Switched to Bazzite in November
Switched to Bazzite in November
Quite liking it so far, though it's a bit like stepping back 20 years with the fiddling to get some games working. Next step will probably be ditching the Nvidia card for something else.
Definitely ditch Nvidia. I bought an AMD one and it works with Linux without any hassle or tinkering.
AMD has been great on Linux.
I'm curious about Intel's cards, though. They seem to be offering some solid competition now, but I haven't heard anything about their Linux support.
IIRC, Intel just straight up settled on using DXVK in their drivers after realizing it'd take them ages to catch up to AMD and Nvidia.
Good to know. Will probably be a while before I replace it though as it's a 3080. Will just play the games that work in the meantime (which is most of them so far).
Nvidia is the main reason I went with Pop!OS. it just works. heck I'm honestly surprised people are still having issues on other distros.
but now you have already got it working there's no need to make plans to upgrade for a good long while. Things could change in the market many times before a 3080 isn't good enough, shit it will probably burn out before that's the case.
I went from an ATI Raedon to a 3060 Ti. Graphics cards don't need to be upgraded very often and I think we've hit a tipping point where, like I said, the electronics will die long before the gaming performance is unacceptable.
Keep an eye on the NVK project.
For the record, I find it's harder to get all display features working (HDR, VRR, HDMI 2.1 support and so forth) than to get Nvidia drivers installed. Linux's display issues aren't just Nvidia compatibility. Particularly on Bazzite, where they have a specific install for Nvidia with the drivers baked in.
Do Linux distributions unable to work with Nvidia cards? I had a laptop with an nvidia GPU on Ubuntu, didn't seem to have issues, although I used the proprietary driver.
Nvidia works fine on Linux, I used it for ~10 years in both rolling and stable distros (Ubuntu, Arch, and openSUSE Tumbleweed). AMD just works better because the driver is FOSS and included with the kernel. Specifically, this means:
- no upgrade failures - if the kernel and nvidia driver sees out of sync, it'll fail to boot to a GUI and you'll need to fix it without the GUI; only really an issue on rolling release distros, and then only a couple times/year
- better support for new rendering features - for a long time, Nvidia just didn't work with Wayland because they refused to implement the same interface as AMD; they have since backtracked, but AMD still probably works better with Wayland
- timely updates - AMD updates come with the new kernel, Nvidia comes when someone updates the package
If you already have Nvidia, don't feel obligated to replace your GPU, but the next time you're looking to upgrade, consider AMD.
I had a similar arc this year. I did go through with switching from Nvidia to AMD. I started with Bazzite, but ended up on Aurora.
I'm very happy ditching Windows.
I liked the look of Aurora as well, ultimately decided that Bazzite was a better fit as I spend so much time gaming. Still learning how to get things set up the way I want, but at least Steam works out of the box.
I do a lot of gaming, too. But I wanted some of the developer features in aurora-dx. Very happy with it.
That portion will only grow over time.