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?
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Anyone that has video drivers and flatpak should work in your case. If you dislike Ubuntu and don’t like the direction, usually poops and mint are the ones recommended.
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
I am a nobara user aswell, never encountered or heard about this issue
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
it is just nvidia card with propertiary nvidia drivers (535) and kde
Are you on a laptop using Prime Render offload? That fixes it, otherwise you probably just didn’t notice. I’d recommend you compare it to gaming on X11
Yep I am on a laptop, thats probs it (wayland)
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.
Get the Garuda gaming edition and the only real learning curve is apt vs pacman.
+1 for that. It’s a very friendly distro from what I’ve experienced
I’m currently experimenting with Garuda gnome. Pacman is frustrating for me. Games run incredibly smooth using proton I’m constantly amazed it’s this good now. I keep waiting for something to break though.
Using Garuda for 6 months now. No issues.
I have horrible luck with any OS. They always break down and require me to reinstall even with minimal usage and zero tweaks. It has one good side effect of teaching me how the system works but it is exhausting having to fix stuff that shouldn’t be breaking. I work in IT and my coworkers agree I might be cursed. Stuff works when I walk in the room for people that ask for my help which is weird. Not complaining about that. It’s just that if it’s something for me it usually breaks.
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.
I think you just answered your question
But the ads are just for Ubuntu pro, which is free for personal use so it’s more of a tip. And the Amazon part was to my knowledge just in the unity days. Not defending Canonical, just showing more of the picture
I knew “ads in the terminal” was hard to believe for some reason. I’m guessing it’s easily disabled too.
They were easily disabled, but if I wanted to spend my time disabling annoying shit that’s on by default, I’d just run Windows :p
Haha I mean fair, sort of. But if Ubuntu worked for me better than pop os in other ways, I could easily justify commenting out that line in a script or whatever
They were just MOTDs, which are few lines of text displayed on the terminal when you first launch a session. You just have to edit one line in a config somewhere to get rid of them. Annoying but not exceptionally so.
Not just MOTDs, they’re in apt now too
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I’ll +1 for LMDE here as well.
Yep. LMDE, add the kisak-mesa PPA and use Steam Flatpak and you’re off to the races
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Go with nobara.
I’m currently struggling with Nobara and the growing amount of bugs with each new kernel update.
Otherwise I would have recommended that one, since it offers some great convenient features, like a graphical management tool for all sorts of Wine versions, which can be installed in parallel. The kernel supports fsync and is tuned for low latency. Game performance is decent and I also got all my games and launchers (native Linux and also Wine) working.
For the audio part, there is pipewire, which works like a charm. There is also a compatible flatpack for DSP/equalizer which I couldn’t find it on Ubuntu’s snap store: JamesDSP. Now, after some tuning, my rather flat-sounding headphones sound do super boomy.
What are the bugs thta you have been experiencing on nobara
It started with conflicts between the preinstalled gnome extensions - namely the desktop icons broke other extensions, like Pop!_shell for window tiling. So I had to disable desktop icons.
My latest installed kernel (6.5.11) breaks screen detection - The resolution is stuck at 1024x768.
My PC gets stuck (probably on self test) after reboot or switching it on, after Nobara has shut down. Solution: Pull the power plug, wait 10 seconds, reconnect and turn it on.
I expect more to break with the next updates.
For that last one, try disabling Fast Boot in your BIOS/UEFI. That may be the culprit.
On nobara I have never had any of these issues on nvidia and on KDE.If you wanna give it a try you can even get it to look like GNOME.
Alrighty then: Now I have a reason to switch graphics cards and install Nobara on my other SSD. I bought a Radeon RX 7600 for this setup, because of AMD’s praised open-source drivers. My spare GPU is an RTX 3060, so I can actually test both worlds.
Nah AMD works much better than nvidia, my statement was meant to be like “works even on nvidia” you should definetly stay AMD
That’s what folks over here tell me, and you are most probably right. There is still one more issue scratching my head though: RayTracing performance on Cyberpunk 2077: It works great on high settings with stable 50 FPS minimum on my Windows 10 + Nvidia build, but it’s quite the opposite on this Nobara + AMD system. 5FPS and slowdowns are just unplayable. I expected the bad AMD performance being fixed by today. I think I should swap GPUs between both systems and test again.
I am also getting like 20 fps less on linux than windows, I think its just how it is with cyberpunk. Testing can’t hurt
I second Nobara, but IMO get the KDE edition of it if you’re used to Windows. You’ll feel much more at home.
You could’ve at least read his post first?
What about it? OP is asking for a distro recommendation.
if you’re used to Windows.
While OP writes, in his first sentence:
I’ve been using Ubuntu as my daily driver for a good few years now.
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 Steam 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. 😅
Endevour os for me. No issues on kde nvidia and wayland, pretty straightforward installation. If I were you I’d do some distro hopping in the new PC. I’d try one of those ublue images, then nobara then endevour and see what you prefer.
Big second for EndeavourOS. I loved Linux mint early in my distro adventures, but I had issues, sometimes steam wouldn’t launch. Sometimes my secondary monitor would lag out every minute or so. So I tried nobara, which was okay, but never fell in love with it.
Enter EndeavourOS. In over six months I’ve had one instance of a broken package hampering my experience. I keep a backup of important files on an external drive, so I just nuked it and reinstalled. I also use BTRFS and timeshift-autosnap, so if a package does create issues, now I can just boot to an older snapshot from grub and wait to update that package until the issue has cleared up.
In the same vein of an “easier” Arch install, maybe also look @ CachyOS.
Gaming on Wayland with Nvidia is straight up not enjoyable for games running through XWayland due to this bug. This affects all games running with Proton/Wine, Steam, Discord, Firefox without MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1 environment variable and many more
Personally I haven’t had that issue. I had lots of issues with latest 545 but downgraded to 535 and it’s all good so far.
It doesn’t happen on Systems using Prime Render offlading. Are you playing on a laptop?
Endeavor is fine. But when it came to performance I had a number of issues. By default it put my i7 into power save. One could use core control to put it back into on demand or something more reasonable after every boot. Or go in and change the configs manually which I did. But that’s still beyond people in general. Also for whatever reason if I had more than one app actively using the GPU. Say blender open using GPU, accelerated cycles etc. And another window open doing something with OpenGL and Vulcan. I would get the whole system hanging under x11. I’d have to drop to the terminal. And kill all of it off and restart it again. And not just isolated. It was heavily repeatable.
I ended up giving Garuda a try. CPU scheduler is much more same out of the box. Graphics card support under x11 and Wayland has been rock solid as well.
They’re both arch. And it is all personal anecdotes on isolated systems. So make of it what you will. I like both systems though and actually have computers running both
Yeah, I also gave garuda a try but it was too messy for my taste, like I had to spend time un-costumizing kde because I just wanted vanilla plasma.
Oh god yeah. I forgot about that. I applied all my normal look and mods within minutes of getting to the desktop the first time lol. After that it’s been great
Not much a of a definitive answer here imo. There’s a lot of distros that fit this criteria, but I would definitely stay away from Debian due to the age of the packages. As said, you don’t have to go with a rolling distro but at least look for those who keep at least their gaming related packages fairly updated.
The tough part about Arch & similar rolling distros is that they can and will break when you update something, and then you have to know how to fix it. I used Manjaro & EndeavourOS for quite a while. Manjaro was actually stable for me, but when I wanted to reinstall after a couple years to switch to btrfs I thought I try EndeavourOS, due to the criticism towards Manjaro. Unfortunately it didn’t even took a year for it to break and now I’m on Nobara, which is okay but also has many issues that annoy me. OpenSUSE Tumbleweed is another often mentioned one, which is rolling but with a delay too, but when I tried it out (before installing Nobara) it was extremely hard to install as the installer was buggy and when it finally was installed it was extremely broken to the point where I couldn’t even change my resolution properly.
Fedora Atomic, especially Bazzite.
Bazzite is a project of uBlue, which is Fedora Silverblue with a lot of gaming stuff on top, similar to Nobara or the tweaks on the Steam Deck.
It has the same big advantage of every other immutable distro, that you don’t have to manage your system yourself. It updates without you noticing, will never break, you can easily roll back if something doesn’t work as intended, and so on.
The cool thing is, that you can just rebase to another atomic variant if you don’t like it, or when you realize, that every gaming distro is just as capable for gaming as every other conventional distro too.
I have EndeavourOS, but with the nature of Bleeding Edge packages, things can break, so setup automatic snapshots with btrfs (you want this for your data anyways).
Bleeding Edge packages have the advantage of you getting the latest features, patches and improvements, which is required for some gaming cases.
I use Arch + Gnome with VRR patches on my main PC.
It find it actually easier to use than e.g. fedora or ubuntu due to better documentation and way more available packages in the repos… With many, many more packages being in AUR!
By installing all the stuff commonly found on other distros (and which many consider bloat), you’ll get basically the same thing as, well, any other distro. I have all the “bloat” like NetworkManager, Gnome, etc. which is known to work together very well and which tries to be smart and auto-configure a lot of stuff. Bloat it may be, but I am lazy~
Personally, I think it’s better to stick to upstream distros whenever possible. For example Nobra, which is being recommended in this thread quite a lot, is maintained by a single person. In reality, it’s not much more than regular Fedora with a couple of tweaks and optimizations. Vast majority of those one could do themselves on the upstream distro and avoid being dependent that one person. It is a single point of failure. after all.
Honestly Arch (and the more pure Arch derivatives like Endeavour) is fantastic as long as things don’t break, and I’ve never had anything break that wasn’t more complicated than updating my mirror list or forcibly uninstalling a conflicting package. There’s always the potential for something more serious to go wrong, but having the Arch wiki is such a fantastic resource.
That valve uses Arch is irrelevant in all honesty. Proton is not a Valve product, Valve is merely one of its users and contributors, and it is not wedded to one distro…Similarly Valves own Steam packages are not distro specifi, and there are other gaming platforms to consider which also benefit from Proton (for example you can get Gog windows games working in Linux too quite easily), as well as all the Retro gaming options.
Pick a distro you personally like. I use Mint as I like the cinnamon desktop interface and the distro is pretty much good to go from fresh install. I use Mint both as a dual install with Windows on my PC and also within VMs in Windows. I still spend a lot of time using Windows because of specific games compatibility and work related apps.
EndeavourOS seems a good choice if you do want to go the Arch route but it’s only something I’ve played with in a VM.
If you want something gaming specific then Draugar seems like a good choice - it apparently uses Ubuntu LTS but with the mainline Kernel updates optimised for gaming. But I have no personal experience with the distro.
I also see a lot of people seem to like Pop!_OS, but again no personal experience.
I’ve had no issues with Mint on my setup.
Proton is most certainly a mission critical Valve product. But, yeah, use whatever. I swear by Fedora.
Exactly. Proton is Valve’s name for their WINE-based product. It’s basically WINE with some patches to work with the Valve ecosystem.
It’s also largely community driven, but that didn’t make it not a Valve product, Valve still controls what goes in and what doesn’t after all (which is why projects like Glorious Eggroll’s proton builds are so prevalent, sometimes you want to try stuff Valve hasn’t approved yet).
Proton is developed by valve, with help from the company behind wine.
