cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/16149785

Cross-posting here for more opinions.

Gentlemen, just for context, I usually use Linux. I have been a user of Debian, Ubuntu, and Fedora for a few years.

Recently, I acquired a decent graphics card (GeForce RTX 4070) and decided to uninstall my Windows and install Linux.

I saw that Pop!_OS already has an image with everything pre-configured for Nvidia. Is this pre-configuration worth it, are the games more stable on this distribution, or is it the same as manually installing Nvidia’s proprietary drivers on Manjaro?

  • yala@discuss.online
    363·
    6 months ago

    Why are you even considering Manjaro?

    If gaming is the priority, then I honestly don’t think anything out there can beat Bazzite in terms of ease of use, ‘hands-off’-ness, robustness and stability.

    Honorable mentions include: Nobara and Pop!_OS.

    • governorkeagan@lemdro.idEnglish
      5·
      6 months ago

      How’s Bazzite if gaming is not your main “thing”? I use my PC for work and video editing but I also enjoy gaming on the weekends if I get the chance. I’m happy with EndeavourOS, just curious.

      • yala@discuss.online
        5·
        6 months ago

        In your case it’s still an excellent choice.

        Though, other opinionated images by uBlue (like e.g. Aurora and Bluefin) do deserve a mention. I’m on Bluefin (through secureblue to be more precise) as I desired more hardening than what Fedora offers by default.

        The excellent part is also that it’s possible to rebase to another branch without reinstalling. So, let’s say you’re actually interested in experiencing these different images without going through the installation process over and over again. Then, you simple enter the following command:

        rpm-ostree rebase ...

        With ... being replaced by whatever is required for the image and/or branch you’re interested in. Then, simply reboot, (pro-tip: make a new user account and through the new user account) experience the other image. Rinse and repeat to your heart’s content.

      • azvasKvklenko@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        5·
        6 months ago

        Bazzite is Fedora os-tree immutable distro. It allows installing RPMs but it’s not nearly as flexible as traditional distros. That being said, you can still do basically everything, but not always straightforward. If you need a C/C++ dev env with toolchain and what not, you better of using something like Distrobox or your custom Podman/Docker containers for that.

        • Lem453@lemmy.ca
          4·
          6 months ago

          Aurora dev edition is the bazzite equivalent for devs. Containers built right into the terminal (ptyxis).

        • Croquette@sh.itjust.works
          2·
          6 months ago

          I don’t have a lot of time these days, so my PC is mostly used for gaming at the moment. So I am not too worried about the OS being immutable if the gaming is good out of the box.

          I still keep a kubuntu os and dual boot the other os I want to try on another ssd.

      • yala@discuss.online
        4·
        6 months ago

        The answer found here should give my general thoughts.

        But, with embedded dev, I’d argue that both Aurora and Bluefin (with their respective DX: (i.e. development friendly) variants) should make more sense.

        • Croquette@sh.itjust.works
          3·
          6 months ago

          I am mostly gaming these days but a few months a year, there is a 3d printed project with some embedded components so I’d like the distro to be relatively easy to use in those cases.

          Thanks for the explanation.

  • Archaeopteryx@kbin.run
    141·
    6 months ago

    It usually doesn’t matter which distribution you use for gaming. Most of major ones are perfectly fitted for gaming. I am using openSUSE Tumbleweed and there is no difference to e.g. Arch or Ubuntu when it comes to gaming.

  • boredsquirrel@slrpnk.net
    10·
    6 months ago

    Pop!_OS by far.

    Note that NVIDIA ships proprietary, out of tree drivers.

    No Linux Distro really supports NVIDIA as they cannot fix the drivers, as they are proprietary.

    Manjaro is weird semi-rolling with a criticised mechanism of holding back packages without real testing (which might be outdated info).

    PopOS is based off Ubuntu LTS, a stable distro and the most common Linux variant.

    Stable distros will not break the NVIDIA stuff. NVIDIA doesnt care about rolling release etc, and Distros need to not break it, as they can package them but not fix them.

    Yes, Bazzite using Fedora Atomic is very nice through the inherent stability of the OS distribution model.

    But they rely on rpmfusion, an external repo packaging the proprietary NVIDIA stuff for Fedora. The repo is not supported by Fedora, and the drivers cannot be fixed by anyone.

    Keep that in mind. NVIDIA sucks.

    • yala@discuss.online
      4·
      6 months ago

      But they rely on rpmfusion, an external repo packaging the proprietary NVIDIA stuff for Fedora. The repo is not supported by Fedora, and the drivers cannot be fixed by anyone.

      Not sure what you’re trying to say here. Would you mind elaborating? FWIW, Bazzite’s model (by default) allows automatic fixes to be applied to a broken driver without requiring any manual intervention from its user.

      • boredsquirrel@slrpnk.net
        2·
        6 months ago

        allows automatic fixes to be applied to a broken driver without requiring any manual intervention from its user.

        If you get an update, and after that update your system doesnt graphically boot anymore or something, you can use sudo ostree admin pin 1 and rpm-ostree rollback to switch back to the working version and make sure it never disappears.

        Then you can wait for a next update (still no good update info mechanism afaik) to fix it, try it, unpin the saved version and go on.

        But there is no automatic repair voodoo anywhere, on any distro. That driver is proprietary, only NVIDIA can fix it. rpmfusion packages it to work on Fedora, Fedora Atomic helps making this very unstable mechanism more failsafe.

        But you are still relying on 3 entities (NVIDIA, rpmfusion, Fedora, (uBlue)), with NVIDIA not caring about Linux that much, instead of 1 (Fedora) like with AMD, where drivers are FOSS and can be adapted for Fedora specifically.

        AMD does not opensource a lot, and ROCM or the entire amdgpu-pro driver is a similar situation. But at least the basics work.

        • yala@discuss.online
          3·
          6 months ago

          But there is no automatic repair voodoo anywhere, on any distro. That driver is proprietary, only NVIDIA can fix it.

          Consider to revisit this, cuz this is basically (at least for me) most of uBlue’s schtick:

          “No more building drivers on your laptop, dealing with signing, akmods, third party repo conflicts, or any of that. We’ve fully automated it so that if there’s an issue, we fix it in GitHub, for everyone.”

          And the way it’s setup, is so that you don’t get the broken update ever on your device in the first place.

          So, contrary to what you might expect, this black magic (or just excellent engineering) somehow does exist.

          • boredsquirrel@slrpnk.net
            2·
            6 months ago

            uBlue does not repair anything, they dont automatically detect a broken driver on your system and block an update.

            This would be possible, but slow down boot (running some GPU benchmark on every boot via a systemd service, if it fails run the commands that I mentioned).

            rpm-ostree is awesome, and has the potential to do that.

            you don’t get the broken update ever on your device in the first place.

            In theory yes, but this would mean uBlue is some kind of stable distro. I dont know, at least their base images just get updates.

            Their big advantage is that they dont have the legal restrictions, so they can ship 1:1 the system you run. I dont know if they do, but having some automated benchmark tests on real hardware with these devices would be useful.

            But that costs a lot of money. uBlues trick is that they can run their whole huge project for free on Github.

            But for sure, the dependency issues will not occur. But this does not guarantees that there are no issues on bare metal.

            Or a stable branch, Bazzite was longer on F39 for example. I use the :latest branch which automatically gets upgraded to the latest version, which they determine. So having an :testing branch that is up to date, and slowing down the releases of the latest branch, could help.

            • yala@discuss.online
              3·
              6 months ago

              I think we’re misunderstanding eachother. So perhaps consider to outline if you agree with the following:

              • uBlue has some systems in place that enable it to detect some breakages.
              • uBlue’s pipeline is such to not ship you the detected breakages.
              • After a method has been found to fix a breakage (or other issues), uBlue’s maintainers implement these fixes and then, the very next update, the users will receive an image that contains both the updated package and the fixes required for it to not cause problems. Heck, the user didn’t know anything was up in the first place. They didn’t notice a thing*.
              • uBlue’s issue/problem detect systems are not absolute; things might slip through.
              • However, Nvidia drivers will not cause breakage that will make you shiver in fear.
              • uBlue does not fix it on your device. They fix the image and that fixed image will deliver you the fix built-in; so manual intervention are a thing of the past (except for edge cases).
              • Their pipeline does not require nor does it detect (through telemetry or whatsoever) the breakage on the device of the user. Heck, as implied earlier, most breakages are detected, prevented from shipping broken, fixed, ship the fixed one before any end user is disturbed by it.
              • uBlue is not a Stable system (i.e. it does not freeze packages (apart from security updates) until the next major release). So yes, you receive updates all the time.
              • Not being tied to legal restrictions is cool. However, a lot of derivatives do this. So this can’t be its unique selling point.
              • uBlue is not entirely free. Its maintainers do pay money for providing some of their services (as has been mentioned by Jorge).
              • Some of their images do have testing branch; even Bazzite has.
              • boredsquirrel@slrpnk.net
                4·
                6 months ago

                Yes agreed.

                I didnt know they have testing images, but makesbsense in their flagship variants.

                I miss the old website with the full image list.

                • yala@discuss.online
                  2·
                  6 months ago

                  Thank you for contributing so that people don’t misunderstand!

                  I didnt know they have testing images, but makesbsense in their flagship variants.

                  You can verify it yourself from here.

                  Though, with all that’s mentioned above; do you still think Pop!_OS is better than Bazzite for Nvidia?

      • boredsquirrel@slrpnk.net
        1·
        5 months ago

        The tree refers to the Linux kernel Git repo. On Linux normally all drivers are in there.

        I think that is a pretty crazy concept, but it kinda gives trust and if it is in there is will likely not break.

        Out of tree means the driver is not compiled in (like BTRFS on RHEL distros) or cannot even be included as it is proprietary or else (NVIDIA, Displaylink, Virtualbox).

        These drivers are added locally using kmods OR akmods, I dont know the difference and never used it.

        uBlue adds some drivers during the build process which is pretty cool. So even though it is out of tree, it gets centrally included and if it breaks you dont get the update.

      • ryannathans@aussie.zone
        2·
        6 months ago

        I run amd and still pick pop. Ubuntu compatibility with out of the box working experience, with no snaps, no canonical package repos, optimised scheduler for gaming performance, QA team testing every system update like kernel and mesa and excellent developers that even provide support on lemmy? Can’t go wrong with pop

  • imnapr@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
    41·
    6 months ago

    If you liked Debian, definitely Pop as it’s basically Debian but with easier to install nvidia drivers. But also if you liked using Fedora, I’d consider Nobara, it’s a distro maintained by a Redhat engineer and has an nvidia image like Pop OS. Stay tf away from Manjaro, you might wanna look into EndeavorOS if you want Arch for gaming