this post was submitted on 24 Sep 2023
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Linux Gaming

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Loving PopOS but apparently I can't get the latest Nvidia driver? (Your regularly scheduled "What Distro should I use" thread) (ttrpg.network)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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Basically the title. Loving PopOS as my daily, but I understand that PopOS uses their own process and makes sure that only a checked driver gets wide release. Great for stability, less great for playing games that just came out. Is there a distro that this community generally recommends for gaming?

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[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 year ago (7 children)

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 The issue that you're coming across is plain and simple, PopOS is severly outdated.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.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Also the new Arch install script is very easy and reduces the need for Manjaro, even for new users.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I would still not recommend arch to new users or people who want a stable system

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

On the one hand, you're right. But on the other, the fuck is Windows even doing here:

The reason why it failed was that windows put my EFI partition onto a different drive than itself.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 1 year ago

I don't think a Linux installer should need to worry about Windows, frankly.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I use Manjaro, and can confirm.

Do not use Manjaro.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Friends don't let friends use Manjaro

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Garuda is great