Do you use Linux?

[AusWolf]

Probably not the best choice if you care about gaming. Gaming often requires new packages for a number of things. Mint, being Ubuntu-based is more about stability and that means older, tested packages.
If you want up-to-date, I would suggest OpenSuse Tumbleweed or some Arch derivative that comes with a proper installer. Do some research first, see what works for you.

The only reason I'd choose Mint is because I've used both Mint and Ubuntu in the past, so it's at least something I know well (until I have to rely on the Terminal, where I'm dead).

For what it's worth, on my Linux box I'm able to successfully run and use:

• Steam
• Blizzard's Battle.net launcher for Diablo II R, III, and IV, WoW, Starcraft, etc. (lutris launcher)
• Ubisoft's Connect Client for Assassin's Creed Mirage, Avatar FoP, etc. (lutris launcher)
• EA App for Star Wars Jedi Survivor, Dragon Age franchise, etc. (lutris launcher)
• Rockstar's Client for RDR2, GTA V, etc. (lutris launcher)
• Other games installed from Windows installers (like games from Spiderweb Software) (lutris launcher)
• Epic Games, Amazon Games, and GOG using the Heroic Games Launcher

I think you've mentioned in the past that you have some extra hardware after upgrading. The best thing you could do is put together a box and start messing with/learning it now.

So basically, you can install and run all your games using only 3 launchers? That's awesome!

Yeah, I'll really have to look around for some spare AMD parts. I've got a bunch of Nvidia cards laying around, but considering that AMD drivers are zero effort, being part of the kernel, I'd rather go that route.

 

[bug]

The only reason I'd choose Mint is because I've used both Mint and Ubuntu in the past, so it's at least something I know well (until I have to rely on the Terminal, where I'm dead).

Here's the thing, trying a Linus distro is basically free: they all offer bootable ISOs that you put on a USB stick and try without changing anything on your system. But yes, Ubuntu/Mint are more suited for people that just want things to work (nothing wrong with that, it just happens I'm in the opposite camp).

Edit: Forgot to mention it, even for Ubuntu/Mint there are PPAs available that will offer newer packages that the official distro does. I just grew tired of hunting for them, but they did their job for quite a while.

 

[Shihab]

Server or not, I've always wondered why Windows relies on periodic reboots while other OSes don't.

Patching active components aside, I don't think any modern OS "relies" on reboots to maintain performance and stability.
A poorly made application or driver may cause instability as uptime grows, but this is true for any OS. Hell, my current linux installation barely lasts a couple of days before it starts slowing to a crawl (I suspect it has something to do with Nvidia/X)!

Probably not the best choice if you care about gaming. Gaming often requires new packages for a number of things. Mint, being Ubuntu-based is more about stability and that means older, tested packages.

Most stuff of significance are pulled from outside the official distro's repos.

Valve for example provides everything related to the compatibility layer. Other launchers can do the same, and the launchers themselves can be distributed as flatpaks (which makes the practically similar on all distros).

Only difference I suppose would be the drivers, especially in Nvidia's case. Although even in this case one can just grab the latest .run from Nvidia's website. My 2c: it's better stick to the stability route with this one. Graphics drivers issues can be a pain. I always find myself going back to Ubuntu because of them.

 

[bug]

Most stuff of significance are pulled from outside the official distro's repos.

Valve for example provides everything related to the compatibility layer. Other launchers can do the same, and the launchers themselves can be distributed as flatpaks (which makes the practically similar on all distros).

Only difference I suppose would be the drivers, especially in Nvidia's case. Although even in this case one can just grab the latest .run from Nvidia's website. My 2c: it's better stick to the stability route with this one. Graphics drivers issues can be a pain. I always find myself going back to Ubuntu because of them.

I'm on Nvidia and I never install the drivers myself. Always from a repo (be that official Arch, Ubuntu PPA or whatever). But the bigger problem is AMD: their drivers almost always need bleeding edge Mesa and outside rolling distros, nobody provides that from official repos.

 

[remixedcat]

The DAW I use called bitwig studio was made for linux basically... made by ex ableton devs! As a producer that's all I need

 

[TheinsanegamerN]

I'm on Nvidia and I never install the drivers myself. Always from a repo (be that official Arch, Ubuntu PPA or whatever). But the bigger problem is AMD: their drivers almost always need bleeding edge Mesa and outside rolling distros, nobody provides that from official repos.

Oh boy I ran into this recently. Trying to upgrade MESA on MINT is a fools errand. Arch, ironically, was easier to get running via Manjaro for gaming.

that is one thing Nvidia gets right on linux, since it is proprietary its contained in the driver install package.

 

[Evelynn]

Switched fully and successfully to Linux over the past two weeks, what an adventure.

On and off, I've tried making the switch for around three years now. There have been so many small problems to solve that it's always been an uphill battle with each install. I've tried Mint, Ubuntu, Fedora, and finally Debian.

Stability has always been an issue for me when running Linux.

Mint: Worked wonderfully but gaming performance was horrible in that every 3D application had poor frame pacing. Disabling the compositor did not help, nor did setting the CPU governor to performance, nor did setting the GPU to high performance.

Ubuntu: Crashed multiple times daily. Desktop would freeze. Steam would hard lock my system. Discord would also cause hard locks. Audio would still play in the background so I knew the system was running, just not actively refreshing the screen. Snap store applications seemed worse than those I could download directly from manufacturer websites.

Fedora: I didn't get far enough in to Fedora for any real testing. It just didn't feel right with me, likely because I've been utilizing Debian based releases for so long. I found myself writing sudo apt-get install, into the terminal, simply out of muscle memory.

Debian: Yes. The minute I began researching Debian, I knew it was perfect for me. I much prefer stability to the bleeding edge, especially when I've experienced so many problems running Linux in general. After installing Debian and using it for 48 hours, I didn't have a single hard lock. Steam functioned correctly. Discord worked just fine. Choosing MATE, I was happy to see it defaulted to X11 instead of Wayland, which all of my games seem to prefer. The only problem I've ran into thus far is the scheduler tagging my efficiency cores inappropriately, giving them latency sensitive tasks such as gaming; I did not experience this on Ubuntu or Mint.

I love Debian's stability and I love MATE's simplicity / flexibility. Seeing 2.2 GB of RAM utilized at system idle is insane coming from Windows 11 - which is what encouraged me to make the switch, since 10 is losing support soon. Running Wireshark and seeing no outbound connections is wonderful. In general, Debian 12 has the perfect balance of "do it yourself" (having to enable / configure unattended-updates) for me. I miss the days when updates were optional and my system wasn't speaking to credit score websites hourly.

On to the problems I've encountered with Linux, Debian, software, or my DE:

#1 In /etc/apt/sources.list - I had to remove "cdrom:[Debian GNU/Linux 7.0.0 _Wheezy_ - Official amd64 CD Binary-1 20130504-14:44]/ wheezy main" from a source list. Software would attempt to install from a local disc source, instead of the official repos.

#2 GDebi isn't a default application / dependencies are on you to solve without it. Having GDebi to me is almost a necessity since it downloads the framework for whichever applications you're attempting to install. I know Debian is meant to be very barebone, so it's not a complaint whatsoever. I was just surprised at how hands-off Debian was in comparison to Mint and Ubuntu.

#3 The built in disk manager for MATE isn't as flexible as I would like. I ended up installing gnome-disk-utility since it's something I've used in the past and certainly find to be more useful than MATE's default disk tool. Of course, everything accomplished in these applications can be done in command line, but I have genuine fears of screwing up when utilizing fstab commands.

#4 The built in AMD drivers for Debian were underperforming on my 6900 XT, at least in some games. The frame rate was half of what I was expecting (and received) after installing the non-free AMD drivers.

#5 MATE Tweak is necessary just to rid yourself of the desktop SSD/HDD icons.

#6 The CPU governor defaults to powersaving on my system. This resulted in pretty atrocious frame times. Solved it with Aptitude + cpufrequtils + editing /etc/default/cpufrequtils to be on Performance mode for all cores. MATE does not have an option to toggle power saver, balanced, or performance. You must do this manually through the text file.

#7 There is no toggle for the compositor on MATE, however, it can be disabled through the terminal via: gsettings set org.mate.Marco.general compositing-manager false - disabling it causes screen tearing on the desktop. I've yet to decide how I should handle this situation. Some games take issue with the compositor being active, but majority do not.

#8 Things I took for granted on Ubuntu (rsync being installed by default, updates being automatic on Ubuntu, etc.) took me by surprise. I had to learn about what wasn't present on Debian by default and how to handle that as a whole.

#9 When using Ubuntu, it defaults to Wayland. I do not like Wayland in it's current form for gaming, I had titles crashing (Hogwarts Legacy) while using Wayland. Applications such as Discord and Steam were also only hard locking my system while using Wayland. When using X11, they would simply lock themselves, causing the applications to error out and crash. Disabling hardware acceleration fixed it for me in Wayland.

#10 RDNA2 GPU's seem to have power throttling issues in Linux. I was using this script
echo high | sudo tee /sys/class/drm/card0/device/power_dpm_force_performance_level
Every time at login to solve the problem. Eventually, I learned that you can simply add: radeon.dpm=0 - to the Grub which disables the dynamic power management / clock scaling.

#11 ASPM was causing lock ups when active, though not outright system crashes. Even though within my BIOS I have ASPM (active state power management) disabled, the OS still needs to have it disabled as well. I had to add: pcie_aspm=off - to the Grub.

#12 Stutters on everything. CPU stuttering from the performance governor being set to Powersaving. GPU stuttering from RDNA2 power throttling. SSD stuttering due to ASPM hangs (I'm running nvme drives), and stuttering from the compositor being active in some titles. I could go into depth on these problems for multiple paragraphs.

There are a few more problems / troubles I've encountered in the last two weeks, but these are the largest offenders that took me the longest time to find and solve. However, it was worth it. I love Debian and MATE is perfect for me. Having learned so much about things we take for granted on Windows was very humbling. Issues I would solve on Windows with only one or two clicks is ~30 minutes of research on Debian and 10 minutes of applying that newly minted knowledge.

 

[bug]

@Evelynn Nice to read your story. Unfortunately, bleeding edge is more or less a must on Linux if you want 3D to work properly.
On non-bleeding edge distros, you can only use Nvidia in a trouble-free manner. Intel or AMD use Mesa and you will have to update that yourself on "stable" distros. The caveat being, the moment you enable a third party repo to pull in a more up-to-date Mesa, any stability guaranteed gets thrown under the bus. That's not to say the system will start crashing and stuff, just that there's little to no testing for stable distros + 3rd party repos.

Fwiw, I'm using Arch at home and OpenSUSE Tumblweed for work. Both rolling distros, both rock-solid stable so far.

 

[SchumannFrequency]

@Evelynn Nice to read your story. Unfortunately, bleeding edge is more or less a must on Linux if you want 3D to work properly.

Bleeding edge is not necessary. You just have to see that the Mesa driver and other things that are important for gaming are not too outdated.
For example, a system such as Void Linux is somewhere between bleeding edge and outdated software, but will work fine for gaming.

I think that Evelynn likes systems that use 'apt' and work very similarly to Debian/Ubuntu.
The list of issues she has would probably have been halved if she had used Debian testing instead of Debian stable.

After her experience, I also feel obliged to describe my experience with Calculate Linux.
Since the moment I installed it, there have been remarkably few issues and I will literally list all the issues with the solution I found.

1. There were two issues with emerge that involved dependencies on certain packages not being filled in correctly. I didn't mind solving these problems because I learned a few basic things about system configuration for Gentoo. One of the two issues would have been solved by reading the Gentoo wiki. For the other issue, I'm ultimately not sure which step resolved it, but I noticed that Gentoo users are generally much more helpful and knowledgeable than the people who work for Microsoft support teams.

2. The ZFS version I installed would not compile/install. Solution: I saw that there were several versions that I could install via emerge, and when I installed another version it suddenly worked perfectly without any issues.

3. The Blender version that was installable via emerge was not stable, it crashed when importing .blend files. Other versions gave a Ninja related error. Solved by using the Flatpak version of Blender.

The above issues are the only issues I can currently remember in terms of problems I have had with Calculate Linux.
Or to put it another way, I haven't had a single "real problem" with Calculate Linux.

My Calculate Linux system has (more than) all the features/apps I need for a productive desktop system. There is no app that I need yet that would need to be installed or anything like that.

There are seven games installed and I haven't seen any stability or performance issues in these games.
I use Alder Lake (efficiency cores) and latest generation AMD graphics, but this hardware has behaved flawlessly every second on Calculate Linux.

 

[cazzie.nl]

My AM4 desktop system runs Nobara linux, my backup Minisforum UM690 runs Windows 11 [without a MS account],
then i have a cheap intel Dell 314 chromebook running Fedora. I am more then satisfied with my home set-ups.

 

[bug]

Bleeding edge is not necessary. You just have to see that the Mesa driver and other things that are important for gaming are not too outdated.
For example, a system such as Void Linux is somewhere between bleeding edge and outdated software, but will work fine for gaming.

I think that Evelynn likes systems that use 'apt' and work very similarly to Debian/Ubuntu.
The list of issues she has would probably have been halved if she had used Debian testing instead of Debian stable.

Thank you for proving my point
Perhaps "bleeding edge" is too strong a name. But you certainly cannot expect much in the way of 3D from more conservative distros. I mean, it's usable if you only need "light" 3D, but for the likes of Proton and such, you want newer Mesa more often than not.

And since we're chipping in, my experience with Arch:

1. Couldn't break that thing even when I hit the reset button while in the middle of a kernel update. Couldn't boot after that, booted from a stick, chroot, mkinitcpio and I was back in business.

2. As a software developer, I get all the latest and greatest without needing to look around for PPAs and such.

3. Only need AURs for Spotify and one other thing (see below).

4. Had some issues after I pulled pre-release KDE6 from testing repos. Getting back to stable repos was a bit of a hassle because of package versioning. I don't blame Arch for that, it's just the nature of playing with pre-releases.

5. I did manage to break Arch for good when I enabled ALHP and inadvertently selected x86_64_v4, which my CPU doesn't support. User error, there's a big disclaimer on the ALHP packed that selecting the wrong version will result in a broken system. I did it anyway.

 

[SchumannFrequency]

Thank you for proving my point
Perhaps "bleeding edge" is too strong a name.

Debian unstable is bleeding edge.
Debian testing is somewhere between bleeding edge and outdated software.

Google uses Debian testing on their production servers and it is a good choice for desktop systems as well.

I prefer Devuan, and it also has this stable/testing/unstable versioning:

Packages | Devuan GNU+Linux Free Operating System

Free GNU+Linux base OS. Devuan is a fork of Debian without systemd. Devuan provides a safe upgrade path from Debian, to ensure the right to Init Freedom and avoid entanglement.

www.devuan.org

Devuan 5.0 Daedalus (stable)
Devuan Excalibur (testing)
Devuan Ceres (unstable)

My advice for people with a recent AMD GPU who like apt and Debian/Ubuntu would be to use Devuan Excalibur (testing) as in my experience this is the best 'apt operating system' currently available.

If you're interested, Calculate Linux and Gentoo appear to use the same Mesa version as Arch LInux.

Arch Linux: https://archlinux.org/packages/extra/x86_64/mesa/

And I saw that Calculate Linux is using the same 24.0.7 version according to the updates info.

Whether Gentoo or Arch Linux are better systems seems like an interesting discussion because both are ideal for gaming.

I'd say that in the grand scheme of things, Arch is willing to sacrifice options or choices in order to reduce complexity (which is what is meant by simplicity for the developers) while Gentoo is significantly more complex but also more flexible. You can change low-level system components (libc, init, compiler flags, even the package manager) much more easily on Gentoo than you can on Arch. On the flip side portage has dozens of variables and hundreds of USE flags. pacman, by contrast, has relatively few options even compared to something like apt.

Arch: I briefly dabbled in Arch but got burned by its instability at the time.
Gentoo: Okay, it's not Debian Stable or CentOS. But Gentoo has an extremely rigorous package QA process. I consider all my Gentoo systems to be rock solid and dependable. In conjunction with the above, all my systems run a cronned auto-update and have done so for multiple years on a single install, without developing problems or requiring manual intervention.

Calculate Linux is Gentoo-based and as startup it uses OpenRC which in my opinion is faster and more stable than the systemd tradition used by the various Linux distributions.

OpenRC 1: 15s 460ms 2: 15s 46ms 3: 15s 16ms 4: 14s 59ms 5: 14s 51ms

systemd 1: 27s 43ms 2: 26s 08ms 3: 25s 56ms 4: 26s 10ms 5: 26s 17ms

runit 1: 17s 12ms 2: 15s 47ms 3: 16s 36ms 4: 16s 41ms 5: 17s 00ms

s6: 1: 13s 56ms 2: 12s 39ms 3: 12s 37ms 4: 13s 34ms 5: 12s 46ms 6: 13s 52ms

 

[Wasteland]

Oh boy I ran into this recently. Trying to upgrade MESA on MINT is a fools errand. Arch, ironically, was easier to get running via Manjaro for gaming.

that is one thing Nvidia gets right on linux, since it is proprietary its contained in the driver install package.

Yeah, this is why I like Fedora or Arch for "gaming" rigs. Of course Mint is great for user friendliness--best distro for casual users, IMO.

You can install the Hardware Enablement Stack on Ubuntu/Mint if you find yourself with newer hardware than the stock LTS kernels support. And as you note, Nvidia drivers are basically effortless on Mint, whereas a new user might have difficulty setting them up on e.g. Fedora. The story, as is so often the case with Linux, is that you have to pick your poison.