I’ve been using Ubuntu as my daily driver for a good few years now. Unfortunately I don’t like the direction they seem to be heading.
I’ve also just ordered a new computer, so it seems like the best time to change over. While I’m sure it will start a heated debate, what variant would people recommend?
I’m not after a bleeding edge, do it all yourself OS it will be my daily driver, so don’t want to have to get elbow deep in configs every 5 minutes. My default would be to go back to Debian. However, I know the steam deck is arch based. With steam developing proton so hard, is it worth the additional learning curve to change to arch, or something else?
If you like Ubuntu but don’t like the direction it’s going, you can try Mint. It’s Ubuntu, but with the bad decisions reversed. Or use LMDE, which is Mint but Debian based.
I’ll +1 for LMDE here as well.
Yep. LMDE, add the kisak-mesa PPA and use Steam Flatpak and you’re off to the races
I just run Ubuntu on an old Mac for email and browsing.
Just curious, what are these bad directions?
Some people like to rag onto Canonicals bad decisions. These include:
- Putting ads in the terminal
- Use of Affiliate links in the DE
- The forceful use of Snap
- The proprietary Snap infrastructure
- The feeling of being abandoned, in favour of the server market (lack of desktop innovation)
- Lens search, that allows company (eg: Amazon) tracking.
- Anti-privacy settings enabled, by default.
I didn’t know about any of these, but terminal ads by itself would be enough to make me switch to something else. So would the affiliate links. Why would they think that’s a good idea? Well, aside from money, obviously.
I think you just answered your question
But the ads are just for Ubuntu pro, which is free for personal use so it’s more of a tip. And the Amazon part was to my knowledge just in the unity days. Not defending Canonical, just showing more of the picture
I knew “ads in the terminal” was hard to believe for some reason. I’m guessing it’s easily disabled too.
They were just MOTDs, which are few lines of text displayed on the terminal when you first launch a session. You just have to edit one line in a config somewhere to get rid of them. Annoying but not exceptionally so.
Not just MOTDs, they’re in apt now too
They were easily disabled, but if I wanted to spend my time disabling annoying shit that’s on by default, I’d just run Windows :p
Haha I mean fair, sort of. But if Ubuntu worked for me better than pop os in other ways, I could easily justify commenting out that line in a script or whatever
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It doesn’t really matter what distro you go with, just don’t go with something like Debian Stable because of how old their packages are. You don’t need a rolling release system, but you also don’t want something too old because of performance reasons.
If you are using flatpacks it would reduce the dependency on out of date system packages.
That’s fair.
Please stop spreading falsehoods.
Have you ever tested Debian stable vs Debian sid? You’ll notice a clear performance difference. Why? Because Debian Stable has older packages that don’t include performance related patches found in the newer ones. This is basic knowledge.
Newer = more feature & performance related patches at the cost of stability.
Older = Stability & downstreamed security patches. This is how releases cycles work.
Just look at it in terms of kernel version.
Debian Stable by default is at what? Kernel 6.1.0 now?
Arch is at kernel 6.6.3.
If you follow the Linux Kernel news you’d know that there’s pretty huge optimizations between these, some of which directly impact gaming on wine & proton.
Then there’s Mesa :
Debian Stable, Mesa 22.3.6
Arch Linux, Mesa 23.2.1
Huge performance patches between these.(Elaborating now that I’m not on mobile…)
Have you ever tested Debian stable vs Debian sid?
Yes, I have, as well as developed and packaged software for both. And not just a little. Your comment about how release cycles work is patronizing, and your diatribe is misleading.
Arch is at kernel 6.6.3.
Debian Stable currently has kernel 6.5 for those who choose to install it. Not that it matters, because a higher kernel version number doesn’t magically grant better performance. Specific changes may help in specific cases, but most kernel revisions don’t offer any significant difference to games. The more common reason to want a new rev is to support specific hardware.
Unless you have a very new GPU (released less than a year ago), your games are not likely to get any benefit at all from the latest kernel.
And unless your games require the very latest Vulkan features and you run them without Steam, Flatpak, or any other platform that provides its own Mesa, you’re not likely to get any benefit from a distro providing the latest version of it.
Practically everything else that games need is comparable across all the major distros, including Debian. (Arch might have hundreds of other packages that happen to be newer, but those won’t make games run faster.)
OP, choose a distro that makes you happy, not one that some random person claims is best for gaming. If what Debian offers is appealing to you, rest assured that it is generally excellent for gaming.
Bruv. I’ve packaged software for all 3 and beyond.
Which btw is completely irrelevant here so get off your high horse.
There’s clear performance differences between 6.1 and 6.6.3 Why? Because there’s several performance related patches & bug fixes that effect various APIs both Wine & Proton take advantage of.
Ofc, you can install newer kernels, you could install kernel 6.6.0 if you wanted, but you’d be going outside of the stable repo to do it which kinda defeats the entire purpose of Debian Stable. Not to mention that mixing and matching packages can lead to problems in the future. Like accidently using the wrong dkms driver version on the wrong kernel version, and other general compatibility issues.
I take it that you’re not active in the kernel development space, which is fine. However I personally am. Hell, there’s going to be even more of a noticable difference in kernel 6.7 thanks to FUTEX2 improvements.There’s clear performance differences between 6.1 and 6.6.3
As already stated, kernel 6.5 is available on Debian Stable.
Ofc, you can install newer kernels, you could install kernel 6.6.0 if you wanted, but you’d be going outside of the stable repo to do it which kinda defeats the entire purpose of Debian Stable.
No, it does not. Stable Backports exist for exactly this reason.
Not to mention that mixing and matching packages can lead to problems in the future. Like accidently using the wrong dkms driver version on the wrong kernel version.
I don’t know how you might have managed to do those things, but no, installing the Stable Backports kernel would not cause either of them.
Please stop spreading falsehoods.
“Stable Backports” what a joke, Backports can and have destabilized user systems.
Let me just take the thing that’s not ready, configure it a bit differently and by some magic it’s “stable”, make it make sense.
At that point you have a semi-stable system, so… Ubuntu, PopOS, LMDE.
Even the Debian devs tell you to use the Backports with care.
Ignore reality, I don’t care. Go do it on someone else’s time.Changing the subject away from Debian’s gaming performance is a strange tactic, but since you’ve shifted to mocking the name of the distribution, Debian Stable’s name comes from this sense of the word:
stable 3 of 3 adjective
1b : not changing or fluctuating : unvaryingI would expect someone so familiar with “all 3 and beyond” of the Debian distros to know that.
To indulge your sophistry, though, practically all operating systems have released broken packages at some point. Debian Stable has a well-earned reputation for doing it less than others. Even with kernel Backports. Trying to scare people away from it is a disservice to the community.
A question here: plan to upgrade to 7800xt sometime in the near future. The card is quite new, so i have doubts after your reply above. I am mainly gaming and do basic office stuff (Libre office is enough). Also, though I can install Ubuntu - press X to win type install works for me - I am new to linux, so not big on fiddling with obscure packages. Just want games to run well - so, in this specific usecase, what distros would you recommend to try?
That GPU is indeed new, and I don’t have one, but I think the amdgpu driver has supported it since kernel 6.4 or 6.5. Any distro offering that and recent AMD firmware will probably work. (You could also manually install the firmware files if you change your mind about fiddling and want a specific distro that hasn’t caught up yet.)
I don’t generally recommend specific distros, since people’s needs and preferences vary so widely. However, I would probably try Linux Mint (and the KDE Plasma desktop because I dislike Gtk) if I were in your position. Mint gets a lot of praise for being an easy distro based on the good parts of Ubuntu. It also maintains a Debian edition (LMDE), which I think is a good insurance policy in case Ubuntu ever goes off the rails and becomes unsuitable as a base for Mint.
If you find yourself struggling to choose, remember that you’re not married to whatever distro you try first. If you run into a problem that’s not easily solved, you can always switch.
Thank you, that helps.
The fiddling bit is not that i am particularly against, it just requires learning things that have no other use for me outside of playing a random game in my free time (so spending that valuable time on learning about OS internals instead of things i actually care about).You can call me a perfect user for windows - i just am tired of them trying to track me, changing their shit constantly and pushing their services within the product i paid for with my own money. Hence linux.
So what i am looking for is an out of the box experience that will not turn my eyes red.
For what it’s worth I have an RX 7900XT and it works great with the Free software driver. The other reply is right that amdgpu is supported. I use Endeavor and was a bit confused about setting it up at first, but the nice guys at the GamingOnLinux discord helped me out and now it’s extremely painless to use and upgrade.
Thanks! Can you walk me through here: what exactly is a Free software driver? As with everything in linux - you either know, or don’t)
It’s just what it sounds like: the driver is Free software. This is in contrast to the situation with Nvidia where there’s a Free software driver that doesn’t perform well and a proprietary driver from Nvidia that performs better, but is kind of a pain in the ass for users and distro maintainers to maintain. You’re reliant on Nvidia for support so you’re forced to use certain versions of kernels and libraries (I think). The AMD driver is free, open source, performs well and is more flexible.
I game on Arch, works great. Flatpak Steam, X11. 👍
Why Flatpak over the multilib one? Would it be easy to switch to Flatpak Steam?
I dunno, just felt better not enabling a whole repo just for one app, so I went with the flatpak version.
Super easy, just install it and go. Just remember to also install the Proton flatpak package in order to enable running Windows games on Linux. And to enable it in the Steam settings. I don’t think there’s much else to it other than standard flatpak stuff, like things don’t work too great if the system GPU driver version is out of sync with the flatpak one. So if you upgrade one make sure to upgrade the other, etc.
Give it a whirl if you like, and if you bump into issues I might be able to help. We’ll see. 😅
Pop OS works great for me. It’s Ubuntu minus snaps and imo some of the rough edges
Plus it can support Nvidia out of the box.
Good point. I had a lot of trouble with my Nvidia card before switching to pop os. I ended up switching to AMD anyhow, but the reason I even landed on pop os was this fact.
I have a 2060 super. It has all the performance I currently need. I would like to buy a non nvidia graphics card but I can’t justify buying a new card for that reason alone.
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I’ve been using Nobara for some time now, and I’ve been successfully able to play on Nvidia & Wayland, so that’s quite a feat in itself. Also, everything is setup at install time, so you don’t have to setup many things yourself.
Are you not playing Windows games via wine/proton?
This issue is what stops me from switching to Wayland on my GTX 1080. It basically makes games unplayable because the frames get displayed out of order
This bug was the nail in the coffin on Nvidia for me and I finally picked up a 6700 XT to replace my 2080 this month…
But, when I was on my 2080 trying out Wayland, I of course always noticed this bug on actual apps themselves (such as my IDE…) but it didn’t always manifest in games, at least not till 545 came out.
Not sure why, since of course most games are run through XWayland. Perhaps they’re in a similar situation and I’d be curious if they opened something like Discord, if they saw it there.
I am a nobara user aswell, never encountered or heard about this issue
Weird, it’s definitely not fixed yet (just tried it on up to date Arch). I don’t think Nobara included a fix for it, what Desktop environment and GPU are you using?
Edit: Also happens on nvidia-open drivers and with RTX 40xx cards, which is mentioned here
So if it really doesn’t happen on your system in XWayland apps these people would probably be very interested in your setup
it is just nvidia card with propertiary nvidia drivers (535) and kde
Are you on a laptop using Prime Render offload? That fixes it, otherwise you probably just didn’t notice. I’d recommend you compare it to gaming on X11
Yep I am on a laptop, thats probs it (wayland)
Nobara is specifically customized for gaming, created by Glorious Eggroll (from Proton-GE) himself, with specific packages which he tells you not to install as flatpak so you don’t lose the optimizations he made.
What kind of optimizations?
Here it lists a bunch.
Debian is exactly pike Ubuntu, with all bullshit
removednever addedEndevour os for me. No issues on kde nvidia and wayland, pretty straightforward installation. If I were you I’d do some distro hopping in the new PC. I’d try one of those ublue images, then nobara then endevour and see what you prefer.
Big second for EndeavourOS. I loved Linux mint early in my distro adventures, but I had issues, sometimes steam wouldn’t launch. Sometimes my secondary monitor would lag out every minute or so. So I tried nobara, which was okay, but never fell in love with it.
Enter EndeavourOS. In over six months I’ve had one instance of a broken package hampering my experience. I keep a backup of important files on an external drive, so I just nuked it and reinstalled. I also use BTRFS and timeshift-autosnap, so if a package does create issues, now I can just boot to an older snapshot from grub and wait to update that package until the issue has cleared up.
In the same vein of an “easier” Arch install, maybe also look @ CachyOS.
Gaming on Wayland with Nvidia is straight up not enjoyable for games running through XWayland due to this bug. This affects all games running with Proton/Wine, Steam, Discord, Firefox without MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1 environment variable and many more
Personally I haven’t had that issue. I had lots of issues with latest 545 but downgraded to 535 and it’s all good so far.
It doesn’t happen on Systems using Prime Render offlading. Are you playing on a laptop?
Endeavor is fine. But when it came to performance I had a number of issues. By default it put my i7 into power save. One could use core control to put it back into on demand or something more reasonable after every boot. Or go in and change the configs manually which I did. But that’s still beyond people in general. Also for whatever reason if I had more than one app actively using the GPU. Say blender open using GPU, accelerated cycles etc. And another window open doing something with OpenGL and Vulcan. I would get the whole system hanging under x11. I’d have to drop to the terminal. And kill all of it off and restart it again. And not just isolated. It was heavily repeatable.
I ended up giving Garuda a try. CPU scheduler is much more same out of the box. Graphics card support under x11 and Wayland has been rock solid as well.
They’re both arch. And it is all personal anecdotes on isolated systems. So make of it what you will. I like both systems though and actually have computers running both
Yeah, I also gave garuda a try but it was too messy for my taste, like I had to spend time un-costumizing kde because I just wanted vanilla plasma.
Oh god yeah. I forgot about that. I applied all my normal look and mods within minutes of getting to the desktop the first time lol. After that it’s been great
I use Arch + Gnome with VRR patches on my main PC.
It find it actually easier to use than e.g. fedora or ubuntu due to better documentation and way more available packages in the repos… With many, many more packages being in AUR!
By installing all the stuff commonly found on other distros (and which many consider bloat), you’ll get basically the same thing as, well, any other distro. I have all the “bloat” like NetworkManager, Gnome, etc. which is known to work together very well and which tries to be smart and auto-configure a lot of stuff. Bloat it may be, but I am lazy~
Personally, I think it’s better to stick to upstream distros whenever possible. For example Nobra, which is being recommended in this thread quite a lot, is maintained by a single person. In reality, it’s not much more than regular Fedora with a couple of tweaks and optimizations. Vast majority of those one could do themselves on the upstream distro and avoid being dependent that one person. It is a single point of failure. after all.
Honestly Arch (and the more pure Arch derivatives like Endeavour) is fantastic as long as things don’t break, and I’ve never had anything break that wasn’t more complicated than updating my mirror list or forcibly uninstalling a conflicting package. There’s always the potential for something more serious to go wrong, but having the Arch wiki is such a fantastic resource.
Fedora Atomic, especially Bazzite.
Bazzite is a project of uBlue, which is Fedora Silverblue with a lot of gaming stuff on top, similar to Nobara or the tweaks on the Steam Deck.
It has the same big advantage of every other immutable distro, that you don’t have to manage your system yourself. It updates without you noticing, will never break, you can easily roll back if something doesn’t work as intended, and so on.
The cool thing is, that you can just rebase to another atomic variant if you don’t like it, or when you realize, that every gaming distro is just as capable for gaming as every other conventional distro too.
I’m currently struggling with Nobara and the growing amount of bugs with each new kernel update.
Otherwise I would have recommended that one, since it offers some great convenient features, like a graphical management tool for all sorts of Wine versions, which can be installed in parallel. The kernel supports fsync and is tuned for low latency. Game performance is decent and I also got all my games and launchers (native Linux and also Wine) working.
For the audio part, there is pipewire, which works like a charm. There is also a compatible flatpack for DSP/equalizer which I couldn’t find it on Ubuntu’s snap store: JamesDSP. Now, after some tuning, my rather flat-sounding headphones sound do super boomy.
What are the bugs thta you have been experiencing on nobara
It started with conflicts between the preinstalled gnome extensions - namely the desktop icons broke other extensions, like Pop!_shell for window tiling. So I had to disable desktop icons.
My latest installed kernel (6.5.11) breaks screen detection - The resolution is stuck at 1024x768.
My PC gets stuck (probably on self test) after reboot or switching it on, after Nobara has shut down. Solution: Pull the power plug, wait 10 seconds, reconnect and turn it on.
I expect more to break with the next updates.
On nobara I have never had any of these issues on nvidia and on KDE.If you wanna give it a try you can even get it to look like GNOME.
Alrighty then: Now I have a reason to switch graphics cards and install Nobara on my other SSD. I bought a Radeon RX 7600 for this setup, because of AMD’s praised open-source drivers. My spare GPU is an RTX 3060, so I can actually test both worlds.
Nah AMD works much better than nvidia, my statement was meant to be like “works even on nvidia” you should definetly stay AMD
That’s what folks over here tell me, and you are most probably right. There is still one more issue scratching my head though: RayTracing performance on Cyberpunk 2077: It works great on high settings with stable 50 FPS minimum on my Windows 10 + Nvidia build, but it’s quite the opposite on this Nobara + AMD system. 5FPS and slowdowns are just unplayable. I expected the bad AMD performance being fixed by today. I think I should swap GPUs between both systems and test again.
I am also getting like 20 fps less on linux than windows, I think its just how it is with cyberpunk. Testing can’t hurt
For that last one, try disabling Fast Boot in your BIOS/UEFI. That may be the culprit.
Fedora or Nobara if you’re lazy are a good option. If an immutable variant appeals, I have a good time on Kinoite. There is a gaming centric ublue version now too IIRC
Get the Garuda gaming edition and the only real learning curve is apt vs pacman.
+1 for that. It’s a very friendly distro from what I’ve experienced
I’m currently experimenting with Garuda gnome. Pacman is frustrating for me. Games run incredibly smooth using proton I’m constantly amazed it’s this good now. I keep waiting for something to break though.
Using Garuda for 6 months now. No issues.
I have horrible luck with any OS. They always break down and require me to reinstall even with minimal usage and zero tweaks. It has one good side effect of teaching me how the system works but it is exhausting having to fix stuff that shouldn’t be breaking. I work in IT and my coworkers agree I might be cursed. Stuff works when I walk in the room for people that ask for my help which is weird. Not complaining about that. It’s just that if it’s something for me it usually breaks.
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Mint is based on Ubuntu, removing corporate shinanigans.
