Ok so ‘I think’ is not the same as ‘yes I tested it and I know’.
But anyway… yeah you’d have to give a more detailed description of… well, pick one particular attempt at an OS install, and specifically describe what did or did not work, with that one.
I’m not trying to be an ass, but its basically impossible to troubleshoot when the info you have is ‘i tried a bunch of things and they all didn’t work in different ways’.
Gotta be able to go through an actual diagnosis of a defined scenario.
I know. Well I never tested stuff because apart from shit nvidia drivers I never had issues on windows. What would you like me to test anyway? Memtest or give some suggestions.
The only real tangible issue was the one I mentioned on fedora with the timezone selection issue. All the other distros either did nowlt want to install or just had general performance issues either in the DE or just in games. Especially the 2 games I really only care about. Squad 44 and War thunder (the only ones I actually play) both ran like shit on all the distros I tried (bazzite, nobara, debian, cachyOS)
Well… ok, let me try to respond broadly, first, then more narrowly, second.
Nvidia drivers are also shit on Linux.
To install Nvidia drivers on Linux, you actually have to install an entire custom kernel, much of which is propietary, not open source, other people cannot see the actual code.
This means that you basically have to pick a particular Nvidia driver/kernel, and build a Linux OS around it… with the added difficulty of… if Nvidia updates its drivers, well now the OS has to check literally every possible thing they could have changed, while not being able to directly see those things that may or may not have changed.
This… is significantly harder to do to a 100% OS stability/functionality assured level… than with AMD, who open sources their entire Linux drivers.
(I am not sure what the status is here for Intel GPUs)
So, yeah, basically, a shitty broken Nvidia driver update, on Linux, in comparison to Windows, has the additional capacity to potentially break literally all of your OS.
There is an open source version of Nvidia drivers, the Nouveau drivers, that are much more broadly compatible with various Linux distros… but its basically unofficial, a bunch of people trying to reverse engineer the official, blackbox, propietary Nvidia drivers.
So… it usually significantly lags behind the propietary drivers in terms of up to date features and optimization and newer game support.
There’s a good write up on this here, if you eant more details:
So, IMO, a more sane approach than just going bleeding edge with your Nvidia driver/kernel, is to use an OS that semi-regularly rebases itself around the latest stable Nvidia driver/kernel.
Of the OSs you listed, Bazzite is the most straight forward and also reliable, in that way.
Debian is exceedingly stable, but, requires you to learn learn how to use it properly… you have to find an Nvidia driver/kernel that is basically compatible with your version of Debian, then stick with that untill Debian does a full new version of itself, about once a year I think.
Nobara and Cachy are basically bleeding edge; more frequent updates to latest Nvidia versions, but also this means greater chance something breaks and doesn’t get noticed or fixed for a bit.
Now to try to be more specific:
When you say you only ran into timezone issues on ‘fedora’, do you mean standard mainline fedora?
Or does that include Nobara and Bazzite? They are both based on Fedora, basically customized versions of Fedora.
You also say your main use case concern here is WarThunder and Squad 44, the latter I think meaning the WW2 submod of Squad? Or is it actuslly a fully distinct game at this point… I haven’t kept up.
(Ah, apparently it is its own thing now!)
So anyway… both of those use kernel level anticheat.
Kernel level anticheat tends to not play super well with Linux. Because… well now we have another thing fucking with the kernel, in addition to Nvidia!
Another thing that is not open source, that is a black box, that works in ways other people don’t know about, and can again change something rather important, which can potentially break a lot of other things.
It is hard to build an OS around kernel cores when the kernel itself is a mystery to those designing the OS.
While Squad proper implements EAC in a way that does work on Linux, Squad 44 doesn’t appear to. So, Offworld would have to… do that.
WarThunder on the other hand implements BattleEye in a way that works on Linux, but my guess would be they have not prioritized optimizing it much.
I dunno, what uh… what kinds of frame rate and such differences were you getting on which OS and which gfx settings vs … same gfx settings on Win10 or Win11?
So… it usually significantly lags behind the propietary drivers in terms of up to date features and optimization and newer game support.
That would not be an issue for me I don’t think. I am literally running 2 year old drivers on win11 rn because anything never has been vibe coded by nvidia and my games literally started crashing and my PC would just stop outputing video signal on newer drivers. (went back and it fixed it).
When you say you only ran into timezone issues on ‘fedora’, do you mean standard mainline fedora?
Yeah I meant fedora workstation (44 I think) with Gnome. I had no ikssues with nobara and bazzite apart from bad performance and not liking the way they do updates and some other minor things (mainly preferences not really dealbreaking)
You also say your main use case concern here is WarThunder and Squad 44, the latter I think meaning the WW2 submod of Squad? Or is it actuslly a fully distinct game at this point… I haven’t kept up.
(Ah, apparently it is its own thing now!)
It was a mod for squad that got spun into its own game called Post Scriptum that was then later abandoned, reaquired by offworld, rebranded, handed off to the devs of one of the biggest mods that got officially integrated and now seemingly is abandoned again.
I dunno, what uh… what kinds of frame rate and such differences were you getting on which OS and which gfx settings vs … same gfx settings on Win10 or Win11?
I was using same or lower settings as win11 and getting less than half the frames with really bad stutters. I even ran a little experiment with WT on my laptop. On win10/11 I could run the game at 80 fps on low settings on an intel Iris XE iGPU. The same laptop running fedora 44 and the native linux version of WT (that actually exists surprisingly) could barely run the game on ultra low graphics (old videocard support) at around 50-60fps with inconsistent frametimes and sometimes bad stutters with the game often freezing for 2 seconds upon entering a match.
Ah thank you for the history update on Squad and related things!
Once upon a time, I was one of the first, fairly long term beta testers for Project Reality… waaaaay back when it was just a mod for BF2, before something like half the team formed into OffWorld, made Squad.
I distinctly remember basically reverse engineering one testing session… that dbzao had made a simple character handling mistske that was breaking the entire kit/squad system, before the 0.5 release. Basically, he forgot that player names can have non-alphanumeric characters in them. Any time they did, those players could request infinite numbers of any kit, probably because somewhere, he wasn’t handling strings properly in python.
He screamed curses i did not understand, when he double checked the code and realized that simple mistake had been the last blocker for the 0.5 release, lol.
As to your pc/game performance… you could find and run… some linux distro, that is built around a kernel from around the same time as your last good/stable Nvidia drivers on Windows.
It might be that Nvidia just fundamentally fucked their drivers for older cards, and carried that forward into Linux as well, where with your hardware, its… even more fucked, basically.
Looks like that would be… either R535 ot R550?
Which… I think means that you want to find a Linux distro that is based around v6.15 or lower of the Linux kernel.
Which I think would give you potentially better performing on your hardware distros of:
Ubuntu 24.04 LTS
Debian Stable 12 ‘Bookworm’
Fedora 38, 39, 40
Arch-LTS
Linux Mint 22
PopOS! 22.04 LTS
… there are probably more options than this, there are… /a lot/ of linux distros.
But yeah, unfortunately in your case, most ‘gaming oriented’ distros use a pretty modern Kernel, to be able to support more modern gaming hardware. Some of them may offer a kind of LTS/legacy variant of themselves, but I’m not aware of any off the top of my head.
You having older hardware, but still quite gaming capable… yeah, probably go with one from that list above, and … it might/should work better?
Nvidia will probably yell at you to force you to upgrade your kernel if you just try and do things their ‘normal’ way for their linux drivers… so… you may have to figure out a specific way to get a specific kernel compatible version of the linux drivers installed.
Because if you let the normal Nvidia drivers… jump your kernel to a new version… on an older or LTS distro… that will basicslly break most or all of your OS.
Here’s Nvidia’s extremely user friendly linux driver archive:
Alternatively… you might just try the Nouveau drivers. You having a 30 series GPU… I think Nouveau should work at least decently well, as… their shit works much more reliably on hardware that has been around longer, though you’d likely lose DLSS and FrameGen and such.
Linux:
Ok so ‘I think’ is not the same as ‘yes I tested it and I know’.
But anyway… yeah you’d have to give a more detailed description of… well, pick one particular attempt at an OS install, and specifically describe what did or did not work, with that one.
I’m not trying to be an ass, but its basically impossible to troubleshoot when the info you have is ‘i tried a bunch of things and they all didn’t work in different ways’.
Gotta be able to go through an actual diagnosis of a defined scenario.
I know. Well I never tested stuff because apart from shit nvidia drivers I never had issues on windows. What would you like me to test anyway? Memtest or give some suggestions.
The only real tangible issue was the one I mentioned on fedora with the timezone selection issue. All the other distros either did nowlt want to install or just had general performance issues either in the DE or just in games. Especially the 2 games I really only care about. Squad 44 and War thunder (the only ones I actually play) both ran like shit on all the distros I tried (bazzite, nobara, debian, cachyOS)
Well… ok, let me try to respond broadly, first, then more narrowly, second.
Nvidia drivers are also shit on Linux.
To install Nvidia drivers on Linux, you actually have to install an entire custom kernel, much of which is propietary, not open source, other people cannot see the actual code.
This means that you basically have to pick a particular Nvidia driver/kernel, and build a Linux OS around it… with the added difficulty of… if Nvidia updates its drivers, well now the OS has to check literally every possible thing they could have changed, while not being able to directly see those things that may or may not have changed.
This… is significantly harder to do to a 100% OS stability/functionality assured level… than with AMD, who open sources their entire Linux drivers.
(I am not sure what the status is here for Intel GPUs)
So, yeah, basically, a shitty broken Nvidia driver update, on Linux, in comparison to Windows, has the additional capacity to potentially break literally all of your OS.
There is an open source version of Nvidia drivers, the Nouveau drivers, that are much more broadly compatible with various Linux distros… but its basically unofficial, a bunch of people trying to reverse engineer the official, blackbox, propietary Nvidia drivers.
So… it usually significantly lags behind the propietary drivers in terms of up to date features and optimization and newer game support.
There’s a good write up on this here, if you eant more details:
https://machaddr.substack.com/p/nouveau-vs-nvidia-the-battle-between
So, IMO, a more sane approach than just going bleeding edge with your Nvidia driver/kernel, is to use an OS that semi-regularly rebases itself around the latest stable Nvidia driver/kernel.
Of the OSs you listed, Bazzite is the most straight forward and also reliable, in that way.
Debian is exceedingly stable, but, requires you to learn learn how to use it properly… you have to find an Nvidia driver/kernel that is basically compatible with your version of Debian, then stick with that untill Debian does a full new version of itself, about once a year I think.
Nobara and Cachy are basically bleeding edge; more frequent updates to latest Nvidia versions, but also this means greater chance something breaks and doesn’t get noticed or fixed for a bit.
Now to try to be more specific:
When you say you only ran into timezone issues on ‘fedora’, do you mean standard mainline fedora?
Or does that include Nobara and Bazzite? They are both based on Fedora, basically customized versions of Fedora.
You also say your main use case concern here is WarThunder and Squad 44, the latter I think meaning the WW2 submod of Squad? Or is it actuslly a fully distinct game at this point… I haven’t kept up.
(Ah, apparently it is its own thing now!)
So anyway… both of those use kernel level anticheat.
Kernel level anticheat tends to not play super well with Linux. Because… well now we have another thing fucking with the kernel, in addition to Nvidia!
Another thing that is not open source, that is a black box, that works in ways other people don’t know about, and can again change something rather important, which can potentially break a lot of other things.
It is hard to build an OS around kernel cores when the kernel itself is a mystery to those designing the OS.
While Squad proper implements EAC in a way that does work on Linux, Squad 44 doesn’t appear to. So, Offworld would have to… do that.
WarThunder on the other hand implements BattleEye in a way that works on Linux, but my guess would be they have not prioritized optimizing it much.
I dunno, what uh… what kinds of frame rate and such differences were you getting on which OS and which gfx settings vs … same gfx settings on Win10 or Win11?
That would not be an issue for me I don’t think. I am literally running 2 year old drivers on win11 rn because anything never has been vibe coded by nvidia and my games literally started crashing and my PC would just stop outputing video signal on newer drivers. (went back and it fixed it).
Yeah I meant fedora workstation (44 I think) with Gnome. I had no ikssues with nobara and bazzite apart from bad performance and not liking the way they do updates and some other minor things (mainly preferences not really dealbreaking)
(Ah, apparently it is its own thing now!)
It was a mod for squad that got spun into its own game called Post Scriptum that was then later abandoned, reaquired by offworld, rebranded, handed off to the devs of one of the biggest mods that got officially integrated and now seemingly is abandoned again.
I was using same or lower settings as win11 and getting less than half the frames with really bad stutters. I even ran a little experiment with WT on my laptop. On win10/11 I could run the game at 80 fps on low settings on an intel Iris XE iGPU. The same laptop running fedora 44 and the native linux version of WT (that actually exists surprisingly) could barely run the game on ultra low graphics (old videocard support) at around 50-60fps with inconsistent frametimes and sometimes bad stutters with the game often freezing for 2 seconds upon entering a match.
Ah thank you for the history update on Squad and related things!
Once upon a time, I was one of the first, fairly long term beta testers for Project Reality… waaaaay back when it was just a mod for BF2, before something like half the team formed into OffWorld, made Squad.
I distinctly remember basically reverse engineering one testing session… that dbzao had made a simple character handling mistske that was breaking the entire kit/squad system, before the 0.5 release. Basically, he forgot that player names can have non-alphanumeric characters in them. Any time they did, those players could request infinite numbers of any kit, probably because somewhere, he wasn’t handling strings properly in python.
He screamed curses i did not understand, when he double checked the code and realized that simple mistake had been the last blocker for the 0.5 release, lol.
As to your pc/game performance… you could find and run… some linux distro, that is built around a kernel from around the same time as your last good/stable Nvidia drivers on Windows.
It might be that Nvidia just fundamentally fucked their drivers for older cards, and carried that forward into Linux as well, where with your hardware, its… even more fucked, basically.
Looks like that would be… either R535 ot R550?
Which… I think means that you want to find a Linux distro that is based around v6.15 or lower of the Linux kernel.
Which I think would give you potentially better performing on your hardware distros of:
Ubuntu 24.04 LTS
Debian Stable 12 ‘Bookworm’
Fedora 38, 39, 40
Arch-LTS
Linux Mint 22
PopOS! 22.04 LTS
… there are probably more options than this, there are… /a lot/ of linux distros.
But yeah, unfortunately in your case, most ‘gaming oriented’ distros use a pretty modern Kernel, to be able to support more modern gaming hardware. Some of them may offer a kind of LTS/legacy variant of themselves, but I’m not aware of any off the top of my head.
You having older hardware, but still quite gaming capable… yeah, probably go with one from that list above, and … it might/should work better?
Nvidia will probably yell at you to force you to upgrade your kernel if you just try and do things their ‘normal’ way for their linux drivers… so… you may have to figure out a specific way to get a specific kernel compatible version of the linux drivers installed.
Because if you let the normal Nvidia drivers… jump your kernel to a new version… on an older or LTS distro… that will basicslly break most or all of your OS.
Here’s Nvidia’s extremely user friendly linux driver archive:
x86_64:
https://download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86_64/
Arch64:
https://download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-aarch64/
Alternatively… you might just try the Nouveau drivers. You having a 30 series GPU… I think Nouveau should work at least decently well, as… their shit works much more reliably on hardware that has been around longer, though you’d likely lose DLSS and FrameGen and such.
Nouveau drivers should work with newer kernels or what? Because honestly I could not give a shit about dlss and such stuff. Pure raster for me please
It’s unlikely to be a hardware issue if Windows works fine for them.