this post was submitted on 24 Sep 2023
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Linux Gaming
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Nobara is pretty good for a "just works" gaming-centric distro. The issue that you're coming across is plain and simple, PopOS is severly outdated. Most of System76's dev team are likely working on COSMIC.
If you want the absolute most, contiuously up-to-date packages, then I can't recommend anything other than Arch. I've used it as my daily driver for a little over 2 years now and I've always come crawling back if I try something else. Gaming on it isn't a hassle, most of the time it just works, not to be a stereotypical Arch user but do read the Wiki. Arch was also my first ever distro, a friend got me into it.
If Arch is a bit dawnting for you then something Arch-based is just as good, from experience I recommend EndeavourOS. Do not use Manjaro.
I second the "Do not use manjaro". It has incredibly many issues that arch doesn't have and the only advantage is that it comes with an installer.
Arch with nvidia is a bit of a pain though. The nvidia driver updates break my system or some games every 1-2 months.
Also the new Arch install script is very easy and reduces the need for Manjaro, even for new users.
I disagree, it just does the steps in the manual for you. You still need to know what's happening.
I tried using it, got a bunch of python stack traces and eventually decided to do it manually. The reason why it failed was that windows put my EFI partition onto a different drive than itself.
An installer needs to catch stuff like that, so archinstall is beta at best.
On the one hand, you're right. But on the other, the fuck is Windows even doing here:
It's windows. It always does absolutely asinine shit like this. It's only getting worse as time goes on, so the earlier you switch to a proper OS, the better.
I don't think a Linux installer should need to worry about Windows, frankly.
I would still not recommend arch to new users or people who want a stable system
Tell me if I'm wrong or that's not what you meant. But your Nvidia problem should go away as soon as you use nvidia-dkms (or nvidia-open-dkms) instead of the regular nvidia package (or nvidia-open). I haven't had any problems (of that kind) in a long time.
I use Manjaro, and can confirm.
Do not use Manjaro.
Friends don't let friends use Manjaro
I did my personal yearly “year of the linux distro” litmus test with Nobara and I had many problems tbh, two of the most notable ones were fullscreen video stuttering and shader cache stutters.
So I was like, we are getting close, but I am not sold.
Then I decided to try arch and shit just works tbh, basically no issues with stuff I play usually, the biggest struggle was getting Battle.net up and all it took was changing proton version on steam to get it installing.
On my gaming rig I run and love Garuda, which is also based on Arch. I’m technical enough to handle Arch but I don’t like having to search around a bunch to figure out which combination of packages I need to make certain things work. Garuda comes with a ton of stuff preinstalled, which makes it a lot less lean than Endeavour, but I think they generally make good choices for default settings (I love their Fish terminal setup), and things like Nvidia drivers and configuration backups through btrfs snapshots just work out of the box.
For gaming I think Garuda or Nobara are the best bets, personally.
"severly outdated"? You mean updated kernel, mesa, NVIDIA and other important packages?
https://github.com/pop-os/linux/pull/282 https://github.com/pop-os/nvidia-graphics-drivers/pull/191 https://github.com/pop-os/mesa/pull/18
Garuda is great
The more I read the more I think I should switch from Linux mint to arch. Never tried it before.
My server is running Ubuntu but I want to switch to NixOS. So switching Linux mint to arch sounds right.