Linux Gaming @lemmy.ml marcie (she/her) @lemmy.ml 3 wk. ago

Bleeding edge gaming distros with driver managers?

Lately I've been suggesting Mint or PopOS for laymans looking to swap to linux, but do any of you know of any good gaming distros with a driver manager GUI built in ala Mint?

I've tested most gaming distros with latest (nvidia) hardware and they do not run most major titles out of the box due to driver issues. If there were a gui for driver rollbacks while having great general performance, I could see it beating out Mint/PopOS for my recommendation. Being able to install .deb files is quite nice for laymans too, though I don't know of any other deb based OSes that run well out of the box.

26 comments

What does a driver manager do that isn’t solved with a normal (graphical) package manager? Automatically picking the correct one for your GPU?
- Yeah, thats useful for laymen / people that dont want to tinker a whole lot
  
  A driver manager will not make the problems inherent to Nvidia's crappy proprietary drivers that need workarounds go away.
  
  If you don't want to tinker a whole lot, buy a GPU from a vendor that hasn't been actively hostile to its users for decades and is well supported by Linux and the freedesktop such as AMD.
  
  No AMD GPU user has a need for anything resembling a "driver manager".
I don't know how "bleeding edge" it is, but Nobara is a good gaming distro maintained by GloriousEggroll (the maker of the GE versions of Proton on Steam) that also has a GUI driver manager. It's based on Fedora, so you're not gonna have the absolute latest stuff 100% right now as you might with Arch, but it will likely be ahead of anything Debian or Ubuntu based. The one drawback in my short experience with it so far is that the package manager sucks for exploring stuff or locating packages if you don't know the package name, it's just an alphabetical list you search through by name.

But as has been said elsewhere in this thread, if you're having driver issues with new Nvidia stuff, you may just be SOL until the Nvidia driver support in general catches up, no matter the distro.
- I've been using Nobara on my main machine for a few months and it's impressed me so far. It's got the GUI driver manager which worked fine for me although my card is quite old.
Bazzite is a Fedora Atomic-based gaming distro. You cannot rollback your drivers separately, but you can rollback your whole system image, as it is an immutable distro.
- Bazzite works so well out of the box that I don't even have to think about drivers.
- Been running it for two months and it's magic. Also on my deck. Fantastic software.
  
  Seconding this. All the pain ive incurred was due to nvdia, but I just had to get one for the cuda and RT. I wish i had dlss though. Maybe it will get implemented later who knows.
- Yeah, install the distro, done. No more thinking about anything. The distro does it all for you.
Garuda is what you're looking for, Arch base with performance tweaks and usually bleeding edge kernals officially supported. Comes in 2013 rgb gamer wet dream, and normal flavors. Also works out of the box with Nvidia(as long as you let it load with proprietary drivers). Doesn't have deb support obviously but snap and flatpack are fairly normie friendly these days.
- +1 to this used to use it and has all the wine packages pre installed so its super simple to setup lutris. I've since needed to go back to Windows just because there is no AMF encoding support for sunshine on Linux AFAIK
- Very cool
- Does it have a driver gui?
  
  Yes it does.
GUI doesn't matter. AMD will always be simpler right now. Nvidia still has all kinds of issues. I think what you want to know is which distro has the fewest issues with Nvidia drivers? Just a guess.
- GUI absolutely does matter for helping adoption of linux, I'm not interested in hearing arguments to the contrary either. Everything should be as GUI'd as possible if we want linux to grow
  
  It does not.
  
  The GUI just relegates all commands to the CLI tools under the hood.
What do you mean by a driver manager? I'm not familiar with that term, it sounds like a gui for managing and updating drivers. Or maybe you want something to help you switch between integrated graphics on your cpu to your dedicated gpu?

In most cases, updating drivers doesn't require a GUI and can actually create more work. For instance, compare this Manjaro video of how to use its gui to install Nvidia drivers vs this line of code to install/update the Nvidia drivers on endeavorOS.

eos-update --nvidia

Ofcourse if you use an arch based distro you can also use the arch wiki to help you manage your drivers exactly the way you want. https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/NVIDIA

If you want to control which apps use your GPU or integrated graphics, than you can just install prime and prepend a package name with the string prime-run when opening or in steam launch settings.
Kinda not what you're asking about but pop OS does provide an nvidia version of the ISO, so you wouldn't need to configure anything in the first place if you chose the correct ISO. Same with nobara, and probably other gaming focused distros.
Linux mint lol

Is great for gaming and everything else too lol, you install nvidia drivers with like two clicks.
Manjaro,
benefits of Arch,
while being gamer ready,
easier to use and more stable.

It also has a GUI to manage your graphics drivers.
- easier to use and more stable.
  
  citation needed
  
  Go see for yourself,
  don't knock it till you tried it.
- I used to like Manjaro but they way they handled the recent pacman changes were so terrible that I no longer recommend it. It still has a great GUI and I think other arch based distros could learn from.

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