Linux gamers, what distro are you currently on?

nlm@beehaw.org to Operating Systems@beehaw.org – 89 points –

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!

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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.

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

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.

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.

Nvidia works. What issues are you having? I have optimus running on my laptop and it works fine.

I did notice the nvidia settings app doesn’t work though. My gpu doesn’t show up, but I installed nvtop and confirmed it’s running.

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 services.xserver.videoDrivers. You might also need to accept unfree packages but you'll need to do that anyways for Steam.