I am not bad with computers and have a beginner+, maybe intermediate level knowledge of Linux and I kept running into some problems here and there with different distros. Most claimed to work out of the box (which may be the case for some users, but I have a shit ass Nvidia 1060 and that was not at all the case, until I installed Nobara KDE/Nvidia.
Just came here to potentially save someone time, this shit is actually working out of the box, closest experience to this was with Arch, but that’s definitely not out of the box.
.,
Just responding to say I love your username OP lmao
MX Linux was nearly effortless
Nice job! If you can get the nvidia driver installed properly, any distro should work in theory.
On Ubuntu: https://ubuntu.com/server/docs/nvidia-drivers-installation
On Pop!_OS it should be already installed by default
I’ve been hearing good things about Nobara, Ill have to try it out!
Yeah, POP has its nvidia version that comes with it installed. I was using that til I switched to AMD and just reinstalled the OS instead of dealing with removing the nvidia stuff.
From my experience, it might be better to try gaming on a stable distro rather than a gaming distro to get a better feel for Linux first. Seems you already have some experience of that already, so here are the gaming distros I’ve tried and some thoughts about them. Keep in mind I’ve been using AMD stuff for my latest computers, but I do have an Nvidia laptop that I don’t game much on but often run the same distro on.
Solous was the first gaming distro I’ve tried, might be close to ten years ago, so memory is kinda fuzzy. But it had support for most of the things you needed for gaming out of the box back then, which was rare. Development on it kinda went into a standstill or something, which made me go distro jumping.
Manjaro was where I ended up. Most everything worked out of the box. I ran it for a long time, but there are some problems in how it’s being managed. The Arch but not Arch approach made it feel unstable sometimes. So when I made a new computer, I distro jumped again.
Nobara which build on Fedora was much more stable than Manjaro had been for me. I had no real problems with it. Lots of patches and tweaks to make gaming a smoother experience build in. But I’ve stated eyeing the atomic OS that had been pooping up. The benefit of not having to run a custom-made updater every time you wanted to update made me do the latest jump.
Bazzite is built on an atomic Fedora, so some settings and tweaks are a bit harder to do. But the benefit is that updates are automatic, and it comes with a lot of good tools and guides on how to work with an atomic OS. As a power user, you will have to familiarize yourself with containers to get full use of it. I’m not gonna lie, the out-of-the-box experience was a bit smother on Nobara, but I don’t really see me going back.
Pop!_OS I’ve never really given it a good chance. I did try it for shorter periods, a couple of years apart. One time I just did not like its default windows manager and another it did not have support for my GPU.
Be careful with Nobara. I’ve also used it for a bit (fedora 38 base) and had an easier time setting it up than fedora 39. It disables most security features to get better performance. Besides that, it’s only developed by one dude and primarily for personal use, so when it went from 38 to 39 he just completely dropped his gnome config, broke the upgrade in so many ways, and switched to kde. Also it didn’t have an upgrade notification and I had to accidentally learn that a new major version came out.
Dropped it after that because it doesn’t inspire confidence, no matter how important GE is for gaming on Linux. I’d rather spend at most an hour setting up MX (Debian) for gaming.
I tried Nobara and quickly ran into the lone developer problem when it didn’t support secure boot. I don’t really see the point of secure boot when the machine will still accept any USB I stick in there, but most other distros seem to handle it. I didn’t want to spend a lot of time working on it and later find other unsupported things.
So I switched to Bazzite, which other people keep recommending, and that seems to work fine. AMD GPU over here tho, YMMV.
Nobara was my first attempt at leaving windows for good and it was great until it wasn’t. I went a few months without ever booting windows but started having issues when I bought a new gpu. I went from Nvidia to AMD and everything I read online said you just install the AMD gpu, nothing else needed to be done. Every game I tried to play and would crash within 20 minutes every single time. I eventually got so frustrated that I just booted windows, ran DDU, downloaded adrenaline and I was up and running. After I got settled in, I nuked nobara and installed bazzite and haven’t had a single issue since.
I’ve seen this recommendation a few times now, this is working flawlessly for now, so I’ll keep running it, but if and when it doesn’t, I’ll try this out. I gotta say, as a whole, installing most of these has been a breeze, and none of them have had the annoyances that comes with a fresh windows install (do you wanna be tracked, do you want ads, wheres your acct, are you sure you wanna not use edge, etc.)
Good to hear I might be on a painless track! I’m also really loving the idea of rpm-ostree. Kinda interested in setting up one of those automatic builds, just to learn.
I agree with you. Every time I would encounter a distro that “works out of the box” only for it to crash and make me lose all the files in my hard drive.
Until I installed manjaro KDE. I haven’t had any crashes so far, I’ve been using it for months!
I know people say that Manjaro sucks and etc, but it’s the only one I’ve used that doesn’t crash, how am I gonna use something the community says is better if I don’t know if it will crash 2 months down the line?
I’ve been using Linux for 15+ years and it never corrupted my data. Even if it completely breaks you can always (arch)chroot and recover everything.
PopOS is, in my opinion, the easiest distro to use to get Nvidia cards working without a sweat (as long as you install the Nvidia ISO). I don’t use PopOS anymore, been on Fedora now for almost 2 years, and have had 0 issues with my 3050 after installing the drivers, but it does take a bit of configuring to get there.
Yeah IIRC with Pop!OS it just asks you if you have an Nvidia card during install, and then it takes care of it all for you. I run it on my desktop machine and have had no issues so far.
Although word of caution, they’re supposed to be transitioning to the brand new COSMIC desktop environment sometime this year, so I don’t know if that will cause any instability.
Those are wise words of caution. Anyone planning on getting or staying on PopOS should heed those words.
6 for gaming? There are only a few real serious Distros: Fedora, Opensuse, Debian, Ubuntu and MX/Mint/Arch(all in the same category). From what Ive seen there is only 1 serious distro: Nobara. That comes with Kernel Patches.
How dare you not use the same distro as me. Just kidding. Glad you found one that works for you. :)
uBlue Bazzite is pretty cool, Fedora/Nobara, Pop!_OS, Mint, etc. mostly just work, Gauda is arch-based, is optimized for gaming and performance and is pretty user friendly.
A ton of people recommended it, so I went ahead and installed it this morning, same if not better result than Nobara and just as easy to install.
