• Laser@feddit.org
      3·
      6 days ago

      Debian gaming wasn’t great when a lot of the landscape was changing (around 2016?) and even one of my very Debian friendly colleagues switched his gaming machine to Arch back then because getting the new stuff like AMD Vulkan drivers and DXVK running was really hard on Debian. Don’t think he migrated that particular machine back since then.

      • Rob Bos@lemmy.caEnglish
        1·
        4 days ago

        I’ve always enjoyed the tinkering. My gaming habits pretty much grew up with WINE. DXVK was very exciting!

        Never been a stranger to compiling my own kernel or mucking about with DLL overrides.

        • Laser@feddit.org
          1·
          4 days ago

          The thing is, back then, for the stuff to work on Debian, you needed to

          • compile your own newer kernel
          • compile the new mesa that depended on that kernel

          and with how frequent updates were, this was something you’d probably do multiple times per month – at this point, why bother with Debian when you need to compile all the packages yourself? Remember that was a gaming machine… so why bother with Debian and spend hours each month when with Arch, it was just a pacman -Syu followed by a reboot and you could try out all that fancy new stuff?

          • Rob Bos@lemmy.caEnglish
            1·
            4 days ago

            That really was not my experience. I didn’t game much. WoW mostly. Some StarCraft. Minecraft. Online games. Debian unstable worked fine and I don’t think I had to compile my own kernel (for gaming) at any point past 2005 or so.

            • Laser@feddit.org
              21·
              4 days ago

              The discussion was implicitly around the changes brought by Vulkan and DXVK which enabled playing Windows Direct3D (this part is important) 11 and later 9 games without performance penalty. You could previously play Windows Direct3D 9 titles using Gallium Nine if you had an AMD card, though this was a bit iffy.

              WoW mostly.

              That’s OpenGL, so not affected.

              Some StarCraft.

              Not 3D even.

              Minecraft.

              Neither Windows nor Direct3D, but Java with OpenGL.

              True, if all the games you played were OpenGL-accelerated, these changes didn’t matter. But about 95% of games on the market weren’t.

              • Rob Bos@lemmy.caEnglish
                11·
                4 days ago

                I’m glad you’re here to tell me how my experience the last 30 years was. Thank you for enlightening me as to how my choices were wrong and how I was silently suffering.

                I gamed on Debian. I was so wrong.

      • rumba@lemmy.zipEnglish
        2·
        6 days ago

        Prior to bookworm making non-free easy and nvidia driver opening one could make some arguments.

        These days, though, nothing compelling can be said to walk past Debian.

        • Laser@feddit.org
          3·
          6 days ago

          Yeah, but the post I replied to said “since 1998”. That is prior to bookworm.

          Personally, I don’t care for it too much. Every time I try it (which is rare) something annoys me. "DO NOT EDIT THIS FILE"s, deviation from upstream that renders official documentation less valuable. With Arch (which I don’t use anymore), you can be pretty sure that what’s on your machine is what’s currently released by upstream. This refers both to version and the software itself. Remember cdrkit? xscreensaver? The weak OpenSSH keys? Sure, these must notable examples are from long ago, but there were just so many issues over the course of my “career” that the distribution for me is somewhat burned. Also because all of this could have been easily avoided.

          Anyhow, use what you want, but it’s for sure not my favorite distro.

      • hue2hri19@lemmy.sdf.org
        4·
        6 days ago

        Installed 24.04 this week. On the second day my graphical interface was completely borked. Bare in mind I only installed the usual things I need like neovim, appimage support, compilers, etc.

        I’ve used the same installation of Arch, Fedora and Suse on different machines for years in a row without an issue

      • Possibly linux@lemmy.zipEnglish
        3·
        6 days ago

        Canonical is focused on servers and the cloud. Ubuntu lacks quality controls and does things differently than many other Linux systems which leads to instability. I’ve seen people complain about gnome but in reality they are complaining and Ubuntu gnome not stock. Ubuntu also uses netplan instead of network manager and doesn’t have as much systemd integration.

        Snap is also it’s own special form of hell. It runs as root as daemon and is slow to do anything. It also forces auto updates and takes control when you try to do anything with apt. It is much heavier than Flatpak and you are forced to get your apps from it.

        The sad part is that 15 years ago Ubuntu was actually pretty solid. They have just slowly lost relevance as they move the focus to things that make actual money.

        • polle@feddit.orgEnglish
          1·
          5 days ago

          Thanks for explaining! I am currently on kubuntu, because after some testing different distros, it had the best kde plasma 6 experience with less bugs then the others. Iam not really an ubuntu fan, but it just worked best as an kde distro.

          As for snap, I don’t know any backgrounds of it. But I had several problems with flatpaks and the same program in snap worked. It was mostly random small stuff like, Signal does not show notifcation bages or copy paste that did not work in remmina. In Both situations lots of debugging didn’t help, but switching to the snap package did. Could be a kde/flatpak/kubuntu issue of course. Auto update (for some specific) applications can be good I think and I can understand thats not the vibe that the typical linux person wants. As of the overall anti snap hype I started with just flatpaks, but they aren’t as golden as they are sold.

      • rumba@lemmy.zipEnglish
        3·
        6 days ago

        yeah, snaps… they should have just gone with appimage I don’t like them either, but at least we can all settle on one bag of pain.

  • NostraDavid@programming.dev
    5·
    6 days ago

    If you’re a programmer: NixOS.

    Define your OS config, which programs to install, and dotfiles in one repo. Install a fresh OS, pull in the repo (nix-shell -p git, because NixOS doesn’t come with git >_> ) and run the command to install the whole thing (sudo nixos-rebuild switch --flake .#wodan for me. wodan is just the name of a config - I have multiple all combines into one repo, so I can share configuration between machines).

    Took me 17 minutes to set up my laptop exactly the same as my Desktop. Same configuration, applications, and OS settings. It’s so fucking nice.

    With Windows, that used to take 2 days to download and install everything manually.

    Only downside: You’ll need to learn Nix-the-language, nix-the-os, and nix-the-terminal-program, which took about a month of deeply digging into the Vimjoyer and LibrePhoenix channels.

  • damdy@lemmings.world
    14·
    7 days ago

    Using pop OS for 5 years. Never tried any other, never seen the need to. I picked at mostly random and don’t really understand the differences.

    • MehBlah@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      7 days ago

      That is the thing of it. I started with Slackware. Then Debian and moved to ubuntu. I’m still using ubuntu. I’ve loaded up some other distros but they bring nothing definitive to the table. I’ve installed pop os and it works. If it had existed when I moved away from slackware I might have picked it. If you are using it and its working for you why bother changing.

    • Lazhward@lemmy.world
      1·
      6 days ago

      I went Ubuntu > Mint > Ubuntu > Pop_os. The only difference I’ve noticed is Pop breaks less often.

    • Captain Aggravated@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      12·
      7 days ago

      I used Mint for a good long while, but went to Fedora KDE for better Wayland support. KDE is quite different to Cinnamon, not sure I have the words to articulate how. It’s fussier. The main difference about Fedora is package management, DNF is slower than APT, a lot less software is packaged as RPMs, and a lot of “we don’t package it, you have to compile it” software offers no instructions for Fedora, and trying to translate the Debian/Ubuntu instructions practically always fails because the library they want you to install isn’t there. So Fedora is Linux with less software.

  • LucidNightmare@lemmy.dbzer0.com
    11·
    7 days ago

    TL;DR: I’m a true Linux noob, and now love and appreciate Linux thanks to openSUSE Tumbleweed. :)

    In all seriousness, as a Linux noob, openSUSE Tumbleweed made me actually start to really enjoy using Linux as my main OS. I’ve fucked up plenty of times, and at that point I would’ve had to reinstall most other distros, but Snapper came in and saved the day. I’m sure there are plenty of other distros that do snapshots just as well, but this is coming from someone who last tried running Linux 5-6 years ago, and was still fucking my shit up somehow. I’ve never had the best of luck with Linux, which is why I always stayed on Windows.

    Then came Microsoft’s ever increasing enshittification, and I saw openSUSE Tumbleweed on the distrowatch website, downloaded it, and here we are 8 months later, and openSUSE has remained my main OS. I only got a desktop for gaming, and it fit the bill almost perfectly. I had to learn some things, that’s for sure, but what got me to stay was the stability! I had never used a Linux distro up until that point that made BTRFS and system snapshots the default. This was crucial for someone like me who only dabbled in Linux because I love the idea behind it, I could just never get too far into using it before fucking my shit up!

    There are plenty of options that are similar, or maybe even better than openSUSE, but they won my interest and respect for getting a noob like me to truly envelope themselves into Linux.

    I’m still nowhere near anything that might resemble your common Linux user, but damn do I really love my computer again now. It’s like when I was kid again, and first started using computers, fascinated by what I could do.

    • b000rg@midwest.socialEnglish
      4·
      6 days ago

      Out of curiosity, do you have an Nvidia graphics card? I tried migrating to Linux at the beginning of this year, but I couldn’t get my favorite games to run, like Cyberpunk 2077 and Kingdom Come Deliverance, so I ended up bailing.

      • LucidNightmare@lemmy.dbzer0.com
        1·
        5 days ago

        EDIT: I don’t recommend using the flatpak version of Steam, because it gets buried in folders that aren’t human-readable. I installed the openSUSE version, and chose a sane folder name like how it is on windows where all my games are stored.

        Yes! I had a 2080ti that I replaced with a 5080 two months ago.

        I had no issues whatsoever when I first installed openSUSE, because the graphics card was probably old enough to be supported fully by the time I made my way into this OS.

        When I upgraded from the 2080ti to the 5080… I did not have a good time for a few days as I had to learn (the hard way) that nvidia switched from whatever drivers I was using to some “open-driver” that they are going with moving forward (I think, don’t quote me).

        I messed up plenty of times trying to get this new graphics card working, but let me tell you, thanks to snapper and BTRFS, I felt confident that no matter how many things I tried, I would always have a snapshot to return everything back to “before swapping cards” is what I named the snapshot through YaST System Snapshots.

        After I found the correct terminal commands to install the new open-drivers on the openSUSE website, I was good to go again!

        Since then, I’ve played and beaten DOOM: The Dark Ages (came with my card, had to sign into Windows and use a fucking chromium browser for whatever god awful reason…), System Shock Remake, and just a few days ago, Prey (2017).

        When playing games through Proton (or even on windows!), I highly recommend going to pcgamingwiki.com, finding your game you want to play, and reading some of the great tips they have on there (ini config, for example on System Shock, because enemies were appearing way way to close to me instead of being able to see them from a distance) and the most important bit to me since I like to edit my saves or back them up to my own server, is the location of your save file in proton compatibility prefix. So, on KDE, I can copy whatever prefix number (System Shock being 482400) and copy that number, open up KDE Runner (windows key+spacebar for me) paste the number in, and go into the compatdata folder.

        Needless to say, I’m almost positive that your nvidia graphics cards will be supported in some way, but you just may need to study up a bit before you have it working. Once it is working though, it is working great! :)

      • Crozekiel@lemmy.zipEnglish
        1·
        6 days ago

        My laptop has an nvidia gpu. It never really worked right on Bazzite, basically could not game unless the igpu could run the game. I switched it over to Garuda (which I had been running on my desktop for a couple of years) and the gpu drivers all just worked. It now plays games just as easily as my desktop. The above comment could basically be exactly my experience, just replace openSUSE Tumbleweed with Garuda. I am unlikely to hop distros because I (luckily) found one that “just works” for me.

        Honestly, that is kind of the beauty of Linux to me, and why I hate all of the “distro recommendation” threads. If someone only tries one distro, they might never stay because they got unlucky. I’d love for them all to truly work just as well as any other, like so many posts claim, but it just isn’t the case (out of the box, at least). We all have so many varied experiences that drive those recommendations.

      • burntbacon@discuss.tchncs.de
        1·
        6 days ago

        As someone with two separate computers that have nvidia cards, I can only recommend hopping distros until one works.

        (I’m not going to admit that manjaro worked out of the box on both of them and I ended up staying on it out loud on the internet)

      • sykaster@feddit.nlEnglish
        1·
        6 days ago

        Same bro, Nvidia and Linux don’t play very nice together. I had horrible framerates in browser animations for example, so even videos ran at 3fps or so with audio glitches.

        Not to mention 3d gaming. I’ll try again in a few years, see if it changes.

  • Kyden Fumofly@lemmy.world
    5·
    6 days ago

    Just checked my Mint. Why Cinnamon uses so much VRAM? I have over 1GB idle, without anything running. In my Windows i usually have 400Mb with all things closed.

  • BigPotato@lemmy.world
    132·
    7 days ago

    I consider myself to be ‘techie’ for lack of a better word. I have custom janky solutions for everything. I have in the past written down a blue screen and troubleshooted it to give the IT team notes… Hell, I used to be the guy IT would call if they received a ticket from my office (anyone in my office) because I could give them more details and such… So, I like computers and shit, right?

    And holy fuck I don’t get the Linux world. I used Mint back in '13ish and it was fine but in a different place back then. I use Pop_OS! on my laptop and I like it just fine. I use Ubuntu on my secondary computer and I like it just fine. I don’t get what I’m supposed to prefer about all these different distros/environments. I can’t wrap my head around it. Do y’all change OSes that often? Am I missing out on something? Am I wrong or are y’all the kids who are wrong?

    • Getting6409@lemmy.dbzer0.com
      12·
      7 days ago

      I feel like a lot of it is from new-ish users excited to talk about it and in the process of forming often prematurely strong opinions on this versus that within Linux. After 15 years of daily driving Linux desktop environments i settled on the one that gave me the least fuss and havent given it a second thought since. I suspect there are many with a similar story, but it’s a boring conversation start if people are looking to debate it.

    • BlameTheAntifa@lemmy.world
      11·
      5 days ago

      I really wish they would bring back an official KDE flavor. Cinnamon is fine, but nothing really comes close to KDE in terms of user experience and flexibility.

      • Zozano@aussie.zoneEnglish
        3·
        6 days ago

        GPT: “first, I’m gonna need you to drop a hardware.opengl.enable = true;”

        Me: “GPT, you fucking slut! They changed the opengl option to graphics in 23.11!”

      • AdrianTheFrog@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        6 days ago

        Is there any reason not to? I was thinking of using nixos whenever I switch to linux on my desktop just for the sake of ‘doing it properly’. I’ve mostly used archinstall before (home server and laptop) but it seems fairly breakable because I have no idea exactly what’s doing what.

  • DonutsRMeh@lemmy.world
    1·
    5 days ago

    I actually wanted to run Ubuntu and then Fedora, but they both kept breaking out of nowhere. I don’t know get why people have a more stable experience than I do with these, I don’t even fucking tinker and fuck with shit.

  • FuyuhikoDate@feddit.org
    4·
    7 days ago

    I… I just heard of cachy OS yesterday for the first time and i like it…

    I used pop!_OS before btw. and i hated it.