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 I cannot count on my two hands how many times I have provided support to a user, to find their issue was outdated libraries due to using Linux Mint.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.
Forgive my ignorance here. I’m not new to Linux but I am new to gaming on Linux…
Don’t most games in Linux run in Proton/Wine? And using Steam from outside the distro? Are there really many underlying library dependencies that aren’t in snap/flatpak?
I’m actually curious now because I just installed Ubuntu on a machine and want to make sure I’m not going to have problems in a year. I am running the very latest that just came out.
Mainly kernel and in case of AMD cards - Mesa drivers. You really, really want these things up to date for best gaming performance and compatibility. In worst case scenario you can end up with your brand new bleeding edge hardware not working at all because most recent drivers aren’t in your system. But more commonly delayed updates mean unpatched bugs and worse performance, sometimes missing features and so on.
LTS distros are multiple versions behind which makes them inherently inferior to rolling distros for gaming (although they’re better for other usecases)
This isn’t totally. Here is where I disagree. Newer doesn’t always translate to better. I’ve written about my story where I spend 3 months testing and discovering a bug that affected the Arch Linux family, where I could not run Steam games. This was with a RX 6800XT that was purchased brand new in Dec. 2022. At the point of purchase the card/product line was 2 years beyond release. A single kernel update (v6.x) rendered Steam unusable and it did not matter which Mesa and LLVM version was installed. I went from Manjaro => EndeavourOS => Garuda => raw Arch and they all exhibited the same erroneous behavior. I was unable to get support from the communities for the above distros nor the greater Linux community so I was basically on my own testing and discovering the erroneous behavior, reporting back my findings in multiple forums. More than 20 other users reported that they encountered the same bug and were perplexed. I ended up testing both Mint/Cinnamon 21.1 and Pop_OS v22.04 and both were stable. They were running 5.x kernels and even after upgrading to the 6.0 and 6.01 kernels the installations and Steam remained stable without issues.
LTS releases aren’t necessarily inferior and rolling releases aren’t necessarily superior. There is greater nuance to them. The way that Linux is structured with loosely connected moving parts (AMD kernel driver, Mesa, LLVM, OpenGL/Vulkan) each can be updated independently this can be a strength. If one has bleeding edge hardware, I’ve learned to not expect plug-n-play right away. Linux support takes time (think in terms of many weeks to many months).
Thats interesting. I’m using 6900xt on manjaro since november 2022 end I have never encountered any critical issues. The only clear bug was Steam System Information tool causing system crash - which turned out to be the kernel issue. But that wasn’t preventing me from playing any game or using Steam in general.
LTS Distros would avoid this as it wasn’t present in kernel 5.15 and older.
What were the symptoms in your case?
Ah, well, I haven’t done it in a long time but I’m not above going outside the distro for a newer kernel or drivers. Or I’ll backport. HOwever it’s don’t best in Ubuntu.
If you have ancient version of Wine, it might cause problems.
On Mint, I almost don’t use Flatpacks because the experience sucks. You have your distro and it’s package manager, plus you need to have half of the system duplicated as flatpacks for any GUI application to work properly. I’ve encountered incorrectly set permissions on flatpacks so the basic functionality of software didn’t work. Most Linux developers learned to publish for package managers, it’s changing and people are slowly discovering Flatpack, but most Flatpack packages are (hopefully) maintained by some random dude, not by creators of the software and sometimes it’s packaged poorly.
Steam luckily manages versions of the proton for itself, but it still uses system libraries if it’s running in native mode. You can use steam runtime, which keeps separate version of each library, but I’m not sure which option is the default.
Then there is kernel and drivers. Luckily Mint has tools to update to newest GPU drivers, but that’s it. Outdated kernel can still cause incompatibility for other hardware, performance issues, incompatility with peripherals etc.
And that’s just the technical stuff not concerning user-friendliness. On Mint, you have to install lots of tools manually (utility to control GPU, fan control, steam, wine, whatever controls RGB on Linux, display calibration, mouse configuration…). Most users don’t even know what they should be looking for. I know Linux, but I didn’t know there is community software to control fans and wattage for Nvidia GPUs and lots of other software. Mint does lots of hand-holding, but it’s not targeted at gamers.
There isn’t any major differences. OP is talking out of his ass.
I think OP is talking about the release schedules of distros. Debian/Mint/etc aren’t rolling release, and take a few months shock for updates to make their way to the stable repos. Though this is easily fixed by switching to the testing upstream repos, this is a step too far for most (even “experienced”) Linux users.
Man shit like this makes me glad I went thought the pain of starting with arch Linux. I taught me so much
This. The thing inside my skull is a little slow but holy crap the sheer amount of documentation and enthusiastically helpful users has been a great experience.
No clue why you are being down voted. Its true, the level of documentation out there for arch is insane. Sure you start with nothing but if you are willing to read documentation its everything I could’ve ever wished for
I’ve noticed all mentions of Arch Linux and anyone praising it gets downvoted on this particular sub. On top of that, Reddit has a tendency to pile-on if they see something downvoted. The person I replied to was in the negative when I replied, for instance lol
For whoever is doing it: You could just spend that time doing literally anything else. Staring at a wall would be better for your blood pressure.
But yeah, I was a solid B and C student in high school and dropped out of college. If you’re willing to take the time, Arch is really not that big of a deal. And the boons you get from taking that time is well worth it.
there are. you can’t even play cs2 on debian stable with nvidia, but it works flawlessly on tumbleweed, for instance
OP’s title is about Mint, and I am replying to someone asking about Ubuntu (I suppose since Mint is based on Ubuntu)
These distros work great for gaming.
The issue most people have with NVidia is the poor Wayland support, but both Ubuntu (LTS) and Mint are still using XOrg. They work great on NVidia hardware.
Debian defaults to Wayland now, so people with NVidia hardware will have issues.
It is nonsense to say “Don´t use Mint for gaming”. What one could say is “Don´t use Wayland if you have NVidia hardware”
it is nonsense because mint is stuck with old mesa libraries and old nvidia drivers, it doesn’t matter about wayland
Not sure if you missed a “not” word there, but to be clear:
Ubuntu (and therefore Mint) is not running old nvidia drivers. My aptitude upgrade install the latest nvidia drivers, the same version available for download from nvidia’s website (not sure if that was within a couple of weeks, days or hours, but the latest version came out on October 31st and that’s what I have installed now)
okay, depends if you consider 535 newest, i’m currently running 545 which fixes a bunch of issues but it doesn’t change the fact that what OP is saying generally holds true
I have had the same experiences on debian that the OP is describing. It’s nice that things work for you but there are certain distributions like fedora and debian which I’ve had all around terrible experiences with in gaming. mint is a great OS but rolling release is just better generally when it comes to being a linux gamer in 2023
Most triple A games, possibly. But far from “most games” run through wine. In fact, maybe 80% of my steam library has native Linux versions, such as factorio, cities skylines, oxygen not included, transport fever 1/2, …
You’re the exception, not the rule.
Interesting. I actually hadn’t considered that. Much of library also has native Linux versions, but I would normally play those on my Mac. (if there’s a LInux version, there’s probably a Mac version too).
So what kind of dependencies do native Linux games have? Aren’t they normally statically linked binaries?
Only Cities Skylines was fully Linux optimized for me. But if I’m not mistaken, Valve stated to developers just optimize for Windows/Wine, as Proton will take care about the transition, which is 99% as native anyway.
I’ve seen reports about Proton out performing a native Linux port, and sometimes the other way around.
I usually prefer the Proton version over the native Linux version. It’s usually faster for me.
It’s more than only Flatpak libraries and such.
Flatpak still talks to the kernel and mesa drivers. So if your stack is stable, but not more close to the edge, it can be problematic for gaming. I like to think of them as a inner and outer ring, both need to be optimized.
I think that’s one of the reasons Valve chose Arch Linux as its base. In most cases bleeding edge offers more performance, but may lead to potential data loss and such. Fine for a Steam Deck, but not much for a desktop distro.