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.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0
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.
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).
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?
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 kmods
OR akmods
, 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 1
and rpm-ostree rollback
to 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 :latest
branch which automatically gets upgraded to the latest version, which they determine. So having an :testing
branch 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:
testing
branch; 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.