Let me start by saying I think Linux Mint is one of the top 5 greatest distros of all time. It is an absolutely essential starting point for many people and their work is responsible for much of the user-friendliness you see in the world of Linux today. It is stable, has a nice aesthetic, “just works”, and doesn’t make you update constantly.
These things are great but they are the very things that make Linux Mint unsuited for online gaming. Is this a bad thing? No!! It’s just not a distro made for gaming purposes. It’s like showing up to a monster truck drag race in a Ferrari. I cannot count on my two hands how many times I have provided support to a user, to find their issue was outdated libraries due to using Linux Mint. It happens all the time. Go look at any game on ProtonDB that is currently working, and you’ll find 1-2 “not working” reports and they are always on either Debian on Mint.
I understand why we see it so often, because Linux Mint is awesome and users want to play their games on it. But if I suggested Hell Let Loose to a friend using Linux Mint right now, the first distro suggested for gaming in our FAQ, he wouldn’t be able to play because of his choice of distro. Making rolling distros look like a fortress in 2023 and suggesting Mint for gaming will only set new Linux users up for disappointment.
Distros aren’t designed to do anything, “gaming distros” are a giant meme.
This just once more highlights the problem with application distribution on Linux. Flatpak is far from perfect, but just use it for Steam and it’ll be virtually the same on every distro. I game on fucking Alpine. Bottles is mainly distributed as a Flatpak as well and Lutris has a Flatpak build too. Mangohud, ProtonUp Qt, vkBasalt, Protontricks and so on are available as well.
Added benefit: You can adjust permissions, which is nice for proprietary applications (see the recent minecraft debacle).
What is the Minecraft permissions issue?
I was referring to some incident a while back, where popular minecraft mods were infected with malware, and a while before that the log4j java vulnerability that also affected minecraft.
Point being, with flatpak you can restrict the programs permission like file and device access which will protect you from things like that.
Also privacy, because i’d rather keep things like Epic Games and Ubisoft Connect contained if i can help it.
Gaming distros are only a meme if you think you’ll get more FPS.
Many of them do provide a simplified experience for “gamers” as despite the stereo type they aren’t very tech savvy.
Garuda for example starts you off with a set of software choices with explanations and one click installs on setup. It also has its own “garuda-update” script that takes even more work off the user, an example being when Arch had that grub issue most garuda users didn’t as the script reinstalls grub when there’s an update.
Try and tell me a “gamer” isn’t going to have an easier time on Garuda or Nobara compared to things like vanilla Arch, Fedora, Mint, Debian, Ubuntu, etc.
No they aren’t magic but what they do is take things we can do our selves and automate that for those who can’t.
It really depends on the “gamer”. Arch is the best distro for people who play MMORPGs and mod their games a lot.
MMORPGs because basically, you start with like 3 abilities in your rotation, and this eventually becomes like 20 abilities to maximize DPS, just like Arch starts with bare minimum, and as you learn to use it you get more comfy with it like you get comfy with a large rotation.
I honestly think people’s mileage may HEAVILY vary on this of course, but dropping a bunch of shit on an end user at once is like if you kicked someone into an MMORPG mid-expansion, rushed them to level 60 by way of a special item, and said “hey, decipher all this bullshit you’ve had no practice with that we dumped on you all at once, and if you don’t maximize DPS your team is gonna yell at you”. I think this is the folly of some “beginner distros” that include a bunch of shit by default. “where is microsoft word, what in the fuck is a Libreoffice? I haven’t googled anything or practiced in a smaller scale yet and I’m overwhelmed!”
All these issues boil down to the fundamental problems of linux.
Fragmentation, especially when it comes to application distribution. The classic package managers might work well for foss, but not for complex and proprietary crap like Steam and games.
If there will ever be a proper solution to the problem, so people can reliably click on “Install Steam” and just have it work then there’s no need for a gaming distribution (and i guess flatpak integrated into a software store is the closest to that rn). You don’t see people crying for help to install Steam on Windows.
What i think we don’t need is yet another Arch or Debian based distro that installs some packages and configures some basic stuff, that’s ran by like 2 people and disappears in a year or two. That should either be made trivial in the “upstream” distro or be a setup script on diy systems like Arch. Please stop making distros, it’s not like we already 100s of them that solve nothing and just confuse people.
Sure, i see things like Garuda being useful for now, but it’s a band aid fix for the real problems.
You say that but ironically games and proprietary software are more likely to package more of the needed libraries with them. Steam being a Literal example of that. Ironic.
I wouldn’t say we NEED a gaming distro but they literally automate extra work for the gaming crowd.
Oh but I see them crying about so much more.
Right, because that is totally happening all the time and is a real problem the community at large faces.
Meanwhile in reality land thats not really an issue.
And as long as they aren’t doing that then they’ll be a market for “gaming” distros.
No, they don’t really confuse people (aside from morons recommending Manjaro). When people ask or even research theres like 4~ 8 distros tops that popup for gaming.
If it fits it ships.
Uff this pointless back and forth reminds me why i don’t comment usually.
They ship a runtime for the games, but the Steam Client regularly breaks or has (sometimes minor, but still) problems. The post literally is about this very thing. Steam recently also broke with a glibc upgrade on several distros and flatpak wasn’t affected.
My point is that each distro shipping their archaic package manager and packaging the entire world is not sustainable, causes inconsistencies between distros and makes software developers shy away from distributing software for Linux.
Another exmpale is DaVinci Resolve, that shit constantly breaks on Arch from what I’ve heard.
The rest I feel ist not worth responding to.
You mean when you get called out for trying to either pass opinions as fact or simply saying untrue things?
And yet thats less about “fundamental issues with Linux” and more about the pros and cons of different approaches to software.
Using a flatpak.apiimages are great options for people and I wholeheartedly support their promotion and development. That said its not a drop in replacement and people to have to make certain considerations and acknowledgements such as permissions and performance loss which can be zero or in the worst case for some up to 20%.
That, and you’re acting like Windows has never had platform breaking updates before so its not even a “Linux” problem.
You say “each distro” like every distro uses apt.
I would love for you to explain how DNF is archaic. Its not like Windows still using code from NT workstation and running a file system from 1993.
Lol, this is just a copy pasta bad faith argument. They can just literally choose to package and use the libraries they need that may be effected. If you claim this is magically TOO MUCH then you just argued against Windows and Mac as well.
Oh I just love that. “from what I’ve heard”. Very scientific. Thats not really a thing. Sure DaVinci wants you to be on Fedora or REHL but theres a work around for its check. Thats it. Hell you don’t even have to use the AMDPRO driver for gaming to use it for DaVinci.
Plus maybe the outdated take on Arch’s stability should be shelved in favor of reality. Sure it was unstable back in the day, and so was Ubuntu and other distros to an extent. But Arch, even with occasional hiccups is pretty solid.
And if Windows is “stable” Then Arch is almost unbreakable by that standard.
Sure thing buddy. Just remember for next time, throwing out emotion and stating it as fact doesn’t get you far in a tech sub.
Yeah agreed, that’s why I said in some comment above that the classic package managers work well for foss and not for proprietary software. And i’m not a big fan of flatpak anyways, but it just works more realiably because of the runtimes when talking about things like Steam.
Foss software you can rebuild against new libraries and do qa to make sure they work. Proprietary software is a blob that might break with a libc upgrade or it might not. And when debian ships an older version of the library and arch a newer one then it causes inconsistencies when talking about proprietary blobs.
That’s what i meant.
I meant the underlying design of having (mostly) one version of a library on your system that every binary uses.
Flatpak uses the lazy approch of just shipping a linux distro minus the kernel as a runtime and something that actually tackles the dependency problem in a smart way is nix.
Not really sure what you mean here. How would a proprietary application bundle for example libraries in the context of a traditional package manager? The entire idea are shared libraries. Glibc doesn’t support static linking afaik so that’s out of the question.
Yeah in one of Brodie Robertsons videos. I don’t use it, it’s just an example.
And i’m not saying Arch is bad, it’s just once again the problem of programs being build for one version and Arch constantly updating libraries that might cause problems with software you can’t rebuild yourself.
You’re confusing the terms stability and reliability. Arch is inherently unstable, like every rolling release.
It might be reliable with regular packages, but the combination of the shared libraries that constantly update in combination with proprietary blobs will cause issues.
And why so defensive? I’m not attacking your precious linux in bad faith, i use it myself and prefer it to windows & mac.
Developer / Sysadmin here… I use Nobara because of familiarity with Fedora based systems and ease of setup for my rig (nvidia gpu…). Just makes life simple, and if I do need to go under the hood, I am familiar with what I see.
Lol, funnily enough I do IT contracting work for the government and mostly build servers and while I game on Garuda I have Nobara on my laptop for Fedoras solid base and extras if I wanna dick around and play Halo some where (sadly can’t on most sites or our main site as no personal devices allowed past a certain point).