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’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
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:
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.
It doesn't really matter what distro you go with, just don't go with something like Debian Stable because of how old their packages are. You don't need a rolling release system, but you also don't want something too old because of performance reasons.
If you are using flatpacks it would reduce the dependency on out of date system packages.
That's fair.
Pop OS works great for me. It's Ubuntu minus snaps and imo some of the rough edges
Plus it can support Nvidia out of the box.
Good point. I had a lot of trouble with my Nvidia card before switching to pop os. I ended up switching to AMD anyhow, but the reason I even landed on pop os was this fact.
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
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.
I am a nobara user aswell, never encountered or heard about this issue
Nobara is specifically customized for gaming, created by Glorious Eggroll (from Proton-GE) himself, with specific packages which he tells you not to install as flatpak so you don't lose the optimizations he made.
Debian is exactly pike Ubuntu, with all bullshit ~~removed~~ never added
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.
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
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 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.
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.
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.
Fedora or Nobara if you're lazy are a good option. If an immutable variant appeals, I have a good time on Kinoite. There is a gaming centric ublue version now too IIRC
Mint is based on Ubuntu, removing corporate shinanigans.
Realistically just use what you prefer. The differences between distros, even when it comes to performance, are very small when it comes to gaming. The most important things IMO are good Wayland support, stability, and consistent updates.
I always recommend Linux Mint Debian edition. I don't use it, but I've had friends who've had good luck with it. Straight Debian is a great choice as well. If packages aren't new enough, you can always use testing and keep a really stable experience.
It honestly doesn't matter much which you pick unless you're using the absolute latest hardware or something. I personally use OpenSUSE Tumbleweed, which has worked really well for me. I don't recommend it because there just isn't as much help available online specific to the OS, so I tend to recommend more mainstream distros. I used Arch for a few years before I switched, and Tumbleweed feels pretty much the same, but with less fiddling.
Anyway, regardless of what you pick, feel free to come back and ask questions. Most problems have similar solutions regardless of distro because Linux is Linux, so please don't hesitate to ask.
Garuda or Chimera, depending on what you want, exactly.
Personally, I really like Garuda Linux and CachyOS for Gaming. You can also check out ChimeraOS or uBlue Bazzite if you want something closer to the Steam Deck.
Linux Mint Debian Edition and Fedora are some general recommendations of mine. Nobara is a fork of Fedora optimized for Gaming.
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