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!
I have been quite happy with Arch Linux, up until I got my Steam Deck, at which point I stopped playing on my non-Deck PCs, so... SteamOS, I suppose.
... which is an immutable variant of arch.
It is, but I still count it as it's own thing, in the same way most people count Debian and Ubuntu as two seperate distributions.
Yes, you're correct, just a little funny that you moved from arch to basically steamarch, or as I've recently taken to calling it, arch plus steam
Came here to say SteamOS as well. I am surprised more people aren't saying it. But the thing is, the Steam Deck works so well I have to wonder how many people don't know/care the OS it runs, or maybe they have forgotten it's running Linux, or maybe they know but don't consider themselves "Linux Gamers" just because they are using it.
Sort of like how people playing on a Switch or PS3/4/Vita are technically FreeBSD gamers deep down.
I would take a look at pop_os. It's Ubuntu, but without Snap and a closer to mainline kernel version. They have a lot of great usability tweaks too.
I run Arch BTW. I just like to make things difficult :)
I installed Kubuntu.. I couldn't be assed to resize my efi partition to a gig and disrupt windows.. Done that in the past with varying results. Wish they didn't require it to be that big tbh.
I do miss Arch.. wouldn't surprise me if I'll install it again soon.
Kubuntu works. But where's the fun in that? :)
It's like.. I installed it, messed with lutris a bit (needed a newer version) and installed Diablo 4, everything works.. and now I feel like I'm missing out somehow. :)
You're missing out on chasing the dragon for the latest and greatest. :)
Arch is fine once you get it setup, but I feel like the nerd in us can never just leave it be. I'll probably go back to pop_os next major release they have.
Sometimes I wish I had a machine dedicated to nothing but reinstalling different distros. :)
It can get a bit disrupting to do it on your main rig too often.
Use a VM?
I know, I do that too but it's just not quite the same for some reason.
VMs are great for that
I use Pop!_OS and have been happy with it for the last couple years or so.
I think I just might have to give pop a go and see what all the fuss is about. :)
A very simple, almost stock setup of Arch + KDE.
X11 or Wayland? I find games like csgo stutter on Wayland.
Wayland. I've had no issues, but then I don't play CS:GO. However I've played Cyberpunk on ultra with no issues, for example.
Make sure you're running the sdl environment variable that makes them native on Wayland, in my experience when that's on it makes my games that are native significantly more performant.
I used Manjaro with Wayland last year and had no issues at all playing games.
Does StreamOS count?
Sure does!
Save yourself a lot of trouble and get a secondary SSD to put Linux on instead of doing a traditional dual boot. Normal dual boots with windows suck ass and lead to problems.
As for a distro, I keep going back to endeavourOS. It's just so minimal out of the box, and I still can't find anything to match the convinience of the AUR + Pacman for package management.
It's on a laptop. I do have an external usb that I have linux installed on but it feels like a hassle to connect/disconnect every time I need to switch OS. Maybe it could've been worth staying on it though?
I actually usually run linux on a USB SSD myself haha, but I am on a desktop so I can just leave it there. For you that's definitely a hassle.
I mean it works I suppose, at least when I'm at my desk at home which is where I mostly use it, but still. It's not quite optimal. :)
I'm really comfortable with mint cinemon
I'm currently running Nobara and I really vibe with the Gnome desktop and Fedora in general. However, I recently installed Linux Mint for my girlfriend's gaming rig and I was surprised by how lightweight and responsive it felt. It was also dead simple to use during the entire setup process and I can absolutely see how you'd never need to enter a terminal if you didn't want to. If I ever have a reason to leave Nobara, I'm definitely going to go with Mint!
I use Arch with KDE Plasma for that comfy desktop environment feel but switch to BSPWM ever so often for productivity or to use my pc as just a media center
As a former Arch user, Fedora has been so amazing for me. It's so rock solid and simple to use. It also has great software compatibility because lots of software is distributed as rpm due to businesses using CentOS and RHEL.
Came here to say exactly this. I've hopped distros for years, Fedora is the longest I've stuck to a single distro and it's been fantastic.
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.
Got to love the wife rating :D
But yeah, I had manjaro on an old chromebook at University, it was pretty nice!
It's funny, she's become more of a Linux evangelist than me, she really went all in.
Sounds like a keeper! :)
She certainly is <3 celebrating 10 years this year
Good for you guys!
Thank you!
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.
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.
Pop!_OS ᕙ( •̀ ᗜ •́ )ᕗ
Pop!_OS for life!
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)
I am on Manjaro. To be honest there isn't a big difference between distros nowadays because more and more apps are on the web or deployed via AppImage/shell script. Manjaro does rolling updates, makes it easy to install drivers and the install is easy, but you can still follow the Arch wiki and use AUR.
It runs Steam totally fine. Thanks to Steam (and WINE) I basically don't use Windows anymore.
I do remember enjoying Manjaro when I ran it back dutin Uni studies.. I don't even remember what made me switch tbh. Probably some distro hopping itch. :)
I really should have known better than to expect a consensus in a topic like this 😁 Ask 10 linuxheads which disto is the best and you'll get 12 different answers
Well that's what's fun though isn't it? :D
I ended up installing Kubuntu 20.04 for now.. I was going to install Pop but they require a 1GB EFI partition and I didn't have the patience to move my Windows partition around to resize it so.. Kubuntu it is.
Knowing myself I'll probably distro hop in a few days again.
Trying out different distros are almost as much fun as actually using them (probably more fun at times!)
I think your next task is to start modding Skyrim so you can have the ultimate experience of spending more time setting something up only to spend a fraction of that time actually using it. XD
That or setting up a retro gaming sysgem.. gathering and scraping roms, setting up a nice frontend with cover art and everything just to never touch it again when it's done. :)
How dare you call me out like this.
Been there, done that eh? :D
I spent a few days trying to get modded skyrim working on linux, but just couldn't get the nexus mod manager working :(
I gave up, so I'll probably end up trying again in a few months when someone I know IRL brings it up again
If I were doing it on some spare PC maybe I'd find it fun too but I rely too much on my main workstation to just constantly reinstall stuff on it, and dual booting looks like a risk/hassle too. I am prepared for the inevitable day I take the plunge into linux for good, hopefully the number of distros doesn't triple by then ^^
Don't worry!
They'll quadruple..:)
It definitely feels like they have in the past decade. When I last used Linux everyone would just dump Ubuntu on you, give you a nice pat on the head and wish you good luck. PopOS got big at one point but I think there were some issues when LTT tried it that gave it a bad rep. I haven't even heard of 90% of distros in this thread.
I weirdly did not see anyone mentioning SteamOS? Formerly based on Ubuntu, now based on Arch, I believe.
It's the distribution that the #SteamDeck is packaged with, and so it's become my main gaming distrib now. :]
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?
According to the website the public release is based off of Debian still.
Yeah, thought so. Hope they'll publish their newer versions as well soon.
@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).
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.
Ah cool!
Not something I'd use now then but still neat that you can get it :)
garuda, it's just a fancy arch install with the ugliest, bloatiest, default theming you can imagine, but once you get rid of it it's pretty solid.
You're really selling it :D
..I looked it up. You're correct. That.. was flashy.
I’ve been using Garuda as well. It’s solid, and I like the fact they have a gaming variant that takes a lot of the nitpick presetup out of the picture.
I've been running Linux Mint for a few years now and it's been really good for me. Runs games through Steam and Lutris about as good as I've had it.
I've also run other distros like Pop! and Fedora here and there but they seem to give me more issues.
In my case, I use Fedora exclusively (no dual boot).
I tried PopOS, but I had problems with each update.
Any particular reason for Fedora or is that just what you are comfortable with?
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.
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.
Pop!_OS. It just works, it's easy, and it makes me enjoy using my computer.
I'm starting to want to try Pop.. they seem to have quite a few fans around here!
It is one of the simplest ones to play games on
Yup, Pop!_OS is virtually flawless for me on my Nvidia laptop. It can run every game that I play for hours with no crashing including Tears of the Kingdom on the yuzu emulator.
PopOS is best for out the box gaming, its similar to Ubuntu so you'll be familiar with it
What's their biggest advantages against Ubuntu?
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
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.
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
Fedora, KDE spin. Been working great, and I'm kinda liking DNF
Love Fedora, soooort of regret using KDE. Once I started messing with it the way it encourages you to it kept having moments where it totally crashed and the taskbar equivalent wouldn't move, windows wouldn't move, or anything else... made me feel like resource-strapped open source projects should stick to a coherent vision over trying to support every style of desktop interface under the sun.
It seems alright - but absolutely bonkers that there's no GUI method to upgrade releases on KDE, especially with the way Fedora releases work
I mean I usually update via terminal anyway. But makes me feel second class when something so basic isn't supported.
But I really don't care for GNOME, and nothing else supports Wayland. So what can I do.
I use Arch with KDE. I've been daily driving Arch coming up a decade now and despite testing various other distros on laptops over the years, I haven't seen anything yet to tempt me away. I heart Pacman.
Personally I find most of the laziness factor with Arch is a non issue once you get installation done. My previous install was 6 years old and the only reason I reinstalled was because I got a new PC.
That said if an installer is a must-have then I would recommend Endeavour OS or Manjaro for best of both worlds.
I use Arch with XFCE. Yes, it took a while to get running properly, and just the other day I went to print something and realized cups hadn't even been installed yet, so I spent 15 minutes getting my printer up and running, so I totally get that it's not for everyone. I like it because of the detailed wiki with great tutorials and instructions on getting things working, like the one I used to get a nextcloud installation working on my computer. And I like it because of the extensive Arch User Repository, so I know I can install whatever I like. I mostly just play Stardew Valley and trackmania on it. I've used Manjaro before and enjoyed that too, and it comes with all the benefits of arch.
I installed Mint on my friends computer, which works totally fine, but I don't know how it is for gaming; she definitely doesn't game.
Arch really is a documentation project rather than a distro, their wiki tops most everything out there :)
Seriously, ArchWiki has taught me most of what I know about Linux.
Yeah, that's basically where you go if you ever have some obscure problem, it's incredibly useful really.
I'm on Arch right now, migrated to it after almost 2 years on Fedora. I'll probably still go back and forth between the two.
NixOS, not going to lie to you and say it's always easy to get games running on it though. Sometimes it's a complete pain in the ass.
Running Ubuntu 22.04
Linux mint gaming
Now I am on fedora. Before I used debian stable and before that I tried some other distros, like some flavors of ubuntu, endeavor, mint, manjaro and so on.
Wonder how redhat's latest move to keep the source behind a paywall will affect fedora?
I don't think I've actually tried a red hat based distro since.. eh.. the late 90's maybe. Been a while :)
It shouldn't, because Fedora is upstream of those changes. But in terms of the 'principles' of the organization, who knows? It might just be the start of IBM finally manipulating it's marionette.
Oh yeah, true, I keep forgetting how the red hat/fedora setup is like.
Let's hope it's not the start of them going too iffy
Ubuntu's done. Use Mint now.
Debian
Endeavour OS (PC and Laptop) and Steam OS. Very happy with both.
On my gaming desktop, I am using Fedora currently with the Awesome WM. That might change though with all the RH stuff going on. On my gaming laptop I switch between Arch and Void with Qtile on both.
Im running good old Ubuntu with gnome. I mostly play terraria, minecraft I and Bethesda rpgs these days so it does everything I need.
I'm starting to realize that *buntu LTS with snaps and flatpaks should work pretty well.. the OS itself is kept updated until what.. 2032 with Ubuntu Pro I think? And the flatpaks keeps their stuff up to date on their own. Pretty nice combo, shouldn't have to reinstall any time soon (unless I want to try something new....)
I am on Mint, but I have a GPU accelerated VM running Windows 10 for gaming. It performs very well, but you run into the occasional game that detects VMs and will refuse to run.
You get a decent performance out of that? Sounds like it would take a bit of a hit?
I've been using Mint without any issues for a while now. I only play Steam games, though.
Native steam with linux supported game makes things rather peachy.
I do tend to end up in Blizzard land again and again.. they tend to run smoothly with some tinkering though.
Also on the latest Mint. I really like it. I was previously on PopOS and enjoyed that, too.
Not at all an expert, but I'm doing fine with most games on Manjaro. Most things worked out of the box with Proton on Steam. I also liked Arch before I got old and lazy, and Manjaro seems to be a good way to get most of the benefits of Arch with lazier upkeep.
Ok, since I created this thread I think reflashed the same thumb drive with four or five distros already.
Without actually installing anything.
This is going to have me obsessing for a bit.. :)
I've been on arch with swaywm for about 3 years now, have't really had to tinker with it at all after getting everything set up. Mesa drivers with amd cards are awesome. Biggest issues I've had were not with gaming but with proprietary codecs in firefox or getting MS Teams to play nice for work. Other than that once in a blue moon the gpg keys for pacman may need to be updated before running the regular update command. I don't recommend sway for everyone, i just find it convenient for me, gnome or kde is fine too.
Teams us a hurdle no matter the os you use..
Here's my config (no hardware):
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.
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.
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.
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.
I'm currently using NixOS, seems to work pretty well provided you enable steam with the option rather than just installing it is a package
Can't see myself using any other distro at this point to be honest
This is the most Linux answer ever!
I've been using base Debian with KDE Plasma for the past month or two and gaming on it, and it's worked really well, about as good as any other distro I've used. I always eventually end up back on Debian regardless of what I try using. I could technically get a better experience on rolling release because of mesa and kernel updates, but I've never noticed much of a difference, ymmv depending on hardware though.
They recently started supporting closed-source firmware officially so there's no longer that notorious hunt to find the right .iso just to get your wifi and nvidia GPUs to work.
That's really the nice thing about linux, as long as you know what you're doing you can probably get any distribution to work pretty much just as well for your own needs.
Interesting that they've started supporting closed source firmware.. I thought they were very much against that?
They're still very focused on having a primarily open source system, but they held a vote and it was decided that it's best for the computer to actually work and then try to be as open source as possible after that.
They did offer the firmware before, but you had to go out of your way to enable it and they didn't provide security updates, was considered unofficially supported. With this, they're considered officially supported, on by default if needed, and get security updates.
If you're curious about the vote they did, it was this one and Proposal E is what won. https://www.debian.org/vote/2022/vote\_003#proposere
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.
Ok, I want your setup. Can I have it? Please? :)
Sounds pretty nice!
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
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!
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.
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.
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.
How's your vm setup?
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.
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.
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.
NixOS is the path to enlightenment. Very good stuff. Also look into steam-run if you’re not already aware!
We used to run Ubuntu at my last job, it was so nice! I'm back in Windows land now though..
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
I'm still happy WSL exists, it's definitely better than nothing if you're stuck in Windows land!
Yeah absolutely! I know I dissed it, but I was happy to have it when I was stuck on windows for work.
I was using Gentoo for a while, but I kept having issues with the proprietary Nvidia drivers, so I set up a Win10 VM with GPU passthrough.
I actually just switched to NixOS, haven’t had a chance to get my games set up just yet but I am excited for the number of people I have seen have success with it. Setting up gaming is next on my list.
Arch Linux at the moment, though I distro hop quite a bit!
When it comes to gaming, I can't really say I've found a distro that "felt" better for gaming, and I've been on a fair amount of them - Fedora (and Nobara), Arch, NixOS, Endeavour, pop!_OS - I haven't noticed a difference. I didn't measure benchmarks because at the end of the day its about what I can perceive, not what I can read from a spreadsheet.
Realistically I think the only difference I ever noticed was with pop there's a Nvidia ISO that has the drivers already included in the live environment, so I get to skip a step post-install.
I find myself just using Flatpaks for gaming stuff (Steam, Bottles, Heroic, etc) these days since I know that I can take those on just about any distro. I've heard that there is some FPS loss from running games through Flatpak, but again I haven't done any benchmarks so I can't confirm nor deny this.
These days Ubuntu can install the nvidia drivers for you during the install as well if you just click the "install proprietary blabla" so you get a pretty game ready system there as well tbh so I'm starting to feel like a more gaming tweaked version of Ubuntu is a bit redundant?
That's a surprisingly pleasing font by the way!
Grr Lemmy just ate my comment, I guess I have a chance to refine my response a bit now!
Ah, thank you - it's been a while since I used Ubuntu on my main system (Ubuntu was my foray into Linux back in the Hardy Heron days!) but now that you mention it, I do remember seeing that option when I briefly had Ubuntu installed on my old MacBook (which I then moved to Fedora to play around with before using it on my main PC). Having that option was quite nice for the broadcom wireless drivers that those Macs need for WiFi.
Thanks! I came across it a couple of years ago, and I joked about it at first but it grew on me over time so I purchased (it is a paid font but there is a very similar one called Comic Mono) the font and have been using it in my IDEs and terminals since then! I wouldn't use it everywhere of course, but for a monospace environment its really good and I can't quite put my finger on the "why".
Funnily enough, I've tried to use Comic Code on both Windows and macOS as well and there is something about the FreeType system on Linux that makes the font really excel for me. On Windows the font feels too "thin" and on macOS the font feels too "thick". 10 years ago if you had tried to tell me that I'd enjoy the way fonts look on Linux better than the other two major platforms I would've fell to the floor laughing for a few minutes - I imagine its due to a combination of improvements over FreeType and displays over the years, along with me actually branching out and not just sticking with the default font that happens to be picked for me by whatever I'm using 😅
I stumbled upon Comic Mono myself a while ago and have been meaning to set it up in my IDE's but haven't gotten around to it yet. Might just have to though. It looks strangely easy on the eyes. Almoat relaxing somehow? Cant really putn my finger on why however.
I can agree with the fact that fonts feel different depending on your OS. I usually use Source Code Pro and I never got the feeling that it looked quite as good when I went from Linux to Windows after getting a new job.
Mint Cinnamon. Things generally work put of the box. There's the occasional weird config mess to get into but it's Linux.
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).
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.
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 findubuntu12_32
,ubuntu12_64
folders which are pre-packaged dependencies & libraries forsteam-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 usemythgame
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, theamdgpu
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 viapacman
, everything works, including Proton-based games. Technically Steam is still running underXwayland
, as evidenced byxlsclients
output, but it works and seems much snappier than running on Ubuntu with X11.Geez.. you guys are making this hard.. now I'm bouncing between ubuntu, pop, endeavour and manjaro..
Nicely formatted post by the way :)
Tumbleweed, but waiting for VanillaOS 2.0
@nlm CachyOS. It's Arch based with a bucketload of performance tweaks & bespoke patches, including a kernel scheduler developed by distro maintainers. It also has a small but super-responsive community that tends to resolve issues quite rapidly
Sounds interesting. Having a look at it. :) Thanks for sharing. 👍
For me Fedora is my go-to, but I'm looking at moving to Nobara
How come? Isn't Nobara just Fedora but a bit easier to get going? Or have I missed their point?
Figured since you already have a running Fedora installation you ought to have what you need already set up?
The major benefit I've seen is that they have edited non-free GPU drivers to work correctly, but if you're already running Fedora... just add their GPU repos.
I'm using Manjaro KDE - working well with Steam Games with Proton for must games.
I use a steam deck.
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
: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:
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.
Never really looked into Nix at all.. it seems neat but I really don't think I want to tinker too much these days. I'll probably settle for something easier. Probably either *buntu/buntubased or arch-based.
..or tumbleweed..
..or something else.. :D
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 :).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?
Yeah, exactly! For
steam
itself on NixOS you don't have to manually usesteam-run
, butsteam-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.Which packages do you add to extraLibraries? How do you find the dependencies? I’m struggling with this at the moment.
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.
Put the libraries into
extraLibraries
; it'll add them for both µarches. No need to explicitly usepkgsi686Linux
yourself.Oh good tip, thanks!
Win11 is worse than a phone vis a vis spying. Finally made a switch. could not install popOS, so ended up with mint.
Arch/EndeavourOS. Updates for the recent hardware come pretty fast and they are stable. Most of the time I use gamescope from Valve to get better latency.
As my main I'm currently running EndeavorOS. I'd say it's pretty good. It does all of the legwork of installing Arch, but comes with minimal bloat and really lets you make it your own.
I have tried it but it was a while ago.
When it's installed, what's different than pure Arch?
I'm not a heavy gamer, but I'm content with Manjaro. I don't dual boot, though I do have access to an older computer with Windows 10. I haven't had cause to use it for games, though.
Don't see it mentioned here - Nobara. Fedora tweaked by Glorious Eggroll to be as compatible as possible with games ootb. Worth looking at.
I used to use Arch but Nobara works too well for me to go back.
A big thing for me too is the custom version of OBS that the welcome GUI installs is excellent and allows for application specific/exclusionary audio sinks so I can screen record games without having audio from discord/music.
Seconded for Nobara, gaming is a smooth experience with it
Arch on my laptop but Pop on my gaming rig. At the time I installed it, I wanted the extra relative ease of Pop's handling on video drivers. I have since switched to AMD, so no driver woes at all since they're in the kernel, but I have stuck with Pop for that system. If it ain't broke... who am I kidding, I'll probably switch to Arch soon.
I have my gaming computer hooked to my TV and running Chimera OS. Makes it easy to use with just a controller.
Sounds like a sweet setup for controller based gaming!
I am currently using Pop!_OS, which is based on Ubuntu and comes with GNOME but because I don't really like GNOME's interfaces, so I swapped it with Sway and i3bar.
I never played modern games on this thing, so I don't really know how well it does, but I heard it's pretty good for gaming.
Currently running Fedora on my laptop and Arch on my desktop, though I’ll probably migrate from Fedora to openSUSE next month.
Oh, an openSUSE fan! There's dozens of us! :)
I do really enjoy Tumbleweed with Plasma to be honest. It just feels so polished.
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.
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, it shouldn’t ask for it.
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
It’s my favourite distro =3 No matter where I migrate to, always ends up coming back to it.
Ubuntu 22.04 LTS - it works perfectly all the time now. I have no idea at this point why anyone would continue to use Windows, tbh. A couple of years ago, audio management and networking were still a little bit fiddly, but I have not typed SUDO in almost two years now. I game with Steam, and Proton works with pretty many titles, but not all; I guess I am not that heavy a gamer - having a hard time getting past Kerbal Space Program 1.0 with its endless variety of fanbase mods and CKAN for mixing and matching them.
Ubuntu is pretty solid, but there are definitely still issues. Things like screen sharing on Discord etc cannot also share your sound, and it's still difficult (some cases impossible) to manage lighting and macro keys on gaming keyboards.
It's not big issues, just a series of small pains that you have to deal with repeatedly.
That's pretty much how I feel about Ubuntu as well.
It's not exciting or cool but it just works without effort.
I use Void Linux. I like how much more up to date the libraries and apllications tend to be, it's quite similar to Arch in that regard, as it's a true rolling release just like Arch.
It also tends to be very stable as well, with couple minor issues I had ever experienced got fixes within 48-ish hours. One was hugin not launching, and the other a transition issue between pipewire-media-session and wireplumber being the default.
Void uses runit for service management, and is still multithreaded despite taking a more similar approach to just plain shell scripts, and constantly monitors services. What I like about this is more much simpler services are to write compared to SystemD, and then you just put a simlink to them from /etc/sv/<name> to /etc/runit/runsvdir/default/ to enable or disable.
Void also uses their own XBPS package system, which operates similar to pacman, and is equally fast. Void is basically a rolling release like Arch, with the latest updates, but instead has a more "classic" system management style, which I for one greatly appreciate.
After nearly a decade of distro hopping, Void is where I landed for at least the past several years, and I see no reason to leave. Just sharing incase someone else out there thinks this sounds like the system for them, and if so, Take a Step Into the Void, it might be what you're looking for. That's what I like about there being so many distros, there's choice to match each one's needs.
That's another one I've heard of but never tried. Sounds pretty nice. Rathet Arch-like in a KISS approach l?
Yup! That's my kind of approach too. And Void boots just as fast. Up to date, boots very quickly AND is a install what YOU need, without tons of preloaded choices, distro. Arch and Void are at the top of my list for that reason. My personal file server runs Arch, my "client" computers run Void. I was surprised the touchscreen on my laptop (Ideapad 5 Pro, Ryzen 5600U version) worked without any configuration honestly, so hardware support is quite good on Void too.
Sounds pretty nice tbh!
Currently on Artix, but planning on changing to Gentoo soon.
I use Ubuntu currently. I was considering daily driving Debian 12 now that it works on my desktop, but I couldn't think of any significant reason to use Debian 12 instead of Ubuntu (I'm mostly just indifferent towards a certain packaging format that a vocal contingent of the linux community hates). I'd say any distro is "good for gaming" as long as it has good drivers for your GPU of choice. I've kind of just lost interest in the "latest and greatest" tech in the Linux ecosystem so LTS distros like Ubuntu (and stuff based on it) and Debian stable are what I gravitate towards now.
I've been using PopOS for about 3 years now. I found it easier to get Steam to work compared to Linux Mint (can't remember why though). I've never tried Ubuntu or non-Debian based systems.
EndeavourOS with Plasma. migrated from Manjaro after one too many questionable decision on their side.
What bugged you about Manjaro?
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.
Sure, there are some bad mistakes in there but that site feels like a personal vendetta though.
Like several others here I am using pop_os. I bought a System76 laptop though so they kind of go hand in hand.
Ubuntu 20.04lts
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
Or openSUSE Tumbleweed :)
Is Debian Testing actually rolling I thought they froze it before new stable releasea?
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.
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.
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.
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
I’ve been running Arco Linux just up till now and have switched to the new Debian 12 release. It have not been to much trouble to get my Nvidia card and Steam running. I mainly switch because of all the updates and “maintenance” that I feel is associated with a Arch system, so kinda like you said.
My main distro for years has been Mint, but I play around with a several others frequently. For me, it comes down to the package managers I feel most comfortable in (I know apt the best, but I know zypper and pacman ok enough to get by) and the window manager integration. Personally, I prefer Cinnamon and I think Mint has the best integration for it. My only complaint with Mint lately is the difficulty of getting nvidia drivers to work properly. It should be as simple as selecting the driver you want in the driver manager, but secureboot complicates things a bit.
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"
toservices.xserver.videoDrivers
. You might also need to accept unfree packages but you'll need to do that anyways for Steam.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.
It looks pretty nice straight out of the box too. You used it long?
yes. years now. I keep on trying something else but I don't have much patience now and take the easy way out.
It's pretty nice that linux has gotten far enough that we can have that luxury these days. :)
Zorin OS 16.2
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.
I'm on EndeavourOS, but my laptop will be moving to Fedora Sericea (Silverblue, but Sway) to try that out.
EOS / Arch.
I'm running Kubuntu which is just Ubuntu but with KDE Plasma instead of Gnome
Yeah, Kubuntu is real nice. Kind if wish their LTS woud be supported as long as Ubuntu LTS though.
I'd probably upgrade before it would go end of life but it still bugs me.
Nobara, Gnome version. I had tons of problems with PopOS on Nvidia GPU with a HiDPI monitor. X11 for whatever reason was completely borked when it came to gaming - I am 100% positive it was a niche issue with my machine, but it happened - and switching to Wayland also caused a bunch of issues.
Nobara worked out of the box with no struggles.
All of my workstations are now running Fedora Silverblue. Steam is installed via flatpak, and GPU is a Radeon 6800 XT. I also have a Steam Link for couch co-op. All is well on the gaming front!
Debian Sid and Arch have run equally well with this setup. Your choice of distro matters much less now compared to a few years ago, especially if you favour a flatpak workflow.
Edit: typos!
gentoo!
i love the versatility it offers, but it's very much so DIY. it has great documentation. anyone who considers themselves a "linux enthusiast" should try an install in a VM at some point or another, if nothing else it's a great learning experience.
for gaming in particular: flatpak steam / lutris / bottles. it's great because it's completely distro agnostic. i can take the $USER/.var directory and put it on any distro with flatpak installed and it'll just work.
I am starting to realize how handy flatpaks can be!
I've been distro hopping like a madman these last couple of days and it's gotten so much easier to get going with my games now!
Fedora but I'm about to move to NixOS Unstable or VanillaOS if it gets better NVIDIA integration.
I am on Vanilla OS with a NVIDIA gpu and its running pretty well.
Awesome. I've heard there are some problems with hardware acceleration.
I'm using Gentoo.
If I wanted a smooth no-tinkering experience, I'd use Ubuntu. Or hell, steamos.
Arch Linux. Been using it since long ago and play most of my games on it.
I've been using Fedora for the past few years and have been pretty happy with it. It updates at just the right cadence for me where I get new stuff pretty quickly but I'm not on a rolling release.
Been gaming on Gentoo for over a year, even if I haven't found much time for gaming in the last few months.
Don't do it if you've gotten too lazy for Arch though. Try Pop!_OS or Linux Mint or something. Enjoy an easy distro for a bit, till you get the itch for Arch back.
Oh I've tinkered with Gentoo plenty in the past (I still miss OTW if that rings any bells) and no, I really don't have the patience for it these days. :)
And yeah, I'll probably end up installing something a bit more fancy soon-ish.. for now I plopped Kubuntu 20.04 on there and Diablo IV is downloading as we speak!
I use Arch with KDE. I don't recommend Manjaro because it has historically had some serious problems, so for people who want Arch without as much hassle, I'm recommending EndeavourOS. It's what Manjaro should be like.
Most of my gaming these days is done on my Steam Deck running stock SteamOS. I also play a few games on my main Linux Mint system.
SourceMage! It's a source based distro like Gentoo. I've been using it as my main distro for a solid 10 months now, I'm very happy with it! We have flatpak so steam works great, as well as lutris and everything else. Definitely wouldn't recommend it to someone looking for simplicity though!
Or short install times. Compiling KDE takes forever. Or at least it did back when I used SourceMage, years and years ago.
Honestly, the times aren't too bad as long as you have a recent CPU! It definitely varies though - on my main PC, compiling glibc takes about 15 minutes, on my netbook that I had a smgl install on, it took about 20 hours lol
I'm on Slackware - it's a bit of a pain because Steam is 32 bit so you have to install the compat libs.
Slackware! How's that these days?
It's exactly the way it was, but with higher version numbers for all the software!
Which is how I like it if I'm going to be honest. All the other distros are too clever. They overwrite your config files or put them in dumb places. With Slackware, I know where everything is and it just works.
The binary package manager is simple but effective, even if it doesn't have dependency management. That can be a bit of a pain, but it's a small one.
The latest release is brilliant.
Are you me? Did you also use BlackArch for a while, and still use Rainmeter? :P
Ubuntu does make things easier.
I had everything set up the way I wanted it in Ubuntu the other day.. but something still itched a bit so now I'm on Tumbleweed and feeling better. :D
Though Diablo 4 tends to crash after playing it for a while.. not sure if I'd have the same issue in Ubuntu or not, might have to triple boot for a bit just to try it out. I really do want to stay here in chameleon land though so it would probably be better to just try to find the cause of the crashing.
I do think this is a pretty common thing among us linux geeks though, never really feeling content and just wanting to try everything. :)
Never did try BlackArch or Rainmeter though!
I've played around with plenty of distros though.. Slackware, Redhat, Gentoo, Arch, *buntu, SuSE (before they split into openSUSE), openSUSE, Manjaro, Endeavour OS and probably a bunch more that I can't even remember but those are probably the ones I've played around with the most.
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.
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
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?