This isn’t me asking for help or anything, I already replaced it with fedora kinoite. I just felt like talking about this ridiculous venture of mine.
So a couple weeks ago I started hyper focusing on cities skylines, but played on my Xbox. I learned that mods and all kinds of fun custom content was available on PC so I tried to play on my system. Problem, my laptop has an rtx 2070, but I was running fedora kinoite and couldn’t figure out how in the world to install nvidia drivers.
So after a bunch of searching around I give up and decide to try installing a “gaming” focused distro in the form of endeavour os. It was awful.
Maybe I am weird but the x11 rendering didn’t feel good at all, the lack of some default applications, as well as a bunch of apps I didn’t know the purpose of. (This one is my own fault since they have a kde spin, but I remembered why I didn’t like gnome) and finally today it froze in the middle of an update and hard rebooted, no longer able to launch.
Worst part, I didn’t do a lick of gaming on the thing cause I moved on to Borderlands 3
EndeavourOS isn’t a gaming distro it’s just an Arch installer with some defaults. It’s still Arch and comes with Arch’s woes. It’s not a beginner friendly just works kind of distro.
Coming from kionite, you’d probably want Bazzite if you want a gaming distro: it’s also Fedora atomic with all the gaming stuff added.
Yeah that’s why I put it in quotes, it just kept popping up when I searched for distros more inclined towards gaming lol.
Yeah I didn’t know about bazzite before going about this whole thing, but I am not going to try gaming on my system until nvk becomes more capable. Even then only light work.
I’m not necessarily a begginer as I have been using Linux for a few years now, but arch is definitely out of my wheelhouse
In theory, Kinoite is just the KDE spin of Bazzite (or the other way around, lol).
You can also get used to Arch over years until you find yourself editing kernel code directly and fixing the drivers by yourself
Gentoo has a lot of nice quality of life features if you want to roll a custom kernel. You can do it on any distro though.
Stick with the beaten path. Ignore the people who confidently tell you to use anything new or obscure.
Fedora Workstation, Linux mint or Pop os is what you want
I’ve had good luck striking out on a new path with Nobara after years of only ever using Ubuntu. There was a bit of a learning curve (and I still haven’t gotten everything I wanted to work the way it did before), but I mostly got it figured out.
But that may well be a Survivor case in the sense of Survivor Bias, no idea how many people tried and decided “wasn’t worth it”.
I did have a bone to pick with pipewire because my old pulseaudio config no longer worked and I had difficulties figuring out just how to redo it in pw, but that’s probably not distro-specific.
This is the voice of reason. Good to see there are some reasonable people still out there.
This makes a lot of sense, though I can’t help but think about the fact that all these distros were once brand new projects that people had to go out on a limb and try out before they became what they are today.
Though I also guess these projects had more official dedicated support.
In any case, I won’t be the one going out on a limb for a while now lmao
Using Linux was going out on a limb for a long time. Now it has matured enough to be stable without to much knowledge or work.
If you find yourself wanting to game on your distro again, layering nvidia drivers ontop of immutable fedora is do-able. If you want a more hands off approach you can use bazzite (https://bazzite.gg/), which has an nvidia compatible version and is just a kinoite-based OSI image with gaming oriented tweaks and extra apps.
You can even just rebase to it if you’re already using kinoite (and rebase back to kinoite if you don’t like it), no need to reinstall your system. The download page has a one-command exemple on how to do that.
Rebasing is easily one of the coolest features of the atomic suite. I will definitely look into bazzite more in the future, just wish I knew about it before all this lmao
Bazzite also has a lot of extra gaming-oriented changes to Fedora, such as including the System76 scheduler, which can increase performance in games. Since Bazzite has versions with Nvidia drivers in the root image, it makes it easier to use Nvidia cards.
By the way, if you hadn’t figured out the install for Nvidia drivers in Kinoite, here is a simple guide for how to do it. Also, there is documentation from the RPM fusion repo on how to install the drivers, which you can find here (that’s where the commands from the article came from). There are more details elsewhere in the documentation if you need them, such as how to get the Nvidia drivers to work with Secure Boot on atomic distros (though I’d recommend just using Bazzite for that because it can be a pain to get working manually).
I reckon if I go about trying to game again I will just go ahead and rebase to bazzite. Seems the easiest route
If you want something like Fedora that supports nVidia, just run OpenSuSE. It’s also enterprise grade and happily chugs along whatever you do to it.
Fedora is not enterprise grade. That would be RHEL. And entreprise grade mostly just mean stable (some would say stale) packages anyway if you don’t pay for support.
Installing nvidia drivers on fedora workstation is as easy as enabling rpm-fusion non-free and then installing a few packages. The issue here comes from OP running an OSI-based immutable system, which makes layering stuff on top a bit more difficult.
OP’s already running something fedora based, might as well stay where they feel comfortable and just add a few drivers and gaming tweaks on top.
Nothing against opensuse though. I’m currently running aeon because their approach of immutability is more modulable than fedora’s one.
Anyone who tells you that gaming on Linux isn’t somewhat experimental is lying. I think it’s getting there, though.
I mean, OPs distro choice didn’t help here:
EndeavourOS is an Arch-based distro that provides an Arch experience without the hassle of installing it manually for x86_64 machines. After installation, you’re provided with a lightweight and almost bare-bones environment ready to be explored with your terminal, along with our home-built Welcome App as a powerful guide to help you along.
If you want Arch with actual training wheels you probably want Manjaro or at least a SteamOS fork like Chimera/HoloISO.
It probably would have been much smoother with an actual beginner friendly distro like Nobara and Bazzite, or possibly Mint/Pop for a more classic desktop experience.
It’s not perfect and still has woes but OP fell for Arch with a fancy graphical installer, it still comes with the expectation of the user being able to maintain an Arch install.
Yeah, OP definitely played hard mode lol
I just updated gdm-prime on Manjaro to 46.0, when gnome shell is 45.6, and now gdm keeps crashing on startup.
This is one of those problems that Manjaro fans on Lemmy keep telling me are impossible.
I am on EndeavourOS and gnome-shell is on 46.1-2. gdm-prime is on 46.0-1. Everything would work fine using gdm-prime from the AUR.
The issue is that Manjaro holds back the packages in core and extra for weeks but the packages in the AUR are up-to-date ( and expect the version numbers found in Arch ). So you have this incompatibility.
You may find a newer version of gnome-shell in the AUR but, if you do, you may find that the Manjaro package never catches up and you are stuck with an AUR version forever, or worse, end up with packages that cannot be upgraded one the one in the AUR gets abandoned.
In my opinion, using Manjaro is “hard mode” much more than EndeavourOS is for exactly these kinds of reasons.
I fixed the problem by updating gnome-shell with the terminal
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It’s gotten a lot better, particularly for Steam games, but yeah, there’s still some way to go.
PopOS has an ISO with Nvidia drivers included, no issues gaming straight away on my old 1080ti. As I’m a simpleton who just likes their system to with I’ve stuck with it even after upgrading to an AMD card
The UI xan be buggy and and pop shop is a resource hog but other than that it is fine.
I’ve not had UI issues but agree on the Pop Shop. The next iteration with Cosmic looks to be significantly improved at least
Feels good to know that with my dedicated /home partition I can re-install my OS in about an hour. So the very notion of “system” feels strange to me, I mean I feel no attachment to it.
PS: yes I have NixOS install on my slow HD but still didn’t take the plunge. I imagine it “feels” even better to have “it” declarative.
Potentially SteamOS might be an option for you if you are wanting a gaming oriented distro. I believe you can boot it into desktop mode and it ships with KDE.
