Like the title says.
I’ve just been experimenting with some distros like Endeavour, POP! and Elementary. I did a little review here.
Elementary really stood out for me as one of the best looking and easiest Desktop Linux distributions so far. Its simplicity is really appealing to me and I feel it would allow me to focus on the important stuff instead of going full ADHD and constantly trying to tweak my desktop with some new widgets or customization. (KDE is horrible for that, even though I really like that environment.)
Do any of you use it as a daily and specifically for gaming? What was your experience like?
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I agree with your review. I’ve been using Linux since Slack in the mid 90’s and I switched over most of my machines to Elementary. An Alienware with 3090, Airbus laptop with 1080, and a Lenovo with an AMD 550.
Except for NVidia proprietary drivers:
- Fastest OS install. I want to play games, not wait for an OS to install and give me 50 pedantic options to step through.
- Boots very fast, shuts down just as fast.
- Fast Sleep and wake up every time on desktop and laptop. WiFi works, video normal
- Clean, stable, consistent GUI that doesn’t do weird things
- Bluetooth and audio worked great with no fuss.
As you mentioned, Flatseal is a must. However, I use AppImages as much as possible. I get the security benefit of flatpaks, but all this sandboxing and containerizing creates too many problems with apps that need to communicate with one another, and accessing my files was a serious PITA because of permission issues that needed to be corrected. There are no permission issues with AppImage, but security benefits aren’t there either. However, both work wonderfully with Elementary.
- Use AppImageLauncher to automatically create your Application menu items
Heroic Games Launcher was written by wonderful humans!
Cyberpunk won’t work, need to dualboot to Windows. But many windows games work well.
Now, about NVidia: The proprietary driver takes all the horrible fiddling Linux has a reputation for, but reality, is that NVidia drivers are closed source and AMD works with the community. OOTB experience with AMD is flawless.
3090 came up and everything was green, a problem with the Nouveau driver.
1080 everything looked okRan the install, installed the kernel headers, the dev/build packages, mucked around a bit and it works great. However, every time there is a new kernel, the new linux headers and Nvidia module aren’t automatically installed and compiled so it boots to the command line. I know how to manually install them and get back and running, but I haven’t figured out what the problem is yet. Never ran into this on Ubuntu, Fedora or RHEL before.
Why doesn’t Cyberpunk work?
I’ve played it on SteamOS, Nobara and have been playing at the moment on Debian so it’s definitely not a Linux limitation.
Kernel & Wayland versions matter. Elementary ships older versions than SteamOS and Nobara. I don’t know how far behind if at all is EOS in relation to Debian 12.
Fair enough. I’m using Debian testing with bits of unstable and experimental added in for GPU drivers and Mesa.
Thanks for your feedback. :) It’s much appreciated.
That all sounds pretty great except for the last part on the Nvidia drivers. :(
Elementary os looks pretty slick otherwise :)
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Used to run eOS several years ago, as I was coming off using OSX. I quickly realised it was more of a skin deep imitation and ended up switching to gnome, that keeps all the drag&drop actions across all apps. If you have some spare time, give fedora a go, which comes with a vanilla gnome install. Flatpaks are well integeated, speedy tested updates and installing nvidia drivers is 2 clicks on the software app (scroll down on the main page to see the “drivers” section)
