Millions of gamers are facing a critical decision; upgrade their operating system, invest in new hardware or explore alternatives like Linux with the end of ...
Bit of misinformation on this thread, but generally the only thing that can actually get in the way of someone dedicated enough will be compatibility and security systems.
You probably won’t have any luck getting nvidia drivers on android for example, nor take the time to back port those drivers to an outdated kernel.
I suppose you could also have an OS that takes most your system resources for non-gaming tasks, making games unplayable. Something like nixos is non-gaming centric and could reasonably be more optimised than bazzite, less background processes making games actually run better on it.
Depends on what you want to play. If you want to play current games with current hardware then current kernel and drivers help a lot. A base Debian would (if it even works) probably less FPS than an current gaming distro.
A base Debian would (if it even works) probably less FPS than an current gaming distro.
Can you please elaborate on why? I’m running Debian stable with NVIDIA drivers and… it “just works”. I’m using Steam to get Proton and game content (e.g. was playing Elden Ring minutes ago). I didn’t tinker much so wondering what I could be missing.
Throw a distro like Nobara or Bazzite on and see what you get. You might have it optimized quite well, but chances are that the kernel version is far enough behind that many of the graphics tweaks aren’t compatible. nVidia open drivers have come a long way in a very short time, and they rely on newer kernels.
You should just be able to shrink a partition and dual boot between distros, or put another drive in and use that.
That being said if youre looking for performance, the last thing you’d want is open source nvidia drivers; theyre built entirely off reverse engineering, which takes time. This allows for large performance gains like those of late.
The proprietary stack hasn’t had much change in performance over the last couple updates, a couple have even result in a performance regression to push new features. As of the latest preview driver (565.77) the minimum kernel supported goes back to the 4.15 Linux kernel release. This technically means you’d be able to run the latest nvidia drivers on anything newer than Debian 10 buster, which went out of support in September 2022.
Sounds like you might have gotten some of your info sources crossed - but thats exactly why distros like Bazzite exist, you dont have to worry about any of this background compatibility bs.
Drivers are 535 on stable, cf https://wiki.debian.org/NvidiaGraphicsDrivers so it’s definitely not the very latest yet even though drivers are important I doubt (and please share benchmarks if I’m way off) there is a radical performance difference.
Oh I’m not advocating that you switch distributions. If you’re happy with performance there’s no reason to change.
The only thing that gives me pause with outdated drivers is the possibility of being exposed to unpatched security vulnerabilities. But in my experience Debian does provide updates when it’s critical.
Yeah I’m thinking bout trying something new because Nvidia just put out new drives to fix a security issue but mint hasn’t seemed to update the driver manager.
Theres a difference between stable and outdated. Generally bleeding edge will introduce many more vulnerabilities than will go unnoticed in stable.
Debian is known (almost exclusively) for only updating their repo when they’re certain it is safe, but also rapidly pushing security patches; its a server oriented distro where security is paramount.
I will say there is something to be said for out of the box experience. Im on zorin mainly because it has a lot out of the box. Granted its not a great gaming one necessarily as it is stability focused over bleeding edge but I could see ones where the gaming elements are ready right after install as being desirable.
Agreed, I’ve been running gaming-focused distros mostly because of the convenience of everything being ready and set up, but I’ve never had any issues on a non-gaming distro to set it up for gaming either.
Are there distros that are actually unsuitable for gaming, besides ones that are designed to be CLI-only or specific to antediluvian hardware?
I feel like gaming-specific distros just include stuff that you could otherwise just manually add to any other distro and make it suitable.
Bit of misinformation on this thread, but generally the only thing that can actually get in the way of someone dedicated enough will be compatibility and security systems.
You probably won’t have any luck getting nvidia drivers on android for example, nor take the time to back port those drivers to an outdated kernel.
I suppose you could also have an OS that takes most your system resources for non-gaming tasks, making games unplayable. Something like nixos is non-gaming centric and could reasonably be more optimised than bazzite, less background processes making games actually run better on it.
I have yet to find a distro that doesn’t run my favourite game
Depends on what you want to play. If you want to play current games with current hardware then current kernel and drivers help a lot. A base Debian would (if it even works) probably less FPS than an current gaming distro.
Can you please elaborate on why? I’m running Debian stable with NVIDIA drivers and… it “just works”. I’m using Steam to get Proton and game content (e.g. was playing Elden Ring minutes ago). I didn’t tinker much so wondering what I could be missing.
Throw a distro like Nobara or Bazzite on and see what you get. You might have it optimized quite well, but chances are that the kernel version is far enough behind that many of the graphics tweaks aren’t compatible. nVidia open drivers have come a long way in a very short time, and they rely on newer kernels.
You should just be able to shrink a partition and dual boot between distros, or put another drive in and use that.
That being said if youre looking for performance, the last thing you’d want is open source nvidia drivers; theyre built entirely off reverse engineering, which takes time. This allows for large performance gains like those of late.
The proprietary stack hasn’t had much change in performance over the last couple updates, a couple have even result in a performance regression to push new features. As of the latest preview driver (565.77) the minimum kernel supported goes back to the 4.15 Linux kernel release. This technically means you’d be able to run the latest nvidia drivers on anything newer than Debian 10 buster, which went out of support in September 2022.
Sounds like you might have gotten some of your info sources crossed - but thats exactly why distros like Bazzite exist, you dont have to worry about any of this background compatibility bs.
Presumably because things like Mesa and video drivers would be somewhat out of date
Drivers are 535 on stable, cf https://wiki.debian.org/NvidiaGraphicsDrivers so it’s definitely not the very latest yet even though drivers are important I doubt (and please share benchmarks if I’m way off) there is a radical performance difference.
Oh I’m not advocating that you switch distributions. If you’re happy with performance there’s no reason to change.
The only thing that gives me pause with outdated drivers is the possibility of being exposed to unpatched security vulnerabilities. But in my experience Debian does provide updates when it’s critical.
Yeah I’m thinking bout trying something new because Nvidia just put out new drives to fix a security issue but mint hasn’t seemed to update the driver manager.
Theres a difference between stable and outdated. Generally bleeding edge will introduce many more vulnerabilities than will go unnoticed in stable.
Debian is known (almost exclusively) for only updating their repo when they’re certain it is safe, but also rapidly pushing security patches; its a server oriented distro where security is paramount.
I will say there is something to be said for out of the box experience. Im on zorin mainly because it has a lot out of the box. Granted its not a great gaming one necessarily as it is stability focused over bleeding edge but I could see ones where the gaming elements are ready right after install as being desirable.
Agreed, I’ve been running gaming-focused distros mostly because of the convenience of everything being ready and set up, but I’ve never had any issues on a non-gaming distro to set it up for gaming either.