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[The Fartist]

SteamOS is for turning your PC into a console. If you want your PC to be a PC, but you hate Windows, check out any of the most popular Linux distros. Fedora, Ubuntu, Manjaro are good places to start. Try both the major desktops KDE (more classic windows like) and Gnome (more Mac like).

I run Fedora and Debian, I have a Windows partition just for gaming. I thought Valve was making their own distro?

 

[HogIsland]

I run Fedora and Debian, I have a Windows partition just for gaming. I thought Valve was making their own distro?

They are yea, but it's not a good replacement for Windows unless you overwhelmingly use it to game. It boots to a Gamepad/TV interface.

 

[The Fartist]

They are yea, but it's not a good replacement for Windows unless you overwhelmingly use it to game. It boots to a Gamepad/TV interface.

Yeah, I basically only use it for gaming, YouTube, any content creation, photo/video editing I do on my M1 MacBook Air. I use fedora for work and media consumption.

 

[ThatPolishGuy]

I have been using Ubuntu for the last 10 or more years but after taking a look at CachyOS that was mentioned earlier in this thread, I might give it a go on my next PC build. I just installed it into a VM and it looks pretty good. It's nice that I can choose which WM I want to use instead of the distro choosing it for me. I have never been in the Arch ecosystem before but it doesn't look that different outside of the package manager. I am also considering PopOS but I think I favor CachyOS at this point.

https://www.youtube.com/@Mattscreative check out, for tips on CachyOS and general Linux gaming tips + emulation and also how to install mods for games on Linux. His main is CachyOS.

 

[ThatPolishGuy]

Never even heard of cachyos. Ranked #5 at distrowatch i see. And mint still at #1. Funny. I have this machine that was on Nobara for years and for some reason recently I wiped that. I can't remember why. But I ended up with mint so clearly my heart wasn't in it lol.

I was distro hopping a lot. The only distro I've settled for a long time was Ubuntu Budgie - 2 or 3 years of usage. So I got GNOME more in-heart than ZorinOS Windows like interface.

Being able to choose a WM in Cachy and doing the dash-to-dock look I loved similarly to Ubuntu Budgie is a huge plus for me.

20-30 mins setup

I love how clean this looks. All the programs I have ever used are there. So it was a nice test run.

 

[Crayon]

I was distro hopping a lot. The only distro I've settled for a long time was Ubuntu Budgie - 2 or 3 years of usage. So I got GNOME more in-heart than ZorinOS Windows like interface.

Being able to choose a WM in Cachy and doing the dash-to-dock look I loved similarly to Ubuntu Budgie is a huge plus for me.

Mint is a default around here because wife just sticks to that. If I installed mint on here then that means I was out of ideas lol. I remember trying something else that didn't work out.

I never had a strong preference for any distro, really. I liked that Nobara with gnome well enough to stick with it for a long time.

 

[Soodanim]

Using linux for gaming or anything desktop is a bad idea. You better stay on Microsoft widnows. Trust me.

How can I possibly deny such a well reasoned argument? In light of this much evidence I will never game on Linux again

 

[nowhat]

this forced Nvidia to take some action and make part of its drive open-source (in 2023)

Just to be pedantic (hey, it's the Internet, what else I'm supposed to do?), the driver was, in a way, already open source and has always been - it interacts with the kernel code and thus must be GPL v2. But previously only like the "glue" that binds the driver module to the kernel was open source, the rest of it was a BLOB (think a firmware that's tens of megabytes in size). So if/when things went wrong with the driver, there was no way to debug it, much to the annoyance of Linus et al.

 

[Wolzard]

Just to be pedantic (hey, it's the Internet, what else I'm supposed to do?), the driver was, in a way, already open source and has always been - it interacts with the kernel code and thus must be GPL v2. But previously only like the "glue" that binds the driver module to the kernel was open source, the rest of it was a BLOB (think a firmware that's tens of megabytes in size). So if/when things went wrong with the driver, there was no way to debug it, much to the annoyance of Linus et al.

Nothing is open source on the Nvidia side. The userspace is proprietary and it communicates with a blob that runs alongside the kernel and interacts with it. The entire ecosystem is obscure.

GPLv2 allows this, so much so that one of the reasons for creating GPLv3 was to avoid this kind of thing and for this reason, Linus Torvalds disagreed with Richard Stallman and kept the kernel in GPLv2. Without this, I believe Linux would have less hardware support. It's not just Nvidia's proprietary blob that exists in the kernel, there are several others, such as Broadcom's wireless drivers.

What Nvidia did was migrate most of the blobs to the GPU firmware and created open source kernel modules, although they are not yet present directly in the kernel. Maybe they aren't, but it's easier to manage now. There will still be the proprietary userspace and there you will have access to Nvidia features such as DLSS, ray tracing, CUDA.

Red Hat is creating an open userspace in Mesa 3D called NVK. As far as I've seen, it has better performance than the proprietary one (in one game), but it still doesn't have the same features, as they will depend on their implementation in Vulkan.

For At Least One Game, Mesa's NVK Driver Can Outperform NVIDIA's Proprietary Driver - Phoronix

www.phoronix.com

Here's an interesting video explaining the Linux graphics stack, if you're interested in finding out more.

 

[Unknown?]

SteamOS is for turning your PC into a console. If you want your PC to be a PC, but you hate Windows, check out any of the most popular Linux distros. Fedora, Ubuntu, Manjaro are good places to start. Try both the major desktops KDE (more classic windows like) and Gnome (more Mac like).

I always felt Zorin OS was great for Windows users who just want something that works like Windows.