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?
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 The issue that you’re coming across is plain and simple, PopOS is severly outdated.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.
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
The kind of game-specific fixes that get added to GPU drivers on Windows are typically added to Proton, not the Linux GPU drivers. Waiting a week for the Nvidia driver so you can be sure it won’t break your system is only a plus in this instance.
Nobara Linux. It’s a fedora derivative that’s focused for gaming, with regular updates. It even comes with all the important things like Steam and Feral Gamemode installed. Make sure to download the Nvidia version if you have an Nvidia GPU.
SteamOS is based on arch linux, and I joke that when someone merge a pull request on github, Arch starts to build their package.
EndevourOS is basically arch linux for beginners, they have their own repositories but just for some tools, just cool stuff.
About Manjaro I would recommend to not use it, not because of the reasons’ ppl common raise, for me, it was actually good when I used it, but they try to be “stable” as PopOS in their default branch, so you will never get the latest stuff.
I don’t like Nobara because it is based on Fedora, a semi-rolling-release distro, so some packages don’t update regularly and wait until next release, they probably update everything related to graphics and games but I do not only play games on my machine, I never used Nobara tho.
Said that, I play a lot more than I should, and I use EndevourOS.
As someone that was on a straight Arch install for years I’ve come to appreciate Manjaro + their holding back of non-critical updates for a couple weeks for additional testing. Between that and sticking to LTS kernel versions I’ve run into way fewer issues (not that being on the bleeding edge for updates was that bad, but problems certainly came up occasionally).
Here’s my takes:
- Ubuntu and derivatives are just FINE
- Fedora derivatives have been problematic since F38 for various reasons
- Arch is very good, has an immense of knowledge in their docs and forums, but requires you be already adept to keep it rolling smoothly
- Endeavor is supposed to be an easier to manage Arch experience, but I’m not sure you’ll be escaping any Nvidia issues.
Fedora is fine, but you want to use flatpak firefox to get easy hardware accelerated video decoding if you’re on an AMD GPU.
I have a lot of love lost with canonical and their shenanigans over the years.
