this post was submitted on 05 Jan 2024
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Linux Gaming
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Oh man, you're in for a treat there.
PopOS is what you're looking for friend. Debian is a bit too bare and general use-case. Ubuntu is wrong for the exact reasons you laid out.
Pop is built for the end users, with native integrations for flatpak/deb/whathaveyou. It's built on top of Ubuntu with all the ubuntu annoyances removed.
They even have a distro with pre-baked nvidia drivers should you need it.
I tried it and swapped all of mine over
Fwiw I switched off of Pop onto Debian cause I was annoyed with some of Pop’s bloat and I’ve been loving it. I game pretty heavily on Debian and it works just fine. I do mostly play the same older games rather than buying new releases, however, so mileage may vary if you’re looking at cutting edge games, as driver updates can significantly boost performance in that case.
Make no mistake though, when I say ‘bloat’ I’m mostly nitpicking. Pop is a perfectly valid choice and a good option for gaming.
I'm also mostly interested in slightly older games like Rome Remastered, I probably won't be playing many brand new titles.
Might try and get Age of Mythology working as well as I have so much nostalgia for it!
What kind of games are you into?
I love Age of Mythology! It might take a bit of tweaking to get working, but I don't see any reason why it couldn't on a Debian system. I'm on Gentoo, and I just had to swap around the proton version and force the correct resolution and now it works flawlessly.
I might have to ask you more questions about this when I'm up and running!
I spoke a bit too soon. Played the game and it ended up crashing. It works pretty well most of the time but I wouldn't say it's flawless anymore.
But yeah, go ahead and ask some questions! Your experience might be different depending on your hardware, though.
If you're playing games in Steam, Flatpak, or any other tool that provides its own runtime, the graphics driver updates that tend to affect performance (e.g. Mesa) don't come from your base distro.
(Unless maybe you have an Nvidia GPU and a distro that packages its proprietary drivers? I'm not sure in that case, since I quit Nvidia years ago.)
+1 for Pop!_OS
Using it (as my first real use of Linux) a few months now, and I have yet to find a game that doesn't work.
Turned away from mint/Ubuntu because they definitely pre installed more. There are almost no included installs that I don't use on Pop, very clean.
It's also a frequently updated "stable" release- it gets kernel/driver/more updates every 2 weeks or so. They should really add the update# to the iso, because "22.04" alone makes it sound old.
I have 3 running Pop, soon to be 4. ( Try to switch kids over)