvidia drivers. But I pretty much only felt it by not being able to play one or two games (A Plague Tale: Requiem and demo of the new System Shock remake, there may have been one more that I do not remember anymore).
But as I still have dozens of games on backlog, it was not a big deal, I can wait.
Other than that, I’m a very happy Debian user of almost two decades now.
Currently on Nobara 37, with plans to upgrade to N38 soon.
I like that the distro is focused on gaming, which is the main purpose for my desktop. It has many of the apps that I want pre-installed and it make it easy to get third party library/drivers. While it is a small distro, it uses a solid, widely used base and is supported by a well known contributor(GloriousEggroll).
The main gripe I have is with being behind Fedora releases by a few months. Fedora 38 released a few months ago, but N38 just released in the last few days. I understand that patches have to be re-based, but it feels like I am missing out on some cool new features for a bit longer.
I have considered swapping to a immutable distro, such as Fedora Silverblue in the future. The main reasons are stability and easy of maintenance. I may try using Flatpak version to slowly transition and see if it works for me.
So, I’ve been on Silverblue for years now. (Hard to believe that myself, but yeah.) It would be a pain in the ass to use with proprietary stuff needed for most gaming IMO. Like installing stuff natively on the host OS is a real pain because of the need to reboot. The whole containers thing can be nice for some stuff like software only, but it is difficult when that software needs to get access to the hardware using the kernel. If you really know your Linux fu at the kernel hacker level, I’m sure there are ways to get around the issues I’ve had. The main reason I wanted to use SB containers is for hobbyist embedded stuff like Arduino programming where different toolchains can have different conflicting dependencies, but giving these containers USB hardware access is too much of an undocumented pain to figure out and I layer what I need for this. You also can’t upgrade the distro used inside toolbx which greatly limits its long term utility.
Nix and Endeavor are on my future radar. I may give Gentoo another go at some point now that I have better script fu skills to automate compiling updates, and know how to set CPU affinity/isolation for processes.
If you try SB, buy the Linux Bible because it is good, and bc it is written for a RHEL/Fedora system. Also learn to leverage the RHEL documentation. It is the best advanced technical Linux documentation by a long shot, and it will help fill the holes you’ll find if you go searching for Fedora documentation.
The direct user support from the fedora community kinda sucks too. I think it is because there is spillover from a lot of professionals that fail to pay for Red Hat support and go to the Fedora devs/users instead. A lot of the Fedora devs are RHEL. I tend to get little to no response when asking advanced questions that might have crossed over as a server like issue. Learning to use the RHEL docs was a game changer for me on this front. I rarely have an unanswered question between the Bible and RHEL docs.
I wouldn’t run nvidia graphics hardware on SB.
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