cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/16149785
Cross-posting here for more opinions.
Gentlemen, just for context, I usually use Linux. I have been a user of Debian, Ubuntu, and Fedora for a few years.
Recently, I acquired a decent graphics card (GeForce RTX 4070) and decided to uninstall my Windows and install Linux.
I saw that Pop!_OS already has an image with everything pre-configured for Nvidia. Is this pre-configuration worth it, are the games more stable on this distribution, or is it the same as manually installing Nvidia’s proprietary drivers on Manjaro?
Why are you even considering Manjaro?
If gaming is the priority, then I honestly don’t think anything out there can beat Bazzite in terms of ease of use, ‘hands-off’-ness, robustness and stability.
Honorable mentions include: Nobara and Pop!_OS.
+1 for bazzite. And OP had already worked with fedora
How’s Bazzite if gaming is not your main “thing”? I use my PC for work and video editing but I also enjoy gaming on the weekends if I get the chance. I’m happy with EndeavourOS, just curious.
In your case it’s still an excellent choice.
Though, other opinionated images by uBlue (like e.g. Aurora and Bluefin) do deserve a mention. I’m on Bluefin (through secureblue to be more precise) as I desired more hardening than what Fedora offers by default.
The excellent part is also that it’s possible to rebase to another branch without reinstalling. So, let’s say you’re actually interested in experiencing these different images without going through the installation process over and over again. Then, you simple enter the following command:
rpm-ostree rebase ...With
being replaced by whatever is required for the image and/or branch you’re interested in. Then, simply reboot, (pro-tip: make a new user account and through the new user account) experience the other image. Rinse and repeat to your heart’s content.That’s good to know, thank you! I’ve got Silverblue running on a low end laptop and it’s been great.
How is Bazzite for other things than gaming? For me, mainly embedded dev and productivity.
Bazzite is Fedora os-tree immutable distro. It allows installing RPMs but it’s not nearly as flexible as traditional distros. That being said, you can still do basically everything, but not always straightforward. If you need a C/C++ dev env with toolchain and what not, you better of using something like Distrobox or your custom Podman/Docker containers for that.
Aurora dev edition is the bazzite equivalent for devs. Containers built right into the terminal (ptyxis).
Pop!_OS by far.
Note that NVIDIA ships proprietary, out of tree drivers.
No Linux Distro really supports NVIDIA as they cannot fix the drivers, as they are proprietary.
Manjaro is weird semi-rolling with a criticised mechanism of holding back packages without real testing (which might be outdated info).
PopOS is based off Ubuntu LTS, a stable distro and the most common Linux variant.
Stable distros will not break the NVIDIA stuff. NVIDIA doesnt care about rolling release etc, and Distros need to not break it, as they can package them but not fix them.
Yes, Bazzite using Fedora Atomic is very nice through the inherent stability of the OS distribution model.
But they rely on rpmfusion, an external repo packaging the proprietary NVIDIA stuff for Fedora. The repo is not supported by Fedora, and the drivers cannot be fixed by anyone.
Keep that in mind. NVIDIA sucks.
What does “out of tree” mean and imply?
The tree refers to the Linux kernel Git repo. On Linux normally all drivers are in there.
I think that is a pretty crazy concept, but it kinda gives trust and if it is in there is will likely not break.
Out of tree means the driver is not compiled in (like BTRFS on RHEL distros) or cannot even be included as it is proprietary or else (NVIDIA, Displaylink, Virtualbox).
These drivers are added locally using
kmodsORakmods, I dont know the difference and never used it.uBlue adds some drivers during the build process which is pretty cool. So even though it is out of tree, it gets centrally included and if it breaks you dont get the update.
Hmm… Why is this so much more difficult on Linux than Windows then? On Windows I just updated the driver through the GeForce Experience thing (which is annoying just because it requires a sign in). What am I missing?
Windows is a single OS, with a LOOT of late stage capitalist market monopoly. It is a single OS.
Also the drivers on Windows are not in the kernel, which I think is actually a pretty good thing for security.
But as userspace is always different in the various Linux Distros, vendors just stopped doing that, which is a shame.
But they rely on rpmfusion, an external repo packaging the proprietary NVIDIA stuff for Fedora. The repo is not supported by Fedora, and the drivers cannot be fixed by anyone.
Not sure what you’re trying to say here. Would you mind elaborating? FWIW, Bazzite’s model (by default) allows automatic fixes to be applied to a broken driver without requiring any manual intervention from its user.
allows automatic fixes to be applied to a broken driver without requiring any manual intervention from its user.
If you get an update, and after that update your system doesnt graphically boot anymore or something, you can use
sudo ostree admin pin 1andrpm-ostree rollbackto switch back to the working version and make sure it never disappears.Then you can wait for a next update (still no good update info mechanism afaik) to fix it, try it, unpin the saved version and go on.
But there is no automatic repair voodoo anywhere, on any distro. That driver is proprietary, only NVIDIA can fix it. rpmfusion packages it to work on Fedora, Fedora Atomic helps making this very unstable mechanism more failsafe.
But you are still relying on 3 entities (NVIDIA, rpmfusion, Fedora, (uBlue)), with NVIDIA not caring about Linux that much, instead of 1 (Fedora) like with AMD, where drivers are FOSS and can be adapted for Fedora specifically.
AMD does not opensource a lot, and ROCM or the entire amdgpu-pro driver is a similar situation. But at least the basics work.
But there is no automatic repair voodoo anywhere, on any distro. That driver is proprietary, only NVIDIA can fix it.
Consider to revisit this, cuz this is basically (at least for me) most of uBlue’s schtick:
And the way it’s setup, is so that you don’t get the broken update ever on your device in the first place.
So, contrary to what you might expect, this black magic (or just excellent engineering) somehow does exist.
uBlue does not repair anything, they dont automatically detect a broken driver on your system and block an update.
This would be possible, but slow down boot (running some GPU benchmark on every boot via a systemd service, if it fails run the commands that I mentioned).
rpm-ostree is awesome, and has the potential to do that.
you don’t get the broken update ever on your device in the first place.
In theory yes, but this would mean uBlue is some kind of stable distro. I dont know, at least their base images just get updates.
Their big advantage is that they dont have the legal restrictions, so they can ship 1:1 the system you run. I dont know if they do, but having some automated benchmark tests on real hardware with these devices would be useful.
But that costs a lot of money. uBlues trick is that they can run their whole huge project for free on Github.
But for sure, the dependency issues will not occur. But this does not guarantees that there are no issues on bare metal.
Or a stable branch, Bazzite was longer on F39 for example. I use the
:latestbranch which automatically gets upgraded to the latest version, which they determine. So having an:testingbranch that is up to date, and slowing down the releases of the latest branch, could help.I think we’re misunderstanding eachother. So perhaps consider to outline if you agree with the following:
- uBlue has some systems in place that enable it to detect some breakages.
- uBlue’s pipeline is such to not ship you the detected breakages.
- After a method has been found to fix a breakage (or other issues), uBlue’s maintainers implement these fixes and then, the very next update, the users will receive an image that contains both the updated package and the fixes required for it to not cause problems. Heck, the user didn’t know anything was up in the first place. They didn’t notice a thing*.
- uBlue’s issue/problem detect systems are not absolute; things might slip through.
- However, Nvidia drivers will not cause breakage that will make you shiver in fear.
- uBlue does not fix it on your device. They fix the image and that fixed image will deliver you the fix built-in; so manual intervention are a thing of the past (except for edge cases).
- Their pipeline does not require nor does it detect (through telemetry or whatsoever) the breakage on the device of the user. Heck, as implied earlier, most breakages are detected, prevented from shipping broken, fixed, ship the fixed one before any end user is disturbed by it.
- uBlue is not a Stable system (i.e. it does not freeze packages (apart from security updates) until the next major release). So yes, you receive updates all the time.
- Not being tied to legal restrictions is cool. However, a lot of derivatives do this. So this can’t be its unique selling point.
- uBlue is not entirely free. Its maintainers do pay money for providing some of their services (as has been mentioned by Jorge).
- Some of their images do have
testingbranch; even Bazzite has.
Yes agreed.
I didnt know they have testing images, but makesbsense in their flagship variants.
I miss the old website with the full image list.
Avoid Manjaro
Most of the Manjaro criticism is pure nonsense. It’s one of the most used distros in the Steam Survey. Anybody who’s willing to recommend Arch or Pop or Mint (who are also in the top of the Survey) but not Manjaro needs a reality check.
Just because it’s wildly used it doesn’t mean it’s the best, otherwise you’d be suggesting OP to install Windows 10.
Manjaro has several legit criticism. Maybe they’re not important to you, but they are still legit and relevant points to make. Personally, I ended up going with an Arch derivative that uses the official arch repos. Everything else you like in Manjaro can be easily installed.
Manjaro has several legit criticism.
That page is not legit criticism, it’s a bunch of nonsense. It misrepresents what Manjaro does, outright lying in some cases, it fails to understand how package updates and AUR work, it glosses over the fact that Manjaro helped the AUR infrastructure. It’s prejudiced information made out specifically to make it look bad.
Can you point out exactly what is misrepresented and lies?
- Manjaro repos not being in sync with Arch repos is false and misleading. Arch is the upstream, they’re linked together. Trying to shift the issue into “btw” is stupid. Nobody claims that downstream distros are the same as the upstream, if they were what would be the point. The whole Linux landscape is built around derivate distros. This is entirely in the author’s mind.
- Delaying packages is not stable – that’s not all they do.
- AUR “compatibility” is cited as a problem. For starters it’s a complete red herring – there’s no such thing as “AUR compatibility” and you will be well advised to use AUR very carefully including on Arch proper. But also the author misrepresents how an AUR package can fail on Manjaro. In theory it’s possible that a new feature would be introduced in an upstream package and immediately picked up by a new version of an AUR package, while the new core package is not on the target system yet. But then the author goes on to conclude “the package will break”. Which package? The ones that are already installed won’t break. The new AUR package may not be able to install but that won’t break the existing version. It’s not even certain the new build will fail; it depends on many factors, including how its dependencies are configured and whether it can be built without the new feature. Also this doesn’t necessarily happen on Manjaro alone, it can happen on Arch or any derivate at any time; as long as you don’t update your machine once a minute there will always be a window where AUR doesn’t play well with the core packages that are on the machine at that time. Last but not least, AUR packages are updated fairly slowly and the chances of this scenario occuring with any significant frequency are astronomical; it has never happened to me personally or have ever heard it happening to anybody; but the author makes it seem as if it’s a common issue.
- Security issues. Oh no, a distro has a security issue that has been fixed. Bleh.
- Problems with the Manjaro updater: false.
- SSL certificates for their website expiring. Nobody cares. The user base was not impacted in any way. As a daily user I only found out about it much later, from this kind of discussions. I don’t know what their webmaster was smoking and why they delayed setting up an automatic renewal for so long but it’s irrelevant because it has no relation to the distro or the distro maintainers.
- I’ve explained the AUR “DDoS” in another comment. Briefly, it wasn’t a “DDoS” (obviously) as much as the complete lack of any serious infrastructure behind AUR, which couldn’t cope with its rise in popularity. Manjaro makes it easy to activate and use the AUR. When the problem became apparent it was Manjaro who went out and got a CDN deal and set everything up so that the AUR won’t be in that situation anymore.
- There was another instance that looked like someone maliciously and explicitly hitting the AUR with 10k requests/sec while posing as “pamac”. That one was probably an actual DDoS.
