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 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.
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If you are using flatpacks it would reduce the dependency on out of date system packages.
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.
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 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
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’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.
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
