Lately I’ve been suggesting Mint or PopOS for laymans looking to swap to linux, but do any of you know of any good gaming distros with a driver manager GUI built in ala Mint?
I’ve tested most gaming distros with latest (nvidia) hardware and they do not run most major titles out of the box due to driver issues. If there were a gui for driver rollbacks while having great general performance, I could see it beating out Mint/PopOS for my recommendation. Being able to install .deb files is quite nice for laymans too, though I don’t know of any other deb based OSes that run well out of the box.
What does a driver manager do that isn’t solved with a normal (graphical) package manager? Automatically picking the correct one for your GPU?
Yeah, thats useful for laymen / people that dont want to tinker a whole lot
A driver manager will not make the problems inherent to Nvidia’s crappy proprietary drivers that need workarounds go away.
If you don’t want to tinker a whole lot, buy a GPU from a vendor that hasn’t been actively hostile to its users for decades and is well supported by Linux and the freedesktop such as AMD.
No AMD GPU user has a need for anything resembling a “driver manager”.
I don’t know how “bleeding edge” it is, but Nobara is a good gaming distro maintained by GloriousEggroll (the maker of the GE versions of Proton on Steam) that also has a GUI driver manager. It’s based on Fedora, so you’re not gonna have the absolute latest stuff 100% right now as you might with Arch, but it will likely be ahead of anything Debian or Ubuntu based. The one drawback in my short experience with it so far is that the package manager sucks for exploring stuff or locating packages if you don’t know the package name, it’s just an alphabetical list you search through by name.
But as has been said elsewhere in this thread, if you’re having driver issues with new Nvidia stuff, you may just be SOL until the Nvidia driver support in general catches up, no matter the distro.
Bazzite is a Fedora Atomic-based gaming distro. You cannot rollback your drivers separately, but you can rollback your whole system image, as it is an immutable distro.
Been running it for two months and it’s magic. Also on my deck. Fantastic software.
Garuda is what you’re looking for, Arch base with performance tweaks and usually bleeding edge kernals officially supported. Comes in 2013 rgb gamer wet dream, and normal flavors. Also works out of the box with Nvidia(as long as you let it load with proprietary drivers). Doesn’t have deb support obviously but snap and flatpack are fairly normie friendly these days.
GUI doesn’t matter. AMD will always be simpler right now. Nvidia still has all kinds of issues. I think what you want to know is which distro has the fewest issues with Nvidia drivers? Just a guess.
GUI absolutely does matter for helping adoption of linux, I’m not interested in hearing arguments to the contrary either. Everything should be as GUI’d as possible if we want linux to grow
It does not.
The GUI just relegates all commands to the CLI tools under the hood.
