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Linux for NewB question
- Thread starter narsbars
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mullet
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I thought that was a cheese.
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Garuda is Arch Linux with some specific changes for gaming. Arch has been great to me with gaming over the years (until I went Wayland but that isn't Arch's fault and I don't game anymore anyways) and I've heard good things about Garuda in the past.
Most Linux distributions will contain all needed drivers as part of the kernel. About the only drivers you need to manually install are Nvidia drivers, and that process is now easier than the same process under Windows - Furthermore, there are distro's that also have Nvidia drivers included as part of the install.
Also distros that are now defaulting to the open source Nvidia drivers. We are fast coming up on the closed source Nvidia driver no longer being a thing.
https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/nvidia-transitions-fully-towards-open-source-gpu-kernel-modules/
"For newer GPUs from the Turing, Ampere, Ada Lovelace, or Hopper architectures, NVIDIA recommends switching to the open-source GPU kernel modules."
In another blog post somewhere they have said they will not be supporting the closed source driver for blackwell. Closed source Nvidia drivers are about to become legacy mode for very old Nvidia GPUs.
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Well, I remember the old days when you had to go through nightmares to install some drivers for some hardware. Some drivers were really hard to find. Now it is not an issue, drivers are loaded automatically, even in linux. The first time I installed linux was I think in year 2000. I forgot what distribution it was (most likely red hat as it was popular back then). It was when dual boot was something only gurus can do. Now it is also automatically done, or you can just put it in a VM.
The system I installed mint on was old. It had GTX 1080 card. It was also automatically installed.
The system I installed mint on was old. It had GTX 1080 card. It was also automatically installed.
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I've been using Garuda for 2+ years now and like it enough that I've made a few donations to the project. It has a lot of nice GUI utilities for system management and the Plasma theme looks good too. I'm currently using the CachyOS kernel and package repo; I haven't noticed any difference in performance or stability over the standard Zen kernel and arch repos but it hasn't let me down yet. Garuda has a good forum with lots of helpful people as well. It's just a really pleasant OS all around.
Deadjasper
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Been using Mint Cinnamon for years now. Everything works for me and I have no desire to change but I do maintain a couple of other systems that I throw other distros on just to keep up with the times. Great thing about Linux is everyone has a choice. It's not a one size fits all OS.
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I used to use Mint when I wasn't gaming because I found it to be incredibly irritating to use lutris on it. Always finnicky. Razer mouse support and lack of Plasma 6 was also an issue.
Changed to Endeavour OS and it's my first time using Arch, which I was weary about, since it's supposed to be less polished, or maybe require more configuration (?) than Ubuntu distributions. In the end I didn't notice any difference and all of my previous issues I had with Mint or Ubuntu, or popOS (seemed like every Ubuntu distro) were solved.
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I think Arch Linux is very polished & cutting edge with rolling releases. Some don't like that since it makes them nervous with possible bugs & regressions. I've had a pretty good time with using EndeavourOS & CachyOS. Manjaro is not technically true Arch since it holds back packages, which is more in line with a "rolling" Ubuntu distro.
The people that spread FUD about arch in general have never touched Arch.
Arch is probably the only major distro that isn't aimed at making money. (not counting Mint, Mint isn't a major distro it uses the Ubuntu base)
Ubutnu, Red Hat, Suse (which I do like) they are all aimed at Workstation and or Server markets and support contracts. They are not developed with gaming in mind, or even standard end user use. They are developed to be easy to support. That might sound good to a home user oh easy to support that's good... but think of it more as a WORK version of windows. You know those corpo windows installs that are all locked down, running the same 5 year old version of X and Y application for years. Updated a few times a year by IT.
Arch is made by the people who USE it. It is designed to be up to date and highly customizable. Arch doesn't decide you must use pipewire, or you must use pulse audio or you must use x y z or zz version of this or that. A base Arch install is a super vanilla clean OS not even a DE. From their you can install and configure everything you want yourself. That is why it gets the bad rap. If you are brand new to Linux telling people they need to choose not just their DE (17 officially supported DEs or 11 or 12 non supported but still in the repo options) but also their session manager, wayland or x11... and on and on and on. This is the reason Arch neck beard types refuse to help people using distros like Endeavor. The way most of them see it if you go through a standard Arch install you are proving your willing to do at least a min amount of reading, and at least understand what a session manager and other systems are.
Having said that we do have some really great Arch based distros that at least help you choose some of the basics and get them up without it being all terminal based. EndeavourOS, Garuda, CachyOS, Archo. My current favorite is Cachy, they all have things that make them unique. For a long time I used and told people to use Manjaro, I find myself now thinking Manjaro is a skip. Manjaro holds arch updates for a few weeks to a month for further testing. This seemed pretty logical 4 or 5 years back. At this point IMO arch development has progressed to a point where 99% of stuff is caught by the Arch developers. The 1% of annoying bugs they may miss are likewise missed by Manjaro anyway... and are the type of things that end up effecting all the other distros as well. With the Valve money now starting to pour into the Arch project I suspect it will get even better, and hopefully this year Valve releases SteamOS 3 as a proper download for all. Then the Mint type users can start switching to Valves Atomic version of Arch.
SteamOS3 has been pretty much bullet proof, probably going to be an easy recommend over distros like Mint for most causal/new Linux users.
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BlueLineSwinger
[H]ard|Gawd
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Debian.
The people that spread FUD about arch in general have never touched Arch.
Arch is probably the only major distro that isn't aimed at making money. (not counting Mint, Mint isn't a major distro it uses the Ubuntu base)
Ubutnu, Red Hat, Suse (which I do like) they are all aimed at Workstation and or Server markets and support contracts. They are not developed with gaming in mind, or even standard end user use. They are developed to be easy to support. That might sound good to a home user oh easy to support that's good... but think of it more as a WORK version of windows. You know those corpo windows installs that are all locked down, running the same 5 year old version of X and Y application for years. Updated a few times a year by IT.
Arch is made by the people who USE it. It is designed to be up to date and highly customizable. Arch doesn't decide you must use pipewire, or you must use pulse audio or you must use x y z or zz version of this or that. A base Arch install is a super vanilla clean OS not even a DE. From their you can install and configure everything you want yourself. That is why it gets the bad rap. If you are brand new to Linux telling people they need to choose not just their DE (17 officially supported DEs or 11 or 12 non supported but still in the repo options) but also their session manager, wayland or x11... and on and on and on. This is the reason Arch neck beard types refuse to help people using distros like Endeavor. The way most of them see it if you go through a standard Arch install you are proving your willing to do at least a min amount of reading, and at least understand what a session manager and other systems are.
Having said that we do have some really great Arch based distros that at least help you choose some of the basics and get them up without it being all terminal based. EndeavourOS, Garuda, CachyOS, Archo. My current favorite is Cachy, they all have things that make them unique. For a long time I used and told people to use Manjaro, I find myself now thinking Manjaro is a skip. Manjaro holds arch updates for a few weeks to a month for further testing. This seemed pretty logical 4 or 5 years back. At this point IMO arch development has progressed to a point where 99% of stuff is caught by the Arch developers. The 1% of annoying bugs they may miss are likewise missed by Manjaro anyway... and are the type of things that end up effecting all the other distros as well. With the Valve money now starting to pour into the Arch project I suspect it will get even better, and hopefully this year Valve releases SteamOS 3 as a proper download for all. Then the Mint type users can start switching to Valves Atomic version of Arch.
I've used Arch, and it did what I wanted it to do. I tend to use distro's based on Ubuntu LTS as I simply prefer apt over anything else, it's what I'm used to - And I've honestly never had a problem running Nvidia hardware/drivers. In fact, I prefer running an Ubuntu LTS based distro as I can roll back drivers quickly and easily with one command should a beta release have issues (which is rare). As stated, the only supposed Ubuntu LTS based distro that ever gave me grief was Mint. If I ran an AMD GPU/drivers I'd probably run Endeavor as it's rolling release nature due to the fact it's based on Arch makes it the most up to date platform regarding AMDGPU/Mesa.
I have to say, I don't like the Arch community and disagree that Endeavor should be treated any differently based on the method used to install the OS - Such a perspective is largely elitism no matter how people want to spin it.
Once again, when it comes to Linux desktop gaming, Ubuntu LTS distro's are the only distro's officially supported by Valve's steam platform as well as most game developers.
Fair... they just feel so old.
More I guess it feels Canonical steals all the Debian thunder. Doesn't help that so many smaller distros like Mint choose to base off Ubuntu rather then Debian proper.
Nvidia now recommends using the Nvidia open source drivers. The closed source is probably going to disappear this year or next. There will be no need for bolting on closed source drivers for Nvidia for much longer. The main knock on Nvidia GPUs under Linux is pretty much solved at this point. The NV open driver is now the official NV driver.
As for Ubutnu LTS being the only "official" supported distro. Who cares. Steam runs well on basically every distro at this point. It does not run best on Ubuntu. SteamOS3 is running arch. Hopefully this year Valve finally drops an official Steam OS 3 ISO and removes the dated Ubuntu recommendation.
For a while there TF2 was refusing to run under Arch without tweaking, even when using steam-native. Under Ubuntu LTS based distro's TF2 was running fine. However the issue has since been resolved with the 64bit release of TF2.
There's still compromises in performance regarding the open drivers, proprietary drivers still have a very slight edge in overall performance. I'll switch once the open driver modules mature, perhaps by then the remaining fractional scaling issues under Wayland will be sorted.
There's still propitiatory versions of the latest Nvidia beta's, I've been checking every time I install drivers to see if they use the open modules or not.
Ya I don't know when they plan to make the switch over and end the closed modules. Just know the Nvidia devs have said that is the plan and recommend the open source modules now for hardware that supports it anyway.
I know this post is pretty old now, but just making some comments for anybody else wondering about this topic.
I used Linux Mint because most people mention it, but I found it clunky. I tried out Zorin OS recently and I liked it a lot better. It's based on Ubuntu as well. But its selling point is that it's made for those who used Windows and they are trying to make it as friendly to Windows Users while still being Linux.
https://zorin.com/os/
If you want something that is a bit different maybe look at: Its like Zorin in the fact its made for those from the MacOS world going to Linux. Its also based on Ubuntu.
https://elementary.io/
I used Linux Mint because most people mention it, but I found it clunky. I tried out Zorin OS recently and I liked it a lot better. It's based on Ubuntu as well. But its selling point is that it's made for those who used Windows and they are trying to make it as friendly to Windows Users while still being Linux.
https://zorin.com/os/
If you want something that is a bit different maybe look at: Its like Zorin in the fact its made for those from the MacOS world going to Linux. Its also based on Ubuntu.
https://elementary.io/
Deadjasper
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What's "clunky" about Mint?
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I found the same. It doesn't feel polished. It's hard to put my finger on, but here are a few. This was on mint 20 or 21.. so they could be resolved.
- mouse needed a custom configuration was the gui was unable to lower the sensitivity to a reasonable level. Mouse was also sort of choppy, hard to explain.
- on install no network devices worked. I had to download the driver's manually on a usb on my desktop and then install them. Considering my Intel wifi chip is used in about 50 million laptops out there, I was surprised.
- sometimes when I made visual changes to my layout, they would revert on reboot. Not sure what the deal was but it wasn't enough for me to look into.
- no Plasma 6. This has been out for ages, so what's the deal?
- nothing but issues using Lutris or installing programs via it. Tried Bottles to solve my issue, no luck.
Again, these may have been resolved on mint 22. I used mint for years. On multiple machines and installs and I always recommended it to guys at work. So I'm not exactly against it, but there are better options out there.
Deadjasper
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Yea, it's definitely a YMMV sort of thing. I'm not really picky about minor things but major issues will send me to another distro. Even stupidness like Debian forcing you to enter the user name at log on is enough to drive me away. And did I mention that not being able to configure squat until you add yourself to the SUDO group? Neither of these are of any use to me. Usability is important. screw up the the major things and you'll very much limit your market share.
The problem is Plasma 6 requires packages that are newer than those provided under Ubuntu LTS releases. KDE Neon runs on an LTS base, but the reality is there's a lot about KDE Neon that isn't strictly Ubuntu LTS.
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Sorry, I know "what the deal" is. I'm wondering why they Ubuntu LTS hasn't provided those new packages at this point.
Because it's LTS. The whole idea of LTS is software compatibility using software installed via Canonical repos with a priority regarding stability, to achieve this LTS is somewhat frozen in time. If you add the packages needed to run Plasma 6, you've just created a semi rolling LTS release and entered the realm of a frankenOS that goes against the mantra of compatibility and stability over the very latest bleeding edge features - You cannot be part LTS.
As a KDE Neon user, there are PPA's that I cannot add that are supported by strictly LTS releases due to the fact dependency issues will become a problem as a result of the fact that KDE Neon runs packages that are newer than those supported by the LTS release schedule. Luckily these PPA's are few and far between and many items of software are released as Flatpak's now.
That should not have been required. What network chip do you have?
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Wireless is Intel ax120 (I think, without turning the PC on). Wired, I'm not sure. Neither worked, though. Mint was the only distro I tried where they didn't. Even afterwards my wifi was unpredictable and I had to reset it a few times a day.
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I googled it and apparently the driver needs to be downloaded.
Are you sure it's not because non edge variants of Mint run a very outdated kernel? This is something I've never experienced before, and I specifically seek motherboards supporting Intel networking chipsets.
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Yeah, mistyped. Supposed to be 210.
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Gentlemen. This is entirely part of Linuxs problem. Someone has an issue, that's repeatable and it's always "I've never experienced it".
With more and more people running Linux and more and more computer configurations, these types of things are going to happen. It's not the end of the world, but for someone that doesn't have a second PC to download files to (unlikely, as you need to create a bootable medium at some point), it's a deal breaker that something as simple as network drivers are not included.
With more and more people running Linux and more and more computer configurations, these types of things are going to happen. It's not the end of the world, but for someone that doesn't have a second PC to download files to (unlikely, as you need to create a bootable medium at some point), it's a deal breaker that something as simple as network drivers are not included.
I've experienced the same issues under Windows. HP printer drivers are the bane of my existence when they randomly refuse to function on specific machines. This isn't an issue limited to Linux, especially considering Intel generally do a very good job at adding and maintaining drivers for all their networking chipsets under the Linux kernel. I've also had to install Intel networking drivers on new Windows installs, drivers downloaded using a secondary PC.
No one here's stating it can't happen, it's just odd being an Intel chipset.
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I'll agree that anything printer related is a wild card chance. But printer drivers are something I am not surprised that windows or Linux doesn't offer pre-packaged. But wifi and network drivers? I haven't owned a printer in a decade, but every PC has network adapters.
If you download a Windows 11 iso right now and install it, the likelihood of network driver issues is near zero. Even windows 10 had my wifi drivers, OOB. I was running a Mint install thats way "newer" on the release continuum than W10.
I always find it wild that we have a majority windows user base here that can use windows daily without issue, or configuration, or driver problem. But every single Linux user on this forum will say "I've also had XYZ issue in windows!" when a Linux problem arises.
There are three steps I always see.
1. I have never had an issue
2. Are you sure?
3. I also have XYZ problem in window, so...
Keep on keeping on, fellas!
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Old kernels suck... simply put. That's what you're describing with LTS-based distros.
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Can you guys explain LTS to me a little clearer? Like... It's for stability. That I'm tracking. What I'm not tracking is that there are NEWER releases for these packages that are also stable,.no? So why not update the packages as they become stable?
Axman
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What's stable for you and me isn't stable for LTS users.
It's the difference between residential internet service and business internet service. At home, 99 percent uptime is great, and it's only a hundred bucks a month or less. For businesses, 99 percent uptime is unacceptable, so they pay many times more money for connectivity because the difference between 99 percent and 99.98 percent is worth the expense.
With LTS the expense isn't so much money, though you do need to have a dude who can set it all up with the right hardware off the hop, the expense is opportunity cost. You can't run X, Y, Z hardware and software. But your old shit will run until the EMPs hit.
It's next-level CYA for enterprise stuff. And for admins, it's great. Not only do they not have to do as much work, if someone asks for some feature or function, they can just be like, "Sorry man. Not part of LTS. My hands are tied."
I build MSI Cubi Mini PC's that use Intel WiFi network adapters for clients, on a fresh install out the box Windows 11 never has the right drivers. Driver issues aren't in any way unique to Linux, to state otherwise would basically involve outright lying, something I'm not willing to do.
LTS means 'Long Term Support'. LTS releases generally run slightly older kernels than rolling releases like Arch, they also tend to run older software packages from the likes of Canonical's repo's in the name of stability over bleeding edge features. Packages are released as they become stable, but that process takes time - With the advent of 24.04 it's now possible to run early releases of KDE 6 under Ubuntu LTS based distro's.
Running the latest bleeding edge kernels may mean you get the latest features, as well as the latest regressions. Arch is generally pretty good these days, the devs have improved their development and release process to the point whereby regressions are rare - But they do still happen.
In the case of Mint, which last I checked was still running 5.x kernels (LTS is currently running 6.8.0-51-generic, updated every second point release), I wouldn't be at all surprised if your issue was a result of Mint's use of older kernels.
I'm currently running 6.8.0-51-generic under KDE Neon and experience no issues. My system is stable, gaming performance is great. All the latest Vulkan/OGL libs are packaged as part of Nvidia's drivers, so the need to run the latest bleeding edge kernel isn't an absolute necessity.
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