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 I cannot count on my two hands how many times I have provided support to a user, to find their issue was outdated libraries due to using Linux Mint.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.

  • 589647@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    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%.

    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.

    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.

    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.

    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.

    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.

    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.

    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.

    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.

    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.